Page 138 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things 123

superior argument from a range of competing points of view. Broadcasting
tafsir on the television is not just an act of extension then, but one of trans-
formation as well, reordering what the nature of the tafsir is, transforming
ideas of publicness, of religious affiliation and authority as the recitation
and commentary move from the face-to-face to the mediated event.
Standing behind the technology of television, built into its institutional
histories are deeply held epistemologies concerning ideas of publicness,
equal access, and relativism.

Public Islam

Gumi’s religious renewal took the form of what is defined now as a public
Islam, emphasizing debate, egalitarianism, open-access, and critiquing
ideas of inherited charisma and the use of secret knowledge for which Sufi
clerics are famed. Sufism is organized around a core of mysticism whereby,
at its highest levels, Sufi saints receive special revelations and access to
powerful prayers that become an immense resource for their orders. These
revelations are kept within the order, revealed to disciples when they pro-
gress in knowledge and training. Sufi orders are thus typically organized
around a founding saint who exhibited exceptional learning and mystical
abilities. Believed to possess baraka (magical charisma) and fayda (an over-
flowing of spiritual energy) and skilled in the arts of magic and healing,
elite Sufi Sheikhs are understood to be masters of the “underneath of
things” (batin) the hidden world of meanings that underlies the phenome-
nal daily reality (zahir) we observe.
Gumi, by contrast, represented an entirely different philosophy of
learning and practice, one that he traced to his training at the School for
Arabic Studies (SAS). SAS was established to teach Islamic subjects using
Western pedagogical methods. Training in Arabic was excellent and the
consequence of this mix of Arabic and Western learning was students were
able to engage more fully with broader currents of thought and reform in
the Muslim world. The historian Auwalu Anwar (1989) argues that this

shift in educational style was the key to defining modern Islam in Nigeria
by instituting a split between “liberal” and “traditional” clerics based on
their mode of education. SAS was at the center of this split, training a
whole new administrative and religious class whose power derived from
the bureaucracy and military rather than traditional trading and royal
elites. This is the class of scholars Muhammad Sani Umar (2001) refers to
as “Islamic modernists” derided by established ulama as malamin gwam-
6
nati (government mallams) or malamin zamani (modern mallams) and