Page 55 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Fig. 1.5. Muhammed Hassan’s
“Death of the Apostle,”
probably the most popular
tape in Egypt in the 1990s.

Image right unavailable

presentation of an original founding performance to which it referred. However,
with the increased popularity of such tapes, the development of tape markets,
new practices of listening, association, commentary, and tape-based khutaba#,
taped sermons have become increasingly independent of the mosque perfor-
mances which they reproduce: a signifying practice of their own, related to but
not subsumable within mosque sermons.
Notably the fact that taped sermons may be widely distributed and repeatedly
listened to has meant that they are now subject to a higher degree of public scru-
tiny both in terms of scholarly rigor and general argument, and this has fur-
ther accentuated the dialogicality of the practice. For example, in late 1996 the
widely acclaimed Egyptian khatib Muhammed Hassan put out a re-recording
of his most popular sermon, on the death of the Prophet, which was prefaced
by a studio-recorded apology for certain errors in hadith citation he had made
in the original. The question of an error in a khatib’s discourse, which previously
would have been solely a concern of religious specialists, has become a topic to
be addressed before the mass public of sermon listeners, many of whom now
take an active interest in these issues. In this way khutaba# are now subject to
assessment by increasingly well-informed audiences.
Hassan’s apology illustrates the way the contemporary sermon, as the privi-
leged rhetorical form of the da"wa movement, has come to re®ect the set of de-

44 Charles Hirschkind