Page 199 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

182 Dorothea E. Schulz

with superhuman, divine powers. Whereas fanga denotes the capacity to
affect and transform the world through the use of sheer force, se refers to the
invisible powers mobilized in the course of turning (unspoken, sometimes
written) words into voiced, forceful speech (kuma; e.g., Zahan 1963).
Worldly domination, religious intellectual authority, and the power of speech
thus refer to complementary, not always neatly divided, realms of knowledge/
power (e.g., Wright 1989; Schulz 2001). By virtue of its “touching” effects,
voice (kan) mobilizes a listener’s existential, sensual, cognitive, and ethical
capacities by moving her or him from stillness and immobility to action and
the performance of exemplary “deeds” (kewale).
In recognition of the powers of voice and speech, people’s attitude
toward the spoken word is highly ambivalent. Human speech is held
to have an enormous potential to effect transformation by affecting the
human senses. Because speech has such indeterminate effects, people who
are associated with speech are treated with ambivalent feelings of distrust,
reverence, and disdain because their act of transforming silence into speech
releases the damaging forces of untruth, delusion, and human betrayal
(e.g., Diawara 2003).
Among Muslims, the ambivalence toward the transformative potential of
speech has been historically reflected in a “double-edged” appreciation of
the moralizing activities of women, as opposed to that of male preachers.
Those elite Muslim women, who were highly valued, convinced through
pious comportment and the “truthfulness” of their moral lessons, a
truthfulness assessed in terms of the capacity of their “warm,” “piercing,”
and simultaneously “restrained” voice to affect their disciples’ hearts. This
moving capacity of their voice was contrasted to the “loud” and “shameless”
speech of professional orators whose words could affect listeners against
their will. Still, these female Muslim “educators” were urged not to circulate
their moral lessons beyond the confines of the women-only educational
settings. The sermons of male preachers, conversely, whose truthfulness was
assessed primarily in terms of argument and oratorical skills, were expected
to circulate in a wider, public setting and affect male and female listeners,
even if in separate listening contexts. Conventional understandings of the
“compelling” force of moral lessons offered by female teachers as opposed
to male preachers thus revealed a gender-specific regime of authenticating
“truthful” and proper speech.
How does this culturally specific conceptualization of the power of
speech and of the moving qualities of voice reverberate in the ways in which
religious authority is asserted and validated in the interaction between
individual religious leaders and their followers? Do these modalities of
mediating spiritual experience and of validating religious authority continue
to be gender-specific? And how do audio reproduction technologies, as