Page 198 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Soundscape 181

and sharia-based appropriations of Islam. There thus exists an intricate
connection between touch and aurality in local conventions of asserting and
experiencing spiritual authority.
The centrality of sound-as-touch takes on a new significance in the case of
religious leaders who embrace new recording and broadcasting technologies
to disseminate their teachings to new constituencies. In other words, sound-
touch, in its interlocking with other forms of sensual perception, plays a
central role in the ways in which the “media preachers” assert and generate
authority in the course of their broadcast sermonizing.
To understand how sound-touch operates as a continuum of sensual
mediation in local regimes of authenticating religious experience and
authority, it is necessary to situate it in the context of culturally specific
conceptions of sound and of the affective and ethical powers of sound
sensation. That is to say, an exploration of the status that sound, voice,
the spoken word, and its touching effects enjoy in West African Muslim
societies will help us to understand what forms of spiritual experience are
at the basis of the authority that “disciples” and other acolytes attribute to
religious leaders in this context. It also sheds light on the ways in which
new technologies and materials intervene in, and possibly complicate, these
processes of sensuous mediation and authentication of leadership.
Throughout West Africa, conceptions of spiritual and religious leadership,
as they are articulated by the broad mass of Muslim believers, are not—or
only to a very limited extent—informed by a text-based Islamic tradition.
They are therefore at variance with practices and understandings of sound-
mediated religious experience that exist in other areas of the Muslim world.
Most notably, they contrast with Egypt, where a long tradition of text-based
understandings of the ethical and religious merits of sermon and Qur’anic
recitation audition exists (e.g. Nelson 2001; Hirschkind 2006). Yet, rather
than taking this tenuous link between text-based religious understandings
and West African Muslims’ engagements with religious authority as a
divergence from “orthodox” Islam, I propose another interpretation. West
African Muslims’ understandings of authority, in their appropriation of
local conceptions of compelling speech and a genuine, “heart-felt” hearing
experience, form an essential element of the symbolic and discursive
parameters in which the practice of Islam is grounded in West Africa. In this
sense, it should be conceptualized and recognized as a locally or regionally
specific discursive tradition of Islam (see Asad 1986; Bowen 1993).
Many West African societies attribute a particular agentive capacity to
both aural experience and the spoken word. In southern Mali, for instance,
orality and aurality are said to bear a particular transformative potential,
a capacity that tends to be conceived as a specific form of power (se in
Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali) and is commonly associated