Quranic Matters: Media and Materiality

QURANIC MATTERS: MEDIA AND MATERIALITY Natalia Kasprzak Suit A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Margaret Wiener Silvia Tomaskova James Peacock Gregory Starrett Carl Ernst Todd Ochoa © 2014 Natalia Kasprzak Suit ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Natalia Kasprzak Suit: Quranic Matters: Media and Materiality (Under the direction of Margaret Wiener) Mushaf (read with “s” and “h” separately) is what Muslims call the physical body of the Quran, its pages, binding, and print. In contrast to earlier works on the holy book of Muslims, in my dissertation I shift from studying the Quranic text exclusively as message to its corporeal existence as an object in the hands of its manufacturers and users in Egypt, treating its production and consumption as meaning-making processes. I approach materiality of the Quran -- the corporeal and electronic medium of the text -- as a place for tracking transformations of religious authority, agency, knowledge and Muslim practice in the context of changing technologies of text production. By looking at different media forms (manuscript, print, and digital devices) that disseminate the text of the Quran, I follow tensions existing between a manufactured object, tradition, and practical religious experience among Muslims in Egypt. I treat material carrier of the Quran as an object that mediates between institutionalized authority epitomized by the University of al-Azhar (the oldest religious institution in the Middle East) that controls Quranic production, markets of publishing houses that manufacture printed and electronic “Qurans,” and socially and economically diversified public consumers of the holy word in Egypt and beyond. Egypt is not the only potentate on the Muslim religious publishing market; highlighting the materiality of the Quranic text allows me to track the connections and tensions that arise iii between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a new competitor in the production of Qurans. Through this project, I show how the Quran as an object participates in configuring social ties both locally and transnationally. iv To my committee members, who helped me to fledge. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work owes its existence to a number of people: professors and scholars who helped me to think through this project, Egyptian friends and acquaintances without whom I would have nothing to write about, and organizations that agreed to sponsor my work. First of all, I would like to thank my committee members: Margaret Wiener, Silvia Tomaskova, Gregory Starrett, James Peacock, Carl Ernst, Todd Ochoa, and Terry Evens for their support and encouragement to persevere. Each of them helped me to overcome different obstacles and predicaments, and taught me how to better know myself, which made me love my work and my discipline even more. I carry an unpayable debt to all of the Egyptian friends, acquaintances, and strangers who were willing to share their time (and food) with me. Time and again, I was humbled by their hospitability and kindness, in spite of the tough political and economic times in which they found themselves. I was able to conduct my work thanks to the financial support of educational institutions that sponsored my research and writing through their grants and fellowships: the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, the Institute for International Education Grant, the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the Charlotte-Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. I also would like to thank in particular the Fulbright Office in Cairo who facilitated my work in Egypt in vi amazing ways. Finally I want to thank my family: my husband Kenny and my children Aniela, Alicya, and Karsten, all of whom so patiently accompanied me on this journey. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Language Transcription………………………………………………………….……..ix Table of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………..x Preface …………………………………………………………………………………………...xi Introduction: An Invisible Object………………………………………………………………...1 PART I The Makers: Chapter 1: The Beginnings……………………………………………………………...20 Chapter 2: Topography of the Written Language …………………………………....…46 Chapter 3: From Mushaf Fu’ad to Mushaf al-Madina………………………………….71 PART II The Custodians: Chapter 4: Between al-Azhar and Majlis al-Sha‘ab…………………………………...102 Chapter 5: Al-Rasm al-Uthmani: A Graphic Blueprint………………………………..125 Chapter 6: What the Eyes Cannot See but the Hands Can Touch……………………..150 PART III The Users: Chapter 7: How Printing Created Manuscripts: The Aesthetic and Historical Approaches to Masahif………………………………………………….……..169 Chapter 8: Enacting the Quran………………………………………………………...188 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..217 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………220 viii NOTE ON LANGUAGE TRANSCRIPTION I have chosen to abridge the traditionally used IJMES system of transliteration and simplify Arabic words for the convenience of reading as well as in order to avoid problems of transliteration related to the use of the Egyptian dialect and classical Arabic at the same time. There were two reasons behind my choice to cite original text in Arabic: a visual effect – as this is the subject my dissertation engages – and the ambiguity of some of the older text, which I wanted the interested readers to be able to examine for themselves. Also, I thought it more convenient to separate the Arabic language bibliography from the works and other sources used in English. ix TABLE OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Proportions of letters measured by the nib of the pen……………………………56 Fig. 2 Letter ‘ayn in three positions……………………………………………………..60 Fig. 3 Basmala with kashida……………………………………………………………61 Fig. 4 ‘Uthmanic rasm…………………………………………………………………128 Fig. 5 Stages of adding diacritics………………………………………………………129 x PREFACE There is a book on the table in front of me that is bound in dark green, plastic covers. Quite ordinary looking. It is about a quarter of the size of a regular book. It has five hundred and forty four pages but the paper is rather thin, slightly transparent, covered with black print. A charcoal color ribbon inches out from between the pages. This book can be easily purchased in many countries all over the world. I got mine from a friend in Egypt who had a few of them at home and gave me a spare copy. Before handing it to me, he kissed it and touched with it his forehead in a gesture of deference. On the cover, in the middle of a faded golden arabesque it reads in Arabic: “al-Quran al-Karim.” The book Ali gave me was the Quran, traditionally glossed in English as “the Muslim holy book”; about this book I wrote my dissertation. More precisely, my interest has been in a physical object that carries the text of the Quran and circulates in millions of printed copies in the Muslim world and beyond; an object that people read, touch, carry, and appropriate in many other ways. This dissertation is, then, an account of intimate relations between a text as object and those who make it and use in a concrete place: Cairo, Egypt. Counter to a prevailing -- also in Egypt -- inclination to read through the book without paying attention to its material surface,1 I explore how the book’s physical characteristics, its print design, paper, covers, embellishments, spelling, etc. matter to those who interact with it. This perspective includes the material body of the text as a vehicle of 1 Peter Stallybrass, “Material Culture: Introduction,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 124. xi meaning. Here, printing is a point of departure to thinking about the Quran, with writing and digitization as analytical counterpoints. Both of these media, when thought of in conjunction with printing, problematize the relationship of the Quranic text to the object that mediates it and redefine the notion of a “holy book.” But as this account is not simply a history of Quranic media but rather an exploration in thinking of what the materiality of a religious text may do to those who handle it, digitization and writing make only a partial appearance vis-à-vis printing which, after recitation, is still the dominant technology for disseminating the Quranic message. Muslims print, sell, give, buy, and use Quranic books in large quantities. Undoubtedly, Quranic books that circulate in the Middle East and beyond participate in shaping the Islamic umma (Muslim community) and mediating the divine message in ways that call for academic attention by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike. It was the ways in which my friends and random acquaintances approached their ordinary, quotidian copies of the Quran that initially provoked my interest and in some ways defined my further work in Cairo as “praxiography”2 -- an ethnographic narrative of religious practice. The more I observed people and talked to them about what they did with their Quranic books, the more I realized that my interlocutors discussed issues and performed activities that pertained to theology and technology alike in a way that made it impossible for me to think about the Quran without simultaneously thinking about its material medium: how they are made, controlled, distributed, and handled by Egyptian Muslims. As a site for thinking about the Quranic text as object, Cairo has been both representative and unique. Egypt was the first Arab country to begin mass producing Quran on printing

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