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Faithful Listening: On Sound, Survival, and Becoming in Muslim

by

Alia Hamdon O’Brien

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Music

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Alia O’Brien 2020

Faithful Listening: On Sound, Survival, and Becoming in Muslim Toronto

Alia Hamdon O’Brien

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Music

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

In this dissertation, I follow the trajectories of several contiguous, heterodox Muslim groups in the of Toronto, and unravel the ways in which they use sound and listening to at once cultivate personal, inward-looking spiritual practices, and a more outward-feeling sense of belonging to a variegated local network of Muslim spaces and institutions, and to the city-at- large in which they reside. In the vast majority of these spaces, conversations about faith, service, justice, advocacy, local politics, global current events, and everyday life are woven into the discursive and affective fabric at hand. Across this faith-based network, fricative, disjunctive encounters are common, but do not rule out the possibility of profound moments of camaraderie and understanding across difference; such is the nature of the ummah—that is, a theoretical or imagined global community that encompasses all .

I listened alongside a handful of groups affiliated with a Sufi halqa ( circle) located in the former municipality Scarborough (now a part of the ), including a meshk (hymn rehearsal) group and a prayer group called Masjid al- that

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operates as a place of worship for LGBT2SIQ+ Muslims. These groups’ spiritual journeys were often, but not always, concerned with the internal and inward. Or, in terms derived from the

Qur’an and , which my interlocutors often use as guidebooks of sorts, the individuals that I encountered during fieldwork were attuned to al- (the inner or hidden dimension of reality). Thus, I put forward a batini ethnography—an ethnography of (shared) inner experiences.

Importantly, this dissertation homes in on the roles that sounding and listening play in this realm of interiority. I discuss the ways in which the careful cultivation of modes of “faithful listening” is made possible through the development of safe-feeling spaces. In such domains of refuge, my interlocutors are able to move more freely along the maqamat (stations or stages) of being a student of , passing through difficult times—both personal and political—with hope (raja’), expansiveness (bast), contentment (qana’a), and even humour, but also, at times, with sadness (huzn), and contraction (qabd).

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Acknowledgments

Each word in this dissertation is but a trace; an imprint left by my fingers moving across the keyboard, a remnant of my relationships and interactions with others, a mark left by intersections of bodies and places and ephemera. At times, I feel as though it is barely mine.

Firstly, it belongs to my interlocutors; although their stories are muddied and fictionalized, they are, all the same, the heart of this work. I wish to express my gratitude to the members of the halqa and its network of prayer groups for inviting me in, for being willing to share of themselves, and for teaching me so much. I am honoured to have been their guest.

I would not have been able to even begin the process of bringing this work into the world had it not been for the support, patience, and wisdom that my teachers and colleagues have offered over the last seven years. I extend thanks to my advisors, Josh Pilzer and Farzaneh

Hemmasi, for their compassionate guidance, for many an exhilarating discussion, and for, time and time again, pushing me to the thresholds of my own understanding. Thank you to my committee members; to Jeff Packman for always asking the important questions, questions which fundamentally shaped the architecture of my methodology, and to Amira Mittermaier, for supporting my project, and for urging me to embrace an “ethnography of the interior.” Thank you to Jim Kippen, who first introduced me to the world of ethnomusicology, and whose rigorous feedback has helped, and continues to help, me to hone and clarify my thinking. I would also like to extend thanks to my external examiner, Jonathan Shannon, for offering a deep and thoughtful engagement with my research. Additionally, I am appreciative of the various funding agencies that supported my research during my time at the University of

Toronto, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the

Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) Program.

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I am indebted to my fellow graduate students; it is easier to undertake a journey when one is in good company. Thank you to the members of my ethnomusicology cohort and comprehensive exam study group, Nate Renner and Sepideh Raissadat, and to Yun Emily

Wang, Patrick Nickleson, and Vanessa Thacker, who walked this path before me, for their advice, encouragement, and willingness to lend an ear, or an editorial eye. Thank you, also, to the members of the ethno/musicology writing group, who helped me to push through the final stages of writing—Hadi Milanloo, Nil Basdurak, Allison Sokil, Sangah Lee, Nadia Younan,

Hamidreza Salehyar, Jack Harrison, and Amanda Hsieh—, and to Jillian Fulton, my partner in end-stage dissertation writing.

I would not have made it through this process without the support of my friends and family. I am thankful for my mom, Evelyn Hamdon, who has always offered a shoulder to lean on, inspiring conversations, and an extra set of eyes for my writing, and to sitty, Faye Hamdon, who radiates an aura of warmth and care. Thanks, also, to my dad, Kevin O’Brien, for his endless generosity, and willingness to offer both sage and practical advice during trying times, and to my brother, Geoffrey Hamdon-O’Brien, for helping me to always keeping things in perspective, and for sending me all the good memes. Thanks to my dear friend Heather

McTavish, a master of reassuring pep talks, and to my collaborators in Blood Ceremony, Badge

Époque, Octavio is Dead!, Children’s Story, and beyond, who helped me to sustain my musical practice over the years, even when it felt overwhelming. I am grateful for my inspiring partner,

Mark Cira, for simply being there and loving me, and to his beautiful, welcoming family. And to Maria, my feline companion, who always brings me back to the here-and-now. Finally, thank you to my beloved neighbourhood of Kensington Market, a haven for walker-thinkers; many an idea in the pages that follow was sparked with its sidewalks underfoot, coffee in hand.

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I would like to dedicate this dissertation to those who left this realm over the course of my studies: my friend, musical collaborator, and source of endless light, Litovitz. My ceaselessly optimistic grandfather, Jack O’Brien. My radiant Uncle Awni, whose laugh is unforgettable. And loving, kind juddy, Sid Hamdon, who, just days before his passing, sitting in his living room, gave his grandchildren, all huddled around him, a lesson on spinning a tale. “It doesn’t matter what the details are,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s factual. It’s about getting the feeling right. Here’s an example—a joke! So I ask: ‘How do you teach a Muslim to drink?’”

He paused and smiled. “‘Get thirteen Muslims in a room and start drinking!’” We all burst into laughter; the delivery of the punchline was flawless. “You see—the number, I just chose it. It couldn’t be two, or three. It had to be more. It’s about the feel of it.” Thank you, juddy, for teaching me about what batini storytelling can do.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Figures ...... x

Mudkhal/Entry ...... 1

1 Listening, Affect, Practice: Theoretical Inspirations ...... 7

2 Muslim , Muslim Toronto: On Complex Diasporas and Layered Geographies ...... 14

3 Sufi and “Heterodox” Muslims in Toronto: A Shajarah ...... 20

4 , Sufism, Sound, Flesh: An Overview and Some Definitions ...... 24

5 Fire and Clay: Hearing Beings Present ...... 32

6 On Heterodoxy and “The Margins” ...... 34

7 Post(-)secularism? ...... 36

8 Methodology ...... 38

8.1 Writing the Unknown and the Interior ...... 40

8.2 Religious Experience ...... 43

8.3 Faithful Listening as Methodology ...... 47

9 Exteriority, Interiority: Chapter Outline ...... 51

Chapter One Islam (Not So) Out Loud in Toronto ...... 56

1 Between and Beyond Private and Public: Theories of Sound, Space, and Lived ...... 59

2 In and Out of Earshot: On Zoning, Noise Bylaws, and Public Deliberations ...... 63

3 Theoretical Considerations of Public Deliberations of Sound ...... 67

4 Adhan ...... 71

5 Walking in the City While Muslim ...... 78

6 Conclusion ...... 82

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Chapter Two Signs, Glimmers, Dawnings, and Flashes: Hopeful Audition During Difficult Times ...... 84

1 Ways of Listening ...... 86

2 The Jinn in the Machine: Indeterminate Sounds and the Pious Sensorium ...... 87

3 The Right Path: Glimmers, Flashes, and Dawnings of Affirmation ...... 96

4 Rise Canada and the Noise of Hate Speech ...... 99

5 Singing Another Song: A Hopeful Sensorium ...... 101

6 Personal Encounters, Social Piety: Between Individualized and Collective Religious Experiences ...... 102

7 Conclusion ...... 106

Chapter Three Listening to Bodily Sounds and Silences on the Precipice of al-’ fi al- ...... 108

1 Branches, Crossing, Dwelling ...... 111

2 Dwelling One: Spectral “Silence” and the Halveti-Jerrahi Zikr ...... 113

3 The Halveti-Jerrahi Zikr: An Overview ...... 116

4 al-Batin: Gendered Silence, Qalbi Zikr, Echoes of the Unseen ...... 121

5 Silence, Safa, and Seda: Deciding to Dwell ...... 124

6 Dwelling Two: Voice, Advocacy, and Protection in an LGBT2SIQ+ Prayer Group ...... 125

6.1 Imran 125

6.2 Aisha 127

7 Silence = Death, Silence as Protection ...... 129

8 Ayat: Toward An Aural-Somatic Phenomenology of Muslim “Safe Spaces” ...... 132

9 Conclusion: Listening to Regimes of Silence and Voicing ...... 137

10 Coda: Crossing Paths ...... 138

Chapter Four Faithful Entrainment: A Winter of Meshk with the Scarborough Halqa ...... 142

1 The Voices at Meshk ...... 144

2 Meshk in Historical Perspective ...... 147

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3 Tracing the Path: A Walk Through a Rehearsal in Hijaz ...... 151

4 The Rhythm of Meshk ...... 155

5 Secular Enchantment or Leisurely Religion? ...... 171

6 Conclusion ...... 174

Chapter Five “Reason Won’t Help You Find…”: On Humour and Laughter ...... 177

1 What Humour Does, Part I ...... 182

2 Joking, Roasting, Teasing ...... 185

3 Expletives ...... 187

4 An Intentional Mistake ...... 189

5 Mutterances, “Wrong” Sounds, and Trangressive Speech: Hearing the Muddiness of Everyday Sufism ...... 192

6 What Humour Does, Part II: Humour in Sufi Writings ...... 194

7 Ordinary Humour ...... 198

8 Conclusion: Senses of Humour ...... 199

Chapter Six “Tears Start to Flow from my Eyes…”: Breath and Weeping during Zikr ...... 201

1 Osman’s Esma ...... 204

2 Nafas: The Breath, the Instant ...... 207

3 On Possibilities ...... 210

4 Dwelling in Discomfort ...... 216

5 Conclusion ...... 219

Mukhraj/Exit ...... 220

Bibliography ...... 228

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1. Excerpts from the comments sections on two YoutTube videos capturing the public broadcast of the adhan in Toronto…………………………………………………….…….73

Fig. 3.1. A simplified visual representation of the process through which a sensory experience becomes a sign that leads a seeker closer to al-fana’ fi al-tawhid…………....……….…...136

Fig. 4.1. Modified spectrogram of meshk rehearsal on 10 March 2016…………………...….156

Fig. 4.2. Modified spectrogram of illahi performance at a zikr on 20 August 2016……….…158

Fig. 5.1. Transcription of an esma…………………….…………………….……….………..190

Fig. 5.2. Transcription of Nasira’s mock-esma……………………….………………………191

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Language, Translation, and Transliteration

The languages used by my interlocuters are ample and variegated, but their shared languages less so. English was, by and large, the language used for everyday discourse, while theological concepts were often discussed using and, less commonly, Turkish. As theological

Arabic constitutes a linguistic meeting point for my interlocutors, then, all religious terms and concepts will all appear in Arabic, with the exception of the words esma, zikr, and , which are uniformly referred to using Turkish across all of my field sites. Very occasionally, I make note of instances in which Farsi terminology was used interchangeably with Turkish or

Arabic by my interlocutors; for instance, kiyam zikri was sometimes referred to as zikr-e-kiyam.

For all Arabic terminology, I will use the transliteration system preferred by the International

Journal of Middle East Studies. However, for the sake of ease of reading, I will omit all diacritics with the exception of ‘ayn (‘) and hamza (ʼ) , and, for plural terminology, I will typically add an –s to the singular terms as opposed to using the Arabic plural forms.

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So give thou good tidings to my servants who give ear to the word and follow the fairest of it.

(Surah al-Zumar 39:17-18)

Mudkhal/Entry1

I wish to begin with a mudkhal—a guided entrance into an auditory journey through a string of experiences that are both worldly and otherworldly, of the flesh and of the divine. A passive word, “mudkhal” means “to be entered” or “to be made to enter” something. It is an entrance not of one’s own volition. In the literature of Muslim mystics, sometimes called Sufis, this sort of gerundic construction is often used to refer to one’s experiences on the spiritual path, as it is thought that every action is willed by a Divine essence—, . And so, this story was given its beginning in the East Toronto district of Scarborough: a frosty night, a busy shopping area, an impressive-looking church made of weathered brick and angular, mid-century glass—undoubtedly a later addition from a renovation—nestled among coffee shops and grocery stores. Following along a shrub-lined cement path, I came upon a few steps leading up to a side entrance, which opened onto a cozily lit, meandering hallway on the main floor, winding its way toward and between several small rooms. Perhaps the building would feel less cavernous during the light of day, but it was after seven o’clock in the stark, sluggish time of

1 My dissertation is bookended by an entry and an exit, rather than an introduction and conclusion, drawing inspiration from one of my interlocutors’ favourite Sufi thinkers, who writes: “As for [the word] muqam, it means [the act of] “being placed,” in the same way as the word mudkhal (“entry”) may mean the act of being entered or the word mukhraj (“exit”) may mean the act of being driven out. For one cannot enter a station unless one witnesses God – Most High – placing him into that station” (al- Qushayri: 77).

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2 year that hovers on the precipice of winter; the clocks had fallen back, and the days had grown shorter. During these slow months, the church rented out its rooms for various purposes, and so the house of worship took on the feeling of a sort of nocturnal community compound; there were night classes, training sessions, and yoga sessions to name only a few of the myriad uses of the space. Orderly discussions and hushed words of instruction reverberated through the halls whenever a door was left open, and the building felt at once empty and diversely inhabited.

Ascending the stairs to the spacious hall on the second floor, the sounds changed, as though it were a different building—perhaps a different place altogether. There was a polyphonic chatter that grew louder with every step: greetings, laughter, reminiscing, catching up, children playing, and, from the adjacent kitchen, echoes of dishes clattering, water in the sink splashing, plastic wrap being removed from trays of sweets, and more laughter; Turkish,

Arabic, English, Hindi, Farsi—all of these sounds folded into one another, forming a lively, cacophonous noise drenched in the space’s natural reverb. Before turning the corner while climbing the staircase, one might think that a wedding reception or a birthday party is underway, or perhaps a reunion. And then, as I slipped off my shoes off and rounded the bend, the atmosphere immediately appeared more meditative than the sonic dimension, to my ears, implied. Entering the main hall upstairs, it became immediately apparent that a sacred event was in the works, and although I was in a Church, this is not a Christian service; there were scarves wrapped around heads and draped over arms, small, ornately decorated rugs and sheets laid out on the floor, and prayer beads in hands.

There were thirty-some odd people assembled; smiling faces coming together after busy weeks at work, raising families, nursing ailments—doing all of the things that one does to build and sustain a life. It felt like a homecoming of sorts—everyone was relaxed, as though a

collective sigh of relief has been emitted. All seemed eager, comforted, even, to take some time to remember something between and beyond; to reconnect with the truth of existence—al-haqq, with the divine, Allah, with the unity of all beings and things, tawhid. This was the bi-weekly gathering of a congregation that, in this dissertation, will be referred to as the Scarborough Sufi halqa (circle or congregation).

This halqa is engaged in a collective act of faithful poïesis, one that takes place in a manner that collapses dichotomizing systems and bifurcations. The building is not quite a , but not quite a church. And at the same time, it is both. The gathering is social, and it is spiritual. It is politicized in its perceived heterodoxies (which will be discussed in the pages that follow), while also aimed at transcending the domains of rhetoric and ideology. It is a gathering of bodies in all of their fleshiness: speaking, breathing, heaving, listening, laughing, and crying. It is also a gathering of nufus (souls) and suprahuman beings like , spirits

(jinn), and the Divine (Allah). Or, as Mayra Rivera evocatively puts it: it is the domain of “both flesh and not” (2015: 1).

This dissertation follows the trajectories of several such heterodox Muslim groups in the city of Toronto, and unravels the ways in which they hone their sounding and listening bodies to at once cultivate personal, inward-looking spiritual practices, and a more outward-feeling sense of belonging to a variegated local network of Muslim spaces and institutions, and to the city-at-large in which they reside. In the vast majority of these spaces, conversations about faith, service, justice, advocacy, local politics, global current events, and everyday life are woven into the discursive and affective fabric at hand. Across this faith-based network, fricative, disjunctive encounters are common, but do not rule out the possibility of profound

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4 moments of camaraderie and understanding across difference; such is the nature of the ummah—that is, a theoretical or imagined global community that encompasses all Muslims.

Specifically, I listened alongside a handful of groups affiliated with the Scarborough halqa located in the Greater Toronto Area, including a meshk2 (hymn rehearsal) group and a prayer group called Masjid al-Wali (Mosque of the Divine Friend) that operates as a safe space for LGBT2SIQ+ Muslims. These groups’ spiritual journeys are often, but not always, concerned with the inward work of personal piety and self-tooling (tadhkiyyah al-). Or, in terms derived from the Qur’an and Sunnah, which my interlocutors often use as guidebooks of sorts: their spiritual journeys orbit closely around the concept of al-batin—the inner or hidden dimension of reality, as well as al-ghayb—that which is not visible or unknown, and sirr—the innermost self, or the “subtle entity placed in the [human] body” (al-Qushayri 1045/2007: 110), as they walk along the stations of the Sufi path drawing ever closer (qurb/qarib) to the Divine

Truth (al-haq/).

These groups offer insights into the unique benefits and complexities afforded by decentralized assemblages of faith groups, in which it is possible to carve out sacred dwelling places in which one does not have to choose between the political and the spiritual, the ummah

(global Muslim community) and the local, or, in the case of members of Masjid al-Wali, identifying as queer and being Muslim—here, in this place, amongst these friends, there exists the potential to be both. It is not a matter of or, but of and. Indeed, the Scarborough halqa and its network of prayer groups do things differently from more visible Sufi orders in that their

2 Meshk refers to a rehearsal gathering in which ‘illahi-s (hymns) are played and sung.

gatherings are not usually segregated along lines of gender, even as their practices hold true formally and sonically to the modes of Sufism that trace their lineages to the Konya and

Karagümrük areas of —the Mevlevis, the Jerrahis, the Rifa’i. And yet they have carved their own path on the ever-expanding shajarah—tree—of Sufi orders. Further, the Scarborough halqa and its affiliated groups are grassroots, faith-based assemblages that offer new possibilities for protection, care, and allyship during times in which legislative bodies and elected officials have failed to assure Muslim that their lives are of value.

The network of Sufi-affiliated groups in my dissertation operates in relative secrecy so as to avoid scrutiny—or worse, threats or violence—from more conservative groups both within the local ummah3 and without—such as reactionary anti-Muslim watchdog organizations like

Rise Canada. Because of this, I am unable to go into a detailed account of the Sufi order’s history, and, by the same token, I am unable to use its actual name. Many of the individuals I met over the course of my fieldwork requested protection of identities as well. On the representational level, save for a few instances, the exterior dimension of my interlocutors’ stories—names of places, people, and organizations—has been muddied and obfuscated. No matter, however: the exterior dimension of reality—al-—is not the primary object of study in this dissertation, but rather is situated in the background, so that I might foreground the inner spiritual journeys and small but poignant moments that respectively undergird and punctuate my interlocutors’ lives.

3 Global community comprised of all Muslims, literally translates from Arabic to “community” or “a people.”

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Importantly, this dissertation is about the ways in which these unfathomable domains are reached toward and brought closer into earshot through sounding and sensing, and about how the careful cultivation of modes of “faithful listening,” achieved through moving along the maqamat (stations or stages) of dervishhood4, has helped my interlocutors to pass through difficult times—both personal and political—with hope (raja’), expansiveness (bast), contentment (qana’a), and even humour, but also, at times, with fear (khawf), sadness (huzn), and contraction (qabd). This process is fleshy and corporeal, but it also extends beyond the

"buffered” body5, both toward social assemblages, and unknown mysteries (al-ghayb) that reside at the threshold of perception. Interiority and exteriority, then, might be perceived as components of one divine continuum of experience.

I put forward, then, a batini ethnography; an ethnography of the interior. It is only by focusing on and foregrounding the essences of ethnographic moments that I am able to paint a larger portrait of what sounds do for my interlocutors, and to begin to answer the question: to what effects and affects are they tuning their worlds? I am concerned with complex nestings of the corporeal and the unfathomable, the inward and the outward, and posit that my interlocutors are enmeshed in an aural-somatic religious practice that hinges upon the possibility of inhabiting spaces and places safely. Crucially, though, my methodology expands beyond considerations of strategies and tactics: it engages with small, everyday acts that, taken together, comprise a collective (re)tooling of spaces and assemblages for “otherwise worlds of possibility” (Crawley 2016). Even though my dissertation fieldwork took place during a

4 While the word “dervish” can mean differently depending on the local context in which it is used, here I am using it in the manner of my interlocutors, that is, to refer to a student of a shaykh who has taken hand in a Sufi order. 5 See Taylor (2007: 239).

politically and economically difficult period for many of my interlocutors, this is not a work dark anthropology, but rather a study of listening for hope in times marked by “precarity” (see

Tsing 2015: 20). I listen toward my interlocutors’ cultivations of spaces of refuge and safety, and suggest that finding, sustaining, dwelling, and becoming in such spaces is at once a bodily phenomenon and a social process. Here, during a time where there was a perceived failure on the part of legislating bodies to protect vulnerable populations, Muslim Torontonians came together in grassroots social assemblages to accompany and protect one another.

1 Listening, Affect, Practice: Theoretical Inspirations My dissertation is largely circumscribed by affective and affecting moments; I am attuned to instances in which sounds, perceived or imagined, are connected to senses imbued with political or sacred meanings. My research is particularist in nature, inspired, first and foremost, by the work of Lila Abu-Lughod, who has challenged the notion of cohesive cultures through ethnographic engagements with “the particular” (1990; see also Hahn 2007). Through attention to microlevel processes, fundamental, we might have the opportunity to learn more about omnipresent practices that might otherwise slip through the cracks of our perception— that is, we might get closer to the heart of what Bourdieu refers to as habitus; ways of knowing and being that become engrained in our bodily styles. Indeed, for J. Martin Daughtry, critical, careful listening to minutae can help one to hear “the multiple acts of erasure, effacement, occupation, displacement, collaboration, and reinscription that are embedded in music composition, performance, and recording, as well as in acoustic experience more broadly”

(2015).

In grappling with such sounds and their sentiments, I am inspired by the work of scholars such as Kathleen Stewart and Sarah Ahmed, who focus on what emotions and

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8 sensations do socially. However, whereas Ahmed, for instance, uses psychoanalysis as a tool for the discussion of the circulation of “objects of emotion” (2004: 11), and as a way of grappling with the interplay between various facets of the so-called psyche, I look toward the language and texts preferred by the groups that I worked with. One key experiential framing device for my interlocutors—and, thus, for me—is the system of stations or states (maqamat) encountered by on their paths of seeking, as explicated by both the shaykh of the

Scarborough halqa and the organizers at Masjid al-Wali, and in texts of great import to these groups, namely Abu ‘l-Qasim al-Qushayri’s Al-Risala al-Qushayriyya fi ‘il al-Tasawwuf, and the writings of Ibn al-‘Arabi.

I am ultimately interested in arriving at a study of religion-as-practice that walks along the boundary that demarcates—however fluidly or porously—different perceptions and experiences of “sacred sounds.” How might we discuss the implications of heated deliberations upon the adhan, salat, and, more broadly, sonorous expressions of Islam that diffuse beyond the walls of the mosque and the home into spaces deemed “public”? What is at stake? What if an unanticipated instance of microphone feedback represents, to one individual, shaytan (Satan), and to another, Allah (God) ? How is an agreed upon meaning arrived at, and what does this collective interpretive exercise do for those partaking in it? There is an obvious ideological- sensorial grappling at play, one that is embedded in the collision of—or perhaps the boundaries between—what Jacques Rancière calls “aesthetic regimes.” His concept of “the distribution of the sensible” has increasingly been taken up by scholars working in the fields of sensorial anthropology/anthropology of the senses, sound studies, and ethno/musicology (among many other disciplines), including many studies of sound and Islam in the West, most notably

Deborah Kapchan’s recent work (2017).

Because sound is such a crucial component of Islam, it makes sense that the realm of the sensorial might be treated as crucial to, and perhaps inseparable from, more logos-bound debates about citizenship, culture, and religious practice. Indeed, if recent writings on performativity, cultural intimacy, and affect have taught us anything, it is that sensing, thinking, and speaking, and acting should not be treated as discrete processes, but rather simply as epistemological categories that, in practice—in the experiential realm of social poïesis, for instance—collapse into one another. Sara Ahmed notes that “the distinction between sensation and emotion can only be analytic, and as such, is premised on the reification of a concept”

(Ahmed 2004: 6). For this reason, Ahmed tends to speak of “impressions,” a word which she borrows from David Hume (1964) in order to “avoid making analytical distinctions between bodily sensation, emotion and thought as if they could be ‘experienced’ as distinct realms of human ‘experience.”” (Ahmed 2004: 7). Ahmed further probes the issue of how impressions happen, taking an approach informed by phenomenology, and, by proxy, practice theory, which homes in on the orientation of affective responses. She argues that “the ‘aboutness’ of emotions means they involve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world […] Emotions are both about objects, which they hence shape, and are also shaped by contact with objects”

(Ibid: 7).

Ahmed’s re-apprehension of Descartes engages with an interesting question, one that is central to my project. That is, what might impressions do? Recent scholars interested in the affective dimensions of human experience tend to agree that there is a nesting of the so-called political and the experiential, and that it is neither useful nor accurate to speak of “emotionality” and “rationality” in Kantian terms, that is, as bounded states of re/acting that are separate from one another (see Massumi 2002, Ahmed 2004, Stewart 2007). Brian Massumi is careful to note

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10 that affect—that is, the realm of impressions, or what Charles Sanders Pierce might refer to as

“firstness”—is not merely an object of study, but rather an omnipresent facet of everyday life

“which directly carries a political valence” (2002: vii).

Interestingly, Jacques Rancière uses a different sort of language of aesthetics, one which offers a counterpoint to conversations taking place about affect in anthropology, in his discussion of a concept which he calls the “police order” which, in many ways, resembles

Bourdieu’s idea of “habitus”; it is “a set of implicit rules and conventions which determine the distribution of roles in a community and the forms of exclusion which operate within it” (Sayers

2005) and this order is—crucially—founded upon (not informed by nor shaped by, but founded upon) the “distribution of the sensible.” By “sensible” Rancière is referring to all that is experienced sensorially or affectively. The word “distribution,” gestures toward the distinction between “that which is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, audible and inaudible. It functions like a Kantian categorical framework that determines what can be thought, made or done” (Ibid) and, by extension, how “a distribution of the sensible […] establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts” (Rancière 2013: 12). The maintenance of a seemingly ubiquitous pattern of inclusions and exclusions, for Rancière, is traditional or conservative (in the literal sense of the word) at its best and anti-democratic at its worst. For Rancière, as is the case for scholars such as Lauren Berlant (2008), Sara Ahmed

(2004), and Charles Hirschkind (2006), the realm of the affective is not just an entry point into the understanding of a group’s structure and mechanisms, as some structural and interpretive anthropological studies might have had it, but rather it is its nucleus, its precedent, and the threads that make up its fabric. Thus, if the orientations of one’s impressions begin to shift, one’s ideological orientations follow suit.

This line of thought also undergirds many iterations of Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy, which is likely part of the reason why scholars of sound and Islam have begun to gravitate toward both Rancière’s work, sensory anthropology, and affect theory. In his comprehensive distillation of the Qur’an and , Yussuf al-Qaradawi notes that the “sense of reality” depicted in Islam’s holy texts orients “man towards the assimilation of aesthetic and utilitarian aspects in different fields of life” (Qaradawi: 4). He further notes that the sounds of the recitation of the Qur’an and sacred poetry are meant to embody a “kaleidoscopic charisma” which “invite people to Allah’s way” (Ibid 10-11). Since the time of the Prophet Mohammad, however, arguments have unfolded amongst Muslim scholars regarding whether or not various genres of handasah al-sawt might possibly guide listeners away from God and towards a state of distraction, perhaps even towards shaytan (al-Faruqi 1986). Expressive forms such as qira’ah

(Qur’anic recitation), religious chants such as adhan, and sacred poetry have typically been designated as (permitted), as have functional songs performed at weddings, in the workplace, in the military, or in the home (al-Faruqi 1986: 8). Alternatively, expressive forms classified as musiqa are typically thought to be , , mamnuah (controversial) or (forbidden), and these include vocal or instrumental improvisations such as layali or taqasim, serious metered songs or suites (e.g. waslah), pre- or non-Islamic music, and

“sensuous” musics associated with, for instance, raqs (dance), or professional musicians (Ibid).

Importantly, this ever-shifting framework of categorization rests upon an understanding that one’s sensorium is the gateway to one’s ethos. As an example of this, Deborah Kapchan writes of the gradual sonorous learning that takes place among hopeful initiates in the Qadiriya-

Boutchichiya Sufi – it is through the development of an auditory literacy that her interlocutors’ spiritual lives are manifested and honed (2009: 75-76). Crucially, for Kapchan,

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12 and for many Muslim scholars who have written and spoken about sound, “acts of listening create our very perceptions,” and these perceptions extend far beyond the realm of the auditory

(Ibid: 78).6 Therefore, the belief that we (re)orient ourselves sensorially is held by affect- oriented scholars, Rancière, and Muslim philosophers such as al-Ghazali alike, as is a belief that our worldviews are facets of our sensoria. Thus, my dissertation, I hover upon a collection of interconnected moments in which sounding and listening acts fold in to ideas about faith, belonging, and citizenship; here my interlocutors’ sensoria are tools that they use in processes of creative poïesis.

The sensorially informed making that my interlocutors are involved in takes place internally and externally, individually, and collectively. The product—the fruits of their practice—is, I argue, a faithful mode of sensing that tunes in to the divinity of small sounds and moments. Small those these moments may be, this way of sensing is, at times, a very real tool for survival: it gives meaning and import to both beautiful and violent phenomena; such phenomena become illuminating signposts, each one urging the believer to keep going, to push forward. I noticed that by cultivating such a reverential mode of listening, my interlocutors were able to live more fruitful lives, even as they came up against social and systemic hurdles such as anti-Muslim or anti-queer bigotry, or more personal, atomized instances of loss, health-related

6 Such a perspective is not dissimilar from Charles Taylor’s concept of the “porous self” which he believes lies in stark opposition to a secular, Enlightenment-bound notion of the “buffered self” (Taylor 2007). Taylor notes that: "[m]odern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm. But formerly it was not so. Let us take a well-known example of influence inhering in an inanimate substance, as this was understood in earlier times. Consider melancholy: black bile was not the cause of melancholy, it embodied, it was melancholy. The emotional life was porous here; it didn’t simply exist in an inner, mental space. Our vulnerability to the evil, the inwardly destructive, extended to more than just spirits that are malevolent. It went beyond them to things that have no wills, but are nevertheless redolent with the evil meanings” (2011: 219).

struggles, and grief.

My research unfolded during a time during which North America—to say nothing of the world at large—is facing a host of troubles. Many people are feeling the effects of an economic recession and frozen wages, while the cost of living in urban centres has risen exponentially over the last decade. The current president of the United States has emboldened right-wing groups and state-affiliated institutions alike to more openly and unapologetically target people of colour, people of different faiths (including Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs, among others), people who identify or “read” as LGBT2SIQ+, and so on. The same can be said for Canada’s former

Prime Minister, , whose tenure came to an end in 2015, and, to a different extent, influential public figures such the psychologist-turned-self-help-guru Jordan Peterson, who has a strong following both locally in Toronto and internationally. Most notably, Peterson made headlines in 2016 when they suggested—using warped legalese7—that the expectation that one should refer to trans or nonbinary people by their preferred pronouns was a form of

“compelled speech” and, thus, an assault on freedom of speech. To be Muslim and

LGBT2SIQ+ in this fraught climate, is, at times, akin to being a moving target, and thusly involves a singular sort of day-to-day struggle for survival.

7 Peterson’s argument largely orbited around an alarmist analysis of Bill C-16, which slightly amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code in order to “enshrine the rights of transgender or gender-diverse Canadians by including them under human rights and hate-crime laws” (Dragicevic 2018). Nowhere does the Bill make any mention of pronouns.

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2 Muslim Canada, Muslim Toronto: On Complex Diasporas and Layered Geographies

My background is not the same as that of my interlocutors, and yet it is also not dissimilar. My great grandparents on my mother’s side of the family moved to the north of

Alberta, Canada—Fort Chipewyan, to be exact—from a small village in the Beqa’a valley in

Lebanon (then Syria) just after the turn of the century, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

They later went south to , where they set up a home, and where my great grandmother—“Sitty” Hilwie Hamdon—helped to organize with Edmonton’s Muslim community to raise funds and lobby for the construction of what would be the first mosque in

Canada: Masjid al-Rashid. At this time there were approximately six hundred Muslims living in

Canada, the majority of whom were Sunni, and lived in .

In early 1938, a plot of land was purchased for the construction of the al-Rashid for five thousand dollars, and, later that same year, on the 12th of December, it opened its doors for the first time. The opening ceremony was host to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, including members of Edmonton’s Jewish and Greek Orthodox communities, who had offered support for the masjid project, and was inaugurated by the scholar and translator of the Qur’an Abdullah

Yusuf , who was in North America promoting his most recent work: the third edition of The

Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary. Interestingly, from the outside, the original

“little mosque on the prairie”8 looked nothing like masjids elsewhere in the world, and this is perhaps because the architect responsible for the project, Mike Dreworth, who was Ukrainian

8 Little Mosque on the Prairie was a Canadian television sitcom partially inspired by the story of the al- Rashid, which was created by and broadcast between the years 2007 and 2017 on public television via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Canadian, modeled the space after Eastern Orthodox churches, using a modest neo-Byzantine style. As Guy Saddy, the grandson of another on of the al-Rashid’s founders, Rikia Mahmoud

Saeed el Haj Ahmed (or Mary Saddy), notes in an article that he wrote for The Walrus:

In his ignorance [… regarding masjid architecture…], Drewoth accomplished something far more meaningful than any aesthetic flourish. Although clearly unintended, his fusion of East and West stands as a metaphor for a made-in-Canada Islam, a pliant and less conservative version of the faith that grew out of the western prairie like a field of tall grass. It was an Islam that forgave the odd trespass and contextualized some of the religion’s more rigid proscriptions as remnants from the past. It was practiced here (2008).

Later waves of Muslim newcomers enriched—and complexified—the country’s mosquescape, bringing Sufism, Salafism and dozens—followed by hundreds—of new masjids. The old al-

Rashid eventually was retired as a functional mosque and relocated to a heritage tourism site called , and a new “mega-mosque” was built in the north part of the City of

Edmonton. Many of the families of the original founders stopped attending, mine included. Our weekly and holiday gatherings were moved to a small, seventh floor apartment in

Edmonton’s South Side that Sitty Hilwie lived in until she passed away in 1988.

Saddy speaks of a sort of makeshift, flexible Islam that was practiced at the original al-

Rashid.9 The sentiment that there exists some sort of “Canadian Islam”—however broad and

9 Earlier still, Canada’s first recorded Muslims were Agnes and James Love, who had converted to Islam in Scotland before moving to Canada in the mid-19th Century, and John and Martha Simon, who had converted to Islam in the United States before coming to Canada around two decades after the Loves. After this time, the Muslim population of Canada slowly began to grow as newcomers from both the then-Ottoman Empire and the United States moved to Canada to pursue the Klondike Gold Rush and agriculture.

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16 variegated such a thing might be—is further articulated by Amir Hussain, who, in his dissertation completed in 2001, considered what it meant for a Muslim to build a life of faith as a member of “a minority tradition” in a cosmopolitan, multicultural, modern urban centre.10 His interest lay in what Wilfred and Murial Smith referred to as “cumulative tradition,” and he believed that religion is best understood not through doxa or scripture, but through the “vital, living faith of individual persons” and “the poetry of ordinary lives” (2001: v). Because so- called “Muslim Canada” and “Muslim Toronto”11 are so vast and complex, it is impossible, as

Hussain found in the 1990s, and as I found in my own research, to truly speak comprehensively of such a thing, and yet such categories can be useful starting points when situating this study geographically (Ibid).

Thus, it is useful to undertake a brief historical overview of how Muslim institutions and spaces have been developed and sustained in the City of Toronto, which currently hosts the largest number of Muslim denizens in Canada—nearly 500,000 people according to a 2011 census, which is more than double the Muslim population reported twenty years earlier in

1991—and this number has undoubtedly increased with more recent waves of newcomers. To put this in perspective, a Journey Data Center analysis found that there were between 400,000 and 800,000 Muslims living in the metro New York City area as of 2017. Thus, NYC’s Muslim population is somewhere between two and four percent of the total population, while, in the

GTA, the Muslim population is between seven and a half and nine percent of the total

10 Beyond the Canadian context, Adis Duderija suggests (in an analysis that unfortunately, in my mind, lacks nuance and validity) that there exist two different types of Western Muslim identities: “Progressive Muslims” and “Neo-traditional Salafis.” 11 According to , in 2011, slightly more than one million people identified themselves as Muslim, representing 3.2% of the total population of Canada.

population. Importantly, there are currently over two hundred in the Greater Toronto

Area (GTA), including over thirty large-sized Sunni mosques, seventeen Ismaili jamaat khanas

(meeting/worship spaces), three large Shi’a centres of worship which together comprise the

Islamic Shia Ithna-Asheri Jamaat of Toronto, including the Jaffari Islamic Centre—the largest

Shi’a mosque in Canada—the Masumeen Islamic Centre—located on a large, twenty-eight acre land plot, and the Jaffari Community Centre which houses a school and fitness facilities. It is also home to several Sufi turuq (branches), including the Nimatullahi, Halveti-Jerrahi, Rifa’i,

Mevlevli, and Inayati orders. There are also smaller spaces: storefront masjids, rented spaces in churches and community centres, and prayer groups that meet in spaces that are more miniscule and private still; for instance, in homes and apartments.

Islam in Canada is what Hussain refers to as an “immigrant phenomenon,” that is, despite the fact that the in Canada extends at least back to the 19th Century, the majority of Muslims living in Canada today are either immigrants or first (or 1.5) generation

Canadians (Hussain 2001: 27). He notes that while the majority of Canada’s Muslims are of

South Asian descent (from India, , , and Sri Lanka), there are also large numbers of from the Middle East, North Africa, Somalia, the former Soviet Union and the former , and China. While Bosnian and Albanian communities founded Toronto’s three oldest mosques, recent waves of Muslims have come to Toronto primarily from South

Asia and, more recently, Syria. Thus “Muslim Toronto”—like the concept of ummah more broadly—is far from a homogenous entity, but, in actuality, an ever-shifting, multilayered sort of category which exists somewhere between practice and an imaginary.

It is often impossible to speak of even a single mosque or prayer space in terms of any shared ethnic, cultural, or linguistic heritage. This is even true of the first mosque to be

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18 established in Toronto, the Muslim Society of Toronto’s (MST) Islamic Centre, which was located in a former leather shop in the west-end neighbourhood now known as the Junction.

Although the Centre was technically founded by a small group of Albanian-Canadians, it quickly became home to Muslims from various locales and walks of life joined together to create a shared practice. In an interview with the Tessellate Institute, one of the original members of the Centre, Amjad Syed, recalls:

I tell you I was so thrilled, especially for the first time in my life. I was standing in the row of salat al-dhuhr. There was a white person, black person, brown person, in my — in my lifetime I had never come across a thing like that... I tell you, literally, I remember there were teardrops in my eyes because of this kind of situation... with a white Muslim and a black Muslim standing in the same row with — with me. It was amazing, it was amazing. (Amjad Syed, interview with Aziza Hirsi and Katherine Bullock: 2017).

What Syed is describing, what Hussain talks about, and what I will also illustrate in my own ethnographic writing is something along the lines of what Pnina Werbner, in her critique of

Brubaker, considers a “complex diaspora.” Indeed, senses of diasporic belonging almost always involve a grappling with inner divisions—however subtle—and the boundaries which separate contiguous diasporic groups from another are often porous, fuzzy, and fluid (Werbner 2015:

36)—dichotomizing ways of categorization inherently contain myriad slippages.

The ways in which my interlocutors live and express their Islam(s) are certainly complex, and, in many cases, shift with the passage of time. Some of the members of the

Scarborough halqa and its connected spaces are in the process of discovering religion for the first time. One young woman, for instance, was a self-described atheist and student of philosophy, and came to Islam through the esoteric writings of early Baghdadi philosophers.

She now wears both in and outside of the mosque. Others were raised with different forms of Islam—members come from both Shi’a and Sunni lineages from West Africa through the

Middle East to Southeast Asia. Another young woman, a regular at the Scarborough halqa, was raised in a Pakistani-Canadian Shi’a household, and grew up wearing hijab. She became involved in LGBT2SIQ+ activism as a teenager, which led her to Masjid al-Wali and, subsequently, the halqa. About halfway through my fieldwork, I noticed that she had stopped wearing her hijab, save for during salat (prayers); it was a conscious decision that was also, at its core, very simple: “I felt like going without it today.” Several older women, on the other hand, grew up wearing hijab, and continued to do so at the halqa gatherings—there was a familial expectation to do so, but also, this mode of dress felt familiar and comfortable.

Similarly, some of the members of the group imbibe, while others have not and will not.

The stakes at play in the decisions of my interlocutors to partake in Sufism—particularly a mode of Sufism that is welcoming to people of all gender identities and sexualities—are, in many cases, high. In the cases of individuals that converted to Islam from, say, Catholicism

(which is not an uncommon trajectory across various North American Sufi orders)12, some have faced interrogation or isolation from their families. In the cases in which individuals have moved away from more orthodox Shi’a or toward Sufism, their practices are often perceived as heterodox, or “not really Islam.” In some cases, individuals have been completely cut off from their families, in others, their families have adopted a code of silence—a sort of

“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. In other cases, individuals have not been able to tell their families

12 I found this to be a common occurrence in both the Nur Ashki Jerrahi tariqa in New York City, the Halveti-Jerrahi tariqa in Toronto, and the Nimatullahi khaniqa in Boston (see O’Brien 2010).

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20 at all for fear of dire repercussions, and thus live double lives, moving between the halqa,

Masjid al-Wali, and their family’s mosque.

And then, there is the inherent complexity involved in being Muslim—and in some of my interlocutors’ cases, visibly Muslim, depending on how they choose to dress—in a purportedly pluralist society that is host to groups like the Sons of Odin or Rise Canada. These organizations openly express distrust, dislike, and, in some cases, a violent despisal of Muslims, people of colour, newcomers, and any sort of presence that poses a threat to the supremacy of what former Prime Minister Stephen Harper infamously referred to “old stock Canadians,” a perplexing term that refers to Canadians of Anglophone origin, that is, “White, Christian, and

English-speaking” (Elke 2013: 116). In some ways, my interlocutors’ processes of faithful self- tooling allows them to “make sense” of the variegated people, rhetoric, and policies that surround them.

3 Sufi and “Heterodox” Muslims in Toronto: A Shajarah My research on Sufism and Islam in Toronto began in 2009, when I commenced fieldwork with both Toronto’s Halveti-Jerrahi and New York’s Nur Ashki Jerrahi orders for a project that dealt with women’s roles in the kiyam zikri (also referred to as zikr-e-kiyam) gatherings, and in music-making more generally. A central practice in nearly all iterations of

Sufism, “zikr,” meaning remembrance (here, of the Divine) is a polysemic category that indexes a myriad of spiritual sensations and ideas.13 However, when I returned to my field site

13 To practice zikr might simultaneously involve a recollection of one’s (spiritual lineage) and of God. Zikr is also treated as a path toward fana’, a mode of being in the world that involves the dismantling of one’s ego through annihilation in the divine, and dervishes (followers of the Sufi path) work both individually and collectively toward this state of perpetual, transcendental remembrance.

in 2013, I found that much had changed in the network of Sufi-affiliated groups in Toronto. For instance, due to an over-saturation of researchers, an increase in groups who are openly hostile towards Muslims, and a shift in membership (my two main connections to the Jerrahi community moved and passed away), I did not have the same access to the Jerrahi dergah that I had in the past. While the groups that I primarily ended up working with for my dissertation project are not identified with the Halveti-Jerrahi tariqa—theirs is a different spiritual lineage—they share a zikr format and illahi repertory with other so-called “Classical”

Sufi orders from the Ottoman period, including the Mevlevi and the Halveti-Jerrahi turuq

(paths). It is beneficial, then, to offer a bit of concrete background regarding the history of

Classical Sufism, as well as a snapshot of the practice of Sufism in the West.

Collective gatherings centered around the performance and audition of sacred sound fall into two main categories in this line of practice, although, as I will explore in this dissertation, there are many other “small” sorts of sensory experiences that are of equal import. Firstly, there are sacred concerts, or meshk during which a repertory of sacred hymns—illahis—are performed, and secondly, divine remembrance, or zikr. The boundaries between these categories are often blurred, especially since illahis sung at meshk stand on their own as a sacred repertory but also are performed during zikr.

At Toronto’s Halveti-Jerrahi dergah most sacred music-making and recitation is led by men; in particular, the lead bağlama (a fretted long-necked plucked string instrument native to

Turkey) player, and the shaykh. Women sit to one side of a room, and the men another. Thus,

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22 women are physically distanced from the “guiding sounds.” Despite this separation, women are very much active participants in performing the illahis and zikr. On the other hand, the sonorous activities in the Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali are not segregated along lines of gender—spatially or sonically.

While both Toronto’s Jerrahi order and the Scarborough halqa trace their recent lineages to neighbourhoods in , their are notably distinct, even though their practices overlap in many ways. The Halveti-Jerrahi order was founded in Istanbul in the seventeenth century by Nureddin al-Jerrahi, and currently has dergahs—that is, centers of worship—in Italy, Spain, Australia, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, the United

States, and Canada. The Scarborough halqa, however, is a newer branch of an order founded in what is now Iraq, and has ties to an order known as Ma’rifilik, which differently shows elements of Alevi, Bektasi, Rifa’i, and Jerrahi practices. Indeed, having come from spending time at the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, I was able to recognize and vocalize the esma component of the zikr almost immediately. I was not alone in this experience—several dervishes with whom I spoke “crossed over” from the Jerrahi dergah to the Scarborough halqa, and found the transition to be a fluid one due to the similarity of their zikr formats and illahi repertories. Why leave one dergah for another, though, if the similarities are so pronounced? Crucially, one of the key, and immediately observable, differences between these two groups is the way in which gender and sexuality are addressed (or not addressed). Namely, the Scarborough halqa, in recent years, as a result of conversations between the shaykh and his dervishes, adopted fluid zikr and meshk formats in which divisions along lines of gender are eradicated.

Still, these groups—along with Toronto’s Mevlevi community—come together on a regular basis. For instance, for ’ (whirling meditation)14 classes at the Jerrahi dergah, or for at the Noor Cultural Centre, a liberal Muslim organization and prayer space situated in the Greater Toronto Area region of North York, which serves as a home-away-from- home for several “heterodox” groups whose spaces and resources are not vast enough to host large holiday events.

While there are any number of circumstances that might impact the musical and sound activities at a dergah, four main categories emerged out of my field research and interviews: 1) the individual visions, values, and interpretations of shaykhs; 2) networks of local, national, and international organizations and individuals that have a vested interest in the activities at the dergah (whether religious, social, cultural, or financial); and 3) the interests of the individual dervishes who attend dergah, as well as the local community at large.

One of the places in which these complex dynamics can be seen playing out is in the domain of language. Returning to the notions of “Canadian Islam” and “complex diasporas,” it is essential to point out that the primary language that I worked in—and that my interlocutors spoke in—was English. The next most common language was Arabic—Qur'anic Arabic to be exact—which was used when referring to philosophical, religious, and literary concepts. The third language that I encountered in the field was Turkish, which was used in the illahi repertories of both the Halveti-Jerrahi dervishes and the Scarborough halqa. Finally, my interlocutors occasionally used Farsi to describe Sufi concepts; because very few of my

14 Sama’ also refers to a meditative state of pious listening, and literally translates from Arabic as “hearing” or “hear.”

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24 interlocutors were Persian speakers, this language usage can mainly be attributed to the omnipresence of literature by and Rumi among the Scarborough halqa.15

Perhaps it seems strange—on the surface—to conceptualize or frame English as an

Islamic language, and yet, in the context of the dissertation, I argue that this is the case, insofar as “it is being used and has been used as a language to express Islam” (Hussain 2001: 37; see also Metcalf 1996). The individuals in the Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali come from

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Canada, the United States,

Senegal, Kenya, and England, among other places, and so English and, to a lesser extent,

Qur’anic Arabic are linguistic points of commonality and sharing.

4 Islam, Sufism, Sound, Flesh: An Overview and Some Definitions

I have provided an introduction to the particularities of the groups that I have worked with, but it is also helpful to take a brief step back, and discuss Islam and Sufism more generally, and to arrive at some definitions. Many scholars of Sufism lead into their writings through the discussion of questions such as “what is Sufism?,” “who is a Sufi?” or “what is ?” The answers to these questions vary incredibly. Sufism is a very broad and multifaceted category, one that describes an array of experiences, practices, writings, and philosophies. The discussion of Sufism is made even more difficult by the reluctance toward

15 Members of the Scarborough halqa, while in many ways bound to Istanbul’s “Classical” Sufi formations, often drew inspiration from a variety of religious sources from outside of their direct spiritual lineage. On one occasion, Amanda made reference to the work of Hazrat Khan, and, on another, a member of Masjid al-Wali made mention of New York’s Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi centre. The influence of these sorts of sources, however, is neither widespread nor codified, and has more to do with religious syncretism in diasportic contexts than with a direct connection to such thinkers or turuq.

finite definitions among dervishes. For example, as a precursor to her book Mystical

Dimensions of Islam, Annemarie Schimmel presents the following anecdote: “Somebody asked

Abu Hafs: ‘Who is a Sufi?’ He answered: ‘A Sufi does not ask who a Sufi is’” (1975: 2). In a similar vein, Kudsi Erguner, a Turkish dervish of the Mevlevi order and internationally renowned master of the ney (reed flute), destabilizes the notion of a unified “Sufi sound.”

Erguner instead proposes, “there is no such thing as Sufi music, only music played by Sufis”

(2005).

Despite all of the vagaries and complexities that comprise the term “Sufism,” there are a few general concepts and histories that can help clarify its meaning. Broadly speaking, Sufism refers to the inner dimension of Islam; the Arabic word for Sufism, tasawwuf, derives from suf, or wool, and it is believed that early Sufi scholars often wore wool because of its simplicity and low cost, thus symbolically abandoning materialism. In sohbets (sermons) and conversations with the shaykh (spiritual leader) of the Scarborough halqa, it was articulated that, not unlike

Alevism (see Tee 2013), the ritual practices and philosophical underpinnings of this group— and, by extension, groups connected to it such as Masjid al-Wali—draw upon classical Sufi thought (i.e. the writings of Rumi, Hafiz, and Shams Tabrizi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn al-‘Arabi), but also Shi’a Islam and pre-Islamic Central Asian shamanism.16

The learning that takes place in classical Sufism is not based so much on literature or the written word but is instead experiential, and usually guided by a shaykh. The Sufi poet Yunus

Emre once stated that “one might read all the books of instruction for a thousand years, but

16 Regarding the latter connection to shamanism, which is contested in some corners of Sufi practice, one of the senior dervishes referred me to a text by Razia Sultanova titled From Shamanism to Sufism (2011).

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26 without a guide nothing would be achieved” (Schimmel 1975: 103). Thus, oral transmission is a key element of Sufi learning. Sufism as a practice stems from the teachings of the Prophet

Muhammad as well as a variety of saints and shaykhs. A system of fraternities and orders began to develop in and around the tenth through twelfth centuries in the Middle East, marking the beginnings of the consolidation and institutionalization of Sufi practices into a network of turuq

(paths or orders, plural). Because Sufism is based on the system of guide and student, or shaykh and , many turuq emerged, each representative of the oral dissemination of teachings of its lineage of saints and shaykhs. When a new order is founded, it is typically named after the founding shaykh. Kudsi Erguner notes that new turuq develop “naturally,” and despite this process of renaming, the emersion of new paths is (ideally) not the result of a shaykh’s attempts at cultivating power:

Changes of names [of turuq] do not come in any way from the pride of any shaykh whose wish for power was such that he would have wanted to give his name to the brotherhood. It is much more to mark a change in tone, a different ‘taste’, a ‘perfume’ corresponding to a different epoch. It is somehow, for us Muslims, like the process of the advent of the prophets. We believe in one God who sent messengers: prophets who simply proclaimed the Oneness of God…. The coming of each new prophet does not invalidate the previous message. There is a kind of continuity when the next step is taken, which brings a new light (2005: 93).

Why use sound as an entry point—and object of study—in my work with the Scarborough halqa and its affiliated groups? Perhaps most importantly, Islam is often regarded as an oral and aural faith that orbits around both inner and physiological voices, where much learning takes place using the ear. The revered title of hafiz or hafiza, for instance, refers to an individual who has memorized the Qur’an, and is a practice that harkens back to the foundation of the Muslim

faith, during times of low literacy, when followers of the Prophet Muhammad preserved and passed on both the Qur’an and his teachings orally. This collection of teachings is referred to

‘ahadith (singular hadith), which literally translates to “speeches” or “accounts.”

It is important to note that the word “music” holds particular connotations in Islam, and does not describe all sound-based rituals accurately. Music is a sound that is connected to worldly pleasure, and hearing it can potentially result in a secular or profane sort of ecstasy

(tarab). Conversely, recitation, such as Qur’anic recitation, or utterances of zikr, while sometimes based on the same or similar systems of musical melodic modes () as secular music, are not considered music. These sounds are thought to facilitate a different, sacred form of ecstasy (Schimmel 1975: 178). The divisions between, and attitudes toward, activities that are considered music and non-music vary within and between Sufi circles and Muslim communities. For this reason, I have adopted the term “music” only for activities that are referred to as such in the field. I thus frame categories using the terminology that my interlocutors use—this is less intended to be an intervention in the field, and more so a conscious attempt at what Trinh Minh-ha calls “speaking nearby” (Minh-ha 1982), and perhaps also “listening nearby.”

Sufi practice is no exception to this tradition of aurality, save for a handful of orders, such as the Naqshbandiyya, who hold their own particular ideas about the voice and silence.

Many Sufi paths teach and practice sama’, a word which literally means “to listen,” but, in this particular context, simultaneously denotes a genre of music, a mode17 of attentive, contemplative listening, and—in some cases—the meditative practice of whirling. The range of

17 Or as Deborah Kapchan suggests, a genre of listening (2017: 279).

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28 scholarship on Sufism reflects the diversity among and within Sufi practices and thought. Sufi theosophists have been writing about sound and Sufism for at least eight hundred years, and so the and Sufi thought is quite well documented. One of the most important early Sufi scholars to write extensively about the use of sound was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

(1058-1111), who sought to justify sama’, or audition of sacred sound, as a means of approaching . The word “wajd” has no English equivalent, but can roughly be described as a sort of sacred ecstasy. Al-Ghazali is careful not to use the word “music,” but rather holds to the more ambiguous terms dealing with ecstatic listening in Sufism, such as sama’, zikr or

(remembrance), wajd (finding, also, a sacred mode of ecstasy), and al-hal (another form of enchantment) (Schimmel 1975: 256). This work is crucial, as it provides a record of one of the central debates within both Islam and Sufism: the subject of music. Al-Ghazali also wrote a volume entitled The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife: Book XL of the Revival of the

Religious Sciences, in which he outlines the philosophy and ethos underlying the practice of zikr. It was around the time that al-Ghazali was writing on such topics that various organized systems of Sufi practice began to emerge, and these systems eventually developed into the system of turuq. Central to these systems were “more developed ‘free devotions’ of Sufi Zikr, sema (musical audition), and dance” (Sells 1996: 25).

From al-Ghazali to Kudsi Erguner, figures in various Sufi orders and scholars alike have been careful to emphasize that “Sufi music” as a category is a nebulous descriptor.

Theoretically, it is the intent with which sound is created or sensed that renders it faithful, rather than the form of the sound itself (Erguner 2005; Bohlman 1997). Through the lens of Sufi practice, then, even the most ordinary and involuntary activities such as pulse, footsteps, and breathing can become tools for ritualized acts of remembrance. Catherine Bell defines

“ritualization” as “a way of acting that differentiates some acts from others” (Bell 1992: xv).

Thus, through the lens of ritualization, the daily minutiae in the lives of visitors to the Jerrahi dergah become just as meaningful as grand spectacles; it is through both avenues that dervishes

(followers of the Sufi path) strive toward a state of constant remembrance of God.

European scholars first began exploring Sufism in the twelfth century, and, interestingly, the first Sufi figure to enter into Western literature was Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, a woman Sufi saint who lived in eighth century Iraq. While early writings on Sufism by European Orientalists are criticized by scholars such as Edward Said for their fetishization of “the Other” and the distortion of indigenous perspectives, more contemporary scholarship shows greater insight and sensitivity toward Sufi thought, tradition, and history (Said 1978). In the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, Sufi practices began to be learned and taught in the Western world through teachers such as Hazrat Innayat Khan, Javad Nurbakhsh, and Muzaffer Effendi. At the same time, a new wave of studies of Sufism was emerging in various fields outside of Islamic and

Oriental studies, including psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology.

Within the field of ethnomusicology, Deborah Kapchan’s aforementioned work with the

Qadirriya Boutshishiyya Sufis in France has been particularly poignant. In her recent chapter in

Theorizing Sound Writing, she illustrates the particularities of the realm of the audition in diasporic contexts, where practitioners may not have been raised speaking Arabic, and so they

“learn the […] liturgy [of the order], song lyrics, and melodies by listening—closely, transitively—to sounds that are, for them, nonreferential” (2017: 279). Here, there process of initiation—or taking hand—takes place “through the ear” (Ibid). As previously mentioned in my discussion of language, my interlocutors have varying levels of proficiency with Arabic and

Turkish, and so Kapchan’s description of nonreferential echoing resonates, to an extent, with

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30 my research. There is another sort of listening that Kapchan does not touch upon, however, that is also cultivated in many Sufi orders, including the Scarborough halqa, and that is a more inward-reaching listening and voicing from the heart (qalbi).

In this dissertation, I will touch upon multiple categories that might be considered

“sounds” in a broad sense of the term. I discuss illahi (hymn) rehearsals, singing and conversation at meshk, breathing, and weeping at zikr gatherings, and indeterminate sounds such as analog and digital interference in the forms of microphone feedback and Skype “noise.”

I also touch upon the atomized and individuated listening that takes place using personal listening devices such as smartphones—this is a mode of listening that is pervasive in the lives of my interlocutors. The groups that I worked with also spoke of auditory categories that do not necessarily consist of sound waves falling upon the ear’s tympanic membrane. There are, for instance, khawatir—thoughts—which, according to al-Qushayri, are “speeches that enter the soul [that] […] may be dictated by an or by Satan; sometimes they are the soul’s self- suggestions, at other times they come from God” (1045/2007: 106).18 There is also samt— silence—a maqam (station) on the Sufi path that differently denotes an absence of speech, careful speech, safety from wrong speech, and a devilish failure to speak the truth (Ibid: 138). It also can denote the act of listening to the word of God or to suprahuman agents like angels or jinn (spirits) (Ibid: 139).

Breath (nafas), too, is important in Sufi practice—it is understood as “the perfuming of

18 There are also occurrences——which are “praiseworthy thought[s] that enter the servant’s heart without his invitation [which] […] may come from God for from knowledge. Occurrences are broader than thoughts because thoughts are characterized by a speech of sorts or something similar to speech. Occurrences can be the following types: an occurrence of joy, an occurrence of sadness, an occurrence of contraction, and occurrence of expansion and so on” (Al-Qushayri 1045/2007: 108).

hearts by the subtle entities emanating from the Unseen” and that “the noblest of all acts of worship is to count one’s breaths with God” (Ibid: 106). There is also qalbi zikr, a form of the remembrance of Allah in which a dervish becomes attuned to their heart, and becomes aware of their heart reciting the names of God continuously. This practice of constant inner zikr is often cultivated with the help of counting tasbih (prayer beads). There are also signs of the divine— ayat—that may come to one through their ear through a sound or a song. A carefully tuned heart might me more likely to experience such revelatory instances of audition (Ibid: 95).

Some of these sounds come from sources that seem to be from the realm of al-ghayb

(the unknown or invisible). Others are of the flesh: breath, the mind’s thoughts, the beating heart, beads sliding through meditating fingertips. Through the cultivation of faithful modes of listening, however, these sources—the internal, the external; the familiar, the unknown—come to be heard not as separate, but as manifestations of the beating heart of Allah, and of Allah’s life-giving breath (ruh). Bifurcations begin to melt away in the process of listening for al- tawhid, that is, the oneness of all things. This is not a neat process, however, and there are, of course, slippages, disagreements, ruptures, and interceptions that occur along the way. In her book Poetics of the Flesh, Mayra Rivera pointilistically discusses the complex and often contradictory process of attempting to transcend the flesh while being of the flesh. Her research deals with , but her observations ring true to my research, as well. She notes that the notion of flesh is itinerant and ambivalent: it can be synonymous with the body, but it is also sometimes imagined as “formless and impermanent, crossing the boundaries between the individual body and the world” (2015: 2). The seemingly ethereal can become flesh, too. Rivera notes that words and ideas can “mark, wound, elevate, or shatter bodies” and gender norms are performed as “styles of flesh” (Ibid: 2). Sounds, too, can emerge from flesh, and are

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32 apprehended by sensate bodies, gesturing toward the notion that aesthetics and poetics are inherently corporeal categories. Importantly, Rivera, in the tradition of feminist theologians before her, troubles spirit/matter dualism in Christianity and philosophy in historical and contemporaneous perspective, undertaking rigorous discourse analysis, seeking to portray flesh as a fluid and at times inflammatory category that folds into the body, the world, and the hereafter.

5 Fire and Clay: Hearing Beings Present

In the Qur’an, earth and fire are fleshy substances that constitute both animate and inanimate entities. It is written that there are multiple classes of beings, each created from different elements. While spiritual (non-human or suprahuman) beings are said to be made of fire (nar), humans are said to be made from clay (tin). Both classes of beings are present, in different ways, in my research and writing. On the first night that I attended the meeting of the

Scarborough halqa for their Saturday night zikr, it was a particularly bustling evening, and I ended up being introduced to several individuals who I would come to meet time and time again at gatherings of various groups, including Masjid al-Wali, the Noor Cultural Centre, and at social gatherings in the homes of my interlocutors. The people that come up at various points in the text that follows are reflections of the humans that I met in my research, but with certain details about their backgrounds re-organized ever-so-slightly to obscure their identities. There is

Amanda, a Canadian-born woman raised in the Catholic faith who, during the time of my fieldwork, took hand in the Scarborough halqa. Hamza and Maya are fixtures at the halqa, both of whom were born in , raised with Shi’a Islam, and became dervishes around two decades ago. Their relative, Mouna, also attends meshk and zikr gatherings on a semi-regular basis. And then there is Andrea, a senior dervish at the halqa and also a member of Masjid al-

Wali, who converted to Islam in her twenties, Osman, a younger dervish who was raised Shi’a but opted to shift toward Sufi practice in his thirties. There is the shakyh of the Scarborough halqa, who dervishes refer to as Baba, who grew up practicing Sufism in Turkey, where he was given permission to be a teacher, before bringing his practice to Canada. There is also Ibtihal, a young woman from Iraq who is new to the halqa, but eager to learn its practices.

At points, I gesture back to my research with Toronto’s Jerrahi community, as it remains a fixture in the Sufi landscape, and for some of my interlocutors, offered a first “taste” of

Sufism before they discovered the Scarborough halqa. As well, there are moments of camaraderie where the Scarborough and Jerrahi dervishes come together—during Eid, during

Ramadan, or when one of the communities is in need of help or charity. I mention Safa, a young convert, born in Canada, who was drawn to the more orthodox configurations of Jerrahi practice, and Seda, a newcomer from Turkey, who found the Jerrahi dergah to offer a sense of community and familiarity. There is also Mehmet, a vocalist and senior dervish who grew up in

Turkey, who participates in Jerrahi, Mevlevi, and Scarborough meshk rehearsals.

I also, at times, look toward the activities at Masjid al-Wali, at which point I make mention of Richard, an avid reader and multifaith activist who is well-versed in the Qur’an and

Hadith, but who has not converted to Islam, Imran, a queer-identifying person who was raised

Muslim, and sought out a space outside of their family’s masjid to practice their faith, and

Aisha is a straight-identifying ally and activist who was also raised Muslim.

There are other beings that are present in my writing, however, that revealed themselves discursively through the words and stories of my interlocutors, and so I took them seriously. At different points, my attention was directed toward angels, who document zikr rituals, members

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34 of the silsila (spiritual lineage), who are invoked for, and dismissed after, prayers of supplication or zikr, jinn—spirits who may be either benevolent or malevolent, Allah, and shaytan (Satan).

6 On Heterodoxy and “The Margins”

At times, I use the term heterodox in this dissertation not as a value judgment, but as a means of gesturing towards the sometimes-marginal position that my interlocutors have found themselves in in relation to Toronto’s larger, more visible Muslim institutions. The notion of

“heterodoxy,” in this context, can be unfolded to reveal an array of labels used by different

Muslim sects and practitioners to describe groups or praxes that are perceived to misinterpret the Qur’an and Sunnah, or act out of line with what is thought to be “correct” religious practices. One such term is ghulat, a word that literally translates as “exaggerators,” or

“extremists,” which is used by both Sunni and Shi’a theologians to describe those sects that endow ‘Ali or other mortal figures with divine attributes or access. Because many Sufi groups across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa venerate ‘awliya (saints), these groups have, at times, been classified as ghulat. There is also the notion of bid’ah, differently translated as innovation or heresy, which, among some more orthodox groups, is seen as something to be avoided. Theologians have held long-standing debates over what constitutes good and bad bid’ah—what is halal (permitted), and what is haram (forbidden). The adoption of flexibility around gendered configurations—and an openness regarding gender and sexual expression and identity more broadly—in both the Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali—is viewed by some groups and individuals as bid’ah, for instance. For this reason, the groups that I have ended up working with exist, at times, on the margins of the margins.

I wonder how it is that Islam exists in a marginal and often precarious position in a country that purports to be all but defined by multiculturalism and tolerance? For one, Muslims in Canada are, by and large, newcomers, thus occupying a certain vulnerable status.19

Secondly, it is debatable as to how deeply or effectively the multicultural model is—or ever was—realized in Canada beyond the realm of tokenism, particularly in this current age of what is referred to by some as the “multiculturalism backlash” (see Triandafyllidou 2017).

Canada’s multicultural policy was set in motion in the early 1970s by Prime Minister

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and, in 1988, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was enacted by Brian

Mulroney. The purposes of this act are outlined in Section 3(1), excerpts from which state that it is the policy of the Canadian government to:

Recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage.

Recognize and promote the understanding that multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity and that it provides an invaluable resource in the shaping of Canada’s future.

Encourage and assist the social, cultural, economic and political institutions of Canada to be both respectful and inclusive of Canada’s multicultural character.

In spite of the apparently well-intentioned nature of this Act, I am drawn to recent scholarship that offers a critical engagement with the concepts of “religious tolerance” and

19 “Recent immigration trends were a key factor in the presence of some in Canada. Those reporting Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist made up 2.9% of immigrants who came before 1971. But they accounted for 33.0% of immigrants who arrived between 2001 and 2011” (Statistics Canada 2011).

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“multiculturalism.” I am not speaking, here, of critiques of policies of inclusion—what Mavelli refers to as “attacks on multiculturalism”—by reactionary politicians connected to the recent rise of ultra-nationalist parties in Europe and North America (see also Triandafyllidou 2017).

Rather, I look toward the problematizing of the liberal multiculturalism project—and its language of tolerance—that emerged in the 1980s, which, in some ways, is nothing more than a re-imagining of what Wendy Brown describes as the “mannered racialism” of the 1960s (2006:

2). As Eva Mackey, in her study of Anglophone perceptions of nationhood in Canada, so cogently argues: “‘tolerance’ for ‘others’ work[s] in the construction of an unmarked and yet dominant national identity” and, moreover, “‘multiculturalism’ and pluralism draw on and reinforce racial exclusions and hierarchies of difference” (1999: 16). It makes sense, then, that anti-Muslim sentiments, boiling hot below the smooth-seeming surface of tolerance-as- legislation, bubbled up time and time again in the lives of my interlocutors.

7 Post(-)secularism?

My dissertation, in many ways, falls in to the growing body of contemporary scholarship differently labeled post(-)secular, in that it studies religious practice during an epoch that has been somewhat defined by enlightenment-bound secularity—what Charles

Taylor describes as “a secular age” (2007). On one hand, it falls in line with ethnographic studies—largely coming from geography, anthropology, and their cognate fields—of faithful practices beyond the official, sanctioned, or established spaces of religious institutions (see

Kong 2001; Beaumont and Baker 2011; Beckford et al 2006; Deeb and Harb 2013; Wigley

2018). On another, it is a study of a religious minority in a state whose constitution is—at least in theory—built upon secular ideals undergirded by narratives of universal human rights and multiculturalism, but, in practice, has often adopted highly exclusionary practices (see Asad

2003). I struggle to fully identify with the notion that we have neatly moved from times of presecularity through secularity toward the rise of postsecular society (see Habermas 2008)— faith and skepticism have, to a degree, been present throughout. I do acknowledge, however, that religion has been excluded from the public sphere in certain places, even as constitutions, charters, legislations, and methods of inquiry (legal, scientific, or otherwise) continue to be informed by concepts of theological origin; for instance, the teleological striving that Aristotle made note of in his Metaphysics. It is also beyond the purview of this dissertation to parse different definitions and genealogies of postsecular scholarship and critiques of postsecularism

(see Stoeckl and Uzlaner 2018).

I have found, however, in this vast and friction-riddled arena of literature, some studies that have particularly resonated with my own work, and that have echoed, in some ways, the worlds of my interlocutors. Beaumont and Baker’s idea of “the postsecular city” (2011), for instance, feels to be an appropriate reference point, as does Lara Deeb’s notion of an “enchanted modern” (2006). In both cases, the authors are interested in multiple nestings or affectively layered faithful geographies—perhaps something akin to Foucault’s heterotopos—in order to illustrate the ground-level encounters between different sorts of belief-knowledge in the realms of the social.

In Toronto, there certainly exists a strata of urban social life occupied by a network of heterodox Muslim groups—ones that provide not only religious counsel but social services.

Beaumont and Dias have noted that such assemblages of faith-based organizations (FBOs) have played increasingly essential roles in providing social services in the face of neoliberal austerity:

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[N]ational governments, particularly in the United States and in the United Kingdom, have increasingly revalorised faith based actors in domestic politics of social and spatial (in)justice as the neoliberal assault on welfare continues. […] Influenced by the philosophies of Hayek, Friedman and Harberger, neoliberalisation favours free competition between individuals and firms in the absence of state intervention. Social redistribution in terms of state welfare should, for the neoliberals, be targeted to the ‘deserving poor’ and, moreover, residualised to an absolute minimum. We hypothesise, that: processes of neoliberalisation could lead to the reconfiguration of state-civil society relations and place a greater emphasis on FBOs for addressing social problems and seeking social justice in cities (2008: 383).

It is important to note that all of the groups that I worked with, that is, the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, the Scarborough halqa, and Masjid al-Wali, were all registered as charitable or not-for- profit institutions. Thus, they straddle the line between public and private institutions, and, in fact, are all but necessitated under neoliberal governmentality. For this reason, it is nearly impossible to speak of Canada as wholly secular.

8 Methodology

My approach to research largely involved participant-observation, and is informed (as mentioned) by works of phenomenology and practice that attempt not to probe, question, or undermine the perceptions and beliefs of one’s interlocutors. Over the course of nearly two years, I followed a handful of members of the Scarborough halqa to meshk rehearsals, meetings of Masjid al-Wali, parties, dinners, zikr gatherings, concerts, parades, charity events, and

Ramadan iftars. I learned illahi repertories, voiced zikr, honed my breathing, and took lessons from the shaykh to heart—I brought gifts of food and contributed to charitable events where appropriate, and importantly, shared my own honest thoughts about spirituality with my interlocutors. It would be disingenuous to say that I retained wholly buffered, distanced

perspective over the course of my research, or that my own beliefs remained static during this time. In reality, through the time I spent listening near my interlocutors, I came to adopt, to a certain extent, their way of framing experience—auditory and otherwise. Indeed, my research left an impression—a “dawning,” perhaps—on me that has persisted long after I left the multisited collection of places and spaces that I came to know as “the field.” I did not take hand in the order for ethical reasons, as I felt that it would create a conflict of interest and upset the balance between “participant” and “observer” components of my positionality, but at points, I did consider it.

Ultimately, as a non-initiate, my access to certain events and ways of knowing was limited. I was not given permission, for example, to learn and practice qalbi zikr (zikr of the heart), or to count tasbih (beads). I did not undergo processes of dream interpretation, and did not actively work through the maqamat (stations) of dervishhood. I only went where invited, and, out of sensitivity for the dis/comfort of the individuals and groups that I was working with, did not actively push to attend events where the “obvservation” portion of participant- observation would take away from the experiences of others, or impact the suprahuman dimension of reality.

My research took place both face-to-face and online. In the former instances, my data collection took the form of informal interviews, conversations, and, most importantly, deep hanging out. It became evident very early on in my research process that informality was key, so as not to force individuals to analyze or discuss their religious activities in ways that might be at odds with the methods of their shaykh. Hard-line questioning or formal interviews felt at once inappropriate and counterintuitive, as it would have been wholly out of place for me to take on the role of spiritual questioner. I made recordings during moments in which other

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dervishes were recording sound, and which were deemed safe to document and circulate. I

followed public and semi-public online conversations, but in documenting and archiving these

conversations, I made sure to use pseudonyms for the sake of anonymity. In some situations, I

was presented with information that was of import to my study, but was decidedly “off the

record,” and which does not appear in my dissertation or field notes. Contrastingly, there were

sounds that were central to my study that were essentially un-documentable: the internal voices

and qalbi zikr, for example. These sounds were talked about at length, but not necessarily

heard—certainly not by a digital recorder. Here, I listened carefully to conversations about

sound.

8.1 Writing the Unknown and the Interior

As I mentioned at the beginning of this mudhkal, this dissertation is an ethnography of

the interior; a batini ethnography. Obfuscation of more external dimensions of people and

places, is, for this project, at once an ethical necessity and a literary mirror of my interlocutors’

pious practices. It involves, as it were, focusing less on the Church’s exterior, on the shopping

district in Scarborough, on the names of places and of people, and more on the atmosphere

created, sustained, and experienced by my interlocutors not only on the second floor of the

building, but in their day-to-day lives. It is certainly impossible to fully convey those

experiences and ideas that fall into the categories of al-batin (the interior) or al-ghayb (the

invisible, the unknowable) through language or symbols, but perhaps by muddying and playing

with the textual equivalent of al-zahir, I might come one step closer to gesturing toward the

unsayable.

Still, for the mind of the reader to paint a picture of the experiences of my

interlocutors—and of the stakes at play in their spiritual world-making during a time where it is

particularly dangerous to be what scholars such as Scharbrodt, Sachedina, and Takim refer to as

“a minority within a minority” (Scharbrodt 2018; Sachedina 1994) or “the other within the other” (Takim 2009)—it is necessary to allow glimmers of the material realm to shine through.

Personalities, words spoken, lessons learned, tears shed, laughter laughed; I use these sorts of details and minutiae to attempt to re-convey an atmosphere or moment via the written page. As a visual analogue, I might conjure up the work of the Impressionists, or perhaps the painting technique of Leonardo da Vinci, whose Mona Lisa epitomized a departure from the popular

Florentine tradition of carefully outlining painted images, encapsulating a then-emergent technique commonly known as sfumato, which means "vanished” or “evaporated.” This technique involves the creation of “imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors,” blending everything “in the manner of smoke” (May 2010: 74-5).

Here, large shapes and grand designs appear from a distance, but upon close inspection, one encounters bounded, subtle strokes, which I might liken to the microlevel, seemingly mundane sonorous events that punctuate everyday lives.

Anthropologists and philosophers have long been grappling with the “hows” “whys” and “to what ends” of writing the invisible and interior. Amira Mittermaier, notably, has written of individuals and collective dreams, visions, and apparitions among Muslims living in Cairo

(2010) and, more recently, grappled with what it might mean to undertake an ethnography of al- ghayb (2019), treating it at once as an ontological and epistemological category, and articulating that “al-ghayb presupposes a particular attitude and relationship to the world, in which the very condition of not-knowing is the foundation not only of faith but also of any knowledge” (2019:

20). Interestingly, she notes that many Sufi practitioners, including her interlocutor Shaykh

Salah al-Din al-Qusi, suggest that it is possible to gain insight into al-ghayb through, for

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42 example, dreams and dream interpretation, body language, and encounters with the class of spirits known as jinn, who walk between the realm of al-ghayb and our material world. Her ethnographic work thus focuses on so-called “lay theologies” and lived experiences through which ordinary believers and non-believers alike might taste the Unknown (Mittermaier 2019:

22). Her work relies on hearing the dream-stories (or vision-stories) of her interlocutors without, as she writes “taking them too seriously” as she attempts to cultivate “a certain openness and humility” while also “weaving skepticism, disbelief, humor, and debate into one’s accounts” putting together an interpretive device that is at once “phenomenological and poststructuralist” (Ibid: 27). 20

I am inclined to lean more to the phenomenological side of things, choosing at times to move toward the poststructuralist line of inquiry through the pathway of practice theory.

Undoubtedly, religious practice is not always solely about connecting to the divine or returning to a mythological prehistory, a la Eliade’s concept of “the eternal return” (1959). Rather, ritualizing schemes often do multiple sorts of “work” (Jankowsky 2006: 2) simultaneously, often involving social life, identity, survival, and health and wellbeing. It is a challenge, however, to walk the line between otherworldly and socio-material arenas of experience— between al-batin (the interior) and al-zahir (the external) in one’s fieldwork, in one’s thinking, and—perhaps most challengingly—in one’s writing. Indeed, embodied enactments of piety often appear to do some sort of work beyond what might initially be perceived as purely

20 As we have learned from Anna Tsing, much understanding can come from focusing on the realm of the frictional.

“sacred” from a Euro-American analytic standpoint21 and this “work” often involves making

sense of one’s world and oneself in an embodied, tactile, sensory way. Mittermaier’s statement

gestures toward a larger problematic in the field of religious studies, that is, in navigating how

to represent that which is not perceptible with a sense of einfühlung, or empathy, we must also

grapple with how to talk about religious experiences and sentiments more generally.22

8.2 Religious Experience

In his influential volume Music and Trance (1980), Gilbert Rouget acknowledges that

altered states often know no categorical boundaries, and the experience of trancing is not

limited to Mevlevi dervishes of Turkey or the Tukumba of Malawi, but is also a key experience

“among devotees of pop music” and “bioenergy adepts” (1980: xvii). Despite the presence of

this sort of perspective, however, the categories of “ritual” and “religious experience” have

often been situated as separate from, or in opposition to, or symptoms of other, more material,

facets of social life such as politics, identity, law, and economy. In the early twentieth century,

many scholars of history and anthropology understood “the sacred” and “the profane” to be

distinct from one another. This line of thought is perhaps best embodied by the work of Mircea

21 I tend to agree with Michael Harris when he disrupts the notion of a fixed category of “sacredness,” and argues that this episteme is in fact “subjective to the degree that any location of it is arbitrary” (1997: 130). However, I am also conscious that “the sacred” is a very real part of the lived experiences of many people, and so I am less interested in dismissing the notion of the sacred, and more so in finding out how people encounter sounds faithfully.

22 In many ways, my modus operandi with regard to writing the intangible is inspired by the work of Amira Mittermaier, who notes that: “[t]here are […] many invisible things that we are trained to take seriously as anthropologists […] but the stuff that religious dreams and apparitions are made of is frequently explained away as a symptom of underlying economic or political conditions, as a coping mechanism, as something conjured up by the individual or the community. The temptation is to try to explain what is being seen and why this vision occurs, which takes one away from simply sitting with the uncertain in-between-ness, a not-knowing regarding whether it is, and how it is.” (2019: 27)

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Eliade, who insisted that “the sacred and the religious life are the opposite of the profane and secular life,” even as he argued that sacred experiences were often camouflaged by profane ones

(1957: 1). Eliade did not, however, go so far as to collapse the boundaries between these two realms, as he was wholly invested in interpreting the “dialectic of the sacred and the secular,” which he believed constituted a deep structure that undergirded all of humanity (Altizer 1975).

Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, on the other hand, were both bound to more hermeneutic, relativistic methodologies, and were largely concerned with evaluating ritual processes in relation to wider societal structures. Still, Geertz and Turner treated rituals as “texts” or

“processes” that, while interlaced with other arenas of experience, were ultimately thought to be bounded, symbolically-rich events.23

This mode of thinking permeated the field of ethnomusicology, and still shapes— however subtly—the ways in which many researchers approach religious and ritualized sounds.

For instance, in the introduction to his edited volume titled Enchanting Powers (1997),

Lawrence Sullivan suggests that “[i]t is within the performance of rituals that the political and the sacred often combine in their effort to create a symbiotic blend that becomes a unifying tradition, or put more simply, a musical fusion” (Barz 2000: 144). While Sullivan’s volume was in many ways pivotal, his introductory preamble still, however subtly, assumes a distinction between the sacred and profane without considering how the conditions for this boundary are produced. For instance, the word “fusion” assumes a conflation of distinct parts, and intimates that that “politics” are secular by nature.

23 The idea that ritualized sound does something both personal and social has permeated the field of ethnomusicology since its inception; for instance, John Blacking argued that musical identity-formation is simultaneously individuated and social (1973), and Victor Turner suggested that ritual processes often involve the cultivation of communitas (1966).

The discipline of theomusicology, which coalesced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, worked to engage with American Black music in ways that transcend such “standard approaches of historical musicology and ethnomusicology” (Spencer 1996: 1). In his book Re- searching Black Music (1996), for instance, Jon Spencer moves past Englightenment-bound, secular critiques of religious and ritual music, suggesting that Black music culture, at least that which is “under the canonical authority of the biblical tradition” (Spencer 2006: 50), is undergirded by a current of spirituality (Spencer 1996: 2-5). This premise productively laid the groundwork for a mode of ethno/musicological inquiry that reflexively collapses the ephemeral- material bifurcation. Following this line of thought, then, I posit that sacred sounds cannot always be seen as a mere reflection of inter- and intra-societal relations, as some scholarship on sound structure and social structure might posit (Lomax 1968; Feld 1982), as often the work that they do has very real implications. In his work on stambeli, a healing trance music performed by descendants of sub-Saharan slaves brought to Tunisia, Richard Jankowsky argues that this music is both “a product of, and a commentary on, the historical encounter between sub-Saharan and North Africans,” and suggests that ritual sounds actively perform reconciliatory cultural work (2006: 1). However, in foregrounding issues of domination and resistance (Scott 1992) postcolonial studies of religion may occasionally privilege the socio- material element of religious life, allowing experiences with divinity and the non-human world, which may be of utmost importance to the people being studied, to fade into the background.

In this dissertation, I glean methodological inspiration from phenomenological and practice-oriented studies of sound and faith, for example, Catherine Bell’s work on ritual-as- practice (1992), Steven Friedson and Jeffers Engelhardt’s phenomenologically-oriented studies,

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46 or Deborah Wong’s study of Thai Buddhist performance (2001)24. This body of scholarship tends to articulate that religious experiences, and discourses surrounding them, must be taken somewhat at face value. This may mean, in certain cases, that researchers must embrace ideas of spirit possession, dis-embodiment, or what Heidegger calls “being-away” (Friedson 1996;

Heidegger 1935).

Ethnomusicologists still tend to look toward John Blacking’s definition of music—

“humanly organized sound” (1973). As useful as this definition is, however, musical studies of interaction with spirits (whether it involves invocation, possession, or otherwise) pose the question: what if sounds are not thought to be humanly organized at all, but rather divinely disseminated? Moreover, “what do we do with people who […] are totally away, possessed by a god or spirit?” (Friedson 2009: 9). Indeed, theorists who undertake phenomenological approaches to ethnomusicology in recent years have tried to take such occurrences “for what people who practice such traditions say” they are (Ibid: 9). For Freidson, then, “the musicking body and subject may be a sonic medium for divine revelation, spiritual presence, and cosmic union, reframing (or effacing) the role of human agency in the efficacies of religious musics”

(Friedson 2009, 9).

24 Here, Wong embraces “emic epistemologies of [ritual] embodiment” (Wong 13). In Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Performance (2001), she discusses the Brahminist practices of Theravada Buddhists in Thailand. In an officiant’s invocation of deities from the Hindu- Brahmin pantheon, they invite the spirit into their body, which, unlike in spirit possession, “implies control and choice of a higher, more powerful sort” (Wong 2001: 11).Here, the hearing body walks the boundary between human and non-human worlds, and between past and present. The approaches of Friedson and Wong gesture, in different ways, toward the epistemological limits of humanistic approaches to the study of sound, music, ritual, and trouble empirically-bound ideas about what the body is.

8.3 Faithful Listening as Methodology

In Religion Out Loud, Isaac Weiner argues that religion is as much about bodily style and

modes of listening as it is about discourse and belief, and that, in fact, these three categories are

often inextricably linked to one another (2014: 8-9). Such a perspective has propelled many

ethnographers to critically and methodologically engage with their own listening practices in

the field. Scholars have grappled with—often with great difficulty—how they might learn to

hear what their interlocutors might hear, how they might “learn to be sacred listeners” (Kapchan

2009; 2017), pursue a more “active” mode of listening (Nyitray 2001), or, enact “listening

silences” (Fiumara 1990; Pilzer 2012). Here, I look back to Friedson’s insistence upon taking

surface-level acts very seriously:

[i]f we invoke a kind of epoché and explore the things themselves as they are given […] then perhaps we will stop listening to, thus dismissing, what people are telling us and, once again, begin to listen along with them (2009: 10).

While Friedson’s model of “listening along”—as opposed to “listening to”—involves a

commitment to approaching listening without preconceived ideas about listening in mind,

Deborah Kapchan takes a slightly different approach to the study of listening in her work on

Sufi sama’ in France. Kapchan’s previous work on speech genres informs her theory of

auditory literacy, in which she considers how “ways of listening (like ways of speaking)

structure perception and create an ethos of religious community” (2009: 67). Ana María Ochoa

Gautier, too, has noted the many ways in which listening might operate as a site of production

and deliberation, and that much can be gained by centering listening and the aural as both

objects of study and methodological tools (2014).

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In fact, listening can be defined in a number of ways, and, in the end, my approach to listening in the field fell somewhere between that of Friedson and that of Kapchan, and it also, at times, strives to embody a sort of “Islamic anthropology” (Asad 1986), but one that is particularist in nature (see Abu Lughod 1991; Diamond 2002; Hahn 2007), informed by the words and actions of my interlocutors, as well as the texts which they have referenced in conversation or correspondence. Ultimately, I am interested in drawing attention to that murky place between “listening along” and “becoming a sacred listener,” highlighting how boundaries between auditory regimes are created, navigated, crossed, and dismantled. I thus strive to listen near others as they move between modes of listening and enact interpretations of sounds. To what are people paying attention? In what ways do they differentiate between meaningful and non-meaningful sounds, and what are the conditions of their oscillation between modes of listening? Moreover, what meaning does this hold with regard to their pious lives? Or, as

Kassabian asks in her book Ubiquitous Listening, “how does […] listening engage us and activate the world we move in?” (2013: xi.) These are the sorts of questions that guided my research.

Scholarship attuned to sonically-oriented religious experiences has painted an expansive portrait of listening. In this way, studies of sounded ritual practice have caused ripples in both ritual and religious studies and in ethnomusicology at large. From the pious, contemplative listening described by Charles Hirschkind (2006), to the ubiquitous listening that Kassabian writes of (2013), to Judith Becker’s notion of the “deep listening” of trancers (1979, 2004), to

Rouget’s explication of sama’—a pious mode of hearing that leads toward ecstatic experience in Sufism (1980), it is clear that people encounter, process, use, and talk about sound in complex and varied ways. The perception of non-human, or divine, listening, however, sets up a

particularly interesting problematic. As an example, Paul D. Greene mentions the concurrent listening practices of people and deities in his work on the use of devotional cassettes in South

India:

Between 5:00 and 6:00 in the morning of each day, tea shop managers play back and amplify cassettes of nadaswaram [a wind instrument] music. These sounds, which can be heard throughout the village, are typically the first sounds the villagers hear in the morning. It is also intended that mangala icai be the first sounds the deities hear (1999: 466).

In this study, Greene strives to listen along with his interlocutors who are, in turn, striving to listen along with deities. This tripartite encounter points toward the complexity of “listening along,” or, put differently, listening to the listening of another, in religious contexts. The methodological difficulties of listening in the field can, in some ways, be connected to Trinh

Minh-ha’s approach to the ethnographic “juncture” (Seeger 1958). She believes that ethnographers should, to the best of their ability, avoid speaking for or about their interlocutors, and instead “speak nearby” in a way that recognizes the intersubjective character of all ethnographic research (Minh-ha 1982). Taking this line of thought one step further, it is crucial to highlight that writing about—or speaking nearby—is almost always preceded by an intersubjective sensory encounter that involves “listening nearby.”

In order to weave together my thoughts about aesthetic regimes, listening, and microlevel interactions, one might imagine two instances of “listening nearby” in religious contexts. In both instances, there are two people—presumably the ethnographer and interlocutor—who are encircled by a matrix of historically- and socially-constituted aesthetic regimes. Both individuals may be immersed in the same sounds, but the way in which they

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50 listen to and interpret these sounds may differ greatly. For instance, the interlocutor, a member of a religious group, might encounter certain sounds as echoes of a divine presence, while the ethnographer may not, and thus must rely on the interlocutor’s discussion of their sensory experience to gain some insight into their soundworld. Here, the boundary between the aesthetic regimes of two individuals is quite pronounced, and the researcher is, in effect, “listening along” to what their interlocutor says about sound.

Deborah Kapchan, drawing inspiration from Attali (1985), suggests that it is possible for ethnographers become sacred listeners by immersing themselves in a religious culture’s sound economy, and that this process of becoming takes place through repetition and remembrance:

It is not surprising that listening is linked to memory, or that we gravitate to the familiar in the auditory realm just as we do in other realms, yet it is notable that acts of listening create our very perceptions; that is, not only do we perceive the auditory stimulus that surrounds us, but what we hear in our environment is determined by what we have listened to before. This “conditioning of listening” leads in part to our categorization of sound into music and/or noise. Fortunately these categories are malleable. Like any kind of music appreciation, learning to listen establishes different aesthetic templates in the brain, restructuring our cultural categories of beauty as well as our perceptions (2009: 78- 9).

Like Kapchan, I posit that becoming a sacred listener is simply that—becoming. It is an orientation toward an aesthetic ideal (see Hirschkind 2006; Harkness 2014) rather than the embodiment of absolute aesthetic knowledge.25 In this way, becoming a sacred listener is

25 Of course, “listening nearby” or “speaking nearby” is another such ideal, as inevitably, there are instances in which I end up “speaking for” my interlocutors, especially in cases in which several individuals are condensed into one persona for the sake of protection.

simply another mode of listening nearby; here, the aesthetic regimes in which the ethnographer and the interlocutor are embedded increasingly overlap, presumably due to extended time in the field and, I would argue, a pointed effort to listen near rather than for something. It also involves believing one’s interlocutors, and taking their words at face value, without a desire to impose any sort of “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1965) on their experiences. This sort of faithful listening as a methodology thusly involves embracing the “unknown” that is the reality of the inner experience of one’s interlocutor—it is in and of itself an act of faith and belief, and a surrendering to that which will never be known.

9 Exteriority, Interiority: Chapter Outline

My dissertation cycles inward, moving from a discussion of more external, public conversations and deliberations about and through sound to smaller, more intimate, and often deeply personal instances of individual and collective negotiation. In some ways, this structure loosely mirrors the simultaneous delving inward and outward that takes place on a dervish’s journey of spiritual becoming, and so, where possible, I use concepts connected to the maqamat of Sufism, as understood by my interlocutors, as framing devices. In dancing betwixt and between the outward and the inward using theory steeped in both the paradigms of continental philosophy and the “lived philosophies” embodied by my interlocutors and informed by the works of several Sufi scholars, I encountered many theoretical dissonances that do not easily find resolution. For instance, I delve into recent writings on the public sphere in the field of sound studies, much of which is in conversation with Habermasian conceptualizations of democratic, discourse-oriented public life, while simultaneously discussing outwardness in terms of the Islamic concept al-zahir, the quality of manifestation, of externality, of outward conduct. By the same token, I attempt to draw connections between affect theory,

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52 phenomenology, and Sufi writings on affective and cognitive states in discussing more internal, bodily experiences—al-batin. I believe that, in the case of my research, Sufi literature and so- called “lay philosophies” helped me to conceptualize experiences and ideas in ways that

European and North American philosophy could not, and, at the same time, allowed me to piece together a sort of grassroots, emergent theoretical framework.

My attempts to dialectically grapple with these different lenses never fully resolves into a coherent, fixed model, and, in many ways, this lack of fixity is reflective of the unique complexity of my interlocutors’ own ways of making sense of things. On one hand, they are living in a city, a province, and a country whose legislative bodies bear the traces of

Enlightenment-bound theories of secular governance (but also, for instance, ancient Athenian ideas about democracy). On the other hand, they actively heed the teachings of their spiritual guides and fellow dervishes, and much of their praxis is shaped by their interpretations of texts such as the Qur’an and the work of al-Qushayri. In each of these affective-discursive systems, different ideas about right and wrong, and of significant and insignificant, emerge. My interlocutors found themselves operating within contradictory worlds, embodying multiplicities, but always orienting themselves toward tawhid—divine oneness.26 Ever the faithful bricoleurs

(de Certeau 1984: xvi), they worked tirelessly to taste27 the divine in all that crossed their paths.

26 It seems helpful to mention Giddens’ consideration of the “self” in so-called modernity as inherently variegated and makeshift. He suggests that one “may make use of diversity in order to create a distinctive self-identity which positively incorporates elements from different settings into an integrated narrative” (Giddens 1991:190); this is also a key subject in de Certeau’s work, as bricolage is a central component of “making do” (de Certeau 1984: xv). 27 Dhauq (taste) is a word in Arabic that, like in English, at once means the ability to sense flavours in one’s mouth, but also one’s sensibility (sense-ability?) more generally.

In Chapter One, I orient my study geographically, discussing the ways in which the public façades of “Muslim Toronto” have been shaped by social practice, the local, national, and international political atmosphere, and municipal and federal legislation. In grappling with the ways in which Islam in North America—and in Toronto in particular—has (not) enjoyed a public life, I spend some time delving into Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible,” as well as sound studies scholarship that addresses the social and political dimensions of religious reverberations and silences. I trouble the notion that a faith’s audible presence in a neighbourhood or a city—its “outness” and “loudness”—signifies tolerance and vibrancy of said faith, and, conversely, that silence indicates intolerance and absence. I begin by discussing the notable absence of the adhan in the city’s soundscape, and then delve into a collection of case studies that demonstrate both overt and covert instances of silencing, antagonism, and violence directed toward Toronto’s Muslim denizens.

Chapter Two moves inward, closer to the domain of al-batin, to the more private and personal sonorous experience that mark my interlocutors’ everyday lives. I continue to unravel fixed notions of “public” and “private” religion by discussing the mobile adhan phenomenon, which walks the line between personal and the collective listening. I also touch upon the ways in which public sounds are folded into the inner acts of self-tooling that my interlocutors are engaged in, drawing this time from the writings of al-Qushayri. I suggest that members of the

Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali are involved in a hopeful mode of social poïesis that hinges upon listening to—and making sense of—sounds. Specifically, I discuss sounds of indeterminate or unfathomable origin such as microphone feedback, digital glitches, playlists generated algorithmically, and hate speech, discussing the ways in which these sounds are seized upon to help to sensorially cement a sacred order-of-things.

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In Chapter Three, I move inward still, focusing on my interlocutors’ interpretations of their own bodily sounds—namely, the quietude of qalbi zikr and the more resonant, outward act of voicing one’s prayers. I expand upon the previous chapter’s focus on listening to and for signs, drawing upon Tweed’s writings on religious emplacement (2006), Pierce’s writing on consciousness28, Annemarie Schimmel’s phenomenology of religion (and, in particular, Islam), as well as, once more, the work of al-Qushayri. Crucially, I draw attention to a disjuncture in the ways that bodily sounds are en/gendered in two different spaces. I begin with a description of the (relatively) orthodox Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi dergah (meeting place) where women practice communal zikr (a ritual for the remembrance of God) behind a curtain, shrouded in silence, embodying the divine quality of al-batin in the manner of the many women that walked their spiritual path before them. I then home in on the experiences of Imran and Aisha, who were drawn to Masjid al-Wali where attitudes surrounding silence and the voice are less bound up in convention, and rather informed by contemporary queer rights and social justice activism. In this setting, Imran and Aisha were able to voice their faith out loud.

Chapters Four and Five both continue to hover around bodily sounds and their interpretations. In Chapter Four, I discuss the honing of the voice, the ear, and the heart that took place over the course of a winter of rehearsals with the Scarborough halqa’s meshk group.

Here, I suggest that these rehearsals involve a teleologically-oriented sensorial entrainment that is equal parts musical, social, historical, and ethical. In framing these gatherings, I consider writings on leisurely religion (Deeb and Harb 2013) and secular enchantment (Englehardt

2015), as well as Gill-Gürtan’s work that considers meshk to be an epistemological and

28 A framework that Thomas Turino suggested might be of use to ethnomusicologists using phenomenological modes of inquiry (2014).

ontological category unto itself (2011).

In Chapter Five, I listen toward more “unruly” verbal-bodily practices, including swearing, teasing, and laughing, and humour more generally. I frame these practices within the context of orthodox Sufi pedagogical traditions, moving from literature to more recent

Sufi parables. I also, however, consider scholarly studies on the subjects of laughing, joking, and teasing, specifically in the domains of anthropological linguistics, conversation analysis, and psychoanalysis. Specifically, I discuss the ways in which humour-ful utterances are used by dervishes to both cement social ties, and to grapple with the light and dark elements of both their nafs (ego, self) and of the world at large.

Chapter Six orbits around breath (nafas) and its connection to sadness, weeping, and tears, discussing the ways in which the breathy recitation of the names of God (esma) and qalbi zikr (zikr of the heart) might give way into visceral experiences of ecstatic sorrow. Here, pain— be it precipitated by personal, political, or unfathomable circumstances—is taken as sign of

Allah, as well as a tool for grappling with both oneself and one’s surroundings. I then connect crying to laughter using affect theory and Sufi scholarship on joy and weeping, and suggest that these emotive processes, each originating with an elevated nafas, are similarly harnessed by my interlocutors as a way of moving closer to the experience of tawhid: oneness.

Ultimately, I suggest that the dervishes connected to Toronto’s local shajarah make do via sensing, and this process is simultaneously of the flesh, of social enmeshment, and of the furthest reaches of the unknown. Through a multifaceted process of collectively tuning of their ears and their hearts both inward and outward, they hone a pious mode of becoming that enables them to survive and grow during times of precarity.

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Chapter One Islam (Not So) Out Loud in Toronto

Every hour, the clock tower at the Bellevue Fire Station, located at intersection of Bellevue and

College, where the Annex meets Kensington Market, chimes resonantly, notifying the neighbourhood of the passing time, demarcating its days into twenty four silent parcels. The original clock tower in this location was constructed in 1885, but, after a fire at the station, a replica was constructed, and, crucially, a functioning bell was included in these plans. Next to the clock tower is a church—St. Stevens in the Fields—where, every Wednesday, a free noon- hour organ concert takes place. In the warmer months, the doors to the church are propped open, and the fluid, contrapuntal sounds bursting forth from the monstrous keyboard’s pipes spill onto College Street, rendered ethereal by the church’s natural reverb. These sounds, at times, blur into the soundscape of the street, often going unnoticed by residents who have become accustomed to their frequencies. At other times, however, perhaps in the stillness of the night, or on an oppressively humid late summer day, they command attention, a pause, and contemplation perhaps. Rarely, however, are they sources of tension; the bells and the organ are tightly woven into the architecture of the neighbourhood, just as much as the buildings from which they reverberate.

If one were to walk from the Bellevue Fire Station east along college, south along

Spadina and then East on Dundas (on the north side of the street), it would take them approximately fifteen minutes to get to Masjid Toronto, also known as the Muslim Association of Canada, a mosque that was established in 2002 in a building that was, at one point, owned and run by the Royal Bank of Canada. It is, in many ways, as unassuming a bank: indeed, one might pass it numerous times without realizing that it was a masjid. There is no , and no

ornate decorations that one might associate with a Muslim house of worship—for instance,

Islamic calligraphy or tile mosaics—save for subtle calligraphic designs on the building’s frosted glass windows, which, with their muted taupe tones that give the impression of oxidized copper, would not likely catch the eye. Only if one were to look up at the plastic signboard above the mosque’s entrance would it become apparent that this was a religious space for

Muslims to gather and pray. Notably, it does not broadcast its adhan, a practice shared by most other masjids in the Greater Toronto Area.29

Not terribly far from Masjid Toronto is another mosque—one that exists even more inconspicuously, and intentionally so. This is Masjid al-Wali, a group developed as a safe space for LGBTIQ+ Muslims (but also guests from other faiths) to cultivate religious and spiritual practices. Because the masjid has been targeted and threatened by both orthodox Muslim and non-Muslim hate groups, its organizers are careful to keep a low profile, and to reveal their location only to trusted friends. For those who are unable to attend in person, the group sets up a live feed during their Friday prayers, and people from all over the globe Skype in in order to hear the adhan, the (lecture), and engage in the discourse that follows.

By tracing the trajectories, and geographically mapping these four spaces in subsequent two chapters, a portrait of outwardness versus inwardness is painted; one that involves both projected and cloistered sights and sounds. While the Bellevue fire hall contributes an hourly bell toll that is welcomed by neighbourhood residents, Masjid Toronto sits silently unobtrusively, without minaret or loudspeakers. Masjid al-Wali, on the other hand, is

29 In Canada’s capital city, , there is, in fact, a mosque that is equipped with a speaker system for broadcasting the adhan, but it has never been used (Shendruk 2012).

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58 deliberately evasive, maintaining a carefully guarded, publically unknown location. Still further removed from the physical and sensorial body of the City of Toronto are those individuals who

Skype in to Masjid al-Wali from remote locations, experiencing piety remotely by way of their computers and mobile devices.

In this chapter, I take on the realm of “the external,” bringing into soft focus the backdrop against which my interlocutors navigate their lives and build their faithful communities. I discuss some of the spatial and auditory dimensions of public life for Muslims living in Toronto, articulating the ways in which social mores, fear-inciting campaigns, and municipal bylaws have shaped and, at times, suppressed the Muslim components of Toronto’s sensory environs. This is by no means a new phenomenon for my interlocutors, many of whom practice Sufi-influenced “heterodox” modes of Islam that have been subject to scrutiny under both religious and secular regimes at various points in history. In many ways, the inward- turning practices of my interlocutors lent themselves well to survival—to “tactical” maneuvering—during such a challenging political period (de Certeau 1984). I conclude, then, with a consideration of what it means to move through the city as a Muslim, focusing on a time when hate crimes were on an upswing in Toronto. Here, I point out the ways in which gendered and racialized bodies become targets when moving in isolation, all but demanding the protection of safe social assemblages.

Indeed, in the decades following the Gulf War and the 9/11 attacks, a new sort of discourse has emerged around Islam in general, and, more specifically, its place in the West.

Mehdi Semati suggests that this discourse nearly always is bound up in the issue of terrorism

(2010), while others point toward the gendered racism often undergirds critiques of Islam (Abu-

Lughod 2014). This is true, historically, of Canada, particularly during the time in which my research began, when then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper unrolled several measures and Acts that were cryptically—but recognizably—anti-Muslim. Even under his successor Justin

Trudeau, however, anti-Muslim sentiment is pervasive in Toronto and in Canada at large, as represented by the recent foundation and growth of “heritage” “European nationalist” or “white supremacist” groups such as Rise Canada and the Soldiers of Odin.

1 Between and Beyond Private and Public: Theories of Sound, Space, and Lived Religion

Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have increasingly embraced the study of pious

“spatial experiences” as socially constituted and ever shifting (De Certeau 1984: 118). To highlight the difference between “space” as de Certeau conceives of it, and “place,” I look toward ritual theorist Ronald Grimes’ monograph titled Rite Out of Place: Ritual Media and the

Arts, in which he puts forth a critique of religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith’s work on the place of place (1980; 1987) in ritual, one that points toward ongoing debates and conversations about ritual emplacement in various fields of inquiry. Smith’s mode of theorizing emerges out of the work of Durkheim, and, to an extent, Eliade, in that he believes that “ritual’s primary function is that of social, therefore intellectual, placement,” with a strong emphasis on

“the sacrality of placement” (Grimes 2006: 106). This line of thought echoes Eliade’s assertion that profane space and sacred space are two distinct “things,” and that “[i]n the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation is established, the hierophany [appearance of the Sacred] reveals an absolute fixed point, a center”

(Eliade 2009 [1959]: 21).

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For Grimes, however, “there is no inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one,” “sacralization is […] a function of use,” and “ritual is a kind of action” (2006:

108). Essentially while Smith situates place as something concrete that acts upon people,

Grimes argues that studies of ritual should be more preoccupied with space as something that is socially produced through ritualization. In the case studies that appear in this volume, Grimes disrupts the assumption that sacred or ritual emplacement involves some sort of special-ness or sequestering, and avoids focusing on “presumed popular place[s] of ritual” such as “temples, synagogues, and churches” (Ibid: ix). His research, then, addresses how all sorts of spaces become ritualized through creative expression (Ibid: x).

By the time of Grimes’ interception, however many ethnomusicology and music sociology scholars had already approached the study of ritualized musicking by considering the ways in which sounds are used in previously under-researched “everyday” sites such as city streets, the home, commercial spaces, and the workplace (see DeNora 2000). Here, the work of

Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, both of whom situate sound and rhythm at the heart of the social production of space, has been particularly influential. For instance, de Certeau, paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, suggests that stories—and, I would argue, sounds— “carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces. The forms of this play are numberless” (1984: 118). He goes on to suggest “there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. The perspective is determined by a ‘phenomenology’ of existing in the world” (Ibid: 118). Indeed, for de Certeau, space is an experience that manifests through action, and, as Catherine Bell suggests, this action often involves sound and gesture.

Lefebvre’s volume The Production of Space (1974), which takes a complementary approach to the idea of space, has had a particularly strong impact on the field of sound studies due to the prominence of rhythm, noise, speech, and music in his ideas about the how space is produced using sound:

In cloister or cathedral, space is measured by the ear: the sounds, voices and singing reverberate in an interplay analogous to that between the most basic sounds and tones; analogous also to the interplay set up when a reading voice breathes new life into a written text. Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms that they entertain (gaits, ritual gestures, processions, parades, etc.) and their musical resonance. It is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible, that bodies find one another (Lefebvre 1974: 225).

Moreover, Lefebvre was one of the first scholars to trace the diachronic and synchronic trajectories of Euro-American “senses of place,” to borrow a turn of phrase from Feld and

Basso (1996). Importantly, he argues that religious monuments (Ibid: 225)—at least in orthodox

Abrahamic traditions—became sites of “absolute space”:

[A]bsolute space—the space of religion—introduced the highly pertinent distinctions between speech and writing, between the prescribed and the forbidden, between accessible and reserved spaces, and between full and empty. Thus certain spaces were carved out of nature and made complete by being filled to saturation point with beings and symbols, while other spaces were withdrawn from nature only to be kept empty as a way of symbolizing a transcendent reality at once absent and present. […] More importantly, such places can also be viewed in terms of the highly significant distinction between dominated spaces and appropriated spaces. (Ibid 163-4).

Until the 1980s, most ethno/musicological studies of religious and ritual practices orbited around this sphere of absolute space. Musicologist Carl Dahlaus went so far as to suggest that

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nonrepresentational “Absolute music,”30 a favourite object of study in the field of musicology, came to demarcate absolute space over the course of the nineteenth century; here, “artists became priests mediating the absolute for the public and concert halls the new churches” (Kalra

2015: 25). However, the concurrent emergence of the field of sound studies, which can arguably be traced back to the works of R. Murray Schafer (1977) and Steven Feld (1982), and the proliferation of theories of social poetics in anthropological and ethnomusicological scholarship (Feld 1982; Abu Lughod 1987; Kapchan 1996), combined with a turn toward the musical theorization of those “other spaces” (Lefebvre 1974: 163) of everyday life that were once thought to be relatively insignificant (DeNora 2000; Hirschkind 2006), radically shifted how and where researchers engage with sound and space.

One of the major shifts that this sort of scholarship yielded was the destabilization and decentering of “absolute space” as a privileged site of study. The consideration of space as socially and historically constituted and enacted using—among other things—sound opens up a door to the notion of “plural, permeated space” in which “the self […is…] imaged not as a point, but as a membrane” (Connor 1997: 2006). In studies of music and religion, many scholars have situated themselves as, and amongst, hearing membranes in the “peculiar places that religious studies scholars don’t habitually haunt” (Grimes 2006: x), public, private, and otherwise.

In this study, I do just this, operating in private or semi-private small spaces, working with Muslim groups that exist in the “margins of the margins.” My interlocutors have found

30 This term initially applied by Wagner to the work of Beethoven; see Carl Dahlaus, trans. R. Lustic. The Idea of Absolute Music (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

ways to quietly work around both: 1) large local Muslim institutions that have (or may) label(led) their practices “heterodox,” and 2) municipal bylaw interpretation practices that have historically rendered it challenging to establish permanent masjids. However, it is essential, I think, to begin my dissertation with a discussion the outermost layer—the more public dimension—of urban Muslim life, and what is at stake when one openly expresses one’s

Muslimness in the city of Toronto.

2 In and Out of Earshot: On Zoning, Noise Bylaws, and Public Deliberations

I am interested in touching upon the approaches of scholars such as Weiner, Born, and

Bohlman in order to think about listening to the complex, and ever-shifting, interpretations and nestings of sounds of—and around—Muslim life in the city of Toronto. The most recent iteration of my field research commenced during a fraught time for Muslims in Canada, at the end of what has come to be known as “the Harper years,” during which time the administration of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper rolled out several bills and initiatives that were—cryptically, but barely so—aimed at targeting, assimilating, and potentially criminalizing Muslim Canadians. Bill C-51, Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, was, in some ways, the Harper administration’s answer to America’s Patriot Act; this bill granted the Canadian

Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) unprecedented powers to act as a secret police, and to circumvent the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Ruby and Hasan 2015). In a press scrum organized to address public concerns about the bill, Stephen Harper stated that there would be a zero tolerance policy for any suspicious activity that might be deemed terrorism, no matter

“what the age of the person is, or whether they're in a basement, or whether they're in a mosque or somewhere else" (Payton 2015). Although Harper places the mosque in a list of possible sites

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64 in which a person might become “radicalized,” the other two places—“a basement” and

“somewhere else”—are nonspecific signifiers. Thus, Harper has casually, but also clearly, singled out Muslim places of worship as sites that would be on CSIS’s radar. Furthermore, in

2015 and 2016, Harper set up a “Barbaric Cultural Practices” hotline and encouraged Canadian residents to call in and report behavior that was out of line with so-called “Canadian values.”

The website for the hotline featured the image of the hand of a woman of colour, her arm draped in a loose, black, long-sleeved garment resembling a niqab.

In and around this same time, in January 2015, a number of attacks attributed to Al-

Qaeda took place over the Ile-de-France region, prompting a reactionary swell in hostility and violence towards Muslims globally. Statistics Canada reported that domestic hate crimes towards Muslims nearly tripled between the years 2012 and 2015, from a reported 45 in 2012 to a recorded 159 in 2015 (Minsky 2017) . Many of these crimes involved vandalism and bomb threats at mosques, while others involved physical assault and murder (Owen 2014). Needless to say, at this time, life for Muslims in Canada became, at the very least, uncomfortable, and, more often than not, dangerous.

It was amidst this hostile climate that, during the winter of 2016 and 2017, a zoning bylaw which prohibited places of worship or schools from being erected in designated industrial areas came under scrutiny when the Sakinah Community Centre, an organization that provides both education and prayer services, was shuttered due to zoning violations. This, on the surface, would not have appeared to be a fraught issue, as masjids can theoretically be constructed on commercial or residential properties. However, the of the Sakinah Centre, Said Rageah,

notes that “for the majority of the community, is not attainable due to the price range” (Shum

2017).31

The City of Toronto does not have an explicitly nefarious history of bylaws obstructing freedom of expression or freedom of religious practice—at least not outwardly, much as

Harper’s policies in support of “Canadian values” were not explicitly anti-Muslim. However, as

Toronto-based journalist Chantal Braganza notes, Toronto city legislators have “a habit of going through municipal proceedings without considering all the different types of people who live here, who might not have certain Anglo-Saxon values or whose community-specific practices might be considered “undesirable” (whatever that means)” (Braganza 2012). Engin F.

Isin and Myer Siemiatycki, in their contribution to the volume Race, Space, and the Law:

Unmapping a White Settler Society discuss the ways in which such municipal proceedings, whether they be unintentionally exclusive or strategically so, have historically negatively impacted Muslims living in Toronto.

Foreshadowing the Sakinah mosque’s struggles some two decades earlier, in 1995, a proposal to construct a mosque serving the South Asian Muslim community in Toronto’s East

York region was denied due to the purchased property being located on an industrial site, and having thirty too few parking spots. As Isin and Siemiatycki note, however, “churches are commonplace in East York’s business districts, and places of worship [have since been] permitted in industrial zones across Toronto,” and, moreover “at least four churches in East

York had succeeded in exemptions from similar parking requirements” (2002: 188). Only after

31 This phenomenon is not unique to Toronto or Canada, of course. Weiner’s Religion Out Loud discusses many such deliberations over the establishment of religious spaces, as does Giuseppe Carta’s study of in Italy (2018), Luca Mavelli’s study of European Islam (2014).

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66 an onslaught of public attention and critique, which included newspaper editorials in support of the mosque penned by leaders in Toronto’s Catholic and Jewish communities, did the council approve a scaled-down version of the mosque proposal (Ibid: 188-189). In and around the same time, the Talim-Ul-Islam mosque in the GTA’s North York region underwent a similar struggle to remain functioning in the face of what seemed to be shifting bylaw applications, and the

Canadian Islamic Trust Foundation found that it had hit a brick wall in trying to establish a place of worship in (a municipality just west of Toronto), and, after a slough of neighbourhood complaints, was turned down by the city’s municipal government (Ibid 198-

203).

Interestingly, Isin and Siemiatycki draw upon the work of Regula Qureshi as they ruminate upon what constitutes “Muslim space” in diasporic contexts. For all three scholars, the mosque might theoretically be “any place where Muslims pray—a restaurant, a gathering place, or a home can become a place of worship,” and that the aural components of Muslims’ worship practices supersede any sort of emphasis on Absolute space (Ibid 194; see also Waugh, McIrvin

Abu-Laban, and Burckhardt Qureshi 1991 and Metcalf 1996). Isin and Siemiatycki note that, in

North America, the word mosque or masjid often describes not a building, location, or space, but rather “a group of people uniting for worship” and service, a usage that is built into the word “masjid” itself, which shares the root s-j-d with the verb sajada, which means “to bow down” (Ibid 194). Still, Toronto’s long history of anxieties towards—and obstructions of—the construction of Muslim gathering places often seems to have less to do with the buildings themselves, and more to do with the ways in which said buildings were being used, and by whom.

It is certainly true of most of the heterodox mosques that I have worked with, have, during the two-odd years in which I conducted the most recent portion of my fieldwork, moved between individuals’ homes, rented church basements, activity rooms in community health centres located in high rise buildings, and so forth. Such gatherings were, by nature of the spaces, relatively private, and the adhan and salat that reverberated through the small spaces of these mobile mosques rarely—if ever—found their ways to the ears of listeners on the outside.

Indeed, unlike Cairo, Marrakesh, or parts of Brooklyn, neither the architecture nor the dynamics of Muslim practice have been wholly welcomed into the composite sounds that make up

Toronto’s ambient character.

3 Theoretical Considerations of Public Deliberations of Sound

Following the publication of the first English translation of German sociologist Jürgen

Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), critiques of and addendums to Habermas’ work permeated various fields, including anthropology and ethnomusicology. While Habermas established a theory of the liberal bourgeois “public sphere” that emerged in late nineteenth century Europe, in which citizen discourse circulates alongside, and in conversation with, state mechanisms and institutions (Calhoun 1992: viii), critical theorists such as Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner sought to understand democratic societies as they actually operate in practice. For instance, they teased out ways in which to account for

“nonliberal, non-bourgeois, competing public spheres”—that is, multiple counterpublics”

(Fraser 1990: 61). Within the field of ethnomusicology and, more specifically, the sub-field of sound studies, many academics have honed in on the ways in which public deliberations of piety and religion are shaped by and mediated through various sorts of sounds, including

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68 recitation of scripture, environmental noise, amplified music, and quietude. Many of these studies focus on the circulation of recordings in large metropolises, as urban cosmopolitanism and mass-mediation have often been approached as hallmarks of modernities (Manuel 1993;

Hirschkind 2006).

The sounds of Islam have often been foregrounded in such studies of public religious deliberation, for, as Philip Bohlman notes, “Islam in post-colonial and post-industrial Europe increasingly shift[ed] prayer and liturgical practice from the inside to the outside, with the mosque and especially the minaret signifying the sonic limits of tolerance” (2013: 213). Urban

Egypt, in particular, has become a popular site for the consideration of such sonic contestations.

In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006), Charles

Hirschkind describes the different ways in which da’wa (cassette sermons) of Islamic

Revivalists are listened to, used, and understood. Here, critics of the Revival experience its

“acoustic world […] that embeds and sustains the practices of the da’wa counterpublic,” as “an assault on the ears” (2006: 125). Hirschkind believes that the da’wa soundscape denotes a counterpublic sphere, eking out space and agency, and encountering resistance, through and with sound. Otterbeck identifies similar trends throughout the Arab world (2008), and so such noisy deliberations are not unique to Egypt, although Cairo’s idiomatic soundscape is certainly a compelling point of entry for the consideration of the ways in which people talk about noise.

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32 In Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism, Isaac Weiner expands upon Hirschkind’s methodology, applying it to the study of religious sounds in public spaces in America. Here, he builds upon scholarship that engages with noise as an epistemological category, and the socio-political dimensions of noise regulation in modernity (Thomson 2002; Bijsterveld 2008), and extends this line of inquiry to pious sounds in a “multireligious” (Prothero 2006) and “strategically

While some music scholarship plays upon the public/counterpublic paradigms theorized by Habermas, Warner, Fraser, et al, other researchers have used sound’s ability to transcend the unidirectionality of visual perception (Connor 1997: 2006) to trouble the boundaries between public, private, “everyday,” and “absolute” religious practices. Ethnographic studies of sound and music have allowed scholars to break away from some of Habermas’ and Warner’s structuralist conceptualizations of counter/public spheres, and as such, new sorts of engagements with collective deliberation have emerged. Indeed, there are a handful of recently- published volumes that disrupt liberal-democratic understandings of public-ness and privacy by focusing on sonorous experiences; these publications point toward instances in which these categories bleed into one another, change over time, and sometimes evaporate altogether.

This complexifying project is perhaps best embodied by Georgina Born’s edited volume titled Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (2013), whose mission is to embrace a “critical phenomenology of musical/sonic publicness and privacy” (2013: 23). Born’s vision for this volume emerges out of Stuart Elden’s reading of

Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, in which Elden teases out both Marxian and Heideggerian

pluralist” (Gaši and Raudvere 2009) milieu. He suggests that “most commonly, […] noise complaints have targeted those perceived as outsiders to the dominant community, thereby functioning to marginalize others and restrain dissent,” and what people perceive as “noise” or “public nuisance” says much about a politicized distinction between aesthetic regimes (2013: 5). He argues that the “liberal project of containment [of religious sound]” (Weiner 2013: 7), rooted in “Protestant and post- Enlightenment notions of ‘good’ religion” (Ibid: 6) has sought to contain and regulate unwelcome—or unfamiliar—religious noise, be it church bells in nineteenth-century America, or Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizing in the city streets. By focusing on sound, Weiner’s study of religious pluralism transcends an analysis of “bounded discrete traditions” and instead “maps the complicated and contentious negotiations that ensue” when Americans grapple with “what—and to whom—one should have to give ear in public places” (Ibid: 10).

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70 elements in Lefebvre’s approach, demonstrating that it is “not only phenomenological but also critical, attuned to the social, and concerned with the spatialised operations of power” (Ibid: 23).

Crucially, Born approaches the ideas of “public” and “private” not as fixed categories, as

Habermas might have had it, but as flexible concepts that enable researchers to capture “key dynamics at different scales and across a range of temporalities of social life” (Ibid: 25). She abandons the notion of a public-private bifurcation, and instead borrows from Susan Gal’s semiotic approach to issues of publicity and privacy “in which she portrays the categories as not only encultured and relational, but fractal-like and recursive, such that they are capable of generating ‘multiple nestings’ [Gal 2002: 81]” (Ibid: 25). In ritual practice terms, then, the boundary between public-ness and private-ness is socially constructed and sustained, often using sound.

In his chapter in Born’s edited volume, titled “Music Inside Out: Sounding Public

Religion in a Post-Secular Europe,” Philip V. Bohlman describes the dramatic shifts in sites of religious music-making that unfolded in conjunction with the emergence of the liberal public sphere in nineteenth-century Europe. Here, “spaces inside the synagogue became more public,” as liberalized synagogues became places “of gathering for Jews from different ethnic and historical backgrounds” (2013: 209). Moreover, the publicization of religion and religious sound “led to the reconfiguration of sacred architecture throughout Europe,” as both mosques and synagogues moved toward the centers of cities, the sounds of these “absolute spaces” seeping into major city streets (Ibid: 210). In a chapter in the same volume, titled “Islam,

Sound, and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast” (2013),

Andrew Eisenberg tunes in to a subtle friction between institutionalized, liberal-democratic understandings of public space, and the ways in which Muslims living on Kenya’s coast

collectively use such spaces for inward-looking contemplation. He argues that the Islamic soundscape of Old Mombasa Town ultimately converts what might be thought of as an urban public area into a neighbourhood-wide sanctuary (Ibid: 195). This is a perfect example of the

“nesting” of public-ness and private-ness that Gal (2002) and Born (2013) speak of.

Within the realm of “lay philosophy,” many of my interlocutors—and perhaps many

Muslims living in post-9/11 Europe and North America —hold the optimistic belief that halal or transcendental forms of sound such as the adhan might be the key to re-orienting individuals and groups away from Islamophobic or bigoted stances. As one imam in the United States notes: "After Sept. 11, anything people hear about Islam, they're scared. But if they hear [the call to prayer] every day […] the fear is going to fade away” (Simon 2004). Importantly, such beliefs gesture toward the conviction that states such as anger, fear, and misunderstanding might be eroded through aesthetic or sensorial means. As the shaykh of the Scarborough halqa put it: if one were to “sing another song,” others might sing along.

4 Adhan

The adhan, often referred to as the “call to prayer,” is a stylized recitation, traditionally sounded from the minaret of a mosque during prayer times. The root of the word adhan is a-dh- n; other words that share this root are adhina (to listen, to hear about), and udhun (ear).

Traditionally recited by a mu’azzin, the adhan is meant to reach the ears of all those within earshot, and remind them to pray. In more recent times, usually broadcast a pre- recorded adhan through a loudspeaker, and, in certain locales, the adhan is not broadcast at all.

In Toronto, and in Canada, more generally, the “nesting” of sounds that Born and

Eisenberg write of is noticeably muted, giving the impression that Islam in Canada has largely

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72 been silenced (Frishkopf 2011). Indeed, on the surface, it might seem as though Islam has no public auditory presence in the city whatsoever. Returning to Masjid Toronto on Dundas Street, even during the months of Ramadan, the space does not broadcast its adhan. Indeed, there is no external speaker system, indicating that the founders and architects of the mosque never intended for their sounds to spill into the street as is the way in Cairo, Marrakech, or parts of

Brooklyn. This lies in stark contrast to many churches and clocktowers in the City of Toronto, where bells are an integral and functional part of the building. This is, in fact, true of perhaps all mosques in the downtown core. There is not a single adhan broadcast into the streets, at least, not in the traditional sense.33 During Ramadan 2017, however, a small group of Muslims organized an event called “Fast in the 6,” which was a public event both social and sacred in nature, and involved a community iftar and adhan, which took place at both Mississauga’s

Celebration Square and Toronto’s Nathan Philips Square (Syed 2017).

In 2018, Fast in the 6 put on a second large-scale Ramadan event in various public squares in the GTA, once again beginning with an adhan and iftar, but this time expanding to include fireworks, performances by Muslim-identifying musical artists such as Kareem Salama,

Kelsi Mayne, Nehma Sis, spoken word artist Mustafa the Poet, and comedian Mo Amer; both the mayor of Toronto and Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs were present. These annual public iftars, however, though performative steps toward more public, noisy expressions of

Islam, cannot wholly be considered a quotidian part of Toronto’s sonic-religious fabric, but

33 Himy Syed, the founder of the 30 Masjids project, has spent the last several months of Ramadan breaking his fast at different masjids all over —more recently—, Newfoundland, , and , but, to date, has not made note of any adhan-s broadcast externally in Canada (see www.30masjids.ca). Michael Frishkopf, too, writes of the apparent “silence” of Canadian Islam (2011).

rather fall more along the lines of festivalized Islam (Rasmussen 2010) or Islam on the “World

Stage” (Shannon 2011).

Such events are, notably, not without opposition. YouTube videos of these events, for one, receive a smattering of comments that range from critical to hateful (see Fig. 1.1.).

Fig. 1.1. Excerpts from the comments sections on two YoutTube videos capturing the public broadcast of the adhan in Toronto.

A more highly publicized such example of such deliberation orbits around a sound installation by John Oswald titled A Time to Hear for Here, which was mounted at Toronto’s largest public museum, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), in 2007. In 2012, a series of complaints were lodged at the ROM, all of which focused on short segment of Oswald’s twenty-four hour long work in which the adhan is performed by Sashar Zarif. One such letter of complaint was published on the far-right online platform Canada Free Press; an excerpt of

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74 which demonstrates the author’s visceral response to what is, in his ears, an unwelcome sound:

On Monday, May 21st (Victoria Day), I was guiding the children of a friend around the Royal Ontario Museum when I heard the Muslim call to prayer belting out of the PA system. After the full call was recited, there was an announcement that all would be welcome to join the prayers. I didn’t recognize where the room was in the building (perhaps because of the sound of my teeth grinding). Then the ’s call wailed on again. After that, presumably for ‘balance’ some church- bells dinged away for a little bit.

The Royal Ontario Museum is an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture. The 21 members of the Board of Trustees (15 of them appointed by the Provincial Government) is responsible for the conduct of the Museum in accordance with the Royal Ontario Museum Act. The ROM also has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Culture and has a board of governors to conduct private sector fundraising.

The Islamic Call to Prayer (and presumably all five calls are used) have no place in such an institution, particularly from a religion with far too many adherents who lack any respect for other religions and whose constant practice with regard to relics and sites that predate Islam is to destroy them (Stone 2012).

This letter seemed to be a tipping point of sore for the ROM, who issued a public response on the matter the following day:

It has been reported that the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast loudly over the Royal Ontario Museum’s PA system, followed by an announcement inviting visitors to join in prayer. What was heard was three minutes of an audio art installation called A Time to Hear for Here by acoustic architect and composer John Oswald. Neither the Museum nor the artist is making any religious statement with this installation. This work of art features approximately 7000 sound events,

including a version of the adhan (the call to prayer) performed by Sashar Zarif, which plays once in the 24-hour long work of art and is timed to take place with sunset in . There is no announcement for visitors to gather and pray in the Museum at any time.

The work of art plays in the Thorsell Spirit House every day and is distributed through the 35 speakers in this space only. It was installed in June 2007 with the opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. In addition to the adhan, the work also features other sound elements with religious and ceremonial connotations including Beniamino Gigli’s Ave Maria by Strauss and Tanya Tagac’s solo throatsinging.

“The ROM clearly understands its role as an agency of the Province of Ontario and does not promote any particular religion, but is respectful of the diversity of faith,” says Janet Carding, Director and CEO. “As a Museum of World Cultures, however, we often discuss religions, faith-related customs, sacred objects and ceremonies.” (ROM 2012)

That the adhan was the only one of seven thousand sounds events to stir up complaint— and to drive one patron to grind his teeth—is telling, as is the fact that such complaints came to a head in 2012, during the height of the Harper years. In particular, the ROM incident points toward the different ways that one might hear Muslim sounds. What is for

Muslim Canadians, a sound of beauty, of reflection, or reverence, was for Oswald, and the ROM programmers, a sonic artifact, and was also, for some passers-by, grating noise representing an ideological threat.

Such a collision of acoustemological regimes, and a muddling of perceived private-ness and public-ness is, of course, a tale that has been told and retold ad nauseum.

Indeed, the public adhan debate can easily be positioned in humanity’s long lineage of

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76 noise complaints. Isaac Weiner, drawing upon R. Murray Schaefer, thoroughly details such processes in which some sounds are perceived as “noises” while others are either celebrated or, perhaps more interestingly, go unnoticed all together. That is, they are heard, but not necessarily listened to (Weiner 2013: 19-20). In the context of Toronto’s network of Muslim groups, such deliberations and mis- or dis-hearings have made it all but necessary for those who practices Islam to seek out different, novel ways of sounding their faith. As it turns out, it is possible for the sounds of the Divine to be apprehended nearly everywhere if one’s ears are tuned in. For as Catherine Bell suggests, sacred ritual need not be conceptualized as an object—the public adhan, for example—but can rather be thought of as a practice, as an ongoing process by which one makes do (2009 [1996]:

75-76).

For the time being, the adhan has taken on more private and personal forms among

Muslims living in Toronto; it was not uncommon for multiple individuals at Saturday zikrs or

Friday salaat to have applications on their smartphones such as MuslimPro or Athan, both of which provide visual and audio notifications for the calls to prayer, audio recordings of

Qur’anic recitations, and even digital tasbih (prayer beads) for counting one’s zikr. This personalized form of sonic entrainment is extremely popular globally, and is particularly useful in places like Toronto, where there is no historical precedent for broadcasting the adhan publicly.34

34 According to an article in The Ottawa Citizen, “Omar Mahfoudhi, executive director of the Islam Care Centre in Ottawa, knows of no public calls to prayer in most Canadian cities.”

Despite deliberations that have taken place over rare instances of the public broadcast of the adhan, and what Michael Frishkopf calls the omnipresent “silence of Canadian Islam”

(2011) however, my interlocutors did not feel like their practice was at all compromised.

Indeed, the adhan’s function—to call believers to pray—is less clear in a community that is widely dispersed (Shendruk 2012). In an article detailing the rise of digital prayer application usage among Muslims in Canada, Omar Mahfoudhi, the director of Ottawa’s Islam Care Centre notes that:

The reason to call to prayer is to call people to come and pray. If we can accomplish that better by having loudspeakers then yes, that would be great. […] But the way our communities are, we’re very dispersed, people will come to the mosque … I don’t live anywhere that’s near a mosque and even most of the people that come to prayer here at the centre, they live very far away (Ibid).

Among my interlocutors who prayed regularly, in the absence of neighbourhood mosques broadcasting the adhan, cellular phones have come to serve as personal , reminding them—and those within hearing range—that it is time to pray. Occasionally, their notifications would sound while they were riding public transportation, or standing in a group of people, rendering these sounds not wholly private, and not entirely personal. On any given evening that

I spent with prayer groups or Sufi circles, a handful of cellular phones would sound out for zuhr, asr, or maghrib salat (depending on the time of day), giving a faint impression of the multi-layered adhans that one might hear in, say, Cairo or Mombasa Old Town. Far from perceiving the effect as a sort of simulacra, however, my interlocutors fully embraced contemporary technology—and its sounds—as real facets of their practice.

In one instance, a small group of us had gathered to rehearse some songs – a very

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78 informal meshk meeting of sorts. During this time of year, our collective energy was quite low, as it was the middle of winter, several of us were sick, and others still were bogged down by life stressors of one variety or another. That evening, a guest musician from another dergah,

Mehmet, had come to help us with our singing, and made note that we were having troubles sustaining our voices, or expressing the illahi texts with feeling and reverence (this was a common theme in our rehearsals in and around this time!). He asked if he could recite a few surahs of the Qur’an for us – instead of reading himself, however, he placed his phone at the center of our circle, and played two tracks from his iTunes collection. We all kneeled and listened. The surahs that he chose were Surat al-Falaq and Surat al-Naas, both of which are believed to bring protection to reciter and listener alike. Here, the medium of delivery mattered not—the sounds themselves were believed to hold sacred value and invocatory powers unto themselves, and this, in many ways, gestures toward the precedence of sama’ – listening – above voicing in many Sufi sensorial regimes.35

5 Walking in the City While Muslim

In some ways, the use of portable, mobile devices as conduits for faithful listening might be considered a spatial practice (de Certeau 1984: 91), a way of circumnavigating the public quietude of Islam in Canada. De Certeau describes walking through the city as a sort of articulation of the “relationship of oneself to oneself” that shapes both “the relations among [a place’s] strata” and “the pedestrian unfolding of the stories” that take place when “moving about the city” (1984: 110). He posits, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories, that “the

35 Indeed, Kapchan, in her recent work, discusses the centrality of developing sacred modes of audition in the practices of France’s Qadiriya-Boutchichiya tariqa, and, among my interlocutors, too, listening, watching— sensing—were universally valued over seeking out Absolute sources of religious authority (2017).

childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a ‘metaphorical’ city” (Ibid: 110). Largely, de Certeau invokes the atomized individual, moving with haste or idly loitering, making turns and carving out paths on their way to visit a friend, or to shop. His is a somewhat idyllic portrayal of what it means to move through the city, however, even as he tackles the imposing, structuring, semi-monolithic force that is the planned city (and the institutions of power that inform it). What if the simple act of moving through the city meant that one’s health or life were endangered? What might it mean to walk through the city while Muslim?

The mobile adhan, with its ability to be both a tool of pragmatism and dissent, is also a sonic marker of Muslimness that, in the wrong space, amidst the wrong people, might, in an instant, make its user a target. Multiple times on the public streetcar, I have heard the sounds of a quiet, compressed, mobile adhan; often the hand-held muezzin is not through first takbir,

Allahu akbar, when dozens of heads pivot in unison toward a person now scrambling to mute their phone. The hijab, niqab, and burka, in their multifarious pragmatic and religious functions, also become, in hostile contexts, markers. Walking through the city alone, as a

Muslim—and, particularly, as a Muslim woman—may thus become, at times, dangerous.

In the past decade, incidences of anti-Muslim hate crimes have been on the rise, typically seeing upswings in the wakes of internationally-reported events such as the 2014 hostage crisis in Sydney and the 2015 Paris attacks. In response to these surges in attacks and threats, a movement called #IllRideWithYou emerged. The movement, and its connected hashtag, began in Australia in 2014, following a hostage situation involving a man who was

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80 reported to have wielded a flag with the words of the (la ilaha illallah). According to journalist Adam Chandler, “[o]n a train, one passenger reportedly spotted a Muslim woman removing her hijab, ostensibly out of fear of being targeted. The passenger told her to put it back on and offered to walk with her in solidarity” (2014). As this story circulated, the

#IllRideWithYou hashtag began to trend, and in the days that followed, it was used over

250,000 times on Twitter alone, to say nothing of other social media platforms; use of this hashtag was often accompanied by genuine “offers of companionship and solidarity for Muslim travelers who might not want to travel alone” (Ibid). However, this all amounted to what

Chandler refers to as a “heartwarming subplot” amidst the Australian government’s Operation

Sovereign Borders campaign, which, while not explicitly targeted at Muslims, “debuted in the context of a spike in attacks against Muslims in Australia linked to fears over the rise of ISIS”

(Ibid).

The following year, in the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks, the #IllRideWithYou movement saw a resurgence in Toronto after a series of incidences of harassment and violence against Muslims—mainly Muslim women—in public spaces. Over the course of five days, two

Muslim women were verbally harassed in a subway station, the Toronto Transit Commission found anti-Muslim graffiti on the interior of a train, a Muslim mother was physically assaulted and robbed at her child’s school in North Toronto, and a student at the University of Toronto was spat on and verbally harassed (CBC News 2015). In response to this, thousands of

Torontonians made posts on various social media platforms, typically reading: “If you're feeling unsafe and want someone with #WhitePrivilege to ride with, #IllRideWithYou #TTC.”

Still, incidences of violence and harassment persisted, often going unreported, and one such case touched the lives of the Scarborough halqa: in the middle of the day, the mother of one of my interlocutors, who wears a , was attacked by a young man, who verbally harassed her before burning her with his cigarette. After this incident, she was afraid to walk alone, and her son, Osman, tried to accompany her in public, when possible. However, it was not always possible, and a shadow loomed over their family, and the halqa at large.

In the case of Osman’s mother, the circulation of a hashtag was not enough to protect her from an attack. This sort of physical vulnerability necessitates bodily assemblages, on the ground. It involves moving beyond discursive or theoretical presentations of “accommodation”

(Selby, Barras, and Beaman 2018) or “tolerance” (Brown 2008) and toward in-the-flesh enactments of solidarity. Judith Butler has written extensively on this topic in her development of a performative theory of assembly. Here, she addresses bodily vulnerability, precarious life, and the physical safety that assemblages offer. She also suggests that when bodily assemblages, or “bodies in alliance” (2015: 24), occur in public or semi-public spaces, there exists the potential to performatively demand a “more livable set of lives” (Ibid: 25). For Butler, ultimately, bodily survival requires “social and institutional support […] and networks of interdependency and care,” suggesting that a grassroots social alliance often begins as a way of enacting “the social order it seeks to bring about by establishing its own modes of sociability”

(Ibid: 84). It is likely no coincidence, then, that following the attack, Osman brought his mother

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82 to the Scarborough halqa’s zikr for the first time. It was a means of demonstrating allyship and support in the flesh, albeit in the realm of the private.36

6 Conclusion

By crafting a hazy picture of the City of Toronto with an ear and an eye toward Muslim life, I wish to draw attention to the multiple nestings of violence, deliberation, and alliances that comprise both the “planned city” and “urban practices” of my interlocutors (de Certeau 1984:

93). While Michel de Certeau argues that one’s relationship with oneself dictates the ways in which one moves about, and dwells within, the city (1984: 110), Judith Butler considers that, among members of precarious populations, one’s movements through the city also hinge upon relationships with others (2015: 84). In fact, survival in certain spaces, during difficult times, necessitates alliances between bodies; Butler suggests that this “between” is not “an ideal or empty space” but rather “the space of sociality and of support” (Ibid: 84-85). During my fieldwork, among members of the Scarborough halqa and its network, the realm of the bodily in-between also held the potential to be a site of violence, thus making physical alliances all the more necessary.

Although Canadian legislation purports to protect residents from hate crimes, in practice, such incidents still occur at an alarming rate, rendering public spaces at best unsettling, and at worst, inhospitable, to vulnerable individuals and groups. Among the Muslim

Torontonians that I have spent time with, the establishment of safe feeling spaces, often in the

36 Difficult times also sometimes warrant going underground or incognito, however. Such is the case with some of the members of Masjid al-Wali who are both queer-identifying and Muslim. Here, bodily alliances take place in a cloistered domain, and identities are carefully protected.

realm of private or unassuming locales, made their faithful expressions, aural or otherwise, possible. In this context, then, Islam is a social-bodily practice dependent on the cultivation of protective, caring alliances.

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Chapter Two Signs, Glimmers, Dawnings, and Flashes: Hopeful Audition During Difficult Times

Inside the masjid, the adhan marks the beginning of one of five daily prayers, and is thought to be both an integral part of the mosque environment, as well as a beautiful way of demarcating the day. Other sounds, however, such as microphone feedback, disruptive chatter, or expletives—sounds which might be considered background noise on the humming streets outside of the mosque—become subject to scrutiny, and are often categorized as undesirable noise, and often attributed to intervention on the part of mischievous or malevolent forces like jinn or shaytan.

If the previous chapter began with a discussion of more external, or perhaps public, instances of listening and deliberation, this chapter moves further “inward,” to the more private and atomized locales such as the mosque, the home, the community centre, and virtual spaces.

Here, I discuss more microlevel moments of social poïesis, focusing on the roles that indeterminate sounds, that is, sounds whose origins are unknown or unclear, play in the intimate lives of my interlocutors. Such sounds often come about as the result of technological mediation, and can include microphone feedback, digital glitches, and even playlists generated algorithmically; take, for instance, the disruptive and distracting digital interference experienced by a prayer group whose meetings are held over Skype, where pops, lost sounds, white noise, and fragmented or distorted speech are interpreted as manifestations of jinn.

In particular, I touch upon three cases in which technological glitches were taken as ayat—divine signs—affirming the hearers’ decisions to, respectively, take hand in a Sufi order and convert to Islam. In all of these instances, sounds of indeterminate origin are taken to represent suprahuman dimensions of reality as described in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and, even in

the cases in which their referents are considered malevolent, are used to establish and affirm a mode of sonic interpretation that is playful and creative as it is reverent, which I believe helps my interlocutors to sensorially deepen their understanding of maqamat and key concepts that undergird (their) Sufi experiences. In the case of Masjid al-Wali, social acts of aural interpretation also help to bridge the divide between members of its on-the-ground assemblage, and the disembodied remote membership who attend jumu’ah prayers remotely.

Crucially, such interpretive acts constitute a way of listening that ripples across

Toronto’s variegated heterodox Muslim spaces, binding them to one another despite their differences, and establishing their connection to a broader ummah (global Muslim community) and silsila (spiritual lineage). Collective acts of interpretation also permit a pious resilience in the face of antagonism and violence. Gesturing back to Chapter One, I conclude by discussing the ways in which hate speech—both that of religio-political extremists like Da’ish and of burgeoning white supremacist (or “heritage”) movements—is listened to, and interpreted, by my interlocutors. Indeed, such speech acts, according to one Toronto-based shaykh, are representative of a sort of possession; they are, effectively, shaytan speaking through the bodies of people. His instructions to his dervishes were not to meet hateful discourse with anger or rage, as some had been doing both at demonstrations and on social media, but rather to hear such expressions for what they are—manifestations of the omnipresent shadow side of humanity—and to “sing another song”—to operate in an alternative sensorial-ideological realm.

This way of interpreting embodies the qualities of both raja’ (hope) and tawwakul (trust in

God), two maqamat deemed important by the shaykh of the Scarborough halqa (see also al-

Qushayri), and thus might be read through the lens of a “hopeful” ethnography.

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1 Ways of Listening

While working with the Scarborough halqa, I got to know a small group of people who sustained practices outside of their meshk group. By cultivating an ear attuned to divinity in their meshk and zikr practices, however, their mode of listening to all music began to shift dramatically. One week a woman, Maryam, who had recently taken hand in the Scarborough- based Sufi group, was unable to join us for a meshk gathering, as she had tickets to see the singer The Weeknd for the same night. She let us know over email, however, that she’d be meshk-ing in tandem, but from afar, at the concert, to which several other dervishes replied

“mashallah” (“God willed”). Another member of this group, Tariq, had his own solo musical practice in which he combined samples of his shaykh and other dervishes voicing their zikr, and sounds of, for instance, the nay or the bendir, with electric guitar, synthesizer, and electronic beats. For him, there was a distinct overlap between his experiences listening to industrial music, and his experiences with zikr. Thus, his personal musical practice was a way of expressing the implicit unity of these different facets of his life; indeed, his home recording studio and prayer space were even situated next to one another in the same room.

For both Tariq and Maryam, and, as I discuss further in Chapter Four, for the meshk collective at large, the cultivation of a pious way of listening means that one’s favourite sounds, regardless of their origin, might be perceived as manifestations of—and pathways toward—the divine. It is crucial to note that Tariq, Maryam, and the meshk participants are not the only people that I spoke with who found that their way of hearing shifted as they engaged more deeply with their spiritual practice. Rather, there seemed to be a widespread understanding among nearly all of my interlocutors that the ways in which they experienced sensorial stimuli shifted with every prayer, every meshk, and every zikr, but also during seemingly mundane,

quotidian moments. Here, the lines between private and collective audition become blurred, gesturing toward a sort of individuated-yet-coherent sensorial entrainment, not unlike the phenomena discussed by Charles Hirschkind (2006) and Jeffers Engelhardt (2014) in their studies of pious listening and singing respectively.

2 The Jinn in the Machine: Indeterminate Sounds and the Pious Sensorium

Masjid al-Wali is both a group of people and a space that extends over multiple places, including its weekly meeting place (the location rotates on a regular basis, and is only revealed to members) as well as online forums such as Facebook and Skype. The meetings in person begin with members trickling in, greeting one another, and helping lay out prayer mats and sheets. Chairs are set up in a wide circle, and people begin to sit down in a ring, first in the circle’s centre, and then moving outward, leaving the chairs at the circle’s edge for people with disabilities who are not able to sit on the floor. Every week, someone new voices the adhan, marking the beginning of prayers. After salat, there is a khutbah (lecture), again, delivered by a different person every week. The masjid’s membership extends beyond the city of Toronto, and, on some weeks, members from the United States, the Middle East, and beyond delivered their khutbah via Skype or pre-recorded audio recording. Men, women, and members beyond the gender binary, children, and seniors all take their turns delivering lectures and ushering in

Friday prayers. The atmosphere is, in some ways, a radical extension of Amjad Syed’s description of Toronto’s first mosque—people from myriad places and walks of life coming together and collectively building a safe-feeling space for worship.

After prayers, there would often be snacks and, once a month, a group from the Black

Coalition for Aids Prevention (Black CAP) would join in prayers, bring educational material

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88 about sexual health, and would serve a bountiful multi-course West African meal. Other times, a First Nations elder would join us, performing a smudging ceremony, and offering wisdom about the similarities between smudging and (ritual cleansing).

I had been attending these jumu’ah (Friday prayers) at Masjid al-Wali for months upon months before I realized that I had not yet put myself in the position of so many of its members and followers—that is, I had never listened to an adhan, khutbah, and discussion remotely, my body separate from the congregation, and my ears encountering the sounds of the masjid through mediation both by the organizer’s computer and internet connection, and my own. I also realized that I was not experiencing the textual component—the sort of scripted, messageboard-esque community-within-a-community that the masjid’s remote membership seemed to have cultivated. The week that I decided to participate in jumu’ah digitally from my home also happened to be one of the most technologically-fraught days for the masjid. There was no sound, and every person who was Skype-ing in was unable to hear adhan and the words of the khutbah – the only information being broadcast was a pixelated, choppy image of the person delivering the khutbah. Below is a transcript37 of the conversation that ensued over

Skype chat, during which time the audio feed cut out, the connection was reset, sound was briefly restored, and the members began to ruminate upon the reasons for this technological upset:

Member 1: Call started

Member 2: I think that I should disconnect and call back?

37 I have also included amended excerpts from my field notes in italicized font in order to more accurately depict the sonic components of this interaction.

Member 3: Has the masjid looked at U-stream?

Member 2: Ok. That us what I am going to try. (Still cannot hear anything.)

Admin: i need everyone to mute mice and turn off video

Member 2: It has. U-Stream doesn't have the seamlessness of functionality that Skype does.

The khutbah begins with Richard greeting the circle of listeners:

“Asalaamu alayk—uuuu-u-u-uuuu—m.”

His voice sounds like it has been sent through a ring modulator, the last syllable of his greeting, “kum” (you, plural) bouncing like a spring, before sputtering, and cutting out completely. In the midst of this glitch, a cluster of noise fills my headphones; layers upon layers of what seem to be papers shuffling, keys clicking, miscellaneous mouth sounds, and breathing.

Member 4: Walaikum assalaam.

Admin: please mute

The noises superimposed over the now-silent khutbah were coming from the internal microphones of the computers of those individuals who were joining remotely via Skype. Slowly, in response to the administrator’s request, the layered cacophony dissolved into quietude. The sounds of the khutbah, however, were still missing.

Member 5: where is sound?

Member 6: I am missing sound as well :)

Admin: can you hear now?

Member 1: not yet

Member 5: :(

Member 1: [Member 7] is also trying to join?

Admin: Admin added Member 7 to this conversation 89

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Admin: yes but i am not getting a plus sign to add her...

Admin: so need to add her in myself

Admin: must hang up on her

Admin: please turn off your mic and video

Member 1: I have no sound, and will try and call again

Member 5: me, too. no sound so i'll try calling again.

Member 2: Admin, can you call me in? If no, I understand.

Admin: PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR MICS

Member 7: Am I in the right group? I can't hear anything.

Quietude continues. The image of Richard, who is delivering the khutbah, is visible, albeit pixelated and choppy. His mouth is moving, and his hands are gesticulating wildly, but I cannot hear what is being said. I imagine it must be exciting, judging by his exuberance.

Member 1: Admin, is there any chance of restarting your computer to reset the settings?

Member 2: I know that it is probably late for this now, but it might actually have worked better for Admin to have disconnected this call and started a new one.

Time is passing quickly, and it seems that the khutbah may be nearing its end.

Admin: yes i can restart

Member 6: Thank you! :D

Admin: ok going to do it now...

The call is restarted, and so Richard is no longer visible. I wait, as do the other people tuning in remotely, for feed to resume.

Admin: Call started

Member 5: I can hear!!!!

Richard is now audible, but the khutbah is nearly over. The odd key click or mouth sound is superimposed over the discussion, making the words difficult to hear.

Member 2: Reminder to my fellow beloved Skypers to ensure that your mics are off.

Admin: Admin added Member 1 to this conversation

Member 2: Skype turns them on again once the call is connected.

Slowly, the layers of sounds from the remote listeners disappear as microphones get turned off.

Member 1: great I can hear

Member 1: THANKS!

Member 2: So everyone needs to check their mics.

Admin: this is working, inshallah!!!!

Member 6: Yayyy!

Admin: please turn off all mics and video

[…]

[2015-09-11, 1:49:37 PM] Member 3: The Khutbah is an examination of Islam and Science fiction. The speaker started with talking about the Jinn and how they are created from smokeless fire and that one could interpret that to mean Silicone, because that is the way that silicone burns. He explained that there are more kinds of people than humans and that Qur’an calls Allah the Lord of Worlds which allows for the existence of people outside of Earth. He called us to reflect on what ideas in Science Fiction like space travel might mean to our individual Islam. He is currently talking about comic books and doing sci-fi in different individual Islamic cultures. It is a kind of thinking, a way of approaching knowledge.

Member 2: xx Member 3 xx

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Admin: WOW… that was a great summary

Admin: since i was busy with Skype i missed some of his talk and was wishing i knew what the start was… thanks for fulfilling my wish, alhamdulillah

Admin: opening up to comments now

Member 2: ++ Discussion Points ++ Have thoughts on the khutba? Type them in!

Admin: thank you, Member 2 <3

Admin: sorry video being sketchy

Admin: can you all still hear?

Admin: any comments?

Member 3: Unfortunately we missed much of the khutbah but if we can roll this idea around a bit. One could say we are currently living in the sub-genre of science fiction known as cyberpunk. What does things like attending Jumu’ah on the internet mean for us? I mean are our Jumu’ah prayers accepted, what keeps us from having a 24 hour community in Mecca to Skype into on your own local prayer times?

Member 3: Would we blame Skype issues on the Shaytan?

At this point, one of the members who were present at the masjid read some of the Skypers’ comments aloud. Richard, the member who had delivered the khutbah, began to respond to

Member 3’s considerations. A small, animated man, he eagerly took up the opportunity to consider whether or not virtual prayer is really prayer, and the possibility that Skype glitches might be a consequence of bid’ah (religious innovation). With a smile on his face, he optimistically suggested that it was more likely that the Skype issues might be caused by jinn, a class of suprahuman being, documented in Islamic texts such as the Qur’an and Sunnah, but also in pre-Islamic texts and literature; they are thought to be distinct from angels, and are

believed to usually be physically imperceptible to humans, but capable of “interfering” with this plane of reality in a variety of ways (Braymann 1977: 46). In his study of reported manifestations of and interactions with jinn among Bobo and Zara peoples, Braymann notes that these entities “behave in numerous ways, assuming a neutral character with respect to most individuals, and while they may tease or trick people, they are generally neither harmful nor dangerous if they are not annoyed” (Ibid 46).

Richard then suggested even the Skypers themselves could be likened, in a way, to jinn, suggesting “they are people like us that are here, but also not here. They are participating but not present.” He went on to suggest that a worldview informed by the Qur’an and Sunnah—one that includes different strata of reality and various suprahuman entities—is not unlike a philosophy that is grounded in ideas taken from science fiction. Both involve imagining things that are imperceptible or unfathomable, and both involve creating—whether in one’s mind, on the page, in film, or through discussion—images of a future. Both involve creative and, often, hopeful processes. He finished his thought by saying that science fiction—much like religion— is “perhaps not good at telling our future, but it is useful at helping us understand and interpret the present” (Fieldnotes 11 September 2015).

This playful-yet-serious collision of literary criticism and interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah, taking place in an open-ended discussion that touched upon “indeterminate” phenomena, was seized by Masjid al-Wali’s membership. The notion that the Skype interference—in all its unwanted noises and unwelcome silences—was not just an inconvenience, but also a gateway into a dimension of reality that is described in the Qur’an,

Hadith, and (some) Sufi literature, resonated deeply. Interestingly, as the discussion unfolded, and as the frustration experience due to the technological glitches wore off and faded into

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94 individuals’ memories, the membership came to agree that the interference was not likely to be the result of shaytan, but rather the more benevolent tricksters that are jinn. More importantly, the membership took great pleasure in this collective interpretive act, and seized it as an opportunity to come to understand their experiences, including the seemingly strange, and, for some, alienating, experience of being involved with a semi-virtual masjid, in a way that aligned with both Muslim thought but also—interestingly—contemporary popular culture. In the weeks that followed, at the end of jumu’ah prayers, when people said ‘du’a-s (invocations, or asking

[for the fulfillment of a need]) for people in their lives who were on their minds or who needed help, inevitably someone from the group would mention the Skype jinns, as well as “anyone who couldn’t be there, […] and those far away who don’t know about this space” (Fieldnotes 25

September 2015). Here, spatial schisms were folded in to a higher order of things, and fragmented emplacements were mapped on to a larger, spectral sort of geography.

Indeed, the Skypers tended to be individuals who existed on the margins, unable to be out while expressing their faiths. By centering jinns in this act of interpretation, then, Richard and the members of Masjid al-Wali established that the noises from microphones and digital interference are no longer heard as “sounds out of place” (Bijsterveld 2008: 37). Instead, they are apprehended as ayat; as manifestations of al-ghayb.

A similar—but perhaps more opaque—incident occurred during the celebration and prayers at Toronto’s Noor Cultural Centre’s annual gathering for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the month of Ramadan. Because many of the groups that I spent time with did not have the space necessary to host their members and their families for Eid prayers and festivities, nearly all of these groups attended the event at Noor, despite the fact that their beliefs about gender inclusivity are generally at odds with the centre’s separation of men and

women during prayers. Indeed, although the space does require that men and women sit on opposite sides of the room so as to satisfy their more orthodox membership, they do away with the “men in the front, women in the back” model, and place women on the left side of the prayer room, and men on the right. Crucially, there is no barrier separating men and women.

Thus, the Noor has established a reputation as one of the more “progressive” or “flexible” of the large Muslim institutions in the Greater Toronto Area, and presents its mission statement as follows:

Our goal is to become a leading centre for Islamic learning and the celebration of , while respecting the diversity in peoples and religions as directed by the Qur’an [49.13], and in pursuance of that goal: to promote the sharing of knowledge and wisdom in a spirit of humility and respect; to foster an appreciation of the diversity and beauty of the cultural heritages in the world of Islam; to provide a place for the community where mind and spirit can find peace and spiritual fulfillment; and to encourage understanding and amity between peoples by these means.38

The Noor Centre, located in North York adjacent to the grounds of the Museum of

Islamic culture, is not necessarily conveniently located for individuals living downtown or, say, in the Greater Toronto Area’s west end. Thus many of the visitors from various Sufi centres, community prayer groups, as well as the more regular attendees of the Noor Centre, arrived by carpool. By the time I arrived at the centre after a lengthy foray on public transit, the building was full, and yet people were still flooding in. It was a tight squeeze, but I luckily bumped into a woman that I knew from meshk rehearsal, and managed to secure a spot next to her for prayers. Later that afternoon, I saw photos of the event posted online by several of my

38 “About Us.” Noor Cultural Centre, Accessed 1 July 2016. 95

96 interlocutors—I was completely unaware that they had been there; the room was bustling and bursting at the seams.

When the time came to listen to the khutbah, the remaining stragglers managed to find space on the floor, and the room fell silent. The speaker walked toward the microphone, and began to speak, but the volume was low. He then raised his voice, and there was significant feedback, in response to which he quickly quipped: “It’s a sign!” This line was delivered with a knowing smile, and the congregation let out a collective chuckle. Needless to say, his interpretation of microphone feedback resonated with the group on one level or another and, for those present who I knew from meshk, or zikr, or jumu’ah prayers, I wondered if they were thinking of the jinns in their machines.

3 The Right Path: Glimmers, Flashes, and Dawnings of Affirmation

The discussion of noisy jinns (or perhaps shaytan) among members of Masjid al-Wali, and the microphone feedback during Eid prayers, provide two examples of the ways in which collective interpretation of signs unfold in practice at Masjid al-Wali, the Scarborough halqa, and affiliated groups. One of the key texts shared among my interlocutors is al-Qushayri’s

Epistle on Sufism. During the time that I spent with them, members of the Scarborough halqa embarked on a guided reading of this text, led by a few senior dervishes. The aim of this activity was to gain a practical understanding of some of the key concepts that they had been learning about in their shaykh’s sohbets, including the maqamat. Andrea, one of the organizers, described this reading group’s purpose as such:

The [al-Qushayri] inspires us to talk about how we have understood these ideas in the

past (which may have been a barrier for us), ways we can make use of the concept in our life now, and any other related issues. We do try to keep on topic, but do not if need be.

One of the sections in the book deals with categories of divine signs, namely glimmers, flashes, and dawnings; each category is respectively stronger, more impactful, and “better at banishing doubts” than the last (al-Qushayri 143). For instance, flashes are more profound than glimmers, but dawnings have a longer-lasting impression than flashes. Qushayri notes that such signs:

[…] are characteristic of beginners who strive to ascend by their hearts. For them, these rays of the suns of divine knowledge do not last long. God provides nourishment for their hearts at every moment, according to His words: “They shall have their provision at dawn and evening.”94 Each time the firmament of their hearts is obscured by the clouds of selfishness, the glimmers of unveiling and the flashes of closeness [to God] begin to shine in them; and amidst veiling they suddenly begin to see the glimmers [of divine grace] […] Some of them leave no trace after their disappearance, like some bright stars, which eclipse, while the night stays on. Others, on the contrary, leave traces behind them. While their signs may disappear, their pain persists. Their light may be gone, while their traces remain. A person who has experienced their onslaught continues to live in the shade of their blessings. He is living in anticipation of their return, making do with what he has. (al-Qushayri 142-143.)

This explanation of signs, their affect, their import, and what they do for the beholder, sheds some light on my interlocutors’ encounters with the noisy jinn. These encounters, cemented in meaning through social, poïetic processes, serve as points of contact with the realm of the invisible—al-ghayb—and thus provide affirmation for my interlocuters through their sensorial memories. By continuing to reference the Skype jinn, week after week, they collectively returned to that glimmering moment, pushing forward on their paths more assuredly.

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Jumping forward in time, I want to rest briefly upon a gathering of Masjid al-Wali that took place months after the notion of the “Skype jinn” had been naturalized in the worlds of my interlocutors. It was after jumu’ah prayers and the khutbah when one of the founders of the group initiated a lengthy discussion about belief, and the moment(s) in which individuals realized that they believed in Allah. We went around the room, in which individuals were assembled loosely in the shape of a circle in the interest of egalitarianism, and those who wanted to speak took their turn, sharing their experiences with their friends. One woman came to Islam through the teachings of her mother and father. Another member came to practice

Islam while studying theology. The stories were varied and compelling, and one could feel the sense of intimacy growing stronger as each person spoke in tandem. There was a new face in the circle, and it came his time to speak—a young man, Taro, who had been brought up loosely

Buddhist, but had recently converted to Islam, began to talk about one of the experiences that had cemented his faith.

“I was in the kitchen,” he began, “ I was preparing some food. My computer was off, as far as I knew. No sound was coming from it. Suddenly, a song that I really needed to hear started playing. I hadn’t pressed anything. I have no idea how it happened—I felt like it was a message from Allah that I was on the right path, and so I recited al-Fatiha.”

“What song was it?” asked one of the people sitting near Taro.

“’Lovely Day’ by Bill Withers.”

Everyone smiled and laughed supportively. It seemed strange that one might respond to

Bill Withers by reciting the opening verse of the Qur’an, but in the soundworld of Taro, this glitch—this chance digital performance of an uplifting song—was taken as a sign, perhaps a

dawning, as it led him to pray, and to subsequently recount this encounter with the Divine some days later at Masjid al-Wali.

4 Rise Canada and the Noise of Hate Speech

After Paris attacks, a series of hate crimes directed towards Muslims living in the City of

Toronto took place in the Greater Toronto Area. One of the more publicized attacks took place at Grenoble Public School in November of 2015, where a mother, waiting to pick up her children, was violently attacked by two men, but there were many other such incidents that went unreported. As mentioned in Chapter One, one such incident involved the mother of one of my interlocutors, Osman, a member of the Scarborough halqa, who while walking down the street, was attacked by a man, who flung verbal threats at her and burned her with his cigarette. This triggered an acute, and very personal, series of actions by various members of the Sufi group.

Many involved themselves at the grassroots level, helping to organize anti-racism marches such as the one that took place the Friday after the Grenoble Public School attack in the nearby

Flemingdon Park, and the #IllRideWithYou movement, which, as mentioned in Chapter One, paired up volunteer commuters with their Muslim neighbours who were reticent to use public transport following the reports of several incidences of violence and harassment targeted at

Muslim TTC patrons.

Others took to online platforms to decry these incidences, and some of these text-based actions became quite heated, and, understandably, angry. It was a difficult and painful time for my interlocutors and their familial and social networks, and many people confessed to feeling powerless in the face of what felt like an endless stream of hostility and aggression. Indeed, in response to anti-racism rallies and campaigns to help Muslim Canadians feel safe and welcome, reactionary “heritage” and “nationalist” movements such as Rise Canada took to the streets,

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100 organizing small—but highly visible and audible—anti-Muslim rallies outside of various mosques in the city, including Masjid Toronto, and subsequently began organizing similar rallies all across the country (Robertson 2017).

Here, there exists an interesting collision of sonic conventions. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Masjid Toronto does not broadcast its adhan and, in fact, maintains a modest and inconspicuous façade. However, at the same time, Section Two of Canada’s Charter of

Rights and Freedoms protected the anti-Muslim demonstrators’ rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, and so their chants—and signs with phrases such as “Ban

Islam” and “Muslims are Terrorists”—were permitted to echo through Toronto’s streets.39

Amidst such a noisy backdrop, a debate broke out among my interlocutors. What was the right path to take during difficult times? As I gestured toward earlier in this chapter, during one Saturday evening sohbet, the shaykh at the Scarborough circle offered a solution to the tune of drowning out the noise of hate—noise that he believed to be the product of shaytan—with a louder, more hopeful, song. To a certain extent, he likely meant the literal act of singing songs full of love and reverence at meshk gatherings, but he was also speaking on a figurative level, encouraging his dervishes to move through the world tapped in to a different frequency—to tune themselves to a different pitch. In the days following this sohbet, angry online posts were deleted, and some members even opted to leave social media—instead, they refocused their energies on charitable work and service to their community.

39 However, Rise Canada’s actions potentially fall under hate propaganda and anti-hate provisions that exist under Canada’s Criminal Code. Still, the legal waters are murky enough that Rise’s demonstrations went on without police interference, although counter-protesters began to show up to protect visitors to the mosques and to demonstrate solidarity, after which point the Rise demonstrators quickly dispersed, as they were radically outnumbered.

5 Singing Another Song: A Hopeful Sensorium

It is a hopeful worldview—one permeated by raja’—that understands alienating technological failure as the miraculous meddling of suprahuman agents, and hateful rhetoric— and even assaults and murder—as the more malevolent influence of shaytan. Just as we fashion our machines to be vessels for our ideas, dreams, and creations, so too are humans seen as vessels that might be cultivated in the image of the divine or, at times, the devil. In such a worldview, humans are not seen as inherently evil, but rather as people that walk either along surat al-mustaqeem (the “straight path”) or surat al-dhaleen (“the path of those who have gone astray”).40 This implies that there is always an opportunity to move along another path, and, indeed, in the realm of classical Sufi thought, where orders of dervishes branch off into new turuq ad infinitum, this is particularly true. Indeed, while the logics around municipal deliberations surrounding Muslims’ presence—spatial, sonic, or otherwise—may not always hold the same hopeful trust in Toronto’s Muslim denizens, on the contrary, the interpretive practices of the Sufi-affiliated groups with which I have worked are undergirded by a distinct sort of faithful optimism.

In my framing of their interpretive practices, then, I have attempted to mirror this optimism using a sort of “method of hope,” as Hirokazo Miyazaki puts it—but whereas

Miyazaki critiqued and built upon philosophies of “moral faith” (see Kant 1929) and Bloch’s writings on “hopeful visions ranging from daydreams to fantasies about technology to detective stories and the Bible” (Miyazaki 2004: 13; see also Bloch 1988), my rubric of hope-as-method stems at once from the writings of al-Qushayri, Annemarie Schimmel’s phenomenological

40 As exemplified in the most prevalent surah (verse) in the Qur’an, Surat al-Fatiha (“The Opening Verse”). 101

102 approach to Islam (1994), and Rancière’s writings on aesthetic regimes (see also: Chapter Two).

In this world, phenomena are sensed and experiences as signs—of the divine, of jinns, or shaytan—that at once build upon and reify one’s beliefs and praxis, propelling one forward along one’s path. It is true that “hope,”41 like “noise,” is an epistemological category, and might mean different things or feel various ways in different circumstances. Vincent Crapanzano, in his explication of hope as a “category of social and psychological analysis,” depicts this category in a self-professed panoramic manner, but ultimately suggests that hope is “intimately related to desire” but, unlike desire, relies on “some other agency—a god, fate, chance, an other—for its fulfillment” (Crapanzano 2003: 6). Indeed, in the cases of my interlocutors—from the Skype jinn and their friends, to the Sufis singing “other” songs—their hopeful modes of sonic interpretation at once rely on not only God, but on a broad and variegated spiritual and suprahuman order-of-things as outlined in the Qur’an and Hadith, and also, importantly, by one another.

6 Personal Encounters, Social Piety: Between Individualized and Collective Religious Experiences

In the same way that “public religion” has been complexified and destabilized through neo-Marxist and phenomenological modes of inquiry, so have ideas about individualized and private pious experiences. Some music scholars have offered anxious accounts of individuated, mass-mediated musical experiences, suggesting that they are mimetic, alienating byproducts of

Westernization and late capitalism (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944; Lomax 1968; Erlmann 1999;

Becker 2004). However, many recent studies work against this sort of assumption by intricately detailing the ways in which seemingly isolated listening experiences are still, in fact, socially-

41 Or similar but distinct concepts like inshallah—“God willing.”

constituted acts (DeNora 2000). Indeed, De Certeau points out that “the historical axiom of social analysis [that] posits an elementary unit—the individual—on the basis of which groups are supposed to be formed and to which they are supposed to be always reducible. […] has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research” (1984: xi). This “challenging” research largely emerged out of studies of inter/subjective experience, for instance, Goffman’s theories of interaction-as-performance in

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self”

(1988), Bourdieu’s habitus (1972), Judith Butler’s poststructuralist work on performativity

(1990; 1993), and De Certeau’s and Lefebvre’s work on agentive appropriation. Crucially, these works all reveal that, even in the context of the “social atomism” (De Certeau 1984: xi) of modernity, the individual remains a “locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of […] relational determinations interact” (De Certeau 1984: xi). Here, selfhood- versus-collectivity can be seen as a socially produced bifurcation. The question becomes, then, in what situations and to what end do people use sound ritualistically in ways that feel private, personal, or individualized? What are the boundary conditions for the constitution of private- ness?

In recent years, many ethnomusicological studies have taken up the role that technology has played in individuating and mediating religious sounds. This is not to say, however, that private, personal religious experiences are solely a product of modernity and mass mediation.

Gilbert Rouget gestures toward various sorts of “ravishment” and “ecstasy” throughout history that have ideally been achieved in solitude—incidences of this sort of experience can be seen among “Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists, whether observed in Spain, Senegal, Tibet, India, or

Japan” (1980: 8). He argues that, in certain instances, solitude and silence are “necessary condition[s] for the blossoming of or preparation for ecstasy” (Ibid: 8). However, I am mainly

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104 concerned, here, with contemporary ethnographic scholarship that deals with personal piety and mass mediation, partially because I am interested in the role of personal listening devices in the lives of my interlocutors, but also because this work tends to trouble the public/private bifurcation in interesting ways. For instance, Charles Hirschkind suggests that:

The ear of today's sermon-tape listener is one in tune with the instruments of modernity: an ear accustomed to the cacophony of Cairo's urban soundscape; an ear that requires background noise, the murmur of electronically produced sound, even in moments of private repose or reflection (2006: 9).

Regula Qureshi details a similar situation in urban centres in South Asia, where “even the most exclusive student of unmediated [] music-making cannot avoid a mediated public soundscape that may well transmit the music being studied over loudspeakers, radios, televisions, and cassette tapes” (1999: 63). Thus, it seems that in certain iterations of modernity, more public, environmental noise and carefully-cultivated personal sounds are expected to intermingle; in such cases, listeners are accustomed to the constant interpenetration of personal and collective sounding.

Peter Manuel’s Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (1993) was the first extensive effort to theorize how pious experiences might come to be mediated through the circulation of cassette recordings. He notes that “mass media can and often do enrich as well as alienate,” and it is never wholly a matter of one or the other, a line of thought that is echoed by both Hirschkind and Weiner (1993: 8). In Manuel’s study, both Hindu and

Muslim leaders use cassettes to reach the atomized masses, “extending media control and access to an unprecedented variety of” interconnected individuals (Ibid: 259). On the other hand, the decentralization of the cassette recording industry in India, facilitated by piratic bootlegging, allowed individuals to circumvent hierarchical class and gender structures and

sonorously enact piety in personalized ways (Ibid: 123-4).

Looking back to The Ethical Soundscape, Hirschkind describes a comparable process amongst sermon-tape listeners:

[T]apes may be listened to alone in the relative silence of one's bedroom or in the aurally saturated environment of Cairo's congested streets. Both of these moments of audition are understood to contribute, if in qualitatively distinct ways, to the honing of an ethically responsive sensorium (2006: 10).

In this instance, sound, space, and experience are at once connected and distinct; the portability and pervasiveness of cassette tapes allows listeners to construct spaces for ethical audition that transcend the “qualitative distinction” between the collective and the personal.

In the case of the groups that I worked with in Toronto, the ways in which individuals’ encounters with sounds—both desirable and indeterminate—are treated and spoken about reinforce a collective approach to the interpretation of sound, one in which the human, the material, and the suprahuman are inseparable from one another. A similar phenomenon can be seen in Nils Bubandt’s work on the notion of tech-gnosis in the realm of Indonesian Islam, in which he suggests that “[t]echnology is invoked […] as a way of augmenting spirit worlds. [In this case,] the ‘extraordinary’ nature of technology becomes, as it were, proof of the

‘extraordinary’ world of spirits” (2019: 106).

Not everything is taken as a sign, and not every interpretive act is unquestioningly accepted, however. I have painted a portrait, in the previous sections of this chapter, of instances in which interpretive acts—be they collectively constituted, or imparted by authority figures like the shaykh—are broadly accepted and integrated with minimal questioning.

However, this is not always the way in which events unfold. In the next chapter, I discuss how

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106 disagreements regarding how sounds—namely silence and voicing—are made sense of and discussed might lead dervishes or dervish-hopefuls to dwell in different spaces during their initial process of searching for a tariqa. 42

Ibtihal, a young member of the Scarborough halqa, relayed to me her own story of seeking, articulating varying degrees of—and reasons for—crossing over certain paths.

I spent a lot of time searching for a place in which I felt spiritual kinship. I spent some time with [the Inayati order] Dances of Universal Peace, but it wasn’t for me. It felt very New Age. Then I went to a few zikrs with another order, and one night, there was a loud thunderstorm, and they said ‘It’s our ! He’s with us!’ It seemed too drastic, too literal.

And yet, Ibtihal took to heart the Scarborough shaykh’s suggestion that hate speech was a manifestation of shaytan, and she was also open to the concept of jinn making themselves known through technological glitches. Indeed, these subtle boundaries between interpretations are, in part, the reason that there exist paths upon paths in the labyrinth of Sufism.

7 Conclusion

In my framing of my interlocutors’ interpretive practices, I have embraced a “method of hope,” as Hirokazo Miyazaki puts it, and painted a portrait of the faithful spaces that they construct and inhabit through sound. This rubric of hopeful aural spatiality, assuming an

42 Lauren Halima Boni, in her work with the Halveti-Jerrahi tariqa, offers insight into the delicate “dance of the seeker” as they “taste the many wines” of different teachers and communities in their search for a path that feels right. She says: “In his poem, ‘The Many Wines,’ Jalal ad-Din Rumi warns about the temporary states one may experience in their use of different ‘wines.’ He remarks that there are many ‘wines’ that may facilitate some incredible states of consciousness, however these states are transitory and cannot be sustained. […] Rumi urges the seeker to choose a ‘wine’ that has a sustained outcome, and that gradually moves the individual to greater states of consciousness through a careful and methodical process” (2010: 100-101).

epoché, is inspired mainly by the lived philosophies of my interlocutors. In their worlds, phenomena, particularly auditory phenomena, are sensed and experienced as signs—of the

Divine, of jinns, or shaytan—, and these signs build upon and reify their beliefs and praxis.

Through collective acts of aural interpretation, my interlocutors work to inhabit what Beaumont calls “enlightened” geographies, that is, spaces—particularly multicursal cities—that are made sense of in hopeful ways through processes of “collective [faithful] intentionality” (Beaumont and Dias 2008).

In cultivating such modes of faithful listening and emplacement the Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali encourage one another to push forward along their paths, “making do with what [they] have,” (al-Qushayri; see also de Certeau 1984), even as they encounter painful hurdles. Here, the aural constitution of faithful realms relies not only upon God, or a suprahuman order-of-things, but also, importantly, on one another.

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Chapter Three Listening to Bodily Sounds and Silences on the Precipice of al- Fana’ fi al-Tawhid

When I began my research in 2009, the first field site that I visited was Toronto’s

Halveti-Jerrahi dergah; several individuals that I had made contact with through the Middle

Eastern music scenes in both Toronto and Boston had recommended that I go there, ideally during a non-religious event that was open to the public. My first taste of the order, then, came during a Father’s Day celebration, which consisted of a short concert, socializing, and a special dinner of çiğ köfte. That evening, I met two individuals, Seda and Safa, who would come to figure prominently in my Master’s thesis research. Safa later introduced me to Jancek, a vocalist and senior dervish who taught me of the order’s rich history, and allowed me to participate in musical activities even though I was barely proficient on the ney (reed flute), and did not know the illahi (hymn) repertory. During the three-odd years in which I was away from the field, however, Seda and Safa moved out of the city, and Jancek passed away. I found it difficult to revisit that field site with out these anchoring presences, ones that were also willing to vouch for me as a guest of the order. Safa, however, pointed me in the direction of a connected group of dervishes; she assured me that it was quite similar in its zikr form and illahi repertories, but slightly different in its approach to gendered—and other—configurations. She connected me with a friend of hers—Imran—who would bring me as their guest on my first night, and introduce me to the shaykh and senior dervishes.

How did Safa and Imran come to know one another? And why had they chosen to walk along different—yet similar—turuq? In fact, Imran began their journey toward Sufism at the

Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, and, even though it was nearly a two hour subway ride from their home in Toronto’s east end, they attended weekly zikrs there for nearly a year before making the

decision that it did not feel right. Imran identifies as queer and nonbinary, and found the gendered, bifurcated zikr of the Jerrahis to be a distraction, one that impeded their capacity to move toward al-fana’ fi al-tawhid (unity with the Divine).

Toward the end of their time with the Jerrahis, Imran had heard by word of mouth (from other dervishes that had left the Jerrahi dergah), that there was another Sufi group in which religious activities were not separated along lines of gender. This group happened to be the

Scarborough halqa. Imran went, and felt immediately at home. They marveled at how reassuring it was to discover that the Jerrahi and Scarborough zikr and meshk repertories were by and large the same; this made the shift all the more fluid. And Imran was not alone; as I spent more time at the Scarborough halqa, chatting with various dervishes late into the evening over tea and snacks, I grew to realize that the majority of its membership had initially come to

Sufism through the Jerrahi dergah, before choosing to leave and dwell in a more safe feeling space.

What constitutes a “safe space”? How does one’s body-sense-memory work to inform them as to whether or not a space feels right? This chapter addresses the important roles that silence and voicing play in the lives of Muslim-identifying people who live in Toronto, focusing on the ways in which individuals’ divergent ideas about these two categories of sound inform their decisions to dwell in different sorts of sacred spaces. I begin with a description of the

(relatively) orthodox Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi dergah (meeting place) where women practice communal zikr (a ritual for the remembrance of God) behind a curtain, shrouded in silence, embodying the divine quality of al-batin (interiority, hiddenness) in the manner of the many women that walked their spiritual path before them. Here, for two of the women that I worked

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110 closely with, Safa and Seda, the performative articulation of their silsila (spiritual lineage), in all its silence and separateness, was a prerequisite for their processes of spiritual self-tooling.

I then turn an ear toward Imran and Aisha, both of whom were raised in relatively orthodox Muslim households in Toronto. Imran, as mentioned, identifies as nonbinary and queer, and has spent a great deal of time and thought searching for a space in which they feel comfortable practicing their faith. Aisha is a straight-identifying ally and advocate for queer rights and sexual health, and, like Imran, left the more orthodox Halveti-Jerrahi dergah in search of non-segregated, queer affirming spaces. I suggest that many such individuals' efforts to seek out gender equal, polyvocal, LGBT2SIQ+ affirming places in which to enact Islam are informed by their desires to voice their faiths and identities. In such spaces, discourses surrounding silence and the voice are connected to contemporary queer rights activism, and are perhaps best exemplified by the motto of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power: Silence =

Death. Here, voicing is thought to be essential for realizing the divine attribute of al-wali (the protecting friend), whereas silence often denotes both an erasure of self and a failure to advocate for others. Alternatively, in more orthodox spaces such as the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, the poïetic embodiment of the practices of one’s silsila (spiritual lineage or ancestry) often takes precedence over the consideration of agency in a liberal-humanistic sense, and this, too, can be heard in the sonorous order-of-things.

The writing that follows takes the form of a mosaic-like image, presenting an array of processes by which al-lisan—the tongue—in either its silent stillness or vocal activity, becomes the site and source of ayat. In so doing, I gesture toward the ways in which inner, bodily signs are as compasses, guiding individuals away from, or toward, particular locales and people. In this sense, I put forth an aurally oriented phenomenology of “safe spaces” in the context of

Toronto’s heterodox Muslim assemblages. However, just as there are dissonances that arise among individuals and groups in Toronto’s heterodox ummah, there still exists a quiet solidarity, one that is necessitated by the political, social, and economic precarity that members of the Scarborough halqa, the Jerrahi dergah, and Masjid al-Wali experience to varying degrees. In fact, this sort of faith-based network is increasingly common under neoliberal governmentality, in which decreased public funding for social services requires that other sorts of assemblages take up the work of care-giving and social justice (see Beaumont and Dias

2008).

1 Branches, Crossing, Dwelling

Sufi orders began to emerge between the tenth and twelfth centuries, and the network of

Sufi orders is often illustrated and spoken about as branching out non-uniformly in a shajarah

(tree) of turuq. Here, the trunk of the tree might be thought of as the Grand Shaykh, or founder, of a particular path, and the unfurling branches represent subsequent shaykhs and their teachings, which then guide aspiring dervishes. However, this branching out is not a wholly neat process, and participating in multiple paths is possible, and, moreover, quite common, although it typically happens relatively quietly. As one of the shaykhs (Sufi teachers) that I encountered in my research discussed during a sermon: “I encourage my dervishes to visit other

Sufi spaces and get a taste of other paths before they take hand, in order for them to be sure that this path is the right one for them.” People often use sound to navigate the multicursal labyrinth that is Muslim Toronto, and to determine which spaces feel to be comfortable and safe arenas in which to do the often difficult—and uncomfortable—work of spiritual self-making.

Such guiding sounds include “silence” and “the voice,” two “acoustemological” (Feld

1996) categories that take on distinct meanings and uses depending on a seemingly endless

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112 confluence of factors; including the listening agents perceived to be present—including both human and suprahuman agents such as angels or spirits, the social rules—both spoken and unspoken—of the space in question, the emotional state of those present, current events on both local and global scales, and the list goes on (see Tweed 2008: 72).

Given the variables at play, I was inspired by geographer and religious studies scholar

Thomas Tweed’s work on Cuban shrines in Miami, where he discusses his interlocutors’ religiosity using the concepts of crossing—that is, itinerancy—and dwelling—that is, home- making. Tweed articulates that “religious [people] make meaning and negotiate power as they appeal to contested historical traditions of storytelling, object making, and ritual performance in order to make homes (dwelling) and cross boundaries (crossing). Religions, in other words, involve finding one’s place and moving through space. One of the imperfections the religious confront is that they are always in danger of being disoriented. Religions, in turn, orient in time and space. […] We can understand religions as always-contested and ever- changing maps that orient devotees as they move spatially and temporally. Religions are partial, tentative, and continually redrawn sketches of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going”

(Ibid: 74).

Although Tweed notes that cartographic models can be limiting, they can be useful so long as we don’t imagine them as fixed—in this way, I wish to imagine in conjunction with

Tweed’s model a tree—a sounded shajarah—with branches and roots constantly growing and overlapping, in order to more -emically think about the ways in which sounds are used by my interlocutors in order to orient (and re-orient) themselves.

2 Dwelling One: Spectral “Silence” and the Halveti- Jerrahi Zikr

On an unassuming street in the west Toronto suburb of , surrounded by modest residences, small corner shops, and a handful of industrial spaces, sits Toronto’s

Halveti-Jerrahi dergah. Toronto’s Jerrahi Sufi centre is a multi-purpose building, and this is reflected in the different ways in which people refer to the place: it is known as a dergah when it is used as a place of worship, and, during secular celebrations and music classes, it is often called the Canadian Sufi Cultural Centre (CSCC). The day-to-day activities at the dergah unfold with the help of dervishes, who take turns cleaning, cooking, and arranging rideshares for visitors, but the centre also receives funding from patrons connected to various other

Turkish and Muslim organizations (such as Toronto’s Noor Cultural Centre), corporations such as Turkish Airlines, and public granting organizations. Because of these financial and social ties, it is somewhat shaped by the practices, ideologies, and aesthetics that punctuate broader

Turkish- and Muslim-Canadian cultural life, although a significant proportion of the Jerrahi dervishes are not of Turkish ancestry.

I first began visiting the dergah in 2009, although as my closest contacts moved out of the city, or passed away, I found it increasingly difficult to continue to participate in events at the dergah without taking hand in the order. Between 2009 and 2017, I encountered many individuals who each held particular feelings and interpretations about the soundscape at the dergah—in this section of my chapter, I will discuss the experiences and reflections of two women in particular: Safa and Seda.

Safa was born in Canada and grew up in a Roman Catholic household – she came to

Islam slowly, first through the writings of Hafiz and Rumi in high school, and then through a

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114 theology study group at the University of Toronto during her undergraduate tenure. It was here that she began seriously contemplating converting to Islam, and seeking out a religious practice that felt right to her. She visited many Sufi groups in Toronto and its neighbouring areas, including the self-proclaimed universalist group known as Sufi Order International, or Dances of Universal Peace, before settling at what she deemed to be a more authentic-feeling place of practice, that is, the Toronto Jerrahi dergah. When I met her during the first phase of my research, back in 2009, Safa was in the process of studying the healing potentialities of the

Halveti-Jerrahi zikr, positing that it facilitates experiences of nondualism, a well-tread concept in both religious and secular philosophies that refers to a mode of experience in which the division between “self” and “other,” or “subject” and “object,” dissolves. She held that in order for a dervish to approach an experience of this tawhid they must feel comfortable and safe enough so as to temporarily forget their “selves.” For Safa, this sensation of comfort was missing in the more universalist (or, as described by some, neo-Sufi) orders that she encountered before taking hand in the Halveti-Jerrahi order. She attended the dergah multiple times a week for several before just recently moving out of the city for family-related reasons.

The week before I first crossed paths with Safa, I met another dervish, Seda, during an informal, secular Father’s Day gathering at the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah. Seda was a warm and outgoing woman who had moved from Turkey to Toronto with her husband not one month prior. Over the course of my various visits to the dergah, I learned that her husband, Adam, was in the process of learning the nay, an end-blown reed flute revered in orthodox Sufism,43 an instrument that I have some proficiency on. After some time, Seda offered to have me over for

43 The significance of the ney in Sufism is often traced back to the opening verse of Rumi’s Mathnawi, in which he writes of the reed crying out, longing to be reunited with the reed bed.

dinner and an interview if I could teach Adam to make a sound on the nay; I made no promises, as I had no previous experience teaching the instrument, but I welcomed the opportunity to connect over music, and so happily accepted.

The day of our dinner, I hopped on a city bus, and headed northward on an hour-long trip toward Seda and Adam’s North York abode. The engine heaved and sighed, and the sonority of conversation grew louder and louder as the bus became filled to the brim with passengers coming home from work; together we moved past rows of houses, apartment buildings, Jewish delis, a bowling alley, Government offices, Korean restaurants, city parks,

Italian bakeries, and private and public schoolyard. Finally, I arrived at the stop by my hosts’ home, located in a semi-residential neighbourhood that was also home to a popular Orthodox synagogue, a well-known Turkish grocery, and several car dealerships. They greeted me warmly with offerings of salad, grilled meat, pita, and ayran (a savoury yogurt beverage)—the plan was to eat first, and make music later. Over dinner, Seda told me that they were adjusting to their new home very well; Adam had a good job that he enjoyed, and they liked the array of resources at their disposal both in their immediate neighbourhood and the city at large. Even so, she made a point to tell me that she hoped to sustain some of their old ways of living and doing.

I asked Seda how they had come to the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, to which she replied:

I’m new there. I saw one of their public events advertised in a Turkish language newspaper, and so [Adam and I] decided to go and see. We are Muslim, and members of our families practiced Sufism, and so it felt like a good place to come to regularly. For us, our religion is not just something that we do out of habit, but it is a way of life, and it brings us a lot of happiness.

Indeed, Seda and Adam’s comfort at the dergah had much to do with their desire to embody a familiar way of life. I continued to encounter Seda in my visits to the dergah, although, for 115

116 about a year’s stretch of time, she stayed home to raise her and Adam’s first child. On the night of my first visit, Adam managed to make a small sound on the nay – a small victory for both of us.

Although Safa’s and Seda’s experiences may seem, on the surface level, quite different, there is a common essence in their journeys toward, and their decisions to dwell in, the Halveti-

Jerrahi dergah. They were both searching for a feeling of comfort and authenticity in their practice—for a place that felt right. Indeed, bodily comfort is paramount in the quality of one’s spiritual experience. In this sense, one’s own bodily signals—of relaxation, of tension, of ecstasy—can and are experienced as ayat unto themselves. While Sufi paths of spiritual self- making are rarely an easy or painless endeavor, it seems that there is a discomfort threshold, beyond which a sensorial, bodily experience of tawhid becomes difficult if not impossible. But what exactly is it about the Halveti-Jerrahi zikr that felt right to both Safa and Seda alike? In the sections that follow, I provide a detailed overview of the zikr format at large, and of women’s modes of participation in this zikr, before delving into the reasons behind both women’s decisions to dwell in a space in which they are obligated to remain both separate and silent.

3 The Halveti-Jerrahi Zikr: An Overview44 45

Zikr, remembrance, is a central experience in many turuq, and this is certainly true of the Halveti-Jerrahi dervishes. As a practice, it involves the repetitive remembrance of God, which stems from surah (verse) 33.40 of the Qur’an: “recollect God often.” The practitioner of zikr, and of Sufism in a broader sense, seeks to achieve the state of al-fana’ fi al-tawhid—

44 In this section of the paper, I use the terminology favoured by my interlocutors, that is, mostly Turkish, with the exception of a handful of Arabic words. 45 The following section builds upon a portion of my Master’s research and thesis (O’Brien 2010).

annihilation in the unity God—which at once involves an embodied experience of unity and a recollection of “not-being.”46 Zikr may be voiced, also known as kiyami zikr or zikr-e-kiyam

(lit. “zikr of diligence,” implying a regular dedicated practice) or lisani zikr (zikr of the tongue, voiced zikr), or internal and silent, referred to as qalbi zikr (lit. “zikr of one’s heart”).

Furthermore, it can be practiced alone or in a group. Different turuq explore one or both of these modes of zikr in different ways, using different forms. Despite these differences, it is the practice of repetitive zikr that is the most apparent point of commonality among Sufi orders.

The Halveti-Jerrahi zikr is broken up into two sections: a sitting zikr and a standing zikr.

During the sitting zikr, men position themselves in a circle or multiple circles surrounding a central circle of sheepskins. In mixed-gender zikrs such as those in the tekke in Istanbul and in the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah in Toronto, women sit in some sort of separate section, or behind the men, theoretically remaining still and silent throughout the proceedings. An illahi (or multiple illahis) is sung, whose chorus or entire text is comprised of the line “la ilaha illallah.” This text is the first section of the Islamic profession of faith, known as the kalimat al-tawhid (word or doctrine of Oneness) or simply tawhid, and is also referred to as as-shahada (the testimony),

46 A contemporary interpretation of this term is given by Fethullah Gülen, whose organization funds many Turkish-affiliated Sufi groups internationally, on his official website: “Self-annihilation in God has been dealt with in the following categories by the Sufi scholars: 1) Annihilation in God's acts: Travelers to the Truth who have reached this horizon feel in every act that there is no true agent other than God. […] They hear constantly the voice of the points of reliance and seeking help ingrained in the depth of their consciousness. 2) Annihilation in God's Attributes: Initiates who have reached this point feel that all lives, all knowledge and power, all speech, will, hearing and sight are rays of His Attributes of Glory and reflections of His Light. […] 3) Annihilation in the Divine Being: A person of truth who has reached the point of attaining a new existence in which all the directions are united into one direction falls into such a state that he or she cannot help but utter, ‘There is no really existent one save God.’ (http://en.mfethullahgulen.biz/gulens-works/281-key-concepts-in-the-practice-of-sufism-2/2377-fana- fillah-annihilation-in-god.html, accessed 13 December 2017). The Gülenist movement has come under criticism in recent years, and while it should be noted that the Scarborough halqa is not affiliated with this movement, the ripple effects of its funding can be felt in various corners of Toronto’s Muslim networks. 117

118 one of the . Every zikr that I have participated in has begun with the same illahi, commonly referred to as “zikr illahi in hijaz,” “hijaz illahi,” or “hijaz zikr illahi.”

Following the illahis, the tawhid continues, droning on a particular pitch. The pitch of the tawhid is raised and then lowered chromatically for a variable length of time—often several minutes or longer—, with a hafiz (a dervish who has memorized and can recite the entire

Qur’an) or zakir (zikr leader) singing qasida overtop. Qasidas are a form of improvisatory recitation of sacred poetry, or, sometimes, a more spontaneous and less formal mode of solo singing. The length and structure of this section can vary considerably, as can the tone, intensity, and musical idioms and maqams explored in the individual qasida sections. What is crucial is the presence of the chromatic stepwise motion, which is a form that persists in Sufi practices in several turuq.47 Each time the pitch is increased, the tempo typically increases, and as the pitch decreases, the tempo often follows suit.

After this section, there is usually recitation from the Qur’an, or, less frequently, an illahi is sung; the text used has typically varied in my visits to the dergahs. The recitation is followed by the chanting of the “most beautiful names of God,” also referred to as esma-ül hüzna, or, more commonly, esma. The esma involves various pitched and unpitched repetitive iterations of the names of God, such as Allah (God), Hayy (the living), and prescribed combinations of these, such as “Allah Allah, Hayy!” (God, God, the living!), and “Hu,” (Him).

The esma changes at the discretion of the shaykh or zakir, and on top of this esma, qasida or illahis are sung as a counterpoint.

47 In his discussion of Shaykh Ramadan’s zikr performances in Egypt, Scott Marcus transcribes a similar stepwise motion (2007: 52-3).

The second part of the Halveti-Jerrahi zikr takes place standing up, although this is not always true for women dervishes. In the communities in Turkey—even in women-only group zikrs—as well as at the Toronto dergah, women remain in their kneeling positions, while the men stand up, move the sheepskins to the side, and re-form their circle in a standing position.

Configurations during the standing zikr can vary considerably, and are often subject to the mood of the shaykh or zakir guiding the zikr.

The standing zikr begins with all of the dervishes singing an illahi, followed by

(prayers). The men then join hands, and begin walking in a circle, left foot first, while chanting esma. Alternating illahis and qasidas are sung overtop of the esma, which changes as time passes. As well, bendir (a type of frame drum commonly used across the Arab world and

Turkey) is used to accompany the esma, and helps to drive the rhythm and speed up or slow down the esma at specific points. The bendir’s sound can be roughly divided into two broad timbral classes: a low, resonant “dum” and a higher-pitched, sharp-sounding “tek.” In both

Istanbul and Toronto, it is typically men who play the bendir during the Halveti-Jerrahi zikr, although this is not a hard and fast rule, as there have historically been women bendir players.

After the bendirs enter, the format of the standing zikr becomes extremely fluid. At this point, a succession of illahis in the same maqam is sung; the order of the illahis is either pre- selected during the previous meshk (rehearsal), or, less commonly, is spontaneously selected by the shaykh or zakir. The illahis are normally rhythmically fixed, have (relatively) short phrases, and are sung by at least two individuals in unison. Qasidas, on the other hand, are highly complex and melismatic melodies improvised on poetry; the poetry itself can pre-exist, or might instead be improvised.

Typically, dervishes either hold hands or link arms in a circle, and after a certain point, 119

120 come together in the middle of the circle, with the shaykh at the centre, subtly jumping up and down. The dervishes then may re-form a circle, moving around the circle in the opposite direction. Some weeks, after this, the dervishes fall into two parallel lines, facing each other, with the shaykh in the middle. Angels who have been observing the zikr then pass in between the two lines, documenting the proceedings. After the dervishes have re-formed a circle, the zikr begins to wind down: the esma and bendir slow down and grow quieter, and the illahis and qasida cease. Finally all of the dervishes bring the zikr to a close by collectively uttering a final

“Hu.”

The Halveti-Jerrahi zikr, in its traditional formation, as explicated above, contains notions of divine masculinity and femininity, which are differently expressed through spatial and sonic configurations. Here, symbols and meanings are, for a time, shared by social actors, who embody surah (verse) 49:13 of the Qur’an: “We have created you male and female, and have made you into nations and tribes, in order that you might come to know one another. In the sight of God the noblest among you is the one who is most deeply conscious of God” (Qur’an

49.13). 48

48 The individuals that I spoke with at the Jerrahi dergah held varying interpretations and attachments to the overarching worldview connected to the teachings of the shaykh and the zikr structures as outlined above. While Safa and Seda represent commonly held views of—and affinities for—the activities at the dergah, there are certainly exceptions. For example, one woman that I spoke with identified as an Atheist, and told me that, although she feels that she is wholly a member of the community, she feels no obligation to share their beliefs, and attends the dergah solely in support of her husband, who is a devout Muslim. Still, both come together for the practice of zikr, a practice that is important to them for different reasons. In this particular case, then, for the woman who identifies as an Atheist, zikr functions as a means of building feelings of camaraderie and strengthening her bond with her husband. For her, gendered segregation is a non-issue; it does not bother her, and does not impact her ability to appreciate zikr in her own way.

4 al-Batin: Gendered Silence, Qalbi Zikr, Echoes of the Unseen

In many Sufi spaces in which men and women are separated—the Halveti-Jerrahi centre being one such space—women are often expected to enact their zikr silently, even during group zikr events. This does not always happen in practice, however (see field notes from 2008-2010,

2012-2013, and 2015-2017).49 Regardless, women’s silences in Muslim spaces are often heard through the lens (filter?) of more conservative interpreters and thinkers of the and

Hadith, who have often equated women’s stillness and silences with the value of religious calmness […] while, conversely, perceiving dance and singing as “religion-destroying” acts of sensuality (Van Nieuwkerk 2011: 20). It is an interesting exercise, then, to also approach women’s silences in more orthodox gender-segregated Sufi contexts using the reverence of silence as a touchstone—indeed, this is how nearly all of the women that I spoke with who are affiliated with Halveti-Jerrahi communities in both Toronto and New York described their embrace of silence, quietude, and separateness both in personal and collective acts of zikr. In several conversations, my interlocutors referenced Sufi scholar Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Book on Majesty and Beauty, which connects God’s jamal (beauty) and jalal (majesty) elements to femininity and masculinity, and, respectively, hiddenness (al-batin) and manifestation (al-zahir).

Al-Kitab Al-Jalal Wa-l Jamal (The Book on Majesty and Beauty), expands upon Persian scholar al-Hujwiri’s (d. 1077) famous book al-Mahjub (Unveiling the Veiled), through a discussion of two key characteristics of God: majesty and beauty (Harris 1989). The

49 Although narratives about women’s silence during zikr are often propagated, especially among men, women remain active contributors to spiritual life in a number of different ways, and some take a very improvisatory and vocal approach to zikr from their space in the dergah, which is removed from—and likely out of earshot of—the men’s circle (see O’Brien 2010). 121

122 complementarity of God’s jamal (beauty) and jalal (majesty) elements has been likened to the feminine-masculine dichotomy by various scholars such as Jamal J. Elias (2009). Although Ibn al-’Arabi never explicitly made this link, the interconnectedness of these two dichotomies was also unpacked for me by a number of people connected to the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, including

Safa.

Elias notes that both “the masculine” and “the feminine” in Islam, especially as conceived of by Ibn al-‘Arabi are multifaceted categories:

On the one hand the role of the physical woman as human being is minimalized so that she becomes an accessory to the course of events in mystic life. On the other hand, we see the glorification on the celestial woman as ideal, the creative feminine. Within this framework, the male human being appears sandwiched between the physical woman and the ideal woman, the female and the feminine…. Occasionally the glorified feminine and trivialized female come together, especially in the mystic woman as mother” (2009: 307- 8).

He further stresses that “a complementarity of male and female is built into the structure of

Islamic . On a scale of perfection [the female] exists above the male and below the male; however, she is never equal to him” (2009: 311). He differentiates between “male- female” and “masculine-feminine” dichotomies, linking the former with biological sex and sexuality, and the latter with expressions of gender.

In what are perceived by members of the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah to be more “traditional” practices, majesty is connected to the concept of visibility or manifestation, while beauty is linked to un-manifestation and the hidden realm (Gentile-Koren 2007: 65, Elias 1988). In zikr formations, manifestation can be heard in the loud sonority (and corresponding visibility) of the men’s zikr. Contrastingly, women typically take on a hidden role in a mixed-gender zikr, both

by wearing a veil (hijab) over their hair, by sitting behind a veil or lattice, and by remaining behind the men, theoretically out of their eyesight, embodying the quality of interiority in the manner of the women in their silsila that came before them. Indeed, in the Jerrahi space, the weight given to nonhuman entities—be they angels or their spiritual ancestors—is wholly audible.

By a similar token, in many iterations of Muslim practice, there exists a reverence for qalbi (silent, or from the heart) acts of zikr, and this mode of piety is often placed above lisani

(voiced, of the tongue) zikr. For instance, Shah Naqshband (of the order, noted in particular for their silent zikr) said: “there are two methods of zikr; one is silent and one is loud.

I chose the silent one because it is stronger and therefore more preferable” (Kabbani 2004: 31).

Similarly, a hadith of A’isha (wife of the Prophet Muhammad) states that “the zikr not heard by the recording angels equals seventy times the one they hear” (Ibid: 52). Here, it should be reiterated that, in any given group zikr, there is a moment, toward the end, when angels observe and document the zikr. Silent zikr, here, is not audible to the angels, and therefore not recorded.

Thus, silent zikr is thought to be an un-performative and deeply personal mode of reflection upon the divine, and this hinges upon the acute awareness the presence of suprahuman agents.

Silence—or something like it—can also be framed as a station or state of Sufi experience. In this sense, there is a reverence for the contemplative inner voice among both the

Scarborough halqa and the Jerrahi dergah. Here, samt has the potential to index personal, spontaneous, and “silent” iterations of remembrance known as qalbi zikr. Such instances of remembrance of the Divine are aided by various sorts of bodily cues including the mimed shuffling of mis’baha or tasbih (prayer beads), and “sounding” the esmaʾ Allah al-husna or esma (the ninety-nine names by which Muslims refer to God as described in the Qur’an) or passages from the Qur’an such as “la ilaha illallah” (there is no God but God) in one’s mind. 123

124

After zikr one evening, I asked the shaykh of the Scarborough halqa what was involved in taking hand, and he said that, if he deemed a person ready, he would give them a set of prayer beads. After this point, they would be tasked with reciting “la ilaha illallah” with their inner

() voice tens of thousands of times. When the prospective murid (student) has completed this process, they will have honed their inner voice, and tuned their heart to be more constantly beating in remembrance of Allah. At this point, they are able to ask to take hand in the order. As the shaykh mentioned, this is just the beginning, but it is telling that even before a dervish becomes a dervish, they must embark upon a journey of self-tooling in which their mind’s ear is directed inward, under the shroud of silence.

5 Silence, Safa, and Seda: Deciding to Dwell

Because I had grown close to both Safa and Seda, it was not uncommon for me to kneel next to them during the Halveti-Jerrahi group zikrs. I noticed that neither of them cared much to vocalize during zikr, save for the odd occasion; Safa in particular, who had a background in music, and loved to attend meshk at the dergah, would occasionally sing along with the illahis in a hushed voice, but, generally speaking, both women tended to enact both silence and stillness. Seda told me that the silent and still mode of piety embodied by women at the Halveti-

Jerrahi dergah is all that she has known, and it is, simply put, what feels right to her. The Jerrahi zikr is, thus, a way for her to embody and manifest her ancestry, her heritage, and her home

(Personal Communication, 17 July 2009; Field Notes, July 2009, August 2011, January 2012).

For Safa, on the other hand, the fact that the spatial configurations of the zikr have not undergone any significant changes—including desegregation—was what ultimately drew her to the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah: “some of these formations, breathing exercises, and practices are purportedly thousands of years old. For me, [the Jerrahi dergah] feels more authentic than other

groups I’ve researched or visited” (Personal Communication, 28 December 2014). Thus, for

Safa, too, even though she has no ancestral ties to Istanbul or to Islam, the embodiment of her spiritual lineage, and of perceived tradition, is of the utmost importance.

This reverence for the silisla is not unique to Toronto’s Jerrahi dergah. Denise Gill writes extensively about the same sort of phenomenon in her work with classical musicians in

Turkey, which she refers to as “becoming your lineage” (2017: 112). While her use of this concept is primarily applied to musical transmission in meshk contexts, it holds true in zikr as well, where the names of one’s silsila are recited toward the end of the ritual. As Gill notes, the concept of the silsila “is used in reference to the succession of transmission of religious truths” and that “[p]erforming lineages shows that [individuals’] self-grounding in the present directly informs how they narrate the past and maintain a form of communal self-fashioning” (Ibid: 112-

113). Thus, at the Jerrahi dergah, the quiet tethering of women’s bodies through time is also connected to a perceived anchoring in truth and authenticity.

6 Dwelling Two: Voice, Advocacy, and Protection in an LGBT2SIQ+ Prayer Group

6.1 Imran

Imran grew up attending Masjid Al-Farooq in the western Greater Toronto Area, where their family still goes.50 They are queer-identifying, and not out to all of their family members.

After relocating to downtown Toronto, and trying out a handful of more heterodox spaces such as the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, Imran made Masjid al-Wali their spiritual home, while

50 It should briefly be noted that Imran is an assemblage of multiple interlocutors whose names and identifying details have been obscured for sake of anonymity. 125

126 occasionally attending events at the Scarborough halqa, as well. As mentioned in previous chapters, this masjid is a Sufi-affiliated prayer circle that is an openly LGBT2SIQ+ affirming space but which, for the protection of those who attend, is very careful about broadcasting its location (which, for safety’s sake, changes from time to time), and its membership. On an infrequent basis, Imran attends this group; some of their family members are aware of this.

However, a few of their relatives have, on multiple occasions, threatened to come and teach the prayer group about how “real” Islam should be practiced, and so Imran has been forced to maintain a low profile with regard to their involvement at the masjid, and has kept details about the prayer group—including its location—private.

In an informal interview, they spoke to me about the role that sound played in their decision to cross over their family’s mosque, and dwell in this new prayer space:

At the mosque that I used to attend, and that my family still attends, if I had a question about my faith or practice, I had to write it down on a piece of paper, which would get forwarded to the imam. There was no direct conversation; he never heard my voice, but I heard his. It was an alienating experience. I love this space because everyone has a voice, conversation is casual, people listen and are heard, there is less of a hierarchy (Personal Communication May 2016).

Masjid al-Wali meets weekly for jumu’ah (Friday prayers). There may be anywhere from five to thirty people in attendance, the majority of whom identify as Muslim, but a handful of whom instead describe themselves as Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Wiccan, or perhaps agnostic or searching. Many members of the group are either first or second generation Canadians from

West Africa and South Asia, while others have moved to Toronto from the Middle East, North

Africa, Europe, or the United States. A handful of the prayer group’s membership consists of both recent and not so recent converts to Islam. This is all to say, it is difficult to ascribe an

ethno-cultural identity to this space. It is perhaps more appropriate to suggest that the Masjid al-

Wali embodies a somewhat utopic model of what Canadian multiculturalism might be, if it were a do-it-yourself, bottom-up endeavour, rather than a liberal nation-building project.

Jumu’ah activities typically begin just before 1:00PM, when individuals file in to the room, and help to spread out prayer mats, pillows, and chairs for those who are unable to kneel or sit on the floor. Then, a congregant is invited, or may volunteer, to deliver the adhan (call to prayer). Following the adhan, the group does wudu, or a ritual cleansing of the space and self, if they have not done so already, after which surat al-fatiha (the opening verse of the Qur’an) is recited, along with the mission statement of Masjid al-Wali, articulating the rules for speaking and listening. Following this, a khutbah (sermon) is delivered not by the imam, but rather by a volunteer who had signed up for the date at hand. Topics of have ranged from broad issues such as sexuality and compassion to more specific topics like science fiction and its relation to Islam. Following the khutbah, there is a group discussion, and then, finally, prayers.

After prayers, congregants typically stay for another half an hour or so, drinking tea, chatting, and helping to clean up.

6.2 Aisha Aisha’s spiritual trajectory bears some similarity to that of Imran.51 Her parents came to

Canada from Bangladesh, and still practice their faith in a mosque in Mississauga (a municipality located just west of Toronto). Due to differing views on religion and lifestyle,

Aisha has had little contact with her parents over the last several years, and has been living independently while struggling (but succeeding) at working full time while pursuing an

51 As was the case with Imran, Aisha is also a pseudonym and assemblage of multiple people that I encountered in the field. 127

128 undergraduate degree in the humanities. During this time, she discovered Masjid al-Wali through social media (their Facebook page, to be exact), and was relieved to finally have a comfortable and safe feeling space in which to practice her faith. In spite of what might be perceived as hardship, she is full of joie de vivre, and spends much of her spare time attending lectures and talks around town, going out dancing, and engaging in activist and advocacy work.

She also takes the concept of “radical unity” upon which Masjid al-Wali was founded very seriously and has, at times, even questioned her adherence to a particular religious path, wondering whether only affiliating herself with Islam is too fragmenting or limiting. “Should I even call myself a Muslim?” Aisha asked me one day after jumu’ah over tea. Indeed, at times, she has even expressed a desire to cross over into more universalist spiritual organizations, and these were often accompanied by periods of absence from the prayer group (Personal

Communication, 18 September 2015).52

Still, Aisha kept returning; it was not only the vision of Masjid al-Wali, but also the way that its activities were conducted that appealed to Aisha. “I like to talk, and I have a lot of questions!” she told me at one meeting. “I feel comfortable being myself and saying what comes to mind here” (Personal Communication, 26 February 2016). For Imran, Aisha, and other members of this and other similar prayer groups in Toronto, silence and voicing occur as nodes on a continuum of power where silence, in certain circumstances, indicates for some an absence or lack of voice, which, in the case of Imran’s family’s mosque, Imran felt to be an imposition from above, rather than a personal decision. For those that operate in queer activist networks across the city, silence is often taken on as a metaphor for erasure and institutional violence.

52 It should be noted that the masjid is, however, open to people of all faiths, and one of the organizing members identifies as Jewish, and has no intention of converting to Islam.

This sonorous line of thought can by linked to a project called Silence = Death, although it is by no means solely bound to this particular movement.

7 Silence = Death, Silence as Protection

The Silence = Death project was a political and artistic movement founded during the first wave of the AIDS crisis in the United States in the 1980s. In its manifesto, it was declared,

“silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival” (Smith and Gruenfeld 2001: 273-6). So the breaking of silence is crucial for survival. An organization that closely identified with the Silence = Death project, ACT UP

(AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) NY, founded by Larry Kramer in March of 1987, became iconic for their vocal demonstrations and non-violent direct action methods, which drew attention to central issues of the AIDS crisis.

AIDS Action Now was founded in Toronto in the same year that Kramer founded ACT

UP, and it, too, took up the Silence = Death manifesto and iconography (see Carrera 2015). In the case of Masjid al-Wali, as mentioned earlier, many of their events are held in conjunction with Black CAP, which is an organization whose goal is to increase HIV/AIDS education in

Toronto's Black, African and Caribbean communities. Here, discourse around silence as a sign of social suppression and exclusion is upheld.

The sonic structure of Masjid al-Wali, then, is undergirded by a logic that favours polyvocality—as mentioned, sermons are delivered by a rotating cast of volunteers of all ages, genders, abilities, and sexual orientations—and even guests who are not practicing Muslims, and all are encouraged to take part in the often lengthy discussions that follow the sermon.

There are minimal limits on expression; it is simply asked that no one speak over another, and that all listen and do not pass judgment. 129

130

While such polyvocal and safe spaces for Muslims operate using the logics of various social-justice oriented practices, it is important to note that the meaning and significance given to voice and listening in spaces is often also rooted in Muslim thought and practice. There exists an informal Sufism-oriented group that is connected to the Masjid al-Wali, and one of their favourite Turkish language illahis titled “Derman Aradum Der-di-meh”53—“Seeking for a

Remedy”—mentions the search for al-wali —a friend. In fact, al-wali and the corresponding state of wilayah (to be near something or someone) is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah, and describe a key facet of Islamic practice. Like all Arabic nouns, its meaning is at once opaque and variegated, and thus open to tactical interpretation by those who use it. It may be used to describe an ally, friend, helper, guardian, protector, patron, saint, shaykh, guide, imam, or prophet.

In practices that I have encountered where rigid hierarchies are eschewed in favour of more collective approaches to spiritual mentorship and pedagogy—such as in Imran’s and

Aisha’s prayer circle—the role of al-wali is embodied not only by saints, prophets, one’s spiritual lineage, or one’s primary spiritual guide—be it shaykh or imam—but also the various members of one’s community. Here, bearing witness to the experiences of one’s friends, and allowing their voices to ring out unstifled, is crucial.

In situations where methodical polyvocality is an impossibility, however, what might the embodiment of al-wali entail? The answer comes from the midst of a several-thousand-person crowd assembled in Toronto’s downtown core. It was just past noon, and at the peak of the relentless July heat when I met up with members of Salaam Canada to march with them in

53 Written by Niyaz-i Mishri.

Toronto Pride 2016. We assembled at the north most point of Church Street, in a tragically shade-free location, where we donned matching shirts with the Salaam logo on the front, and text on the back that read “in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.” Salaam’s founders describe it as a “support group for practicing and non-practicing queer Muslims and those who come from

Muslim cultures,” and the organization has had a presence at Toronto Pride for the last several years.

Some of the people that were marching included Aisha, Aziz (a long-time community organizer), and Imran. As we waited to begin marching, we unfurled the Salaam banner, and tried to determine which chants we would use; however, as we began walking, the cacophonous interplay between the DJs in the Black Coalition for the Prevention of AIDS float ahead of us, and the roar of the parade spectators on either side of us, made it increasingly apparent that our voices would not be heard. No matter, however, as the group joyfully walked south along

Yonge Street, it became apparent that chants were not necessary—we were greeted with a constant barrage of supportive shouts of “Salaam!”—we were not heard, but we could hear that we were seen. Here, silence as death (and voice as life) takes on another dimension; while the voices of those representing queer Muslims were not audible, the voices of bystanders rang out in support and in celebration of all that Salaam Canada embodied. Here, parade spectators used their tongues to articulate and enact the roles of ally and, in the ears of some listeners, of al- wali.

Taking this consideration of al-wali as the protecting friend one step further, silence might also be considered as a protective device. This chapter has been deliberately opaque at the representational level—names of people and places are obscured and folded into one another—and this is largely inspired by the practical use of protective silence in one of the more

131

132 explicitly private queer affirming spaces that I worked it. Here, binaristic, homonormative notions that identify “out” and “loud” as ideal states, and of “closeted” and “silent” as inherently subordinate are challenged. For many of my interlocutors, it is neither safe nor desirable for them, at this particular juncture in their lives, to be out about their queerness, or about any sort of experiences or desires which may make certain arenas of their lives—at home, in the mosque, at the border—more difficult or less safe (see Sedgwick 1990). Again, however, silence here is not imposed, but tactically and electively used. Indeed, silence equals death but it can also, in certain circumstances, equal survival.54

8 Ayat: Toward An Aural-Somatic Phenomenology of Muslim “Safe Spaces”

Hearing and voicing are sites of phenomenological possibility. From the moment at which vibrating air hits the tympanic membrane in the ear, possible meanings and interpretations of the resultant sound are, slowly but surely, pared away depending on the person doing the hearing, their history and experiences, the environs at hand, and so on. Charles

Sanders Peirce’s empirical work on subjectivity and consciousness offers a useful schema by which we might further parse how sounds take on significance in the ears of hearers. Peirce’s object of study, here, was the phaneron, which literally translates from Greek as “manifest,” as:

“the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not” (1931: 284). Peirce further dissects the wholeness into three categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness implies a vague realm of affect without causality—one might find a correlation between the experience of

54 The use of silence as a protective cloak in Islam can be seen in early accounts of Sufi practice (see Schimmel 1987).

tawhid (where the boundaries between self and world collapse) and Firstness. Then there is

Secondness, which refers to some sort of contact, correlation, or connection. Where the act of hearing is concerned, the immediate moment when a sound is registered by the nervous system, with no time given for interpretation or comprehension of where it came from or what it means, could be considered an experience of Secondness. Finally, meaning-making, interpretation, or reflection falls under the category of Thirdness—here there is an enmeshment of sign, object, and interpretant.

In the context of my interlocutors’ pious practices, very broadly speaking, these categories theoretically collapse into one another or are rendered null at the height of one’s spiritual experience, as everything is a manifestation of the divine; all is one. On another level, however, the lives of the Scarborough halqa et al are punctuated by specific encounters or feelings that come to be interpreted—at the level of Thirdness—as important ayat of or from

God. In the case of most—if not all—of the Muslim-identifying people that I spoke with during my research, sensorial encounters often helped those searching for the sacred to intuitively55 locate and relocate their selves in relation to the divine.

As an example, I met a woman who had spent a number of years deciding whether or not she wanted to take hand in a Sufi group with whom she had informally taking part as a guest. One afternoon, during a particularly spiritually taxing part of her life, she was listening to music on YouTube. Her video player was set to “autoplay,” which essentially means that once a video is finished playing, another video related to the original content will cue up automatically.

She was deep in the midst of introspection, thinking about her spiritual crossroads, when

55 Intuition, here, refers to a sort of affecting but not-yet-wholly-articulated category of experience that might fall between the Peircean categories of Secondness and Thirdness. 133

134 suddenly she heard an illahi that had been running through her head all week playing, as if by kismet, over her computer speakers. She took this as a sign, and soon after, informed the shaykh at her order that she was ready to take hand. It is apparent, then, that even the most ordinary and involuntary activities such as technological automation, or silence and stillness, have the potential to become tools for ritualized acts of piety.56

Annemarie Schimmel’s adaptation of Friedrich Heiler’s (and Freidrich von Hügel’s) phenomenology of religion is particularly useful in explaining the sheer import that seemingly small events and experiences—sonic, spatial, and otherwise—had on my interlocutor’s affinities for particular groups and spaces. According to such a model, the focus is less on the legalistic and doctrinal elements of Islam, but rather the everyday realm of small experiences.

Schimmel articulates that “the highest spiritual experience can be triggered off by a sensual object: a flower, a fragrance, a cloud or a person” and furthers that:

Islamic thinkers have always pondered the relation between outward manifestations and the Essence, based on the Koranic words: ‘We put Our signs into the horizons and into themselves’ [Surah 41-53]. For the Muslim, everything could serve as an aya, a sign from God, and the Koran repeats this truth over and over again, warning those who do not believe in God’s signs or who belie them. […] These signs are not only in the ‘horizons,’ that is, the created universe, but also in the human souls, that is, in the human capacity to understand and admire; in love and in human inquisitiveness; in whatever one may feel, think, and experience. The world is, as it were, an immense book in which those who have eyes to see and ears to hear can recognize God’s signs and thus be guided by their contemplation to the Creator Himself” (1994: xii).

56 Catherine Bell defines “ritualization” as “a way of acting that differentiates some acts from others” (Bell 1992: xv).

Importantly, Schimmel suggests that each facet of creation—the animate, the inanimate, the human, the suprahuman—gives praise to God with its lisan al-hal, which Schimmel translates to “silent eloquence” (1994: xiii). 57 A more literal translation of this term, however, reads as

“tongue of the spirit” or “tongue of the spiritual state.” Fascinatingly, when used in other phrases, such as lisani zikr, for example, lisan is commonly translated as “voice” or “uttered.”

What do we make of this puzzle, then, where the word “tongue” can denote either silence or voice depending on its context and usage?

Looking back to Peirce, and to the concept of tawhid, the tongue, like the hearing ear, embodies a sort of Firstness, bursting at the seams with ontological and phenomenological possibility. Here, silence and the voice exist not in opposition to one another, but rather as variable states of the same bodily apparatus, and, on a more esoteric level, as different manifestations of the same divine oneness. In the realms of Secondness or Thirdness, however, individuals may take comfort in one state over another when expressing and making sense of their faith.58 Almost paradoxically, it is through Thirdness that a seeker on the Sufi path might be able to find a spiritual community that feels safe and comfortable enough to approach a state of Firstness, or what some philosophers and religious thinkers call nondualism, and what is referred to in Islam as al-fana’ fi al-tawhid (annihilation in the oneness) (see Fig. 3.1.). It is this process of sacred semiosis that I have focused on in this chapter, paying attention to signs that

57 Schimmel’s translation owes something to the work of R.A. Nicholson who wrote of the “mute eloquence” of all things. 58 Peter McMurray, in his dissertation on Sufi Islam in Berlin, suggests that the body (including the vocal apparatus) might be thought of as an archive. Not unlike Bourdieu’s concept of Habitus, McMurray suggests that the movements and states that feel “natural” hold a history of one’s own experiences, one’s familial and ancestral experience, of one’s broader social and cultural surroundings, of trauma, and so forth (McMurray 2014). 135

136 emanate from within one’s own body, particularly sounds (or lack thereof) and the feelings and sensations that they inspire.59

Fig. 3.1. A simplified visual representation of the process through which a sensory experience becomes a sign that leads a seeker closer to al-fana’ fi al-tawhid.

59 Of course, this theoretical sieve is all for naught without some connection to the ways in which my interlocutors frame their experience. Schimmel’s work certainly echoes al-Qushayri’s writings on signs, but beyond this, I look toward the work of Lauren Halima Boni, a member of the Halveti-Jerrahi order who is also connected to the Scarborough halqa, who wrote a compelling and thoughtfully-researched thesis in 2010 in which she discussed experiences of nondual experience—or al-fana’ fi al-tawhid— among her fellow dervishes. In her study, she draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology, particularly the works of Ricoeur and Heidegger, transpersonal phenomenology, and Schimmel’s work on phenomenological approaches to Islam. Indeed, in all of these texts, she finds useful tools for her interpretive understanding of her own religious practice.

9 Conclusion: Listening to Regimes of Silence and Voicing

In this chapter, I discuss the somatic and aural processes through which individuals come to dwell in particular corners of Toronto’s heterodox Muslim landscape. I discuss both the coherence and limits of the ummah as an embodied practice by following two pairs of dervishes along their different trajectories. Even as they remain connected, they practice their faiths in different spaces, for what feels right to one person may feel wrong to another. For Safa and

Seda, quietude and qalbi zikr serve as corporeal and auditory tethers that bind their faithful practices to those of their spiritual predecessors: the women of the Jerrahi silsila. Here, in the ears of Seda and Safa, silence serves to tie faithful bodies together across time. For Imran and

Aisha, however, silence sometimes feels dangerous, especially if it is imposed from without.

Thus, it is, for them, crucial to find a space in which it is possible to simultaneously voice one’s faith and identity.

In some ways, this chapter details two sorts of somatic-sonic regimes, a la Rancière’s

“aesthetic regimes.” Rancière believes that when a group of people finds common meaning in certain sensory phenomena, it becomes a political community by the very nature of its coalescence. He is also, however, interested in the sensory delineation of boundaries between and within groups: “a distribution of the sensible […] establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts” (2013: 12). However, although

Rancière’s work might describe, to an extend, the “branching off” of the Scarborough halqa and

Masjid al-Wali from the Jerrahi dergah, his theory of the “distribution of the sensible” does not touch upon the bodily processes involved in crossing and dwelling. In some ways, the idea of habitus, entrained and engrained body-sense-memory (see Merleau-Ponty 1950; Bourdieu

1972), begins to gesture toward such processes, as does Barthes’ notion of the “grain of the

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138 voice” (1981), which imagines the body as an archive, a concept that McMurray brilliantly applied to the his research on the practices of Jerrahi groups in Berlin (2014).

This chapter branches off from these lines of inquiry, however, in that I am concerned with the experiential processes involved in the perception of right and wrong articulations of the tongue (al-lisan), and the ways in which these processes function to orient assemblages of dervishes toward safety. Here, I worked to become attuned to the listening practices of my interlocutors. My interlocutors, of course, have their own language to describe such phenomena, drawn from the Sufi texts (both written and oral) that they have consulted on their paths. They sense (; lit. “taste”) different orders before deciding to walk down a particular branch or path (tariqa), with the understanding that all branches emerge from the same shajarah, the same

Oneness.

10 Coda: Crossing Paths

Although Safa and Seda may have chosen to walk a path that differs, in some ways, from that of Aisha and Imran, all four people still view their spiritual trajectories as connected—they dwell upon different branches of the same shajarah (tree). It is for this reason, for instance, that Safa connected me with Imran, and suggested that I spend some time at the

Scarborough halqa, even as she remained a dervish (from a distance) at the Jerrahi dergah. This small act gestures toward a broader conceptualization of compassion that is pervasive in the groups that I have worked with. This mode of compassion for different branches of the shajarah is contiguous to, but fundamentally different from, the tenets of “tolerance” that undergird

cultural policies written into the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988).60 The Multiculturalism

Act, and the policies that followed it, are often critiqued as prototypical liberal multiculturalism, where liberalism, as defined by David Theo Goldberg, “is committed to individualism for it takes as basic the moral, political, and legal claims of the individual over and against those of the collective. […] The mark of progress is measured for liberals by the extent to which institutional improvement serves to extend people’s liberty” (1993: 5).

In the case of the network of Muslim groups in Toronto that I have worked with, the ummah, and, more broadly, tawhid, the unity of all things, are both of utmost importance; although individuals walk down their own paths, there is an understanding that others are walking different paths alongside them, and that all paths start from, lead to, and are part of the same oneness (or perhaps Firstness?). In this sense, my interlocutors occupy a sort of heterotopic realm in which collective-oriented modes of being supersede and challenge social atomization.61 This is not dissimilar to the polyphonic assemblages that Tsing describes in The

Mushroom at the End of the World (2015: 23-25); there is a sort of coordination taking place, for the halqa and the dergah, although distinct in their ideological underpinnings in some ways, also rely on one another in order to survive life on the margins. It is imperative to mention that post-1970s North American and European governmental trends have all but necessitated this sort of assemblage. As mentioned in the mudhkal to this dissertation, Beaumont and Dias

60 Richard Day notes that the term “multiculturalism” in Canadian context is used in four different ways, that is: “to describe (construct) a sociological fact of Canadian diversity, to prescribe a social ideal; and to describe and prescribe a government policy or act as a response to the fact and an implementation of the ideal... a fourth meaning of multiculturalism [is] as an already achieved ideal.” (2000: 6). 61 De Certeau spoke of intersections of and differences between the migratory or metaphorical city—a city as lived in and imagined by its visitors and dwellers--, and the planned, readable city of architects, zoning legislators, and the like (1984: 93). This idea of socially produced spaces that simultaneously inhabit and evade hegemonic structures finds a corollary in Lefebvre-via-Soja’s concept of a “real-and- imagined” thirdspace, and, of course, Foucault’s concept of heterotopias (1984). 139

140 articulate that the neoliberalization of government fiscal policies has made it necessary for various sorts of faith-based organizations (FBOs) to “fill in the gaps” in social services in times of austerity and turmoil. They articulate that “processes of neoliberalisation […] place a greater emphasis on FBOs for addressing social problems and seeking social justice in cities” (2008:

383).

In the spring of 2016, a group of dervishes connected to Masjid al-Wali began working on the construction of a dergah to call their own; it was to be located on the rural property of one of the senior dervishes, and would offer a safe haven in nature in which to practice kiyami zikr, to have group retreats, charity events, and celebratory events such as Ramadan iftars. After plans had been drafted, the dervishes decided to begin digging a hole in the land in order to lay the foundation by themselves. They put out a call for help on social media, and saw around twenty-odd friends and fellow dervishes from various local turuq show up over the course of the designated weekend. It was a beautiful surprise, however, when the shaykh of the Halveti-

Jerrahi dergah arrived on the premises with a cheque in hand—a donation from the Jerrahis— and a willingness to take up a shovel and help dig. Even though many of the members of the

Scarborough halqa and Masjid al-Wali had crossed over his dergah, a mutual respect and appreciation remained betwixt the groups.

Looking back to the beginning of this chapter, it is instances like this one that demonstrate that the embodiment of al-wali and the act or state of wilayah is not limited by the boundaries of my interlocutors’ chosen paths, but rather extends, when pragmatic and possible, to other corners of the ummah. For one spring weekend, on a small plot of land outside of the reach of the city’s boom and bustle, shaykhs and dervishes who had chosen to walk down different sonorous trajectories briefly crossed paths, immersed in a joyful mess of laughter and

conversation. As the day wore on, and as the dervishes became increasingly engrossed in the work at hand, voices fell to a comfortable quietude—samt—, revealing the tacit sounds of shovels scraping and pieces of rubble falling to the earth.

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Chapter Four Faithful Entrainment: A Winter of Meshk with the Scarborough Halqa

I was lost. It was winter, the temperature outdoors was inhospitably cold, my phone had died, my attire was hastily thrown together and insufficiently insulating. I was circling the streets of north Scarborough, searching for a street whose name I wasn’t sure of and whose location I did not know. I was well beyond fashionably late for my first meshk (rehearsal), and had visions of barging in mid-illahi (hymn), disturbing the sonorous flow of things, and being cast as a disruptive persona non grata forevermore. In my head, though, floated a line that is often mis- attributed to Rumi, but was in fact written by another Persian poet, Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr:

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire, come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, and come yet again.” Indeed, forgiveness and welcoming is an underlying tenet of many of the heterodox groups that I have spent time with, and so, keeping this in mind, I persisted in trying to find my way to rehearsal. With the help of the owner of a small antique store, who granted me access to their computer and offered their knowledge of the local geography, I was finally able to find my way.

When I finally arrived at meshk headquarters—located in an unassuming high-rise apartment—I was shamefully over an hour and a half late. Flustered, I rang the buzzer as directed by one of my interlocutors, and was let in. The elevator let me off at the eleventh floor, and although I had written down the unit number, it proved to be unnecessary. I needed only to follow the sound of boisterous socializing to an unlocked door. I knocked, but it seemed that the sound was drowned out by the voices inside, and so, hoping that I was not at the wrong party, I let myself. I was immediately and warmly greeted by a group of people puttering around a table overflowing with delicious offerings. The singing hadn’t even begun.

In this chapter, I outline some of the happenings that took place during the winter of

2015 and 2016, during which I participated in weekly meshk meetings connected to the

Scarborough Sufi group. Meshk as I have experienced it, takes on the atmosphere of a social gathering, albeit one with a collective purpose in mind. In some ways, it brings to mind

Goffman’s work on focused gatherings and play (1972), and, indeed, while meshk gatherings do take on a playful element, this is far from their sole purpose. Moreover, because meshk is explicitly a rehearsal for larger events and everyday life-at-large, it is impossible to consider it as a bounded “unit of social organization” (Goffman 1972: 8-9). It is thus also useful to keep in mind Lara Deeb and Mona Harb’s work on leisurely Islam in Beirut as a reference point, in order to understand and parse the complex ways in which leisure and faith map on to and envelop one another during meshk.

Ultimately, I find that meshk involves a sort of teleologically-oriented sensorial entrainment that is equal parts musical, social, historical, and ethical; the learning that takes place involves singing, listening, as well as gestural and affective attunement. Dervishes learn to be “in tune” with one another by striving to sing in unison, certainly, but also by learning to move in unison, and to keep tawhid (unity) with the divine in their hearts. There is also a more informal social attunement that takes place between and beyond singing—this involves eating together, drinking tea together, and discussing and deliberating upon religious practices.

Although every meshk gathering is slightly different, there is a consistent multilayered rhythm to a rehearsal night; on one strata, there is the usul (rhythmic cycle or rhythmic structure) of the illahis, but undergirding the usul is the larger rhythm of the events as they unfold in time: first dinner, then relaxing and digesting, then rehearsing, then prayers, and then tea and snacks, followed by lingering conversations. With the help of modified sonograms, I undertake a

“rhythmanalysis” (Lefebvre 1992) of meshk in its totality, putting forth a representation of 143

144 alternating moments of polyrhythmic conversation and more isorhythmic singing. This cyclical unfolding of speech and song ultimately sustains a eurythmia; taken together these multiple rhythms constitute the beating heart of meshk.

1 The Voices at Meshk

Meshk was usually hosted by Hamza and his wife Maya, both “senior” dervishes, nearing the age of sixty, who took hand in their order decades ago. Both Hamza and Maya were born in South Asia; they grew up practicing Shi’a Islam, but gradually turned toward Sufism after struggling to find a spiritual home in Toronto’s more “mainstream” mosquescape. Hamza was what one might call a gentle giant, a man who was large in stature, loud in voice, but kind in spirit. Maya was stoic, soft-spoken, and thoughtful. She often single-handedly prepared lavish feasts for meshk, always taking all sorts of dietary constraints into consideration. Both

Maya and Hamza loved to laugh, joke, and bring lightness to even the most serious occasion.

Their home was modest and cozy, decorated in wooden plaques and fixtures adorned with

Islamic calligraphy and Middle Eastern mosaics, and always full of delicious smells emanating from the kitchen. For the first hour and a half or so of a meshk gathering, dervishes and guests might be found sitting around Hamza and Maya’s large dining room table, or relaxing with tea and snacks in hand in their small, inviting living room. After appetites had been sated, and everyone had had an opportunity to relax and socialize, one of the senior dervishes or the teacher—if present—would suggest that everyone gather in a semi-circle around the fireplace, which was located between the sitting room and the kitchen. Sometimes the circle was large and compact, with dervishes’ arms pressed against one another as they huddled together to read the words in illahi books, as, inevitably, a handful of people always forgot to bring their copy.

Other nights, attendance would be scant, however these evenings allowed for a different, quieter

sort of intimacy to be cultivated.

The personalities present at meshk varied from week to week depending on work schedules, familial obligations, weather (particularly during the erratic Toronto winters), and health, but by and large, the singers made it a priority to convene on Thursdays if at all possible.

Nearly always present was one of the more senior dervishes, Andrea, who converted to Islam decades ago, and is currently a scholar and teacher specializing in Sufism. She grew up in the

West Coast punk scene in the 1980s, but gradually shifted her attention toward Islam after travelling to the Middle East and North Africa. Still musically-inclined, Andrea is actively involved in the meshk circle, often choosing to play the bendir (frame drum) and sing the percussive, breathy esma; she also takes on various other sorts of organizational activities with the Scarborough Sufi order at large, including leading reading groups and teaching classes.

Indeed, she takes her studies and her service very seriously, and, although her knowledge of

Central Asian and Middle Eastern Sufism runs deep, is always eager to inquire further and expand her understanding and awareness of the variegated practices that fall under the broad umbrella that is Islam.

There is also an assemblage of newer dervishes and guests that come on a regular basis, including Ibtihal and Osman. Ibtihal is a young woman who was born in Iraq, but who came to

Canada during the Gulf War. She has no formal musical background, but has dedicated herself completely to the Sufi path and to meshk, and, as a voracious listener, is always eager to share recordings and videos of illahi performances through email or in person. Osman is a young, first-generation Canadian, born to a conservative Shi’a family from Pakistan. He has a successful career as an artist, and has found Sufism to be both a spiritually satisfying and pragmatic force in his life, as it involves dedication and faith, but is decidedly less prohibitive

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146 and literalist than the practices with which he was raised. His family has remained steadfast in their practice even as he ventured onto his own path, although his mom has given him permission to continue with his Sufi practice, even joining him occasionally at zikr gatherings.

During these times, out of respect for her, men and women voluntarily stood on separate sides of the room.

Importantly, about halfway through the winter of 2016, the shaykh of the Scarborough

Sufi group—referred to lovingly as Baba by his dervishes—brought in a spritely young man,

Mehmet, to help guide his dervishes in finding their voices and learning the repertory. Mehmet has lived in Canada for most of his life, but was raised in Turkey; he is an accomplished musician and vocalist, and has spent time with various Sufi orders, particularly the ones that trace their lineages to Konya and Karagümrük, such as the Mevlevis and the Jerrahis. This is not unusual, especially in Toronto, where these groups—in spite of their differences—share much in common in terms of the forms and sounds of their zikrs and illahis. As it were, many of the individuals that frequent meshk have had some affiliation, however fleeting, with either local Jerrahi or Mevlevi orders of dervishes, while others were connected to other turuq, and others still were guests—like myself—who were interested in music and sound. Occasionally, members of the meshk group would bring a partner, a friend, or a child. On one occasion, I brought my mom, who was in town visiting. This is all to say, while meshk meetings took place in decidedly private spaces, the membership of the group itself was quite open and flexible, albeit mildly vetted.

The Scarborough Sufi group shares a spiritual lineage with the Halveti-Jerrahi tariqa, although in the 20th century, they branched off onto another path. As a small, more privately- oriented group without a fixed address, however, they often share resources with numerous

other contiguous, Könya- and Karagümrük- derived Sufi groups in the Greater Toronto Area, particularly the Jerrahis and the Mevlevis, but also with some practitioners of more Universalist

Sufism (or so-called neo-Sufism) as promulgated by Hazrat . Part of the reason that they maintain a muted public profile relates to the way in which their activities are structured: namely, women and men comingle during prayers and zikr, something that is seen by other contiguous Sufi orders as breaking with their spiritual lineage, and, more seriously, is seen as haram by orthodox or conservative mosques in the Toronto area. So as to avoid being targeted, then, the Scarborough Sufi group flies largely under the radar, choosing to protect itself by operating out of private or semi-private spaces like residences and rented rooms in multi-use community centres. This is not unheard of, historically-speaking, as Gill-Gürtan notes that, in

Turkey, “outside the Enderun and the dervish lodges, meshk typically took place in the private home of the master” which, in many ways, helped to create a “deep personal relationship between apprentice and master” (2011: 620).

2 Meshk in Historical Perspective

Meshk as a practice refers, generally speaking, to rehearsal, although I will nuance this definition in the pages that follow. In the case of the Sufi orders that have come out of Turkey— particularly Konya and Karagümrük—it refers to a group rehearsal of a repertory of illahis; for the Helveti-Jerrahi Sufis of Istanbul, for example, meshk meetings take place every Monday evening, whereas in Toronto, among both the Jerrahis and the Scarborough Sufi group, meshk gatherings happen on Thursdays. Illahis—like genres of hymns in various other religious practices—constitute a large and ever-expanding body of compositions set to poems written in

Turkish or Arabic by various Muslim poets, religious figures, saints, philosophers, and shaykhs.

Some illahis are relatively new, having been composed in the twentieth century, while others

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148 are centuries old. Illahis are, by and large, learned without notation, although in the case of the

Scarborough meshk circle, few people understood the Turkish language, and so transliterated lyric sheets with English translations were used until one was able to memorize the words.

In his article on the well-loved Turkish composer of religious music Necdet Tanlak,

Atilla Coşkun Toksoy discusses the emergence of Tanlak’s meshk group, which began as a meeting of friends in a small mosque in the Karagümük neighbourhood of Istanbul, before taking on a more casual flavour when it was relocated to the house of one of the members of the group who became too ill to leave their home (2013: 69). Indeed, this speaks to the importance of meshk as a place in which friendship and camaraderie are nurtured, and to the malleability of the rehearsal format.

The meshk method of learning is often referred to as fem-i muhsin, that is, transmitted aurally from teacher to student (Toksoy 2013: 69). In his interview with Toksoy, Tanlak notes that “you cannot enjoy singing with musical notes as much as you enjoy singing from fem-i muhsin. […] We would not forget the work that we learn with this method. As a matter of fact, I still remember the hymns I learned by meşk” (Ibid: 69). Although Tanlak was connected to the

Mevlevi tariqa, various orders in the region shared both meshk repertories and pedagogical methods; this included the Halveti-Jerrahi order, the Mevlevi order, and a more recent offshoot of the Jerrahi order that follows the teachings of 20th century Sufi thinker Kenan Rifa’i (not to be confused with the tariqa founded by Ahmed ar-Rifa’i in Iraq). Indeed, beyond the factors of enjoyment and commitment to memory described by Tanlak, the importance of aural and oral transmission of illahis has been described to me by my interlocutors as necessary for imbuing the words and melodies with a feeling of closeness to Allah.

When I inquired about the significance of the illahis, one of the members of the meshk

circle shared a link to a video interview with the late Grand Shaykh of the Jerrahi tariqa,

Muzaffer Ozak. In this interview, Shaykh Muzaffer notes that illahis are “nothing but an interpretation of the Qur’an and of the Hadith—the traditions of the prophet—put in verse and then composed in a manner that it would touch the spirit. So, hearing the music, and the harmony, and the rhythm, and the teaching put into verse affects one’s soul. It is a very strong part of our teaching.” (Interview with Hixon, 1980)

He further notes that illahis are not only a central practice in Sufism, but also a broad- reaching mode of helping individuals toward God:

People have different natures, different degrees of seeing and different degrees of hearing and different tastes—they have different wavelengths. Some people come to God through fear of God, some people come to God through love of God. Some people are helped by prayer, some by fasting, some by listening to preaching. But, indeed, there is a tenderness in every human being towards art and towards beautiful sounds. These hymns that we sing are indeed part of that kind of teaching. Humanity’s sensitivity—in fact, the sensitivity of all of creation, including animals and vegetables—is created in the ear of the soul, when they heard, first, in the universe of the soul, the voice of Allah when he asked: ‘am I not your Lord?’ It is the memory of that sound which lives in us and makes us tender to beautiful sounds. The saints, the lovers of Allah, and the beloved of Allah who examined various means of passing God’s teaching to men have examined this effect of sound and music very thoroughly, and its combination with poetry, which, in itself, is music also. And they have come [up] with different formulae which these hymns which we sing are an expression of. (Ibid 1980.)

Over the course of the year and a half I spent attending meshk with the Scarborough group, I listened to and participated in both illahi rehearsals, but also made sure to pay attention to the ample socializing that took place before and after rehearsals proper. Indeed, our meetings often

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150 ran from seven o’clock in the evening until midnight, but rehearsal proper often took up less than half of this block of time. Over the course of the first hour or so, people would trickle in, usually with some sort of culinary offering in hand. As the evening crept onward, food, caffeinated tea and coffee flowed freely, as did conversation. Typically after nine o’clock, we would get ready to rehearse, bringing tea and coffee along with us as we moved into the living room of the high rise apartment or, on colder days, gathered around the fireplace. Most everyone sang illahis, while a select few dervishes had been assigned a percussive vocal accompaniment called the esma, and fewer still brought frame drums. Occasionally, a musical guest would pop in wielding a harmonium, violin, or nay. We would then begin to work on a suite of illahis in whichever maqam needed the most work. We spent quite a bit of time on hijaz, for instance. The energy of the rehearsal typically increased as time passed, following in tandem with the quickening rhythmic modes of the illahis. Finally, when rehearsal came to a close, we would sit in silence, recite al-Fatiha (the opening verse of the Qur’an), and then decompress with yet more tea and conversation before parting ways.

While meshk, on the surface, was undoubtedly oriented toward rehearsing illahis, it became increasingly apparent that meshk was not wholly about perfecting one’s practice, or about taking a logos-oriented approach to music learning. Rather, it was about developing a certain embodied ease with one’s own limitations and shortcomings, and expressing oneself just the same, both in terms of one’s singing voice, one’s pronunciation of Turkish (a language that few participants understood), and one’s way of being-at-large. This project of self- understanding—and, in conjunction, a cultivation of feelings of closeness to Allah—extended far beyond the boundaries of illahi rehearsals, and could be heard echoing through the hallways of the Scarborough high rise during meshk, and a nearby community centre during zikr, from the moment everyone arrived until we all said goodnight and found our ways home.

3 Tracing the Path: A Walk Through a Rehearsal in Hijaz

Every meshk rehearsal began with dinner; this has not always been the case in the history of the Scarborough Sufi group, but this was certainly true of the rehearsals that I attended during the winter of 2015 and 2016. After dining, we would usually decide on the maqam that we would be focusing on that evening, at which point we would gather in a circle— usually around the fireplace—and begin to sing the esma together, before a group of dervishes broke off into the melodic portion of the illahi.

It was a cold evening in early March when we decided to challenge ourselves by singing the hijaz suite of illahis. For twenty minutes, we attempted to reach our stride; Mehmet had us all sing the esma, and then all sing the illahi, and then each sing a verse of the illahi solo. Still, something was missing. Eventually, the esma became so quiet that Hamza and Maya’s dog could be heard in the background scratching itself, its collar jingling.

“Now from the top…” said Mehmet, trying to rev us up once more.

“Give it your all,” shouted Andrea, emphatically, trying to drum up energy.

“Yeah, I want to hear your best,” replied Mehmet, smiling, “and I’m going to be very critical,” he added, only half-joking.

“Do… what the best is?” asked Mouna.

“I don’t know what that is,” echoed another dervish.

“I’m going to give you one piece of advice,” said Mehmet, taking his role of teacher very seriously, “trust Allah. Trust that Allah will not embarrass you. Trust that Allah will let your

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152 love come out in the way—that harmonizes. And make everyone feel it. Trust him. And just… breathe.” The dervishes took short pause during which they processed and internalized

Mehmet’s words, and prepared to sing more faithfully. “OK. Ready?” responded Mouna, making eye contact with the rest of the halqa (circle). Before the group jumped into the illahi,

Mehmet added: “Start with esma… would be my suggestion. Feel esma, and then…” Mehmet then clapped his hands loudly, gesturing towards the powerful moment when the singers of the illahi break away from the esma, contributing a new layer of sound, poetry, and devotion.

Heeding Mehmet’s advice, the singers joined in with the bendir and a few of the more senior dervishes, who had been voicing the esma throughout Mehmet’s instructions, adding volume and intensity to the words. Here they sat, for four repetitions of the esma, before breaking into the illahi “Hu Demek Ister,” the lyrics of which are attributed to Ahmed Kuddusi:62

Mestü hayranım I admire the boots63 Zarü giryanım I moan and cry Her dem lisanım, With each breath my tongue Hu demek ister. Wants to say “Hu.”

Gözümden yaşlar From my eyes, tears Akmağa başlar […] Start to flow […]

Gezme yabanda Do not wander bul Hakk'ı sen de Find the Truth in you Olmaya bende Hû demek ister. To become a servant, one must say “Hu.”

62 Denise Gill presents both this version, and a variation of this illahi, the lyrics of the latter attributed to the poet Yunus Emre (2017: 78-9). 63 Gill translates this phrase as “I admire the [thin, worn-down] boots,” suggesting that this first stanza depicts the rejection of earthly luxuries (2017: 78). It is also possible that this is a reference to the slippers, also known as “dervish shoes” or “dervish mest,” that dervishes wear during zikr.

Terk et Sivâyı olma mürâi Leave everything other than Him behind Seven Hüdâyı Hû demek ister. The one who loves the Divine says “Hu.”

The voices singing the melody began to drop out toward the end of the illahi, revealing the usul, which had grown quiet and weak, as the dervishes voicing esma and playing the bendir were tired. “That is… very delicate,” remarked Mehmet diplomatically. He then promptly joined in, helping the esma to become more emphatic and a bit faster, in preparation for the next illahi.

However, the rehearsal volume was, again, so low that Hamza and Maya’s dog could be heard running around in the background, as could the sounds of pages turning as the dervishes searched for the next hijaz illahi in their songbook.

After a minute, Mehmet began singing the first verse of the illahi “Nuri Cemali,” the poetry of which was written by Sidki Baba, a Bektashi shaykh and poet who was active in the

20th Century (Bilgin 2012: 17):

“Nuri Cemali, Hakkın visali,

Eyler Tecelli, Dil olsa hali.”

The rest of the dervishes joined in, singing the chorus:

“Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah,

Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah!”

The voices began to scatter and decrease in volume and conviction in the last few words of the chorus; there was some confusion. At the end of this chorus, even though the illahi was nowhere near its end, the singing and esma both came to a halt as the dervishes worked out the arrangement of the song. Mehmet helped by trying to sing the melody for the group—he

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154 explained that the group should try to sing in unison as much as possible, and to avoid harmonizing or singing an octave above. The group decided to try this illahi once more before moving on.

Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah, Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah, Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah! Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah!

Talib-i Haksen, Rehber dilersen If you wish, seek to be a student of the […] Truth […]

Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah, Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah, Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah! Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah!

Gönül sıdkı, Yak Nur-i Aşkı Burn your hearts with light and love, Zikreyle Hakkı, Rûz-i Hayali… Chanting…

At this point, the esma dropped out, as the vocalists were—once again—running out of stamina.

“Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah Hu Allah,

Allah Hu Allah!”

The esma then returned for the final words of the illahi, which were sung with gusto:

“La ilaha illallah!”

The group proceeded to work through two more illahis, each of which increased in speed, register, and difficulty; the entire process takes about an hour and twenty-five minutes. By the end, the voices petered out, and, at some point, Andrea abruptly stopped and apologized: “I’m sorry, I’m still learning this one, I’m sorry.” Sensing that the group has reached their threshold,

Mehmet drew the rehearsal to a close by leading into salat , which the halqa recited in

unison: “Allahumma salli ‘ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ‘ala Ali Muhammad.” At this point,

Mehmet asked for permission from the group to recite a piece from the Qur’an; moving in unison, the halqa nodded in agreement. Twenty seconds of stillness and silence passed as

Mehmet found his place in the text; he then cleared his throat, inhaled deeply, and began the recitation, his voice ringing through the small apartment like a bell, wholly enveloping the space. He then explained: “I’m going to recite three… or, sorry… two more... That’s kind of done as a tradition for protection purposes.” He then proceeded, drawing the meshk proper to a close.

4 The Rhythm of Meshk

On one hand, meshk is an arena in which dervishes attempt, to paraphrase Mehmet, to sing their best. But what does this mean? The dervishes themselves were unsure. Mehmet offered clarification, suggesting that, by trusting in Allah, they would be able to sing with conviction and without worry of embarrassment. The term meshk has historically described a form of aural/oral learning involving a teacher and apprentice (Gill-Gürtan 2011: 616), and here, Mehmet, the teacher, helps his students to better voice their connections with Allah.

However, there is also an aesthetic ideal of sorts at play in this process, as indicated by

Mehmet’s desire to hear the dervishes “sing in unison”; here unison performance, communal spirit, and reverence for the divine collapse into one another. Over the course of six months, that is, between March and August, the Scarborough group prepared a repertory to be performed during a zikr at an important retreat event, to which members of other orders and guests were invited. Week after week, for half a year, voices grew louder, usul (the rhythmic modes played by the singers of esma and the bendir) grew steadier, the practice of pausing between illahis evaporated, and the vocal texture moved from a sort of “heterophonic unison” to a more

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156 solidified unison sound, and, by the end of the summer of 2016, the dervishes were able to sing through a suite of illahis fluidly, and, thus, faithfully. To offer a visualization of the differences between the March rehearsal of the hijaz illahis and an August performance of a similar suite, I have created two modified spectrograms, indicating frequencies sounded over time. The first example shows the initial five minutes of the March rehearsal, as described earlier in this chapter:

Fig. 4.1. Modified spectrogram of meshk rehearsal on 10 March 2016.

A rhythmanalytic approach, in the vein of Henri Lefebvre (1992), reveals some overarching sonic-social patterns in the Scarborough halqa’s meshk gatherings. Rhythmanalysis, for

Lefebvre, looks for repititions, interferences (or a lack thereof) of both linear and cyclical processes in the realm of everyday life (1992: 15). By thinking about the meta-usul (rhythmic cycle) of sociality at meshk, then, we might learn something about the social-aural-bodily entrainment at play in a rehearsal.

In the first minute of this sound-image, there is sporadic chatter as the vocalists prepare to rehearse. While Mehmet sat silently, waiting for everyone to find their place in the illahi

books, others hummed the first few notes of the first piece, over and over, while others asked hushed questions of one another. This conversational expression might be thought of as polyrhythmic; multiple voices are superimposed over one another, not necessarily in conversation. After a few seconds of silence, two of the dervishes began reciting the esma, and continued the percussive recitation for nearly twenty seconds before the other vocalists entered, singing the poetry. Between the one and two minute marks, the dervishes sang; one or two voices seemed to be sustaining the melody, while others hovered closely around its edges, in a loosely isorhythmic manner. There was some hesitation—most of the vocalists were reluctant to fully project, and the voices hovered around the melodic line in heterophony as they strove to remember how to sing the best way. The song then transitioned seamlessly into conversation at the two-minute mark, after two strained repetitions of the melody. Deliberation and discussion burst forth into song around thirty seconds later, and this sonic pattern persisted throughout the rehearsal. The Scarborough circle’s meshk, then, has its own pulse, a rhythmic unfolding of speech and then song, and then speech again. It is as though the entire group, together, is inhaling, and then exhaling, expanding, and then contracting, singing, and then speaking.64

Importantly, a performance of a cycle of illahis, in the context of a public concert or a zikr gathering, sounds quite different from a meshk rehearsal. In Mehmet’s ears, if dervishes are singing their best, they are keeping Allah in their hearts, and trusting in Allah, but also listening more carefully to one another, in order to entrain their voices, so that multiple expressions might sound as one single utterance. This brings to mind Jeffers Englehardt’s ruminations on

64 David Borgo makes use of spectrograms to illustrate a phenomenon that he describes “sync and swarm” among free improvisers, in which musicians move between atomized polyphony and more homophonic or heterophonic configurations. His study adopts the notion of “swarm intelligence” and applies it to musicological analysis (2005 134-144). 157

158 what it meant to “sing the right way” in Orthodox church choirs in Talinn, Estonia. He articulates that the “right singing” has different, situational meanings: “when belief was intense and sincere, singing was a means of prayerful, worshipful expression. In moments of doubt and crisis, singing was a means of convincing, of leading one back into the embrace of tradition”

(2015: 34). Here, we see a same sort of reciprocal interplay between faith and the voicing body:

Mehmet mobilizes the dervishes’ faith in order to precipitate a more “faithful,” cohesive sound and a more careful mode of listening, and, simultaneously, the production of one’s “best” voice cements the dervishes’ faith both in Allah, and in one another. However, it is ultimately the purpose of the sound-making—expressing reverence for the divine—that frames the judgment of vocal and performance quality.65

Fig. 4.2. Modified spectrogram of illahi performance at a zikr on 20 August 2016.

In a second modified spectrogram, we see the performance of an illahi suite in the context of a large gathering that took place in August of 2016. This was a special event that

65 Joshua D. Pilzer, similarly, uses Kant’s concept of “teleological judgment” as a lens through which one might consider the performance of sŏdosori as a musical form that “enact[s] teleological systems that pass through suffering to its relief” and even celebration (2003: 70).

marked the end of the summer, and involved a performance a sohbet, a performance of several illahis, and zikr. It is clear that the interplay between voices here were more isorhythmic; for one, there are no frayed conversational edges bookending the songs. There was virtually no discussion, deliberation, or other sorts of quieter devotional sound-making (e.g. salat, ‘du’a); thus one sort of sonorous and spiritual teleological rubric has been learned and realized, and it can be seen in the distinct metarhythm of this performance. The first illahi was performed at a faster pace, as can be seen in the shorter melodic phrases in the first three and a half minutes of the recording. The various voices in the group are also louder and clearer, as evidenced by the pronounced presence of multiple octaves between the one and three minute marks. Ultimately, this wasn’t really meshk, however; it was zikr, a genre of group recitation that requires careful coordination. Despite this feat of vocal entrainment, not one week after the zikr gathering on

August 20th, without an impending performance, the dervishes at meshk settled back in to familiar eurythmic practices, slowing down to a more leisurely, and at times more uncertain, pace.

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What, then, of those conversational moments, appearing in semi-regular intervals, in

Fig. 4.1? Is it still meshk if the singing and usul have ceased, or if the conversation diverts from the poetry and music of the illahis? As mentioned earlier, the concept of meshk is not wholly explained by the idea of rehearsal; indeed it is a semantically multifaceted term that has been used to describe (and prescribe) different phenomena at different points in history. Denise Gill, in her thorough discussion of meshk’s multiplicities in contemporary Turkey, notes that it refers at once to a type of pedagogical process, but also a process of socialization, habitus-formation, and reification of Ottoman identity during Republic times (2011: 618), as meshk was the modus 159

160 operandi of artistic institutions (musical, literary, visual, and otherwise) during Ottoman rule. A student is not only schooled in music but also “ethics, culture, socialization, respect, style, and

‘how to be’” (Ibid 2011: 620). In her own experiences of meshk, Gill recounts how one of her teachers, Necati Celik, suggested that “spending an hour drinking tea and talking with him was almost more important than spending an hour learning music from him” (Ibid: 620).

In this way, then, the sounds in-between singing are of immense significance, as they are integral sensorial components of meshk-at-large. In fact, they are not in-between at all, but instead crucial pulses in the overarching rhythmic unfolding of a meshk gathering. Thus, conversation, the fluttering of pages, and the clinking of spoons as dervishes contemplatively stir sugar into their tea, all form a sonic tapestry that becomes ingrained in dervishes’ sensoria as they come to embody the practices of their tariqa. Through meshk, Gill argues, practitioners accrue and become agents of what Pierre Nora describes as “duty-memory,” that is, the sustainment of ideas of or from the past through times of fracture, disjuncture, or historical erasure. Although Gill uses this concept to discuss a particular sort of national imaginary produced in post-Ottoman Turkey—not unlike Stokes’ study of Turkey as a “Republic of love”—, this idea of “duty-memory” might be differently applied to the Scarborough halqa, who are working to stitch together a religious community whose membership is comprised of new and first-generation Muslim Canadians on the one hand, and, on the other, converts to

Islam. They are collectively learning about and rehearsing the ways of their chosen silsila—a spiritual lineage that, with the exception of a few dervishes—they were not born into. Gill suggests that, as such, meshk is an inherently performative endeavor, in the sense that Austin or

Butler, or, more relevantly, Mahmood (2011) conceive of it—it is a corporeal style (Butler

1990: 272) which is honed—however un/consciously—in a way that involves a social

entrainment, but also a sort of creative historical entrainment, in which dervishes attempt to embody the ways of being of their spiritual predecessors.

Indeed, Dressler, Greaves, and Klinkhammer note that Sufism has historically “served the function of closing the gap between Islamic law, theology and individual piety” (2009: 1). In contemporary Canada, however, it seems that Sufi groups such as the Scarborough halqa have a much wider gap to close—indeed, the group is at once dedicated to community-building through inter-faith work and social justice initiatives, as well as stitching together a spiritual community comprised of new, first-, second-, and third-generation Canadians, variably raised

Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Jewish, and atheist. Because the “trajectories” (de Certeau 1984; Tweed

2009) of my interlocutors are often enmeshed in varying ideological and aesthetic regimes, the unifying role of meshk—and its production of a sort of “duty-memory” enmeshed in the order’s particular history—is that much more challenging. I posit that one can hear the interplay between ideas about ummah, citizenship, and Sufi thought and practice the sonorous unfolding of any given meshk gathering.

What follows is a description of a particularly “noisy” segment of a meshk meeting, beginning right after the illahi rehearsal proper had come to a close, moving through prayers of supplication (‘ad’iyah) for friends and family in need, and then on to an informal and—at times—cacophonous discussion of various matters related to Islam, Sufism, and their practice.

In this sort of combination prayer-and-question-and-answer period, the illahi teacher, Mehmet, voices ‘du'a al-mas'alah (‘du’a of asking; a type of prayer where one asks for the fulfillment of

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162 a need), and explains the practice (considered bid’ah—innovation—by some orthodox

Muslims) of kissing one’s eyes after mention of the Prophet Muhammad or after ‘du’a.66

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As the rehearsal drew to a close, the group recited, in an orchestrated fashion approaching unison: “Allaahumma salli ‘ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ‘ala Ali Muhammad.”

The dervishes then lowered their heads, reciting al-Fatiha inwardly, mouthing the words, but not uttering them outwardly—the hushed silence of qalbi recitation lasted for around twenty seconds before Mehmet spoke.

“Um…” he quietly uttered, gently ushering the dervishes into the voiced realm. A few more seconds passed while dervishes finished up their prayers, at which point Andrea made a request for a ‘du’a. “Can we say a prayer for my friend who's back in the hospital and that she gets the right medications—for her and her husband,” she asked.

“Mashallah,” responded Hamza, bowing his head.

Mehmet, guiding the ‘ad’iyah, suggested: “If you like, then... we can do it... since we have a minor halqa, we can do ‘AllahAllahAllahAllahAllah’ and then somebody... if you want to say the prayer.”

Quickly, though, the dervishes grew concerned—they had not been given permission to say prayers for ‘ad’iyah. Since Mehmet was not a student of their shaykh, but rather a guest,

66 Notes on transcription: events that are unfolding simultaneously are indicated with a large bracket in the left margin, and the narration of events and sounds is indicated either with small, in-text brackets, or, for larger passages, underlined text.

they needed to clarify this point. Omar, first, noted “We can't,” at which point Andrea elaborated: “Baba says we should never do that.” The other dervishes echoed in a heterophonic chorus of “Yeahs” and nods.

Mehmet shrugged understandingly, and said: “Eyvallah if that's... if you don't have the permission, no problem.” “If you have the permission, say it!” replied Andrea, “But we don't have the permission.” Once more, the other dervishes replied with words of affirmation: “We don't have it,” said one dervish. “We don't have the permission,” echoed another. “If he gave you permission to do it, go for it,” responded a third.

Clarifying his position, Mehmet responded: “I.... I..... I have different permission from different... […] I... I know the responsibilities of it,” to which the dervishes responded with nods and words of confirmation.

With an understanding having been reached, the du’a portion of the evening commenced, with Mehmet urging the group to cup and raise their hands, facing upward, in front of them: “If you want you can just hold your hands and, um...” The group obliged, and began to recite, in staggered unison: “AllahAllahAllahAllahAllahAllah.” This sound undergirded

Mehmet’s recitations and prayers that followed, and resembled a shimmering ostinato with no beginning and no end. Mehmet’s voice began to float overtop of the collective, invoking the silsila in Arabic before switching to English to pray for the sick, listing the names requested by the dervishes. He paused, at which point Ibtihal leaned in to him and whispered “Mouna.”

“Mouna?” asked Mehmet. Still whispering, Ibtihal responded: “She’s not well.” Mehmet then continued his prayers, invoking Mouna and her loved ones. As the prayers came to a close, the group recited, one again “Allaahumma salli ‘ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ‘ala Ali

Muhammad.” Ten seconds of silence passed, at which point Andrea turned to Hamza and asked 163

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“Would you like to recite… al-Fatiha?” Hamza nodded, and proceeded to floridly voice the prayer, at the end of which the group recited “Ameen” in unison.

At this point in the evening, the atmosphere began to wind down. Voices dispersed into different conversational clusters, and the room’s sonority grew quieter. Rehearsal was finished, prayers had been recited, and it was time to visit and drink some tea. Andrea, looking at

Mehmet, asked, very directly “Are you a shaykh in another order?” The questions had obviously been simmering in the back of her mind for a few minutes.” Mehmet smiled, inhaled slowly, and began to formulate a response: “I…,” he hesitated, sighing, before continuing,

“…this is a Mevlevi usul we just did.”

Andrea wasn’t satisfied with this response, which seemed to dance around her question, and so she pressed further. “No I mean…but because you do the thing [the invocation of the silsila]… I thought that’s… ‘cause I don’t know a lot about Turkish Sufism. […] Because I've only ever seen, like, Baba do it, and he says only he can do it, so I thought it was something only shaykhs do?”

Mehmet nodded, and explained: “Every order has a particular... let me explain the history. Every order... has a particular one, so Mevlevis have one, Rif'ais have one... and...

Jerrahis have one, but they all say the same.” Andrea was beginning to understand, and replied,

“Okay.” Mehmet then continued: “In terms of Rif’ai, they... they are given a few different kinds, but one is passed down from their shaykh.”

Andrea, still not wholly satisfied, questioned Mehmet further: “So one is specific to a shaykh. But you smiled a little bit when I asked if you were a shaykh in an order and then you dodged my question, so you must be!”

“No. I am not a shaykh.” Replied Mehmet flatly, a reaction which incited quiet laughter from the other dervishes, who were listening attentively to the exchange between Andrea and

Mehmet.

Ibtihal then chimed in, eager to ask Mehmet a question of her own: “What… what… what is this?” she asked, kissing her fingers and wiping them on her eyes, a series of gestures that she had seen Mehmet do while invoking the silsila. “What does this mean when you do this?” she reiterated. “It’s like… a respect,” responded Mehmet. Osman, overhearing this exchanged, chimed in to get clarification. “When you’re listing the… [silsila]?” he asked.

Mehmet was about to respond when someone’s iPhone starts to broadcast a salat notification, playing a recording of the adhan. They quickly mute their phone—nobody gets up to pray, but, rather, they continue their discussion. Mehmet continues: “It's like a respect but also...” Andrea, familiar with this practice, helped him to articulate his thoughts: “You wipe the blessings...” she notes. Ibtihal, still confused, gave Mehmet a puzzled look. It is clear she would like a more basic description.

“Like when you touch your eyes?” Mehmet asked, attempting to understand Ibtihal’s concerns. She nodded: “Yeah, can you tell me because I get this wrong...” It is clear that she had seen her shaykh making the same gesture, and wanted to know how to emulate it. Mehmet, finally understanding, offered Ibtihal and Andrea some instructions.

“So... you kiss... eyes first...,” he said.

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“But let me see your hands, what are you doing?” Andrea asked. Mehmet responded by demonstrating the gestures slowly. Andrea, seeking affirmation, described his movements: “So you kiss your thumbs, OK, and then you touch them to your eyes.”

Hamza, busy in the kitchen, popped in to offer his own wisdom: “There are different ways. Some people do this...” He then demonstrated a slight variation.

Andrea, realizing that there is no universal way of performing this gesture, then asked:

“What are you supposed to do? What does Baba do? I'm a good girl, I do what my shaykh tells me.” Mehmet laughed, and replied: “I do... the way we do it is we... I kiss the eyes three times, and then, from the top, and then, go down, and then your right arm, and then your left arm, and then… and then, I go down… waist down, after that.”

Mehmet’s description obviously triggered a memory for Andrea, as she began to recollect another experience involving “wiping prayers” or masah: “The nicest was once in this mosque where...you know... the women were all sort of sitting on top of each other right? And this old woman... so I was pretty much sitting in this old woman's lap, right? This is when I first converted and I was living in Tunisia for the very first time. And she started whispering a ‘du'a into my heart through my back. And then she pushed it all around. That was the first time that had ever happened. And she pushed it all over me and everything. And I was like ‘Oh what was that all about? She pushed the prayer on me! She wiped the prayer on me! What's that all about?’”

While Mehmet, Andrea, and Ibtihal had been talking, three dervishes were puttering around in the adjoining kitchen, including Hamza, who had returned to help. At this moment,

they brought out tea and snacks; sounds of rustling and rattling permeated the conversation, begging a pause in the discussion.

“Tea?” asked Hamza, echoed shortly thereafter by Mouna: “Tea?”

Andrea, eager to return to the conversation, replied with gratitude: “No, I'm okay, thanks!”

Nasira, a younger dervish who had been very quiet until this point in the evening, chimed in, recognizing the kind of masah that Andrea spoke of. “That's so southern of her,” laughed Nasira. Ibtihal laughed at this essentializing statement: “Those southern Muslims!”

Not wishing to belittle this experience, Andrea responded: “No, it was just really nice!

Because I was just converted and…” Andrea continued to describe her experience, when

Hamza, whose voice has a joyful, booming sonority, joined the circle, and brought out his phone, queuing up a recording.

He began to speak: “Something... something I listen to every night before going to bed...

I want to share it...” The conversation between Mehmet, Andrea, Ibtihal, and now Nasira, became indecipherable as Hamza pressed play, the sounds of the recording—reverb-drenched

Qur’anic recitation—floating above multiple conversations. Hamza hummed along for a moment, at which point the other dervishes noticed that Hamza was engrossed in listening, and so the conversation died down, revealing an arrhythmic ostinato of glasses clinking in the background as dervishes stirred and sipped their tea.

Hamza became worried that he had disrupted the flow of the evening: “You can talk!”

Andrea, sensing that Hamza urgently wanted to share something with the group, responded:

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“Well if it bothers you...” “No, no.” he answered. However, at this point, Andrea’s interest in the recording had been piqued. “Is this [muffled]?” she asked. “This? Yeah,” replied Hamza. “It is for bad, evil, [...] envy, all of that kind of stuff, it basically protects you against all that. From envy, from evil eye, and all of that. And… this is Ayat al-Kursi... there are many other kinds of

Kursi... ‘The heart of the Qur'an,’ they call it.”

Over the course of this discussion, a type of social learning takes place, facilitated by more “senior” dervishes, including Hamza, who explains the importance of Ayat al-Kursi, and

Mehmet, who explains the process of kissing one’s eyes, and “wiping” after prayers of supplication. This mode of education is tactile and sensorial—discourse and sense collapse into one another to create a soundworld that is meshk: spoons clattering, the heart of the Qur’an playing on a mobile phone, dervishes practicing the right way to wipe the blessings uttered, laughter, quietude, and listening.

Gill discusses meshk as a component of consumer circuits in Turkey, for instance, at the gazino (club) or in amateur circles. Here, musicians speak of meshk as a sort of conversation— something akin to a call-and-response taqsim (improvisation)—among instruments and voices.

This “other face” of meshk, while sometimes critiqued as de-sacralized by some dervishes, is, at other times, embraced as a more outward dimension of the Sufi hymn repertories—sounds that give those outside of the tekke or dergah a glimpse into the beauty of the music and poetry of

Sufi saints, shaykhs, philosophers, and artists. The latter is true of the dervishes of the

Scarborough halqa, who use group email threads as a tool for scheduling rehearsals, circulating recordings of past rehearsals for dervishes to review at home, as well as YouTube videos of performances of illahis, or simply songs that others might enjoy.

In the fall of 2015, Ibtihal shared a recording of an illahi that we sung during the

previous week’s meshk, at which we focused on maqam hijaz. She wrote:

Salam everyone,

I thought I share this with you. Sounds familiar?? She is one of the most famous pop, folk, classical singers in Turkey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU_XCKfMjM4&index=3&list=RD51DQyOKPVW 0

Enjoy.

The link that she sent led to a video taken from a broadcast of a talk show and “lottery”-style showcase program (along the lines of the Idol television shows) titled “Sayisal Gece” on TRT1,

Turkey’s oldest national television stations, featuring a performance by the show’s host, Sibel

Can. Can is a famous Turkish-Romani singer who grew up in Karügumrük (home of the Jerrahi order) in the 1970s and 1980s, and began her career in her teens in Istanbul’s gazino scene before embarking upon a commercial recording career in the late 1980s, working alongside artists such as Orhan Gencebay. Can’s performance of the illahi “Allahu Allah” is glitzy and glamorous; Can is wearing a long sequined gown, and is backed by a large ensemble of instruments and vocalists. The style exemplifies the sort of gazino-meshk that Gill writes of— on one hand commercial, and on the other, a crucial device for the promulgation of meshk as a component of popular consciousness, Turkish, Sufi, or otherwise. Among the Scarborough halqa—at least those who were present on the email thread—, the recording was well received, and helped to develop an understanding that the humble activities that take place at Hamza and

Maya’s house are connected to something synchronically and diachronically larger. Andrea replied to Ibtihal’s email, remarking:

Thank you… i love hearing other versions of songs we sing with meshk... after I listened

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to the song, I noticed the playlist included this version of Talal Bedru Aleyna sung by Yusuf Islam... he does some nice English interplay as well... something for us to perhaps consider incorporating ...

https://youtu.be/dhcF63Z06Vk?list=RD51DQyOKPVW0

xxo

Andrea, less familiar with Turkish folk and popular music as it connects to—and draws from—

Sufi repertories, brought something else to the table: a recording by Yusuf Islam, née Cat

Stevens, a fellow convert. The illahi performed in the recording, “Talal Bedru Aleyna,” also known as “Ay Dogdu Üzerimize,” is less commonly sung in the Scarborough group’s repertory.

In some ways, this integrated use of online media might fall in line with what Robert

Rozehnal refers to as “Cyber Sufism,” or the virtual Naqshbandi Haqqani communities that

Francesco Piraino discusses (2016). However, in my research, I found that the technological goings-on among my interlocutors only fully came to life because of—and through—offline, face-to-face interaction. I am inclined to agree with Cowan’s argument for the “continuing salience of offline place,” in which he, in an Eliade-esque argument for some sort of social hierophany (1959),67 articulates that “[f]or millennia, religious experience has been mediated through the body. […] Computer-mediated communication can transmit only pale imitations of sight and sound, and nothing of the smell of incense, the feel of sharing of a hymnal with a fellow communicant, the physical ebb and flow of the service as the congregation rises for the gospel or kneels in prayer, the taste of the Host on one’s tongue at the culmination of the service” (2017).

67 Or even a Benjamin-esque reflection on the aura (1936).

At the next meshk meeting, after the singing had ceased, Andrea pulled up the Yusuf

Islam recording, and the group listened to it together as they ate, chatted, and sipped on sweetened black tea. The listening experience, at once informal and leisurely, was much more memorable than listening alone, together, online, and it was only at this point that the halqa began more seriously discussing the use of translations. In the months that followed, the group began circulating an in-progress collection of English translations of the illahis so that, at the very least, dervishes could get a better idea of the meanings behind the poetry.

5 Secular Enchantment or Leisurely Religion?

Much ethnomusicological scholarship on orthodox religion seems to focus on honing, polishing, and whittling away error’s untidiness. Oftentimes, scholars have concerned themselves with tracing their interlocutors’ efforts at working toward a sonic aesthetic ideal, assuming that they are simultaneously cultivating and perfecting their pious selves. What ensues, then, in these sorts of studies, is a correlative map in which structures of doxa are linked with structures of praxis. In Jeffers Engelhardt’s Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia, he equates his interlocutors’ attempts to learn to sing the right was with their attempts to live the right way. His main analytic sieve is the concept of

“secular enchantment,” drawing from Reily, which he defines as “the creation of a morally grounded visionary social world through communal music making” (Reily 2002: 4 via

Engelhardt 2014: 16). His use of the term “secular” comes out of the work of Talal Asad and

Charles Taylor, in that he considers religiosity to be positioned always as an “other” in relation to the secularism-as-norm milieu that is contemporary Estonian life. He argues that:

Secular enchantment acknowledges the secular norms and limits within which faith was lived and religious belief led to action, and secular enchantment acknowledges

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the forms of spiritual practice, transcendence, and faith through which the secular was inhabited. Parsing secular enchantment both ways embraces the commonplace fact that Estonians continually mediated between the social, political, and cultural and the religious absolute. Ideals of right singing shaped by institutional initiatives, local parish traditions, and individuals’ religious knowledge and musical abilities were the style of this mediation. Ultimately, the idea of secular enchantment matters because it is attuned to the lives I talk about in this book—lives that were not just sometimes about Orthodoxy or just sometimes about Estonianness and citizenship, but that integrated these “cross pressures” (Taylor 2007) of secularity in musical practice. (2015: 16)

While I appreciate Engelhardt’s integration of the religious and the secular, and thus his critical engagement with secular analysis via the work of post-secular scholars like Asad and Taylor, I wonder how necessary it is to label religious acts in a secular age as “secular enchantment” if such a label does not come from the mouths or writings of one’s interlocutors. I often get the impression, in fact, that the experiences of Engelhardt’s interlocutors are incredibly nuanced, and that perhaps parsing sacredness and secularity is, in fact, an unhelpful task.

Still, Engelhardt’s study is an important one; such a consideration of groups that come together through religious practice in broader secular nation-states (as opposed to theocracies, for example), including those that have taken on multicultural (albeit often neoliberal) policy making initiatives, can offer insight into the unique ways in which personal doings and the politics of belonging become intertwined in “multireligious” (Prothero 2006) and “strategically pluralist” (Gaši and Raudvere 2009) milieus (Tweed 1997: 135). North American Sufism is a special case, especially in the wake of the attacks of 9/11; Bagby articulates that the majority of Muslims in the United States of America have struggled to become involved in what they perceive to be mainstream cultural life (2006: 23). At the same time, these groups and

individuals do not necessarily wish to abandon the beliefs and practices that connect them to the global ummah.

Indeed, one of the wonderful complexities of studying such heterodox practices is that, much as is the way in studies of Islam “out loud,” there is often a less clear, less singular aesthetic and theological ideal, but rather an interplay of multiple sonorous-moral rubrics (Deeb and Harb 2013). Moreover, in some iterations of heterodox Islam—among the Scarborough halqa, for instance, mistakes, stumbling blocks, and frictional encounters (both within oneself and with others) are often embraced and encouraged as opportunities for learning and growth.

Indeed, it is hard to make a mistake when “the ideal” is in constant subtle contestation, as dervishes from different backgrounds “navigate complex moral terrain in order to have fun while feeling good about themselves” (Ibid: 136). Thus, a mishmash of sounds and practices— reverential singing, glasses clinking, people laughing, du’as for the sick, Cat Stevens blasting on the stereo, followed by Ayat al-Kursi—are woven into the path of spiritual becoming upon which my interlocutors have chosen to walk. In this sense, dervishes are working to both sound the “best” way, and are also involved in a sort of moral and ethical negotiation across difference in a pursuit of faithful leisure. Meshk is both of these things, but also perhaps neither of these things—rather, it is simply meshk; a multivalent category that signifies, at once, a form of social negotiation, a musical honing, a means of apprehension, and an ethical and pious becoming. In meshk there is room for gaps in knowledge, disagreements, and blunders. However, almost universally, meshk “denotes a process of transmitting with care and passing on with love” (Gill-

Gürtan 2011: 629).

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6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have considered the multilayered, leisurely entrainment that takes place during meshk rehearsals. Meshk is a very specific process that is at once social and pedagogical, and involves both inward- and outward-listening. In the vein of Denise Gill, I suggest that meshk is its own acoustemological category, marked by particular social-sonic rhythms. Using modified spectrograms, I offer a visualization of the cyclical workings of meshk, which moves in intervals between conversation and song. 68 Ultimately, I consider the sound of sociality to at once include music, chatter, laughter, and ambient sounds, and so I have attempted to consider all of these elements in my analysis.

It seems that there is something at play here akin to what Louise Meintjes describes as

“hi-fi sociality and lo-fi sound” (2017: 209). In Meintjes’ work on recording studios in South

Africa, she notes that musicians often “bring forms of appropriate sociality into the studio, which compromise the performance being recorded” (Ibid: 215). Rather than focusing simply on the musical performance, however, Meintjes recognizes that the sonority of the studio is at once conversational and musical, and, at times, the importance of the former supersedes the latter. Meintjes notes that, in fact musicians often rely on “intense sociality to produce useful alternative networks” (Ibid: 2015), and this rings true among the Scarborough halqa’s meshk group, as well. Indeed, it is only through fostering a certain level of intimacy that the safety of a social circle might be established, and such feelings of security are all but necessary for the halqa members to hone their voices and their hearts, and to undertake the difficult work of tadhkiyyah al-nafs (spiritual self-tooling).

68 It could be argued that any given rehearsal might take a similar sort of shape, and I would be interested to see this approach applied to rehearsal studies more generally.

v

Right before Christmas, which incidentally, some of the Scarborough dervishes celebrate, there was to be a party at Maya and Hamza’s apartment. Guests were to bring a small offering of food—I opted to bring some store-bought baklava from a recent trip to Adonis, a massive Middle Eastern grocery store in Mississauga. Several of the dervishes had been away, travelling for work or to visit family, and so this gathering was partially a “welcome home” event, and so even the shaykh would be present.

I had barely entered the apartment when I was ushered toward the dining room table, which was overflowing with foods of all sorts, including a hefty array of desserts. My plate heaping, I settled into a chair near the fireplace beside Osman, who had just brought out a saz

(long-necked lute) that he had just purchased—it was jet black. He began to play an improvisation. When one of the elder dervishes walked past, I offered them my seat, and ended up sitting on the floor next to the shaykh, with whom I had a lengthy conversation about his background, my background, about my studies, and about music.

I must have been engrossed in this conversation because, at once, seemingly out of nowhere, everyone in the apartment convened at the fireplace and sat down, and Osman’s saz nearly doubled in volume and intensity. A few dervishes had bendirs in their hands, and they sat down on either side of me. I asked the shaykh if meshk was about to happen—I was a bit confused, as there had been no prior mention of this, and I hadn’t even brought my songbook!

He smiled, laughed, and said “perhaps soon.” Almost immediately, the halqa began performing the first part of the hijaz illahi cycle; not knowing the illahis off by heart (only the melodies), I sang along quietly, remaining in my spot near the shaykh and bendir players.

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The atmosphere was electric, and so the group decided to delve straight into an ‘ushshaq cycle once they had completed the hijaz illahis. At this point I felt compelled to sing properly, and so I hobbled across the room {my legs fully asleep from kneeling for so long) and squeezed between Ibtihal and Andrea. I looked over their shoulders at the lyrics for the ‘ushshaq illahis, which were pulled up on a cell phone; they, too, had not brought their songbooks. As we sang, I noticed that Mehmet, our teacher, though singing loudly and clearly, was not in the same key as

Osman’s saz; they were sitting across the room from one another, so it is possible that they couldn’t hear one another. As everyone relaxed into the new maqam, however, it seemed that

Mehmet and Osman grew more attuned to one another, and the group eventually settled into the same tonal centre. After we finished the ‘ushshaq cycle, everyone sat in prayer for a moment, and then in silence.

As though it were any other meshk night, we sat around for a while after singing, drinking tea and reflecting upon the illahis. Pulling out her phone, Andrea drew up some of the illahis that we were a bit unfamiliar with, and other dervishes started sharing their preferred versions. The discussion was heated, but respectful. Ibtihal then told a story about listening to

(non-Sufi) music on YouTube; she had her account set to “autoplay,” essentially creating an algorithmically selected playlist that would play ad infinitum. She stepped away from her computer to take care of some household tasks, but stopped in her tracks when she heard one of the ‘ushshaq illahis that she'd had in her head for days, but the name of which she could not recall, emanating from her computer. She interpreted this as a sign, and told us all that she would be taking hand in the order next week, “inshallah.” The more senior dervishes laughed joyously in response.

Chapter Five “Reason Won’t Help You Find…”: On Humour and Laughter

The previous chapter ends with laughter. To be more precise, a young woman, Ibtihal, who had been spending time with the Scarborough halqa for nearly a year and a half, but had not yet officially taken hand in the order, finally decided, with the help of an illahi, to pass through and become a dervish. The senior dervishes laughed heartily and joyfully in response, overflowing with emotion, and happy that Ibtihal had been so moved by an incidence which—to another set of ears—might have seemed insignificant: that is, an illahi that had wormed its way into her ear popped up randomly on an algorithmically-produced YouTube playlist. It was a sign—aya.

The waves of conversation and deliberation at meshk were often peppered with laughter, especially in the moments when the singing fell apart or came to a sudden halt. In fact, laughter often functioned as a transitional sound of sorts, forming a bridge between the performance of an illahi and a more leisurely discussion of the material at hand.

The sounds of laughing loomed large in the sonority of nearly all the spaces that I visited during my fieldwork. Jubilant laughter, teasing, joking, prodding, jibing, lovingly delivered: these sounds were so omnipresent that, earlier in my fieldwork, I did not even notice them—although humanly produced, this was, for a time, ambient sound. As I moved from what

Schaeffer would call ecouter to compredre, or toward a more “active” mode of listening

(Nyitray 2001), or as I grew stronger at inhabiting “listening silences” (Fiumara 1990; Pilzer

2012), I realized that the laughter that surrounded me was as significant as the life-giving breaths or heartbeat that the mind’s ear also often tunes out. While laughter initially seemed to be something external to, or separate from, the hard work of spiritual self-making, it became clear that laughter—and humour more generally—were integral components of my interlocutors’ lives. 177

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In this chapter, I focus on three sorts of verbal-bodily practices—swearing, teasing, and laughing—all of which fall under the umbrella of humour. To articulate what I mean by

“humour,” a category almost as notoriously nebulous as “love,” I look toward Dianna C.

Niebiyski’s definition, wherein humour and the humorous refer to a “range of discursive [and sonic] strategies meant to provoke” a visceral reaction in response to “the incongruity, double- voicedness, absurdity, or hyperbolic nature of the articulation, utterance, or situation” (2004: 4).

I would also add to this list “unspoken or hidden truths” in order to render it more applicable to some of the joke-work that takes place at—and beyond—meshk. In order to explain the work that humour does, I draw upon writings on and references to humour in the Sufi texts (both oral and written) from which my interlocutors drew. Crucially, contrary to what one might glean from haphazard journalistic coverage of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, the Charlie Hebdo shooting and its aftermath, and other such events, humour has historically held an important place in Islamic thought and practice. One need not dig deeply for “Sufi humour”; one of the best-known archetypes in Middle Eastern and Central Asian literature is

Nasreddin, a trickster-fool who speaks in riddles, and whose absurdist anecdotes and observations are often, at their core, incredibly clear-seeing.

Among the Scarborough halqa, the sounds of laughter, expletives, and teasing take on a multiplicity of functions and meanings depending on the situation at hand, but, generally speaking, they were presented to me as hallmarks of a flexible, contemporary mode of Canadian

Islam, while simultaneously folding into centuries-old Sufi practices.69 In this chapter,

69 Ihsan Bagby articulates that the majority of Muslims in the United States of America (and, by extension, Canada) have struggled to become involved in what they perceive to be mainstream cultural life (2006: 23). At the same time, these groups and individuals do not necessarily wish to abandon the beliefs and practices that connect them to the ummah, some of which have been upheld as threats to

personalities from the previous chapter on meshk will appear, as these rehearsals were a highly social arena, but this chapter will move beyond meshk to the slightly more formal zikr gatherings, tracing the thread of humour from space to space.

I had met most of the meshk group the same way that most of them had met one another: through mutual friends or acquaintances while visiting during a Saturday zikr. At zikr, however, the atmosphere, while certainly relaxed, tended to be a bit more serious. I was relieved, then, when I arrived painfully late to my first meshk rehearsal to find out that, relatively speaking, it was a semi-informal affair that seemed to be as much about building friendship and social ties as it was about rehearsing the group’s repertory of illahis. This is not to say that the meshk group took their musical duties lightly; the goal of these rehearsals was, after all, to hone suites of illahis (each in a separate maqam) for performance during zikr as well as other events like weddings and celebrations. However, meshk also seemed to be an arena in which people were encouraged not to take themselves too seriously, and thus to laugh at themselves and at one another in the name of poking holes in the nafs, a word that comes out of the Qur’an that is differently interpreted as personality, soul, psyche, or—more often in Sufi thought—something comparable to the ego in psychoanalysis (Rassool 2016: 44).

As touched upon in the previous chapter, multiple sorts of work are done at meshk meetings, only some of which involve honing one’s voice and understanding of the repertory. It seemed to be just as important to my interlocutors to laugh, to joke, to roast, to swear, and to fumble. That is to say, meshk was as much about learning to be at peace with “wrong” sorts of

state-defined notions of democracy, freedom, and equality during recent North American military offensives in the Middle East (Ibid: 23; Gade 2008: 47). 179

180 expressions as it was about working toward polished aesthetic or expressive ideals. Having made this distinction, however, it could also be said that that the process of training one’s ears, qalb (heart), and body-at-large to be at peace with “wrong” sounds can also be interpreted as a process of working toward an unpolished and decentered aesthetic ideal.

Thus, for my purposes, developing an analytic language beyond sonic-moral “wrong doing” and “right doing,” beyond the language of perfection and purification, is essential to convey the messiness of meshk as my interlocutors experience it. Martin Stokes, in his book The

Republic of Love, offers one such engagement with popular music during Turkey’s “long liberal moment,” pointing out that public, mass-mediated deliberations regarding “right” and “wrong” sounds (and the sentiments that they fostered)—especially regarding the public figures Zeki

Müren and Orhan Gencebay—became sites for the cultivation of an intimate public sphere

(2010: 190-191). Something similar is certainly at play among the Scarborough Sufis, albeit on a much smaller, more particular social plane.

Looking back, if meshk is something between and beyond “leisurely Islam” or “secular enchantment,” –if it is, al Denise Gill suggests, its own theoretical and discursive category— how might we further imagine the relationship between the social and the hierophantic? Perhaps we begin by not imagining these two categories to be separate, or one area to be the other’s prefix (socio-religious, or religio-social, for example). Let us focus, then, on the point in the

(figurative) Venn diagram where the social and the religious are one and the same—that is, where everyday modes of socializing serve broader religious functions, so much so that they might be heard as part-and-parcel of faith. Considering that the main tone of meshk rehearsals outside of—but sometimes during—singing proper was light and jovial, the primary focus of this chapter is, as I have previously articulated, humour. Rather than considering sacred and

contemplative moments as inherently separate (or a distraction) from more raucous-seeming moments of socialization, however, I argue that they are, in fact, inextricably linked to one another, and both fold in to a broader Sufi way of being-in-the-world as my interlocutors conceive of it. Building upon the previous chapter, I propose that meshk illahi repertories and conversation both operate as arenas in which potential flaws are joyfully embraced, and in which dervishes learn to embrace seemingly oppositional affective modalities.

Very early on in the most recent portion of my field research, I was reminded, by way of a group Facebook conversation with several of my interlocutors, of the quote by Rumi, famously translated into English (and circulated widely in books of quotations) by Coleman

Barks: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”70

As it has been explained to me, the “work” that one does on the Sufi path of dervishhood involves cultivating a deep understanding of the intersubjectivity of existence; that is, one must learn to step outside of oneself, to observe oneself, to be non-judgmentally conscious of one’s stumbles along the way, and, at the same time, to be consistently conscious of the presence of the divine. The shaykhs that I have spoken with have articulated that it is their job not to tell dervishes what to do, but to help them access, confront, and open up facets within themselves— this process involves confrontation with light and dark elements of one’s nafs (self).71 One of

70 A more accurate translation reads “Out beyond ideas of kufr (infidelity) and (religion) there is a field” (Ali, Rosina 2017).

71 While it is not my intention to medicalize Sufi practice, I realize that one might be thus inclined draw comparisons between Sufi practices and processes rooted in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, cognitive- behavioural therapy, and mindfulness meditation. Indeed, many of my interlocutors themselves have pointed out these similarities. In particular, Carl Jung is a figure that comes up quite often in my interlocutors’ conversations and on their social media posts and threads. Jung’s method of psychoanalysis famously involves familiarizing oneself with both the shadow side of one’s own psyche, and the many facets—both joyful and horrific—of what he called the collective unconscious. A similar 181

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the techniques that they use—a technique that, as a result, courses through the lives of their

dervishes—is humour.

1 What Humour Does, Part I

While contemporary scholarship on laughter, comedy, and humour is ample, I am also

interested in using well-tread Sufi writings as jumping-off points for the consideration of the

ways in which humour is used at—and beyond—meshk. This is not to imply that Sufi laughter

is necessarily so different from other sorts of laughter, or that it is a special, more piously

oriented mode of laughing. If anything, laughter is incredibly ordinary. Davide Lombardo’s

reflections of De Certeau’s writing is illustrative of this; teasing out moments of and about

humour in The Practice of Everyday Life, Lombardo draws a connection between trickery,

wittiness, and navigating the quotidian (2010: 76-77).

Can [humour] be understood […] using de Certeau’s description of everyday practices, as “incursions into the of the other”? De Certeau explains these stratagems in terms of resources of the weak. To clarify, this characterization has not to be considered primarily in class terms or in terms of domination, but rather in the mechanism of humour. Such rhetorics, as they undo the landscape and as they soil the territory of the "proper,” do not openly establish an alternative. Rather they point to an alterity without clear demarcation. (Lombardo 2010: 97)

sort of reconciliation and peace making with aspects of both oneself and humanity-at-large that may be perceived to be negative is a key—but often painful—facet of the path of the dervish in many turuq, and can be seen, and heard, at meshk.

In holding that humour operates as a space of phenomenological possibility, Lombardo teases elements of psychoanalytic theory out of de Certeau’s work. Freud, in particular, wrote at length about jokes and wit, suggesting that the “work” of jokes, if we can speak of such a thing, is not unlike dream work (a key tenet of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis as well as of many sorts of Sufi practice). For Freud, jokes can easily embody the nonsensical, various sorts of alterities, and topics and ways of speaking that, in other contexts, might be considered taboo or forbidden; they also elicit laughter, an involuntary bodily response, in the same way that dreaming is, with the exception of rare occurrences of lucidity, also involuntary (1964 [1905]: 310). Crucially, the self is subjected to one’s own laughter in the same way that it is subjected to one’s own dreams, and so jokes, like dreams, mediate between the unconscious and conscious components of the mind, or, in semi- (but not wholly) analogous Sufi terms, joking precipitates a conversation of sorts with one’s nafs (self), qalb (spiritual heart, which contains innate wisdom), and ruh (spirit, connected to the divine essence).

Interestingly, Freud states, in a roundabout way, that humour also contains a subversive, and potentially dissenting, element, and so his work has often been adopted, albeit with a grain of salt, in feminist scholarship on the use of humour and laughter among women. Jo Anna

Isaak, for instance, suggests that Freud “comes very close to delineating a political strategy for those without access to power” (Isaak 1996: 14) insofar as he states that “[h]umour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstance”

(Freud 1927:163). 72 Like Isaak, Dianna C. Niebylski discusses women’s laughter as bodily

72 Isaak also notes that this sort of thinking of humour-as-subversive existed long before Freud began to write about jokes. She cites writings such as “Rabelais’s theory of laughter as misrule, a laughter with 183

184 resistance, associating the noise, movement, and involuntary nature of laughter as the radical embodiment of jouissance, excess, radical and unapologetic embodiment, and, in some instances, sexuality (2004: 10), operating, in a way, as a (not so) hidden transcript of sorts

(Scott 1992).73

Already it is apparent that humour does not do just one thing, and so it is undoubtedly useful to develop a large theoretical palette with which to theorize humour in any given circumstance, especially in instances in which multiple moral rubrics must be considered.

Crucially, then, to approach humour—and laughter—simply through the lens of secular scholarship does not wholly get to the heart of the role that humour plays amongst the

Scarborough halqa. Thus, what follows is a nuancing of both psychoanalytic- and practice- oriented notions of humour using a handful of Sufi writings and stories that explicitly use humour to alleviate stress and sorrow, to facilitate feelings of camaraderie, to confront—and playfully chip away at—one’s nafs, and, most obviously and perhaps most importantly, to have fun. Firstly, however, to illustrate the variegated ways in which swearing, laughing, and teasing might function in Sufi practice, I will illustrate a series of events as they unfolded during three different meshk rehearsals and one zikr sohbet.

the potential to disrupt the authority of church and state. Such ideas may have influenced Barthes’s and Julia Kristeva’s notions of laughter as libidinal license” (1996:15). 73 James C. Scott makes several mentions of the ways in which jokes function as hidden transcripts in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990).

2 Joking, Roasting, Teasing

It seemed as though autumn was finally giving way to winter, and so Hamza, who was hosting the event in his apartment, decided to light a fire. Before rehearsal proper began, we sat down on the floor and cushions arranged in a half-moon surrounding the hearth, ate, chatted, and decompressed after what was—for most—a long and unseasonably cold day. Spirits were high, however, as this was a special meshk meeting: Amanda had recently taken bayah (hand, or initiation) in the tariqa, and so this was her first rehearsal as a dervish. Although raised

Christian, for decades she has been deeply involved in interfaith work that has taken her all over

North America. After a trip to the Middle East several years ago, where she heard the adhan for the first time, she quickly realized that her primary spiritual path was Islam, and began searching for a group with which to practice. Trial and error brought her to the Scarborough- based Sufi group and its meshk circle, and it was only a matter of months before she felt ready to take bayah.

We recounted the evening in which she walked across the threshold with great emotion, and several of us, including Amanda, revealed that we were, in fact, moved to tears. It was not all transcendental beauty, however—the shaykh spent ten minutes testing, roasting, and challenging Amanda, telling her she didn’t know what was in store for her and that she’d be better off getting up and leaving. Throughout the “hazing” process, Amanda simply smiled, laughed, and repeatedly replied: “In my heart I know this is right. I’m going to stay.” The shaykh finally accepted her desire to take bayah, and led a solemn and moving ritual in which

Amanda was brought into the tariqa. After she became a dervish, she circled the room, hugging everyone present.

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Amanda began to tear up once more as she reflected upon this monumental evening at meshk. Osman, a longtime dervish whose family practices a more orthodox mode of Shi’a

Islam, but who, before coming to Sufism, had become disengaged from Muslim religious and social life, chuckled, and said “What a shock—you’re always blubbering!” Others joined in, until Amanda interjected, pleading, “Will someone please take hand so I’m no longer the new dervish?!” The group had spent a good five minutes poking fun at her tendency to burst out in tears—both of joy and sorrow—often. “It’s all part of the deal, working away at that nafs!”

Osman responded, putting a reassuring arm around Amanda. “You know I love you.” “I know.”

This is when I became conscious of the fact that my interlocutors had been nothing but polite and warm to me—the roasting, and the jabbing, and—as we shall see—the swearing, was all part and parcel of taking hand and becoming a dervish. But to what end? This interaction led into a lengthy collective reminiscence about each dervish’s experience as a new initiate in the tariqa, and the ample teasing and poking and prodding and roasting that ensued.

Studies of teasing abound in the field of linguistics, and the nuances and structures of interactions that involve teasing—both playful and more insidious—have been a favourite topic in conversation analysis (CA) scholarship as of late. Early studies such as that of Drew (1987) identified teasing as a mode of interaction that involves “a figurative cutting down or diminishment of a target” but that is delivered in a way that combines “elements of provocation” with “elements of playfulness” (Haugh 2014). Michael Haugh’s more recent work on a mode of teasing he calls “jocular mockery” among Anglo-Australians identified a pattern of interaction in which insults—delivered within a friendly, familiar framework—take on a playful dimension, and serve to both reflect and further cement social ties.

In a similar way, teasing at meshk, especially the teasing of a new dervish, is woven into the very fabric of life. However, it is more useful, I think, to consider such practices from a Sufi perspective, which is how my interlocutors presented them to me. Here, “jocular mockery” is reserved, almost in the manner of a rite de passage, for those who have newly taken bayah, and is established as a crucial tool for self-examination via socialization very early on in one’s journey along their chosen tariqa.

3 Expletives

“It’s fucking ridiculous,” Hamza’s brother, Abbas, said with a smile, but with seriousness, about the state of Canadian politics during one of my first visits to meshk. This was toward the end of Stephen Harper’s final term, when—as discussed in Chapter One—his policies were becoming more unapologetically and uncompromisingly Islamophobic. Abbas was a satellite member of the halqa who lived in ; a few times a year, he would come to visit Hamza, and attend halqa gatherings. Hamza shook his head, and then, turning to me, offered an explanation: “we like to swear here.” Hamza and Abbas were born in South Asia, and, unlike Amanda, grew up attending large Shi’a masjids both in their home country and in

Canada before moving toward Sufism, and so a casual, expletive laden mode of speaking in such contexts is, no doubt, something that they embraced later in his life.

At first I was surprised by the language used at meshk, which diverged greatly from the language used during Friday salat, at Ramadan events, at Eid prayers, or even at many zikr gatherings that I had been to, for that matter. No further explanation of the meshk group’s reverence for expletives was offered, however, nor did the topic come up in interviews. Rather, over time, it became very apparent to me that neither zikr nor meshk were places for spiritual posturing, for self-consciously performing one’s most pious self, or for a preoccupation with

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188 doctrinal etiquette (these qualities are not to be confused with kindness and generosity, which abounded).

Not long after this particularly raucous and expletive-laden meshk meeting, I attended a zikr gathering at which the shaykh, during his sohbet, told a favourite story shared by several

Sufi turuq, often used as a means of explaining the divine quality of Al-Malik (leader, king, ruler), as well as topics such as hospitality, materiality, and ownership (see Frager 2012: 176-

177). The shaykh noted that this story was passed on to him by his shaykh; both men were born and raised in the Middle East, where they also practiced various iterations of Sufism before moving to the Toronto area later in their lives.

The story in question involves two characters, a king and his spiritual adviser, and is, as it turns out, a particularly crass version of a parable that is popular across various sectors of

Islam. The shaykh’s version goes something like this: one day, the spiritual adviser asks the king how much he thinks his kingdom is worth, and the king responds with a loftily large estimate, to which the adviser replies: “Your kingdom is not worth as much as you think—you will see.” He then—through magical means, it is implied—renders the king unable to defecate, or, in the way that the story was told by the shaykh at the Scarborough zikr gathering, he

“couldn’t shit.” Remembering that there were children present, the shaykh immediately apologized for his language, but with a warm, Cheshire-cat-like grin, he then continued to use the same expletive two more times in his sohbet. Every time, the dervishes and guests laughed.

The story continued, illustrating in graphic detail the king’s discomfort as he spent weeks

"unable to shit” before begging his adviser for some sort of advice that might cure his ailment.

The adviser, in response, asks if the king would give up half of his kingdom to “fart”, and the other half to “shit,” and the king, both assuredly and desperately, says “yes” and “yes.”

The shaykh’s story came to a close when he uttered his version of the adviser’s final remark to the king: “Aha! Half your kingdom is worth a fart, and your whole kingdom is worth shit!” All of those present, including the shaykh himself, responded to this graphic, expletive- laden conclusion of the story, delivered with the precise timing and dry, blasé intonation of a comedian’s punchline, with uproarious laughter.74

4 An Intentional Mistake

It was May, and everyone arrived at meshk exhausted and struggling. School deadlines, real estate issues, and relationship difficulties were weighing heavily on various members and guests, and two of the dervishes had quite severe health issues. Mehmet (see Chapter Three) had been invited to the meshk rehearsal to help us with our pronunciation, understanding of the maqams—that day, our focus was maqam hijaz—, and with connecting our voices to our hearts.

Because a guest teacher was present, there would be no dinner social, and so the atmosphere was more formal than usual. Mehmet, however, sensed that our energy was low; we began to sing the opening illahi, but not one person made an effort to stand up. He informed us that, if we didn’t stand, we wouldn’t be able to channel the emotion necessary to infuse the illahis with ishk (love). We stood, and he asked us if we were feeling sad: every single person present nodded. He then prescribed a breathing exercise that we did in unison—we were instructed to

74 An alternative telling, one that circumvents explicit reference to bodily function and use of expletives, is offered by the Syrian scholar Mohammed al-Nablusi: “Let us suppose that a great king is in no need of any of his subjects, but is he ever in no need of the air, water, food or marriage? That is why when Haroun Ar-Rasheed, the famous Abbasid Caliph, whose kingdom spread to the end of the ancient world, asked for a glass of water, his intelligent vizier asked him, “O Commander of the Faithful! How much would you pay for this glass of water if it were withheld from you?” “Half of my kingdom”, he replied. The vizier asked, “How much would you pay if you were unable to get rid of it (i.e. to urinate it)?” “The second half of my kingdom”, the Caliph answered. The vizier said, “Then, your kingdom is worth only a glass of water!” (al-Nablusi 1990).

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190 breath in and out through the nose, rapidly, imagining with each exhalation, negative feelings were being expelled. We then attempted the opening illahi once more, but energy was still low.

Because our resident percussionists were either absent or too ill to participate for great lengths of time, Mehmet, in an attempt to help us, chanted esma (names of God) as we sang, using a rhythmic breathing technique known as qalbi zikr—zikr of the heart—where the diaphragm does a significant portion of the work of moving air through the palate, but the sound is unpitched. To the unfamiliar vocalist, this technique is (mildly) comparable to a chest cough, or perhaps the guttural vocals that one might here in some death metal or grindcore (in fact, a few of the members of the Scarborough Sufi group are self-professed extreme music enthusiasts, but that is a story for another day).

After finishing the first illahi, one of the dervishes, Nasira, who just recently moved to

Toronto from the Middle East, where she also practiced Sufism, asked Mehmet what the technique for qalbi zikr involved. In fact, qalbi zikr can only be seriously worked toward once a dervish is given permission by their shaykh, but Mehmet was happy to break down the process—it is neither a mystery nor a secret, after all. We all then attempted to vocalize an esma—

“All- ah All- ah hayy! - - - ”

(exhale) D D D (inhale)

Fig. 5.1. Transcription of an esma, with indications regarding points of inhalation and exhalation, and when the diaphragm is used to make a syllable sound louder, and therefore accented (D).

—with a sound approximating qalbi zikr. After a few repetitions, Nasira burst into laughter. “I sound like Cookie Monster!” She then proceeded to recite esma in an intentionally comical way, all the while smiling.75 Her delivery was rushed and arrhythmic, with a small increase in volume taking place on pulses one and three (rather than two and four), and ultimately broke down into a guttural laughter that approached hyperventilation:

“All- Ah All- Ah hayy! - - All- Ah All- Ah hayy! £ - -All- Ah All- Ah hayy! – Hayy! Hayy!

Hahahaha (…) £ ”

Fig. 5.2. Transcription of Nasira’s mock-esma, with pound signs indicating the use of “smile voice.”

This laughter—because of the nature of qalbi zikr—was a deep, belly laugh, and would likely be classified as qahqaha, a loud mode of laughing that has been historically labeled as polluting or—at times—haram (forbidden) by more conservative ‘’ (see Szombathy

2013). The transmogrification of the mock-esma into boisterous laughter led to what seemed to be a derailment of rehearsing; we ended up taking time to engage in a bit of socializing, visiting, and laughing before the rehearsal proper started up again. By listening closely to this small moment, the shift between singing and conversing is brought closer into (auditory) focus. Here, laughter is part and parcel of the expanding (bast) and contracting (qabd) pulse of meshk; moreover, by embracing “wrong sounds,” Nasira and her neighbours carved out a space for socializing in an unusually rigid meshk format. When the laughter subsided, and conversation dwindled, Mehmet met our gaze, and led us back into the illahi. This time, Mehmet was extremely pleased with our performances. “You are really singing from your hearts now.”

75 See Glenn and Holt (2017: 307). 191

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What seemed to take place here was a subtle, impromptu negotiation between individuals steeped in different meshk formats, and for whom the purpose of meshk was somewhat different. As mentioned in previous chapters, Mehmet was brought in (as a guest from an adjacent tariqa) to more clearly enforce an aesthetic ideal and a student-teacher hierarchy-of-sorts, whereas many of the participants, including Nasira, were not used to this mode of rehearsal. Indeed, Mehmet, at one point, had us each sing solo, which was a source of great anxiety for many, and a true break with the “collective voice” that the Scarborough halqa had previously been cultivating. The momentary digression into humorous, intentionally incorrect recitation, then, settled in to a familiar way of doing meshk, and, subtly and momentarily, flattened the hierarchical arrangement of things (see, for example, Freud 1927,

Niebylski 2004, and Scott 1992).

5 Mutterances, “Wrong” Sounds, and Trangressive Speech: Hearing the Muddiness of Everyday Sufism

Ray McDermott, in his article titled In Praise of Negation, suggests that negation is “not an occasional event, but a constant ground for every observed object, person, situation, problem, discomfort, and make-shift resolution” and that “established categories – the very guts of language and culture – offer a view of the world, and negation – the negation that simultaneously holds the established world together and challenges it – shows, confronts, and laughs at the arbitrariness of it all and, if deliberately used to challenge, can create alternatives”

(2005: 150-151).76 He then reiterates, in different words, that negation, when “purposefully

76 His rumination upon negation-as-positive takes a close look at speech in practice—parole—using different interpretive approaches coming out of the realm speech act theory, examining utterances as propositional, illocutionary, and collusional. For the purposes of my study, however, McDermott’s experimentation with different types of interpretive lenses for the study of speech acts is philosophically

engaged, can help to replace a dysfunctional pattern with new opportunities. Dizzy Gillespie never blew wrong notes” (Ibid: 166). However, even the word “dysfunctional” presupposes some sort of state of undesirable dis-order as though human experience isn’t always in a state of dis-order. Voided of value judgments, however, I find that McDermott’s study, although directed toward categorization and labeling practices in primary schools, offers a useful analogue, complete with sonic reference points, to Sufi perspectives, as I encountered them, on right and wrong.

Beyond his affinity for Gillespie’s reluctance to label any notes “wrong”—and he could have perhaps extended this line of thought further, toward discourse around “blue notes” in jazz at large—McDermott uses the term “mutterances” to identify common word-sounds that do not exist as categories in the realm of langue, but are used often in parole. His example of choice is

“mneh,” a sound that indicates neither yes nor no (but perhaps leans toward “no”). Indeed, such sounds, with ambiguous, indefinite meaning, are difficult, if not impossible, to interpret, and so interpretation should perhaps not be the goal. In a social situation full of ambiguous utterances that might, on first hearing, sound negative, it is perhaps more useful to reflect upon what such utterances might do for the utterers (and hearers).

I would like to apply this mode of inquiry, then, to the negative-sounding moments that I encountered during meshk and, occasionally, zikr. On the surface level—on the level of langue, say—roasting, expletives, and laughing about revered forms of expression such as qalbi zikr

useful, but practically problematic, as I am very much bound to treading upon the surface of the phenomena that I have observed.

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194 might seem offensive, and perhaps, in some iterations of Islam, counter-productive to one’s work of pious self-making. However, when experiencing these moments as a participant- observer as they unfolded, there was, in fact nothing negative about them. In fact, all of the ethnographic moments that I have described in this chapter were punctuated by laughter and what is often referred to in conversation analysis as “smile voice” (Glenn and Holt 2017: 305-

307). This is extremely important, as there are, then, multiple layers at play: a first, transgressive-seeming layer of interaction at the level of langue, and a second, jovial, and highly reflexive layer at the level of parole.

Laughter’s ability to express ambiguity and ambivalence has been discussed at length by scholars in fields such as anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. Liebscher and Dailey-

O’Cain, in their study of laughter’s role in identity formation, suggest that, in laughing, one positions oneself in ambiguous relationship to a referent; in the case of their study, this referent is place (2013: 239).77 On the other hand, in instances where I heard the collision of negative- or blasphemous-seeming talk and laughter at meshk and zikr, it sounded as though the dervishes were positioning themselves ambiguously in relation to other sorts of referents, including facets of human interaction and experience that are often judged to be negative, and darker sides of their nafs. Indeed, laughing at and with negation and the negative, for my interlocutors, is a mode of self-fashioning that folds into their pious practices.

6 What Humour Does, Part II: Humour in Sufi Writings

While numerous accounts of Islamic Jurisprudence from the Middle Ages through to the

77 Other studies on laughter and ambiguity include Bucholtz and Hall (2005) Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher (2009), and Harré and van Langenhove (1991), and studies of laughter and healing include Westburg (2003), Mora-Ripolia, (2010), and Glenn and Holt (2013).

present suggest that jokes and laughter have often been heard as distractions from more serious, sonically-ordered expressions of piety,78 there are also numerous accounts of the use of humour and laughter in Muslim practice, beginning, of course, with sections of the hadith in which the

Prophet Muhammad notes that when he jokes, he “tells only the truth” (Tirmidhi, Abu Huraira) and where the Prophet Muhammad laughs so heartily that one could see the backs of his teeth

(Maghen 2008: 280). Perhaps the first comprehensive synthesis of the use of humour in Islam in the realm of Western scholarship was written by Franz Rosenthal in 1956, who provides an account of the literary life of the character “Ashab the Greedy” in the tenth century volume titled Kitab al-Aghani, and offers some consideration of the place of laughing and laughter in

Islam.

The philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, too, made subtle use of humour in order to make larger, often complex, philosophical points. His writings are important to consider, as they play an important role in my interlocutors’ understandings of Sufi practice—indeed, his words came up in discussions on topics such as gender, sound and music, and, crucially for the purposes of this chapter, humour. Al-Ghazali’s writing itself is often humorous, and at times even sarcastic and, according to translator Eric Ormsby, “smutty,” which was not uncommon in the adab literature of his time:

His use of tales and anecdotes, his quips and rejoinders, his mischievous rhymes at the expense of opponents, his recourse to snippets of verse, the very playfulness of much of his discourse, links him to such predecessors as al-Jāḥiẓ, at-Tawḥīdī, Miskawayh and ar-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī as closely as the actual content of his thought links him to earlier philosophers, theologians and Sufi masters. (Ormsby 2015: 122-3)

78 Zoltan Szombathy mentions such critiques and perspectives in the words of al-Fudayl, al-Awza’I, and others (2013). 195

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Although Al-Ghazali notably condemned frivolous laughter in several of his texts, he found, in some contexts, certain types of jocularity and humour to be permissible (muzaḥ mashru) from a jurisprudent standpoint. Ultimately, in his mind, humour must reflect or serve some sort of greater truth in a lighthearted manner for it to be permissible (Ibid: 126-127).79

Al-Ghazali’s own use of thinly veiled jocularity in his prose likely owes much, as it were, to the tradition of Sufi humour at large. Studies of Sufism in the realms of philosophy and psychology have often examined humour as an integral pedagogical device. In his 1971 publication of Sufi texts, Henry Corbin suggests that humour offers an avenue for examining and detaching from oneself (Corbin 1971: 25-28; see also Ormsby 2015: 129). Stylistically, Sufi humour is often “exuberant and self-mocking” and is typically used to make “a complex and paradoxical point” (Ormsby 2015: 130). In the context jocular atmosphere of the Scarborough halqa, laughter “simultaneously baffles reason and nourishes it”; or, according to tenth century

Iraqi scholar Abu Ḥayyaan at-Tawhidi, “laughter occurs when our articulate reason (nutq) collides with our innate “animality” (ḥayawaniyya)” or what my interlocutors have often referred to as the “monkey mind,” borrowed from the Buddhist concept of xinyuan/shin'en

(Ibid: 121). As at-Tawhidi-via-Ormsby notes: a “joke fills us with amazement (taʿajjub) and our reason struggles to understand the source of this amazement while our animality directs our

79 Ormsby notes that: “First, the joke must be far from falsehood; when the Prophet said to Anas, “O you with the two ears!” (yā dhā l-udhunayni!), it was both gently amusing and incontrovertibly true. Second, a joke should neither be exaggerated nor long-drawn-out, a stricture already enunciated by al-Jāḥiẓ. Third, a joke must not cause bad feeling or enmity; elsewhere, in his Mīzān al-ʿamal, al-Ghazālī lists unkind jokes as one of the main causes of anger. Fourth, a joke must neither intimidate nor frighten. Fifth, all bawdiness must be avoided. Finally, sixth, a joke should be expressed in fine words; or, as al-Ghazālī, puts it, in friendly words and well-meaning expressions. Here matters of decorum are intertwined with ethical concerns. If most writers on the subject condemn excess, and especially that boisterous horse- laughter known as qahqaha in Arabic, al- Ghazālī stands out for his insistence on truthfulness in jest” (2015: 126-127).

response to the joke either inwardly or outwardly, producing amusement or anger, as the case may be. […] There seems to be something irrational, maybe even non-rational, about laughter; it not only ‘castigates morals,’ it castigates reason too” (Ibid: 122).

One of the most-sung illahis, a favourite among my interlocutors, is titled “Bu Akl Fikr

Ile,” which roughly translates from Turkish to “Reason Won’t Help You Find…,” a lively song that usually appears toward the end of a succession of illahis, which is in maqam ‘ushshaq, described to me as having an uplifting, ascending seyir (melodic character). Indeed, the adhan broadcast for zuhr (noon) prayer in Turkey is typically in this maqam, and so for the few meshkers that are from Turkey, this illahi also has associations with midday. The words, while sung in Turkish, translate roughly to English (with some Arabic retained) as follows:

Reason won’t help you find Mevla, leave it behind Remedy, you won’t find, for this wounded heart of mine ya Allah, ya Allah, Allah Allah Allah

Malady of the heart, sickness without a cure Lovers fear to depart the Beloved’s allure ya Allah, ya Allah, Allah Allah Allah

Souls are purchased and sold in the marketplace of love Though mine’s tattered and old, I would gladly give it up ya Allah, ya Allah, Allah Allah Allah

People say Yunus died, but they speak of the nafs This poor creature will die, Those in love never pass ya Allah, ya Allah, Allah Allah Allah

In the lines “this wounded heart of mine,” and “though mine’s tattered and old, I would gladly give it up” the narrator, but also the person who is singing, expresses acceptance of their flaws

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198 and pain. The combination of the joyful, melismatic melody and lyrics reflecting upon one’s wounds and flaws, in a sense, mirrors the delivery of expletives, mockery, and intentionally flawed renditions of sacred recitation using laughter and smile voice. That is, the faulty and the jubilant are concurrent and contiguous, and this, it seems, is a key sort of layering of affect if one strives to experience detachment from one’s nafs.

7 Ordinary Humour

The ethnographic study of the sounds of conversation is not new, although it is relatively young in the field of ethnomusicology. Indeed, there is a long lineage of ordinary speech and gestural acts being taken very seriously, for instance, in the works of J. L. Austin (1955, 1962),

Goffman (1962), Dell Hymes (1964, 1972), Bauman and Sherzer (1974), Bakhtin (1986), and

Wittgenstein (1981).80 Keith Basso, of course, undertook an extensive study of jokes in his

Portraits of ‘the Whiteman’ (1979), revealing that laughing matters can often be, at their core, very serious; laughter often undermines the weightiness and, at times, operates as a sort of dissensus (see Schwartz 2012). In this way, laughter has the capacity to render ordinary the extraordinary.

Laughing, teasing, and swearing may seem as though they are at odds with the “serious business” of religion. However, using humour and laughter to grapple with experiences of great magnitude is actually exceptionally common. Peter Narváez, in his work on “merry wakes” in

Newfoundland, notes that the solemn and the jubilant often comingle during times of transition or rites of passage. He suggests that death—while weighty—is also baffling: it exists beyond reason, beyond comprehension. Death, like faith, is something that relates to “cosmological

80 Hymes’ work, in particular, laid out a rubric for ethnographic conversation analysis with his SPEAKING model.

design” and “divine or semi-divine beings,” that is, in relates to the immaterial and unknowable.

He notes that, in grappling with death, people often turn to so-called “paradoxical traditions” that “offer humorous avenues for understanding and coping” (2003: 5). Paying attention to everyday laughter and joking, then, helps us to also understand the most daunting facets of life, for, as Freud notes, humor is in many ways a reflexive act which can offer release and reprieve from overwhelming experiences (1960 [1905]).

8 Conclusion: Senses of Humour

That humour winds, like a thread, around pre-zikr sohbets and bayah ceremonies, socializing at meshk, and illahi rehearsals proper, reveals that it is woven into the very fabric of religious-social life among the Scarborough Sufis. This does not mean, however, that everyone always gets the joke. Indeed, one of the byproducts of intentionally using “wrong” or “mis- taken” sounds is that the sensibilities of another might be put off or offended; the perceived crassness of the langue here might outweigh the lightness of the parole. During the winter, I left

Toronto to help look after a sick relative, and thus was away from meshk for a few weeks.

When I returned, I found out that one of the members of the Scarborough halqa circle had quietly gone to the shaykh to let him know that some of the joking at meshk was making them feel uncomfortable. The shaykh then suggested a reversal in the meshk format; rehearse first and socialize later. This way, those who did not wish to stay did not have to.

What this moment of friction revealed, not unlike the confrontational moment that

Novak describes between the band The Heavenly Ten Stems and anti-appropriation demonstrators (2010), was that the dervishes of the Scarborough meshk group, while tied to one another through an appreciation of their chosen tariqa, had distinct senses of humour, “good taste” and “bad taste.” This is not surprising or baffling, and is certainly to be expected when

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200 any group of individuals who come from various religious, familial, and geographic backgrounds get together. What is interesting to me, however, is the fact that the meshk group did not change or diminish in membership; all members continued to take part in social activities even after the shaykh was approached about the polarizingly jocular nature of the events.

While many members of the meshk group had found their way to their chosen tariqa from other, more (or in some cases, less) orthodox mosques and churches, the discrepancies in the sonic-moral rubrics to which they adhered, and thus in their senses of humour, did not warrant uprooting themselves, and crossing over (Tweed 2009) once more toward another faith- based practice. That is to say, while senses of humour were sometimes maligned, and while jocularity at times failed to have the intended effect, never was the discrepancy in laughter so pronounced that a dervish decided to dwell elsewhere. The spaces between laughing bodies, then, remained sites of care.

If you see a person overcome with sadness, give him my regards! —Anonymous Sufi Master (via al-Qushayri)

I wish the sadness of all mankind be placed on my shoulders! —Al-Sari al-Saqati

Chapter Six “Tears Start to Flow from my Eyes…”: Breath and Weeping during Zikr

I will never forget the sound of Mouna crying. It all happened so suddenly, it felt: one moment, the shaykh was delivering a light-hearted sohbet, and the next, sobs were echoing through the halls in the United Church. Earlier in the evening, I had caught up with Mouna, a sixty-odd- year-old woman, and a cousin of Hamza, and found out that she was going to be leaving for a month-long trip to her home in Pakistan to visit her mother, who was unwell. She was excited to go, grateful to have the opportunity to visit her family and to say goodbye to her beloved parent.

During the sohbet that evening, which took place before zikr, Mouna received a long-distance phone call, and quietly ducked out the room to answer it. Silence. Sobbing. The room fell quiet, all ears and hearts fell still to witness Mouna’s pain. More sobbing, and then silence once more, a silence that turned to a collective outpouring of tears. And then the shaykh spoke: “When we are upset over death, it is more about us, and how the death impacts our life, than it is about the deceased. The deceased is with Allah.” More silence. More tears. Out of respect for Mouna, the shaykh brought the sohbet to an end, and the dervishes and guests took a break to collect themselves before zikr commenced.

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During this zikr, two individuals burst into tears while voicing esma. And from there, tears seemed to spread to others, and to myself, as well. Long after the evening was through, memories and recollections of that evening’s zikr reverberated through our conversations. In one chain of correspondence, Andrea commented: “Alhamdulilah, we were able to make zikr and prayers for her soul and for them. [Mouna’s] email is on this list if anyone wants to drop her a note. Maybe there will be a memorial soon, I don't know. May God give them ease and surround them all with love.”

Such a sharing of tears and witnessing of sorrow was not uncommon—if I am to be honest, I did not keep track of the multitude of times that my interlocutors (and I) cried during a sohbet, during zikr, or during conversation. Amanda’s tears were not, as it were, an anomaly— although the way she was teased might have indicated otherwise—but rather something part and parcel of dervishhood on this particular path. In some ways, these instances felt, in the moment, too personal to be fieldwork, which is perhaps why I didn’t make detailed notes surrounding them. However, their lasting power in my memory suggests that shared outpourings cut to the core of the affective dimension of spiritual practice and personhood. Residing within these moments is something very integral to what it is to be, and to become, in a circle of faithful listeners. Like laughter, tears come often without warning, but (perhaps) unlike laughter, they often bring with them feelings of vulnerability, one that, in certain settings, can bring about discomfort, a discomfort that might weave tighter the basket of social cohesion.

In this chapter, I focus on the Scarborough halqa’s zikr, a ritual of remembrance in which dervishes collectively strive toward al-fana’ fi al tawhid in a formal setting. While meshk

frequently saw an outpouring of laughter, zikr brought forth many tears,81 and I suggest that the deep breath (nafas) work—namely the recitation of the esma—during zikr is a site of ontological and phenomenological possibility. In the right circumstances, nafas might turn to weeping. The nafas-crying juncture, in its unexpected, affecting presence (Armstrong 1971), prompts both individuals and the collective to sense, and thus make sense, in unanticipated ways. In this chapter, I focus on two ethnographic moments, the first being Mouna’s huzn

(sadness), and the second involving Osman’s esma, in order to demonstrate the ways in which dwelling in a safe space can open up vast worlds of possibility for positive (yet sometimes painful) transformation (tadhkiyyah al-nafs), and love (mahabbat). In the latter moment,

Osman, while being held in the arms of a fellow dervish, moved from breathing esma into sobbing. Here, wilayah, the state of closeness between protecting friends, is integral for the transformation of nafas into open weeping. Thus, this chapter demonstrates, through instances of sounded vulnerability, the value that safe feeling spaces hold for somatic solidarity.

It is important to discuss breath in the context of zikr because it is during zikr—in the presence of the shaykh—that dervishes learn how to breathe esma, and, if given permission, qalbi zikr. During a meshk rehearsal, as mentioned in Chapter Four, there are many breaks in recitation and singing for conversation and deliberation. This is not the case during zikr, however; stretches of breathing esma are much longer, and much more intense. Indeed, a zikr can last between one and three hours, and can at once be an energizing and exhausting experience. While individuals sit casually in a circle during meshk, perhaps standing only for the last illahi or two, zikr demands that individuals sit or stand in a circle, close enough so that

81 This meshk-laughter and zikr-weeping bifurcation is somewhat of a generalization, as there were several moments in which this binarism was disrupted. 203

204 they are touching (not unlike during salat), often holding hands, and breathing in tandem. Zikr, by its very nature, then, is a highly intimate experience. To participate in zikr involves trust in one’s neighbours with prolonged periods of touch, mirroring one another’s breathing and movements. Occasionally, deep breathing of the esma becomes tears, but I suggest that this sort of affective transformation can only occur in a state of comfort—in a safe-feeling space.

1 Osman’s Esma

I was unsure and unsteady during my first zikr with the Scarborough halqa. It had been years since I had participated in a zikr gathering, and the last time I had done so was at

Toronto’s Halveti-Jerrahi dergah. I wasn’t sure if the Scarborough halqa’s zikr was at all similar. Moreover, I was rusty—I wasn’t sure if I would remember the order of sounds as they unfolded, I couldn’t wholly recall the main zikr illahis, and, most significantly, I forgot how to breathe esma. I felt some reassurance as the ritual commenced, and the familiar sounds came back to me—the general zikr form was, in fact, nearly identical to that of the Halveti-Jerrahi order. About forty-five minutes in, however, I began to struggle. I felt overly conscious of my breath, and as I belaboured what should be the most natural, unconscious bodily acts, I began to struggle. I felt out of breath, out of sorts, and became dizzy. It was impossible for me to get lost in the zikr, as I was overly focused on my bodily, on my breath. As the esma moved through different forms, I struggled more and more. By the end of the zikr, it became obvious that I needed to take a different approach to breathing.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who had made note of my breath struggles. After zikr, it is common practice to sit down for a late dinner. On this occasion, we ate vegetarian

Hakka food from a local restaurant, homemade salads and desserts, drank sweet mint tea and water. As I was finishing up my plate, Osman approached me.

“You looked really pale during zikr!”

“I know,” I replied, sheepishly. “I need to work on my esma.”

At this point Osman explained the significance of breathing correctly:

“If you want to breathe easily, you need to work on letting go of your nafs. If you’re too self- conscious, your breathing will be forced, you’ll be thinking about every breath. Instead, you need to stop thinking about breathing.”

Easier said than done, of course, and Osman admitted that he had been working on his esma for some time, and was only recently given permission to learn qalbi zikr. Interestingly, in order to draw closer to the divine, one needs to hone one’s nafas, which, in turn, helps them move closer still. It is a cyclical process that reflects the act of breathing itself, never complete, every exhalation an echo of the inhalation that preceded it.

I found Osman’s suggestion to be abstract, however, not unlike Mehmet’s suggestion to

“sing the best way” during meshk. It was only in practice, then, that I began to understand what he meant. The sound of the esma, which, as previously mentioned, serves as a rhythmic underpinning for both illahis and zikr, should be raspy and un-voiced. Over the course of a zikr, the rhythmic intensity of the esma increases gradually, and, at one point, the group collectively inhales and exhales using the syllable “Hayy” (one of the names of Allah, al-Hayy, meaning

“the living”), in a manner that sounds like controlled hyperventilation. Because of the intensity of this breath work, it is not possible for everyone to carry the esma, as I discovered during meshk, when more senior dervishes and those who were ill needed to take breaks, and, in a few cases, eventually stopped voicing esma.

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Because of the physical demands of esma (and qalbi zikr), it makes sense that one might move seamlessly from breathing to heaving with laughter, as was the case with Nasira’s mock- esma in the previous chapter. It also makes sense that one might be moved, in a different context, to tears. The latter happened often, usually during zikr, over the course of my time with the Scarborough halqa, but one moment in particular stands out in my mind. Winding back in time—and in text—I return once more to the evening when Osman shared a painful story about his mother being attacked and accosted by a high school student. “She’s a tiny, gentle woman,” he said, his voice shaking, obviously holding back tears, or anger, or both. “He burned her with a cigarette.” He was baffled as to how this could have happened. This discussion took place before zikr, but after the shaykh’s sohbet, during an informal conversation about the upswing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence in the wake of the end of the Harper years and the Paris attacks. The seemingly ubiquitous hatred, fear, and misunderstanding had touched members of the Scarborough halqa deeply, and added an extra layer of difficulty to an already challenging for many of the members who were battling financial problems, health problems, the passing of loved ones, and children going through hard times.

After this discussion, but before zikr, the meshk group was called upon to perform a suite of illahis. Osman, along with a few senior dervishes, voiced the esma, while others sang the melodic component. Near the end of the cycle, Osman’s breaths turned to sobs. The shift was nearly imperceptible, and I only noticed after the suite had come to a close: he was bent over, crying, and Ibtihal was holding him and consoling him. The sounds of sobbing were initially masked by the esma, and by the illahis. However, when the singing ceased, small sobs could be heard, with deep, heaving inhalations in-between. Soon Ibtihal was crying, too, and the two of them sat for several minutes, crumpled over, huddled together; the space between their bodies seemed to disappear (Butler 2015: 84). Others soon joined them in tears.

On these two different occasions, zikr became an arena through which dervishes processed the intense emotions that were grappling with. There were other such moments at both halqa gatherings and at Masjid al-Wali, but these two stood out affectively, as, in both instances, nearly the whole group was eventually brought to tears. Anguish over the personal, the political, and the social melted into one moment shared through listening bodies, weeping voices, breathing and being together.

2 Nafas: The Breath, the Instant

During a zikr, only a select few dervishes who have rehearsed at meshk are selected by the shaykh to voice illahis or the melismatic solo qasida during zikr. The rest of the dervishes and guests breathe a succession of esma forms, all of which, ideally, come from the chest; the qalb. The breath begins with a pitched, ascending recitation of the shahada (see the overview of the Halveti-Jerrahi zikr in Chapter Three), growing ever faster. This then transforms, in an instant, into a slower, unpitched, raspy form:

“LA - i-LA - ha ILLallahhhhhh - ”

(exhale) (inhale) (exhale) (inhale) (exhale)

After this, dervishes rise to their feet, if they are able, and begin to voice “Hu,” in slow, pulsing drones:

“Huuuuuuuuuuuuuu Huuuuuuuuuuuuuu Huuuuuuuuuuuuuu”

(exhale) (inhale) (exhale) (inhale) (exhale)

Here, they stand with shoulders touching, hands interlocked, breathing in tandem, organized in a circular chain of bodies that knows no beginning or end. The next esma to be recited is

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“Hayy” (alive, living). Here, inhalation becomes pronounced, and is nearly as audible as the exhaled utterance.

“Hayy ah ah Hayy ahhhh Hay ah ah Hayy ahhhh.”

(exhale)(inhale) (exhale) (inhale) (exhale)(inhale) (exhale) (inhale)

This form, too, speeds up, nearly doubling in time, becoming:

“Hayy ah Hayy ah Hayy ah Hayy ah.”

This final esma, to an unseasoned breather, becomes extremely physically challenging. It is here where Osman noticed that I was looking ill. It is also in this moment where, on the evening of

Mouna’s painful news, tears began to flow from dervishes’ eyes; this is the sound of the nafas- weeping juncture.

A lynchpin of Sufi practice, nafas refers to the physical, bodily process of breathing, as well as a more philosophical concept that roughly translates to “the instant,” the eternal-present or the ever-now. As hinted at in the previous chapter, there are different “genres” or modes of nafas, including qalbi zikr and esma. Interestingly, nafas and nafs (self, ego, soul) share the same root, n-f-s, which, in the Arabic language, suggests some sort of conceptual linkage.

Although the connection between breath and soul are not explicitly spoken of in the Qur’an or any literature that I encountered, I found it interesting that Osman, repeating the teaching of his shaykh, suggested that nafas and nafs are inextricably linked, and that in order to confront the nafs, and to truly experience esma and qalbi zikr, one must learn to breathe in an unselfconscious manner.

In my interlocutors’ sense-world, nafas becomes a site of dizzying possibility. It can

bring one closer to the Divine, but it can also pull one away from tawhid. It can lead to a release of laughter, or of tears. In an instant, breath is both ordinary and extraordinary, of the flesh and of the ether. It is, after all, God’s Merciful Breath—al-nafas al-rahmani—that breathes out existence into the world. It is also believed that spiritual energy () and Divine light

(nur) are transmitted on the breath of the shaykh during zikr. There is a moment during every zikr when the dervishes form a circle, and the shaykh moves clockwise along the circle, bringing his or her face close to each dervish, blessing them with this breath. Only after taking bayah (initiating) into the Sufi group, however, can a dervish truly begin to understand and experience this Merciful Breath. As F.A. Ali El-Senossi notes: “The [shaykh], who himself has received this transmission of the breath from his own [shaykh], then passes the breath to his [students]. Contemplation upon his own breath can bring the [student] to knowledge of ‘the renewal of creation in each instant.’ “

Ashon Crawley, in his work on Blackpentecostalism, poignantly grapples with the multivalence of breath: the aestheticized breathing in Blackpentecostalism, which he calls black pneuma, enunciates “life, life that is exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally, social, though it is also life that is structured through and engulfed by brutal violence. […] “ (2017: 38). He also points toward pneuma as a Greek word that finds its corollaries in the Hebrew ruach (and, I would add, the Arabic ruh), all of which “carry the same ambiguity of multiple meanings:

‘breath,’ ‘air,’ ‘wind,’ or ‘soul’” (Ibid: 40). He also articulates that pneuma, which is, as it were, a channeling of the Holy Spirit, and thus is connected to the “invisible world of intangible, but also material, animation” (Ibid: 39) in that it is underpinned by sociality, in that “we share in the materiality of that which quickens flesh; we share air, breath, breathing through the process of inhalation” (Ibid: 40). For Crawley, then, breathing, in all of its complexity, is a site and source of “radical sociality” and “otherwise possibility” (Ibid: 41). It is politicized, faithful, social, and 209

210 of the flesh. Nafas, likewise, is a point of sonic and affective possibility, much as Allah has many names and qualities, all of which fold into one name: “Hu,” which floats of the breaths of dervishes as they recite their zikr, and which is always the final, collective utterance at a zikr gathering. Multiplicities all are enveloped in the instant and the breath.82

3 On Possibilities

Some performers may train themselves to laugh or cry compellingly on command, but, generally speaking, weeping is an involuntary experience, one that, during zikr, often has its origins in the deep breath work that is esma. In this sense, experiences of sadness brought on by known or unknown external circumstances, such as the passing of Mouna’s mother, might fall under the categories of “raids” or “attacks,” which sometimes overlap with the realm of ayat:

Raids [bawadih] are things that descend instantaneously upon your heart from [the realm of] the unknown. They may cause either joy or sadness. As for attacks [hujum], they are things that enter your heart due to the power of the moment, without any effort on your part. They vary in their nature according to the strength or weakness of the experience [that precipitates it]. There are those who are changed by [their] raids and act according to the dictates of [their] attacks. And there are those whose spiritual state and power put them above anything that may befall to them. Such people are the masters of the moment. Of them it is said: ‘The vicissitudes of time cannot find their way to them For they are the ones who hold the reins of every great affair.’ (al-Qushayri: 99-100).

Although Osman’s weeping fell more in line with al-hal, especially as he recounted the experience with such reverence, Mouna’s sobbing was approached more like a raid, as the

82 Denise Gill evocatively parses the multilayered meanings that fold into the sound of “Hu,” noting that it is at once a sound, a word, and essence, a component of zikr, an embouchure technique, and a form of embodiment. In addition to all of these things, “Hu” is a form of nafas which involves directing air in a curved trajectory, first toward the front of the hard palate, and then slightly downward, between pursed lips. Ideally, the sound should not reverberate in the sinuses, but should sit in the chest voice—that is, one should breathe “hot air,” so to speak (see Gill 2017: 67).

shaykh gently tried to bring his dervishes into a state of reflection on the naturalness and beauty of death while Mouna cried in the hallway. In this sense, he was attempting to teach the halqa to be “masters of the moment.” Regardless, both experiences of intense, overwhelming affect were treated with spiritual import, and greeted as the will of Allah (mashallah).

Looking back, briefly, to Chapter Five, it is helpful to draw some connections between weeping and laughter. Indeed, both emerge from nafas. Laughter, like crying, comes on suddenly, like a raid, and can also be taken as a sign. There were a handful of moments at meshk gatherings where, in fact, people laughed until they cried, or cried until they laughed. On one occasion, for instance, Amanda was laughing heartily at a “dervish meme” someone had shared, when tears began to flow from her eyes. She wiped them away, continuing to laugh.

Looking back to the illahi “Hu Demek Ister,” there is mention of a similar sort of watery elation, which is not uncommon in the genre:

I admire the boots83 I moan and cry With each breath my tongue Wants to say “Hu.” From my eyes, tears Start to flow […]

Laughter, weeping, and forms of enchantment such as al-hal or wajd overlap in the world of the

Scarborough halqa, and all were approached as activities that mark an “opening of the sadr,” or heart (lit. the chest that encases the heart, but also, more figuratively, all that “can either ‘cover

83 Gill translates this phrase as “I admire the [thin, worn-down] boots,” suggesting that this first stanza depicts the rejection of earthly luxuries (2017: 78). It is also possible that this is a reference to the slippers, also known as “dervish shoes” or “dervish mest,” that dervishes wear during zikr. 211

212 over,' hide, obscure and close off—or else open up and reveal—the pure receptivity of the qalb”

(Morris 2012).84

These seemingly excessive affects, thus, might also be thought of as dissensual, in that, upon their unexpected arrival, they may re-configure “the common experience of the sensible”

(Ranciere 2010: 140), marking a confrontation between what is previously known and yet to be known (about oneself or the world), or between sense and making sense (Parsons 2017). Jessica

Schwartz writes of something similar in her work with Rongolese women activists, among whom emotional voicing constitutes a dissensual act; their songs allow them to process and grapple with historical and bodily traumas, even as they continue to be both physically and metaphorically silenced (2012). Laughter, too, opens up new possibilities for knowing and sensing; Foucault famously was inspired to write The Order of Things after being struck with laughter while reading Borges’ "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins":

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (1970: xviii)

In the preface to his volume, Foucault reflects on what it means to sense beyond the epistemological limits of his epoch, and, in so doing, begins to consider a different way of knowing. It is clear that the words of Borges did for him what the texts of illahis, the words of

Baba, and the writings of al-Qushayri do for the Scarborough halqa. In the case of my

84 See Accessed 15 June 2019.

interlocutors, however, the dawning of new knowledge (ideally) brings them closer to the divine. This sort of becoming-through-sense is best described in the final lines of Sufi poet

Hazrat Imam al-Busiri’s “Qasidah Burdah”:

What has happened to your eyes? The more you tell them to stop, the more they continue flowing.

What is the matter with your heart? The more you tell it to come to its senses, the more it is distracted.

Does the lover think that his love can be concealed while his eyes are shedding tears and heart is glowing?

Sobs, cackles: these cup-runneth-over types of affects often occur on the precipice of the bridging of a divide. In psychoanalysis, this divide might be the unconscious and conscious facets of the mind (e.g. “a breakthrough”), or between repressed memories and one’s working memory, or between amorphous affect and more logos-bound emotional categories. Sarah

Ahmed suggests that the experience of “‘being moved’ emotionally involves the transformation of others into objects of feeling” and that “’feelings’ become ‘fetishes,’ qualities that seem to reside in objects, only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation”

(2004: 12). In the case of the overwhelming and involuntary instances of being moved to laughter or tears, the interpretation of these feelings as raids, dawnings, and signs has “stuck,” but it is also important to recognize that such readings have historical precedent in both Sufi writings such as that of al-Qushayri and the psychoanalytic traditions with which my interlocutors are also experienced.

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v

“Can you recite the opening passage of Rumi’s Mathnawi?” asked Osman during meshk one evening, upon discovering that I had been studying the nay—the end-blown reed flute played across the Middle East and North Africa. The eighteen-verse passage to which he was referring, “The Song of the Reed,” is one of the best known pieces of Sufi writing, and, in the cases of many would-be converts, often one of the first encounters one might have with mystical literature. Originally written in Farsi, it has been translated time upon time again, and has lived many lives in edited volumes and compilations.

“No,” I replied, sheepishly. This is a question that I had been asked before; I had always intended to learn it by heart, but this goal always somehow found its way to the back burner. “It is one of my favourites,” Nasira chimed in. Giving me a sympathetic look, and a knowing smile, she added: “I don’t have it memorized, either.” Hamza, listening to us from across the room, pulled out a book from his shelf, and began to read the first few lines, reminding us of the words and their import:

“Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament About the heartache being apart has meant: ‘Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me My song’s expressed each human’s agony, A breast which separation’s split in two Is what I seek, to share this pain with you: When kept from their true origin, all yearn For union on the day they can return.’” (trans. Mojaddedi 2004).

The passage develops an almost animistic depiction of the nay—the reed—whose airy, mournful, reverent sound is likened to crying. A common interpretation is that the reed, cut off from its roots, estranged from the reed bed, cries out longingly, wishing to be reunited with that

vast place from which it came. Jawid Mojaddedi, a well-respected translator of the Mathnawi, explains that “the reed […] may be understood as a symbol representing the mystic who feels inwardly a strong sense of separation from his origin with God [oneness, tawhid], and yearns to return to that state. Love is the force that intensifies this yearning […], increasing his perception of reality, from which he has become veiled through his attachment to the world of phenomenal existence” (Rumi, trans. Mojaddedi 2004: xxiv). Crying out in elation or sorrow, then, indicates a process of unveiling, or opening of the sadr.

Denise Gill articulates that the melancholic aurality represented in this passage is of central importance to Turkish classical musical circles and their contiguous Sufi turuq, pointing out that her interviewees made “repeated references to the ney and Mevlana’s first stanzas of his

Mesnevi as musicians explain how sounds of sadness, loss, separation, and death are inherently part of their ideologies of listening” (2017: 63). She found that while such “melancholic modalities” might “in isolation […] qualify as negative or destructive,” in the social and sonic context of Turkish classical musical circles, “loss, separation, sadness, and death” were felt to be “beneficial,” and even healing (Ibid: 63). Echoing Gill’s findings, during the Scarborough halqa’s zikr, the affecting breath—bubbling over, transmuted into weeping—was seized by

Osman, Ibtihal, Mouna, Baba, and the like, as an opportunity to come to be closer to their qalb, to one another’s hearts, and to the omnipresent beating heart of the divine. The separation of the chest—the splitting in two—marks an unmistakable aya. Here, an unanticipated outpouring of tears allows the seeker to comprehend their self and reality in ways that would have otherwise been nonsensical.85

85 Kathleen Stewart writes of the sounds of a train whistle in a similar manner: “A train wails in the still of the night. It often wakes her. Or it lodges in her sleep, reemerging as a tactile anxiety in the dawn. 215

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4 Dwelling in Discomfort

In the moment in which Osman’s esma transformed into sobbing, it might be said that he was experiencing al-hal, a state of pious enchantment that brings one nearer to al-fana al- tawhid. He certainly described it, after the fact, as a deeply sacred experience. Deborah

Kapchan writes of a similar phenomenon witnessed among the Qadirriya-Boutchichiyya Sufis, where a beautiful muwwal (a type of vocal improvisation) brings one of the women in the group to tears. When she played a recording of this event in an academic context, one of her colleagues heard these sounds of rapture—of al-hal—as manifestations of trauma. However,

Kapchan’s interpretation is more multivalent, in that she articulates that these sounds of crying are at once representative of pain and praise, and that, indeed, “the sounds of pain are often indistinguishable from those of ecstasy” (2017: 282).

This was the case for the collective acts of weeping set in motion by Mouna and Osman.

Both instances involved dervishes sitting together, sharing and revering the pain felt by their friend, without attempting to transform or “fix” it. This type of bearing witness is common in

Sufi practice, and it is also, as it were, common in ethnographic fieldwork, where we find our ears searching for meaning in ambivalent sounds that were, perhaps, “not meant for our ears”

(Ibid: 282). Or perhaps, contrarily, participating in collective acts of weeping feels as though it is not meant for (field)work; such an experience reaches beyond the purview of observation, dwelling in a realm that is overwhelmingly participatory.

Regardless, these moments involved sitting—dwelling—in the realm of discomfort.

[…] She knows why the train cries. Danny's friend Bobby passed out on the tracks one night and was killed” (2007: 114-115).

Looking back to Chapter Three, it is only through finding spaces in which they felt comfortable that Mouna and Osman were able to wrestle publically with feelings of discomfort—to open themselves up affectively and vocally while confronting sensations of pain and, simultaneously, the Divine. Such states of reverential sadness are seen as integral to the spiritual work that a dervish does. This longing is perhaps most famously communicated in the opening lines of

Rumi’s Mathnawi. However, my interlocutors also read of sadness and its significance in al-

Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, in which he states:

Sadness is a state that prevents the heart from roaming in the valleys of forgetfulness [of God]. It is one of the characteristic features of the wayfarers on the Sufi path. I heard the master Abu Ali al-Daqqaq – may God have mercy on him – say: “The person in the state of sadness travels along the path of God in just one month a greater distance than one without sadness travels in many years.” One Hadith says: “God loves every sad heart.” In the Torah, it is said: “Whenever God loves someone, He places a mourner into his heart, whereas whenever God hates someone, He places a flute into his heart.” It is related that the Messenger of God – may God bless and greet him – was constantly in the state of sadness and endless reflection (al-Qushayri: 209).

Mouna’s sobs and Osman’s weeping were all treated as part and parcel of zikr and, in fact, opened up the floodgates for a collective act of weeping, and thus a deepening of the group’s spiritual cohesion.

My interlocutors are not alone in their experiences with sadness and weeping as intimate forms of poïesis. The works of Steven Feld (1982), Christine Yano (2002), Martin Stokes

(2010), Deborah Kapchan (2017), to name a few, delve into the work that weeping—and listening to weeping—does in the realm of social practice. In my interlocutors’ favoured text, too, there is reference to the social nature of weeping; al-Qushayri notes that “Sufyan b. il-

Uyayna said: ‘If a person in this [Muslim] community who is overcome with sadness weeps,

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God Most High will pardon the entire community because of his tears’” (al-Qushayri: 209).

Kapchan’s designation of weeping as a sort of shared affect seems particularly apt in the case of my research, as “listening involves both subjects and objects in an interacoustic space” (2017:

282). Here, listening ears (and awakened hearts) are all enmeshed in a shared sonorous-affective field, their “sound bodies” taking on the quality of bast (expansiveness) as they share in one another’s sadness. The Scarborough halqa, on these nights, collectively dwelled in the “public feeling” (Cvetkovich 2012: 3) of huzn as a means of moving further along the path of dervishhood, and of making do, together.

Scholars such as Lauren Berlant (1997), Sara Ahmed (2004), Kathleen Stewart (2007), and Michael Herzfeld (1997) have considered the various ways in which an internal affective state might be shared among buffered bodies, and how these bodies might be rendered porous through processes of mediation, the circulation of cultural artifacts and discursive truths.

Although the Scarborough halqa is not large or dispersed enough to constitute a “public” (or counterpublic), many of the observations made by these authors on affect and cultural intimacy ring true. For instance, Stewart writes of the teary reunion of a father and daughter on reality television, its ability to draw masses in to sharing in the feeling (2007). Berlant, too, discusses the sense of “cruel optimism” shared by Americans who painstakingly cling to fantasies of wealth and happiness (2011), or the notion of the “female complaint” in women’s television and literature, and the ways in which this affecting concept has contributed to the sustainment of a female intimate (counter)public (2008).

There is something else going on here—it is connected, in that it results in the social circulation of affect—but it is distinct in that bodies are connected, drawn in tightly, touching hands, shoulders pressed against one another, collapsing into one another, where even the most hushed voice is immediately audible to one’s neighbour. Here, wilayah—the state of

closeness—is enacted on a bodily level. “Sound bodies” are enmeshed with one another, pointing toward the perceived porousness of the zikring self (Kapchan 2017: 282; Taylor 2007:

239).

5 Conclusion

Zikr is, in many ways, a site of heightened collective experience. It is also, however, an arena in which dervishes are given the permission, and the tools, to undertake the more atomized, inward-looking work of tadhkiyyah al-nafs in their everyday lives. Thus in discussing zikr, nafas, and the affective entrainment of my interlocutors’ sound bodies, many of the themes from earlier chapters have bubbled up. Because of the physical closeness involved in zikr, as well as the affective potential of the nafas during the recitation of esma, it is necessary that the halqa’s zikr feel safe. Here, faithful bodily alliances (see Butler 2015) are breathed into being, ideally providing dervishes with the sense of refuge necessary to openly grapple with difficult emotions and events.

The cultivation of such feelings of safety in the context of zikr is certainly connected to the experienced by members of Masjid al-Wali. It is also intertwined with mahabbah, a type of “pure” or “Divine” love that can sometimes be extended to faithfully-oriented interpersonal connections. Indeed, before an individual takes hand in the halqa, they have the option of becoming a “lover” of the order, which means that one dedicates oneself to contributing to a sense of collective intimacy, safety, and care. Zikr is singular in its breathy, affecting potential, but, as is the case with meshk, jumu’ah, and even simply walking in the city while Muslim, its practitioners must feel protected in order to hone their sounding and listening bodies.

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Mukhraj/Exit86

Mukhraj: like mudkhal, a passive construction of the concept of exiting, which implies that one is placed in a position of leaving, much as dervishes are placed in various maqamat (stations) by the divine as they encounter aya, be they joyful or painful (or both). In some cases, individuals are called to leave their spiritual path; I certainly felt like this happened to me as I pulled out of my fieldwork and back toward the realm of the computer screen and the academy. I also saw this happen to my interlocutors over the years; as they encountered difficulties that left them faith-less, as they became overwhelmed with other worlds of responsibility, other interests, other ways of being in the world. In some cases, they became too sick to continue their practice.

In other cases, they passed away. In this sense, all dervishes are moved to mukhraj by one thing or another.

And so, what is it to make a life through faith, when one is always on the precipice of leaving? It involves, at its core, survival in the moment—nafas. I do not mean this in the most literal sense—not just physical survival, not just bare-bones life support—but spiritual and emotional survival. Survive, from the Latin “supevivere”: “in addition, live.” To survive is not just to be, then, but to thrive. It is not just to sense, but to make a life through sensing. Samra

Habib, in her memoir We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir, evocatively traces her processes of reckoning and becoming as a queer Muslim woman in both her birthplace of

Pakistan, and her current home in Toronto, where her family came as refugees. She longingly imagines a life in which she is able to become herself, through the support of a community:

86 The word “mukhraj,” while not commonly seen in Fusha or ‘Amiya, comes out of the Qur’an, where it appears with some frequency. In using it here, I am making specific reference to the work of al- Qushayri, as previously discussed with regard to this dissertation’s Mudkhal.

I see my mother. She’s in the backyard, staring into the garden: her oasis amid all the concrete. […] Off the alleyway are dozens of coach houses owned by bankers, ad execs, and professors who are subjected to a litany of strong odours wafting from our property: lilacs, cumin, roses, and once a year, a goat roasting on the pit for Eid. But my mother doesn’t make any apologies. ‘This is Canada,’ she says. ‘Let these people get used to us desis.’ […] Every Thursday after prayer, she throws a small dinner party. She invites old friends, mostly neighbours who’ve been living here for decades, as well as new immigrants who’ve made a habit of dropping by her makeshift mosque in the basement— refugees from Pakistan, Turkey, Somalia, and Egypt. For many of them, it’s their first time under the same roof as non-Muslims. […] This house gave us the space to figure out who we were supposed to be. To look inward, to listen to our intuition.

But this house does not exist. (2019: 184-187)

Habib’s book has an uplifting conclusion: she eventually did find a resting place in which to dwell and sur-vive, a space similar in conception and operation to Masjid al-Wali. There are many more like Habib, however, some of which I have mentioned in the preceding pages, but there are countless more, living, surviving, attempting to make lives through faith. The groups that I have discussed in this dissertation have attempted to quench such thirsts for spaces in which to become. For members of the Scarborough halqa, Masjid al-Wali, the Halveti-Jerrahi dergah, the Mevlevi dergah, and the many smaller and ever-growing branches of their local shajarah, lived experiences, framed by their religious practices, are rooted not necessarily in making sense of things, but rather in making through sense. Their lives are punctuated by affective and affecting instances of poïesis, that is, a transformative “bringing forth,” or acts of

“making” (see Heidegger 1960; de Certeau 1984). Here, they are at once making a life, making choices, making relationships, and making a spiritual practice—all of these realms are connected, like small spheres of colour which, when taken in at a distance, interact pointillistically to create a larger, more tangible image. My interlocutors’ sensoria—their 221

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“sound bodies” (Kapchan 2017: 282)—are tuned, with the help of their shaykh, prescribed literature, and their fellow halqa members, to listen for, and to, glimmers of the divine in even the most seemingly unlikely of circumstances. These acts of making occur during times of pain, violence, teasing, laughter, love, and while sitting silently with one’s own beating heart.

Moment after moment, like prayer beads passing through fingertips, these small occasions of ritualized listening slowly unfold, cumulatively constituting a way of becoming and surviving together.

Looking back, I began my dissertation by setting the stage, so to speak, with a historical and geographic look at Islam in Toronto, establishing a social and political backdrop against which my research played out. 2015 through 2017 were challenging times for Muslims living in

Toronto, as the end of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reign saw increasingly anti-

Muslim policies and rhetoric, and events such as the November 15th Paris Attacks saw an increase in hate speech and violence directed at Toronto’s Muslim denizens, often at the hand members of white nationalist groups such as Rise Canada and the Sons of Odin. Because of this challenging reality, the sounds of Islam in Toronto are often relegated to private or semi-private spaces.

In Chapter Two, I introduced the concept of ayat—divine signs—and discussed the many ways that my interlocutors made sense of various sorts of “indeterminate” sounds, that is, sounds of unfathomable or ambiguous origin, in a way that reinforced their faith, even in the face of hardship. From cell phone adhans to microphone feedback to Skype jinns to hate speech, my interlocutors worked together to listen faithfully, apprehending even the most reprehensible sounds as manifestations of a divine order-of-things.

In the four chapters that followed, I discussed the body’s organs and their sounding mechanisms as sources of aya. In Chapter Three, I turned toward the bodily practices of voicing and silence. Here, I considered how these two categories of sound are differently taken up in two distinct groups: the more orthodox Halveti-Sufi order, and the LGBT2SIQ+ positive Masjid al-Wali. I argued that my interlocutors’ sensoria played crucial roles in guiding them to dwell in different places, a process that has contributed to the growth of an ever-expanding shajarah

(tree) of auditory and spiritual regimes.

Chapter Four further engaged with the voice, outlining the singing and recitation practices of a meshk group. I suggested that the teleological process of vocal entrainment among meshk practitioners was simultaneously a social and spiritual endeavor, and that, here, the intersubjective, the bodily, and the divine are all intertwined. In Chapter Five, I discussed laughter in a similar manner, articulating how, historically, Sufi teachers have used humour to help their students to confront the nafs, a practice that is also present at the Scarborough halqa and its affiliated meshk group. Chapter Six moved into a discussion of breath and crying as sonic-corporeal tools for experiencing closeness with the Divine.

v

In seeking to illustrate the deeply personal experiences of my interlocutors, and faced with the necessity of also protecting their identities, I embraced a batini ethnography; an ethnography of the interior. Partially inspired by Lila Abu Lughod’s “ethnography of the particular” (1991), a batini ethnography endeavours to focus on the quotidian while muddying external elements— names, locations, and histories—that might “out” my interlocutors. I have discussed the concept of al-batin in its relation to inntermost experiences of faith. However, if we look toward the root

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224 of this word, b-t-n, a host of other connected meanings emerge. Batni, for instance, can refer to the interior of the body—namely the abdomen. Bitanah, on the other hand, is sometimes used to mean entourage or protector, something akin to al-wali or wilayah. Taken cumulatively, this batini (or b-t-n) ethnography is about all of these things, simultaneously. It is about the innermost religious experiences of my interlocutors, it is about bodily experiences of faith—of comfort and discomfort—, and it is also about relationships that are interpenetrative.

In a connected sense, this is also an ethnography of safety, or of refuge. Each of my chapters engages with a different sort of safe-feeling social assemblage in which the hard work of dervishhood is undertaken. From mobile, makeshift assemblages like the #IllRideWithYou movement, to Masjid al-Wali’s physical-and-virtual safe space, to the Scarborough halqa’s meshk and zikr gatherings. Here, my interlocutors are involved in establishing assemblages that circumvent the somewhat abstract engagements with “tolerance” or “accommodation” under neoliberal governance; theirs is a sort of bodily, or in the case of the Skype jinn, differently- embodied, alliance (Butler 2015) informed by ideas of ummah, walayah, and mahabbat.

Although I begin this dissertation discussing the sonic limits of religious emplacement in the

City of Toronto, I proceed to articulate the many ways in which my interlocutors have worked together to make and sustain safe feeling spaces, and how this process is fundamentally informed by practices of faithful listening. Put differently, my interlocutors demonstrate the meaningful types of work—spiritual, aural, solidarity—that can be accomplished when one is able to dwell in a safe feeling space. In this sense, then, my dissertation attempts to push beyond

“dark” anthropological approaches (Ortner 2016), toward what Ortner calls “anthropology of the good” (2016), or an ethnography of hope (Miyazaki 2004: 13; see also Bloch 1988).

v

The last decade has seen a pronounced, and international, sweep to the political right, and this is certainly true of the City of Toronto. In this climate, Canada is often seen as a sort of

“safe [state] space,” with its multicultural policies and semi-universal health care. While this is, in some ways, true, in other ways, parts of Canada have been heavily invested in reactionary politics. The Scarborough halqa and its network thus demonstrate the important work that faith- based organizations can do—and sometimes, must do—under neoliberal and reactionary governance. In a different study, or perhaps a future study, one might think more deeply about the importance of “care,” and how groups such as the halqa can offer alternative care systems in cases where the “planned city” fails its most vulnerable denizens.

Against a confusing Canadian backdrop that, in places, celebrates diversity, and in others, is openly hostile towards “the Other,” including “the Muslim Other” and “the queer

Other,” the cultivation of faithful listening has helped my interlocutors to establish and sustain feelings of hope, humour, belonging, and faith, and to care for one another. This aural practice has also afforded my interlocutors the space to collectively sit with—and witness in others— discomfort, fear, pain, and sadness. Moving outward from al-batin: the qalb, covered by the sadr, broken in two through collective weeping and boisterous laughter; sometimes both, simultaneously. Tears streaming down their faces, gut-busting cries of joy and sorrow, dervishes hear their own bodies, and the bodies of one another, as divinely-sounded. Each sob, each cackle is a sign that holds infinite potential. They rehearse, sing, and remember at meshk and zikr; sometimes the “right” way, and sometimes the “best” way; here, voicing from the qalb becomes a collective activity, and dervishes work together, both fervently and leisurely, to taste the divine. Their voices also rest; for some, silence offers the greatest insight into the inner

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226 voice of the qalb.

The deceptively simple practice of listening; a bodily tool for living and for making.

Listening with one’s friends (al-wali) for the divine (Allah), hearing in the midst of the human and the suprahuman. There are also the listening bodies that reside outside of the realm of the halqa, whose ears may not (yet) know how to listen to the voices and silences of Muslims at the margins, how to comprehend what the members of the halqa, Masjid al-Wali, or the Halveti-

Jerrahi dergah hear. Shifts happen through listening, however. A recollection: the meshk group slowly learning to sing from the heart, together. Another: Osman and Mehmet, celebrating during the impromptu meshk, playing in different keys on opposite sides of the room, gradually settling into a similar perda as they grew more comfortable. Perhaps as the halqa continues to sing its own song, listeners on the outskirts, too, will come to hear them with an open sadr, or maybe not.

Deleuze, expanding upon Artaud’s “body without organs,” describes a “new dimension of the schizophrenic body, an organism without parts which operates entirely by insufflation, respiration, evaporation and fluid transmission” (1990 [1969]: 101). This fleshy imaginary offers an antidote to a dichotomized, categorized, separated world. Centuries prior, hadith al- nawafil became a beloved touchstone among circles of Muslim mystics, describing a similar radical fleshy transcendence. In this hadith qudsi (divine saying), it is reported that Allah said:

“Whoever treats a friend (wali) of mine with enmity, I declare war on him. […] I love my servant, I become his hearing (sam’) by which he hears, his sight (basar) by which he sees, his hand by which he forcibly seizes, and his leg by which he walks. […] There is no action of mine in which I waver more than taking the soul of a believer: he hates dying, and I hate doing him wrong.” In the mystical, heterodox iterations of Islam that I encountered in my research,

too, it is the body—sensing, making—that brings one closer to the divine, and to one another,

‘awliya. In hadith al-nawafil, it becomes apparent that, in fact, sensing bodies are divine, as is one’s inevitable final mukhraj. Processes like crying, breathing, laughing, and listening are tangible, windy, watery, kinetic modes of bodily production and apprehension that take flight in spaces of refuge. Among friends, there exists a universe of possibilities perched on the tip of al- lisan, the tongue, as it rests on the precipice of speaking, or silence, or nafas, and on the membrane of the ear, poised to listen faithfully.

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