Page 197 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

180 Dorothea E. Schulz

“perceptual completion” that emerges from a plurality of modes of sensuous
mediation and being in the world (Hirschkind 2006: 20f).
From this, a set of questions emerges. What particular, regionally specific
forms does this process of perceptual completion take in a particular
historical and social setting? How and to what extent are these modalities of
perception influenced by locally dominant religious traditions, and how do
they feed into, and are in turn shaped by, broader cultural regimes of ordering
and authenticating religious experience, community, and authority?

Soundscape and religious mediation: authenticating authority
and religious experience in Muslim West Africa

Central to the practice of spiritual and religious authority in West African
Islam are conceptions of power that center on sound-touch sensation. Yet, the
importance of sound and touch, of the tactile dimension of sound perception
and mediation, have been largely overlooked in the conventional scholarship
on Islam in West Africa. This is partly owing to the text-centered forms
of analysis that have been predominant in scholarly discussions of Muslim
authority and that tended to oppose two kinds of authority: one being
based primarily on access to the written texts of Islam, Arabic literacy, and
interpretive knowledge, and the second drawing on the special “charisma”
or divine blessings (baraka) associated with Sufi leadership, which grant
family members of “Sufi-related” clans, men and women, special powers to
assume an intermediate position between God and human beings.
Disciples of a Sufi shayk but also non-initiated Muslims are convinced
that the sheer physical presence of these leaders and haptic engagements
with them and with objects that previously came in touch with them allow
them to partake in the spiritual powers they are said to hold. Other people,
too, are considered to carry God’s special blessings and to pass them on
through touch. Among them are those considered “friends of God” because
they not only command special religious knowledge but are examples of
pious conduct, compassion, and religious devotion. The tombs of these
“saints” are often centers of pious attraction (ziyara; literally “visit”) where
believers flock to ask the wali for his or her spiritual intercession. Their
devotional activities revolve on various haptic engagements, such as kneeling
and touching the stone marking the tomb with one’s forehead or touching
other material tokens of the wali’s pious excellence.
These practices illustrate that touch, as a synaesthetic mode of sensation
and perception (e.g. Marks 2000; Verrips 2006), has conventionally played
a pivotal role in local protocols of generating and experiencing authority,
not only in interactions with leaders associated with mystical Islam but
with Muslim scholars claiming spiritual excellence by reference to text-