Page 147 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

132 Brian Larkin

more effective [in spreading your message] than all the years in which you
previously spent preaching” (Gumi 1992, 149). To this day, radio and tele-
vision stations are careful to keep a balance between different religious
movements in their programming. Some, like CTV Kano explicitly chose
“independent” mallams (such as the noted cleric Sheikh Isa Waziri) in
order to avoid this conflict altogether. Following the example of Pentecostal
movements, clerics not selected by the stations often pay to air their pro-
grams realizing that access to media is key to securing a religious reputa-
tion. And political pressure over the choice of tafsir mallam is exerted
particularly after the change of government regimes.
The clerics involved in giving tafsir perceive the use of radio and televi-
sion as a means of extending religion—of reaching new audiences unable
to attend the mosque. But the inherent logic of this transmission is based
on the ideas of balance inherent in a public broadcast medium with its
roots in a deep tradition of secular enlightenment thought. As Sanusi
Gumbi put it, with Dahiru Bauci on the radio giving his tafsir on alternate
days to Gumi, now “the people listen to understand [and] choose.” If the
tariqa are correct then “Dahiru Bauci will represent their ideas. If Izala are
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true then Abubakar Gumi will represent their ideas” What Gumbi
reveals is that the radio operates in much the same way as the pedagogy
Gumi was trained in at SAS. There, religions and religious movements
were presented as systems and students were taught the basic ideas of those
systems and encouraged to choose between them. Broadcasting tafsir on
radio and television is not just an act of extension but one of transforma-
tion 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 radio, built into its institutional histories are
deeply held epistemologies concerning ideas of publicness, equal access,
and relativism, ideas that at times can seem commensurate with religious
beliefs, while at others they become sites of bitter controversy.

Conclusion

Charles Taylor (2007) argues that secular modernity forms the “context of
understanding” or, borrowing from Wittgenstein, the “background” that
forms the preconditions by which modern thought about society and even
religion is organized. Secularism, for him, is not the absence of religion or
its relegation to the private sphere; it is a process that reorders the place of
religion in society and restructures our consciousness to conceive of religion