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EISENLOHR | SOUNDING ISLAM Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Sounding Islam Sounding Islam Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World Patrick Eisenlohr UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by Patrick Eisenlohr Suggested citation: Eisenlohr, P. Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.53 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Eisenlohr, Patrick, 1967– author. Title: Sounding Islam : voice, media, and sonic atmospheres in an Indian Ocean world / Patrick Eisenlohr. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Eisenlohr, Patrick 2018 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license http://creativecommons.org/licenses Identifiers: LCCN 2018007231 (print) | LCCN 2018012075 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520970762 (E-book) | ISBN 9780520298712 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Voice. | Sound—Religious aspects—Islam. | Islamic poetry. | Islam—Mauritius. Classification: LCC BP190.5.V62 (ebook) | LCC BP190.5.V62 E37 2018 (print) | DDC 297.2/67—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007231 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations vi List of Audio Clips vii Acknowledgments ix 1. Sounding Islam 1 2. Devotional Islam and Sound Reproduction 21 3. Aspirations in Transnational Religious Networks 38 4. The Materiality of Media and the Vanishing Medium 59 5. The Work of Transduction: Voice as Atmosphere 79 6. Sound as Affect? Encorporation and Movement in Vocal Performance 109 Conclusion 129 Notes 135 References 145 Index 161 Illustrations 1. Mauritian CD cover of a collection of na‘t recordings 29 2. From a booklet accompanying a Mauritian CD of na‘t poetry 30 3. Center of the Da‘wat-e Islami in Port Louis 40 4. Stall selling CDs and DVDs, Port Louis 43 5. Still from a video recording of a mahfil-e mawlud 63 6. Spectrogram and waveform of “husne ‘amal” 101 7. Spectrogram and waveform of “voh na thā” 102 8. Spectrogram and waveform of “kāsh mehshar” 104 9. Spectrogram and waveform of “terī qudraton” 105 10. Spectrogram and waveform of “past voh kaise ho saktā hai” 106 11. Spectrogram and waveform of “unke dāman” 107 12. Spectrogram of “madīne ke jalwon pe qurbān jāun” 115 13. Spectrogram of “gunbad-e sabz par jab paṛegī nazar” 118 14. Spectrogram of “ek yahī sahārā hai” 122 15. Waveform of “ek yahī sahārā hai” 123 vi Audio Clips 1. “Husne ‘amal” 101 2. “Voh na thā” 102 3. “Kāsh mehshar” 104 4. “Terī qudraton” 105 5. “Past voh kaise ho saktā hai” 106 6. “Unke dāman” 107 7. “Madīne ke jalwon pe qurbān jāun” 115 8. “Gunbad-e sabz par jab paṛegī nazar” 118 9. “Ek yahī sahārā hai” 123 vii Acknowledgments Fieldwork in Mauritius and Mumbai was made possible through the support of Washington University in Saint Louis and Utrecht University, and a generous Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. I am grateful to the University of Mauritius for facilitating my research, and here I especially thank Vinesh Hookoomsing and Farhad Khoyratty. Most of all, I am deeply indebted to Enayet Hossen Edun, Rehana Edun, and their family. Without their support and guidance, my research would have been impossible. Hossen, a noted Urdu scholar and writer himself, and Rehana not only took care of me while I was in Mauritius but also generously shared their profound knowledge about Urdu and Urdu-language devotional practices with me; the many conversations with them sustained my research throughout. I also owe a lot to the late Cassam Beebeejaum and his family, who helped me in my research in many ways. Also, my conversa- tions with Shareef Chady and Fardeen Maraye were an important source of inspi- ration and support. As this book has been in the making for more than a decade, the project accom- panied me during several stations of my career. I began the work when I was a member of the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis, and I thank my colleagues there for the inspiring and supportive environ- ment that helped incubate the research that grew into this book. I also took the project to Utrecht University, and I owe much to my colleagues in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, the Department of Religious Studies, and the Centre for the Humanities for its further development. Finally, my colleagues at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen provided a highly supportive environment for me ix x Acknowledgments and facilitated this book’s completion. Also, I have had the good fortune of hav- ing the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen literally around the corner. The institute was a stimulating forum for exchanges that contributed many insights that aided me in writing this book. Finally, colleagues at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen played a special role in enhancing the book’s approach to the sonic dimensions of religion. Also, events they sponsored and organized, such as the Göttingen Sound Studies Colloquium and a workshop on atmospheres with Hermann Schmitz in November 2014, provided vital inspiration as I was writing this book. I presented earlier versions of the ideas laid out in this book to audiences at the University of Göttingen, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Utrecht University, Washington University in Saint Louis, the University of Chicago, New York University, the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, the University of Amsterdam, the Free University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the University of Turin, the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Harvard University, and I have greatly benefited from their valuable criticism and insights. For their contributions to and comments on material related to this book I espe- cially thank Birgit Abels, Asif Agha, John Bowen, Dominic Boyer, Matthew Engelke, Ilana Gershon, Courtney Handman, Thomas Blom Hansen, Charles Hirschkind, Matthew Hull, Ahmet Karamustafa, Mara Leichtman, Paul Manning, Nandagopal Menon, Birgit Meyer, Annelies Moors, Michael Nijhawan, Peter Pels, Ton Robben, Bambi Schieffelin, Dorothea Schulz, Peter van der Veer, Nargis Virani, and Robert Yelle. At the University of California Press I had the pleasure of working with Eric Schmidt as my editor, and I thank him for his enthusiasm and his trust in this project. My wife, Birgit Abels, has been the main inspiration behind this book’s engage- ment with the analytic of atmospheres. Birgit introduced me to the neophenom- enological literature on atmospheres that had already informed her musicological research. Several of the core ideas in this book took shape in long conversations with her, and my intellectual debts to her are large and obvious. Thank you, Birgit, for your unwavering support of this project. I cannot imagine a better companion and critic than you. I also thank my children, Shirin, Leyli, Leonhard, and Hannah Lou, for being part of the gestation of this book in their very own ways and for making my life so much richer. I thank Shareef Chady and Fardeen Maraye for their permission to use the audio clips in this book. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier version in “As Makkah Is Sweet and Beloved, So Is Madina: Islam, Devotional Genres and Acknowledgments xi Electronic Mediation in Mauritius,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 2 (2006): 230– 245. Sections of chapter 3 appeared earlier in “Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and Islamic Piety Movements in Mauritius,” City and Society 24, no. 1 (2012): 7–28, and in “Religion, Media, and the Global,” in Contesting Religious Identities: Transformations, Disseminations and Mediations, ed. Bob Becking, Anne-Marie Korte, and Lucien van Liere, 59–73 (Leiden: Brill, 2017). And portions of chapter 4 appeared in “Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2010): 314–333. 1 Sounding Islam ECHO In August 2011, I was sitting in Farhad’s living room in a village in northeast Mauritius. Farhad is an Urdu teacher and a locally well-known reciter of na‘t, a popular genre of devotional Urdu poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad. We were talking about different ways of reciting this genre when Farhad reached for his mobile phone and played a recording by the well-known Pakistani reciter of na‘t (na‘t khwan) Owais Qadri. The short audio clip featured a very strong echo effect so that every word, every syllable was audibly repeated several times, the sound of the poetry blurring in this way, with only the beginning of the two lines of poetry “yā khudā” (O God) being clearly intelligible to us.