Page 192 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Soundscape 175

genres. Certain chants serve a similar devotional purpose but are explicitly
acknowledged to form “music” in the proper sense of the term. In some
Sufi contexts, praise songs may also be directed at particular local “saints”
(sing. wali: literally “friend of God”). To a greater extent than the different
styles of Qur’anic recitation, all these chants and hymns draw on the musical
and oral-expressive repertoire and stylistic conventions of particular Muslim
societies.
In some regional contexts, women have historically played an important
role in composing and performing these forms of sonic devotion and in
organizing the religious celebrations (such as the Prophet’s birthday, mawlid
al-nabi) of which the chants are a foundational element (e.g., Mack and
Boyd 2004).
The all-encompassing nature of this sound architectonics is currently
reinvigorated by new, mostly aural recording technologies. These
technologies move practices and experiences related to the aural perception
of spiritual presence into new arenas of daily life, beyond the immediate
sphere of ritual action to which these aural forms of spiritual experience
used to be restricted. Along with these changes, they generate new sites for
the assertion, validation, but also contestation of religious authority. For
instance, in many Muslim majority settings, the advent of new audio and
visual recording technologies creates new opportunities for women to excel
in their conventional “musical” and expressive performances at a new scale;
simultaneously, however, these developments yield very equivocal effects
for women. Rather than helping women to simply “carve out” new spaces
of moral authority and religious leadership, they also expose women to the
criticism of the religious establishment and of other critics.
In most Muslim majority settings, audio and visual recording technologies
interlock with an expanding market of consumer culture and mass-mediated
forms of entertainment. They thereby facilitate a blurring of the conventional
divide of Qur’anic recitation and its attendant strict rules regulating the
correct oral rendering of the Qur’an (tajwid; Nelson 2001, ch. 2) on one
side, and music and other aurally and vocally mediated spiritual engagements
on the other. Not only does the figure of the reciter or “musician,” as
the mediator of religious experience, receive new attention and generate
new debate and disagreement within the Muslim scholarly community;
the recitation and sermonizing traditions absorb stylistic conventions and
expectations of the entertainment industry and thus make preachers and
reciters accountable to the same requirements of an aesthetically compelling
performance to which other types of public performers need to submit.
These various aural forms thus generate new spaces for experience, practice,
and forms of authenticating spiritual leadership and new modes of attention,