Vocal Arrangements: Technology, Aurality, and Authority in Qur'anic Recording

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ian VanderMeulen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Authority ◽  
Recording Project ◽  
Sound Engineer ◽  
Sound Media ◽  
Historical Model

Abstract This article uses ethnography of a studio recording project underway at a Qur'anic school in Salé, Morocco, to offer new insight on sound, media, and religious authority in Islamic contexts. The aim of the project is to record the entire Qur'an incorporating all of its seven canonical, variant readings (qirā’āt), which are enjoying a small renaissance in Morocco. Several of the school's faculty, known as shaykhs, engaged as expert listeners and overseers of the process. I show how a historical model of such expert listenership, which I call “aural authority,” is transformed by the technologies of the studio and then dispersed across a collective of productive agents that includes the reciter and the sound engineer. I argue that these transformations, along with erasure of the shaykh's role from the medium of circulation—the recording—presents significant challenges to the broader qirā’āt tradition and raises questions about its future.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

Aesthetics/Ascetics

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jeremy Stolow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This article focuses on the relationship of aesthetics and ascetics with regard to the publication and popular reception of Kosher By Design, a cookbook published by a major American Jewish Orthodox press, ArtScroll Publications. The article analyses the ideological, rhetorical, discursive, and iconographic modes of address embedded within this text, treating them as instances of popular religion, and also as elements of a project in and through which the Orthodox Jewish intellectuals associated with ArtScroll seek to assert new forms of religious authority, in the context of a broader culture of “kosher consumerism,” to which this text is directed. The article ends by highlighting the paradoxical character of this form of “post-scripture,” in which books like Kosher By Design, and by extension other ArtScroll texts—including their popular prayer-books—are caught between competing demands of popularity and authority, art and asceticism, and religious stringency and bourgeois living.

Strategizing the Sacred

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avi Max Spiegel
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Party Members ◽  
A Site

This chapter suggests that the representations of religion in young Islamists' lives are not the product of prevarication, but rather of personalization. Religious authority has become circulated to such an extent that it has come to mean multiple things to multiple members. In the midst of this diversification, political party members increasingly appropriate the authority to interpret and represent what “Islam” means or should mean to others. None of these myriad representations constitutes “lies.” Instead, these words and constructions represent and reflect members' own strategic desires for themselves. The chapter shows how the haraka represents for some a site for religious study, a place of Qurʾanic learning unfettered by politics. For others, it is a place to make contacts and to get ahead: an instrumental, not ideological, site. For still others, it serves as a strategic site, a place to try out new ideas, and even as a convenient scapegoat. And, yet, for others, it is completely ignored; it simply has no place in their lives as party members.

Suits and Djellabas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avi Max Spiegel
Keyword(s):  
Religious Authority ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Choice Making ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Single Reading ◽  
Single Figure

This chapter argues that young Islamists' constructions of authority are complex and multilayered. They have personalized religious authority by circulating it away from a single reading of a single figure, even one as supposedly central as their “guide.” They have re-appropriated and reconfigured the organization Yassine once established and the scope and the range of the guide's substantive reach. They have even re-appropriated Yassine's memory. From spiritual guide to secular politician, the roles assigned to the head of their organization are constructed to fit their own desires, and, in so doing, they preserve and embrace individual choice, making room for multiple voices within their movement.

Pergeseran Otoritas Agama dalam Pembelajaran Al-Qur'an

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-201
Author(s):  
Tati Rahmayani
Keyword(s):  
People With Disabilities ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Science Of Religion

This paper discusses the shift of religious authority in Al-Qur'an learning. usually, someone who wants to learn to read Al-Qur'an will come to a cleric, or kiyai teacher to teach him to read the Qur'an. however, with current technological advances, religious authorities originally held by ulama or someone who is an expert in the science of religion shifted to other media such as the internet, digital Al-Qur'an or other Al-Qur'an media. In addition, with the advancement of technology, the publishers of the Al-Qur'an have their own innovations to meet the needs of Muslims for children, adults, and even now the Qur'an is available for the diffable. Where there is a pictorial Al-Qur'an for children, the Al-Quran braille for people with disabilities, the Al-Qur'an red pen and the Al-Qur'an tajwid are colored for people who want to study Al-Quran themselves. In addition to the diverse prints of the Koran, there are also online Al-Quran learning sites and other Al-Quran applications both on smartphones and computers. The advancement in technology has made people who want to learn al-Quran easy.

Speaking for Islam

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-127
Author(s):  
Abdoulaye Sounaye
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Religion And State ◽  
Islamic Values ◽  
French Model

Unexpectedly, one of the marking features of democratization in Niger has been the rise of a variety of Islamic discourses. They focus on the separation between religion and the state and, more precisely, the way it is manifested through the French model of laïcité, which democratization has adopted in Niger. For many Muslim actors, laïcité amounts to a marginalization of Islamic values and a negation of Islam. This article present three voices: the Collaborators, the Moderates, and the Despisers. Each represents a trend that seeks to influence the state’s political and ideological makeup. Although the ulama in general remain critical vis-à-vis the state’s political and institutional transformation, not all of them reject the principle of the separation between religion and state. The Collaborators suggest cooperation between the religious authority and the political one, the Moderates insist on the necessity for governance to accommodate the people’s will and visions, and the Despisers reject the underpinning liberalism that voids religious authority and demand a total re-Islamization. I argue that what is at stake here is less the separation between state and religion than the modality of this separation and its impact on religious authority. The targets, tones, and justifications of the discourses I explore are evidence of the limitations of a democratization project grounded in laïcité. Thus in place of a secular democratization, they propose a conservative democracy based on Islam and its demands for the realization of the common good.

The politics of welfare

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110080
Author(s):  
Lois McNay
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Welfare Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
Collective Activism ◽  
Historical Model ◽  
Valuable Role

Steven Klein’s excellent new book The Work of Politics is an innovative, insightful and original argument about the valuable role that welfare institutions may play in democratic movements for change. In place of a one-sided Weberian view of welfare institutions as bureaucratic instruments of social control, Klein recasts them in Arendtian terms as ‘worldly mediators’ or participatory mechanisms that act as channels for a radical politics of democratic world making. Although Klein is careful to modulate this utopian vision through a developed account of power and domination, I question the relevance of this largely historical model of world-building activism for the contemporary world of welfare. I point to the way that decades of neoliberal social policy have arguably eroded many of the social conditions and relations of solidarity that are vital prerequisites for collective activism around welfare.

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