Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 4 Number 1 Voice, Media, and Technologies of the Article 2 Sacred 2018 Paralinguistic Ramification of Language Performance in Islamic Ritual Michael Frishkopf University of Alberta Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the Anthropology Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, and the Islamic Studies Commons Recommended Citation Frishkopf, Michael (2018) "Paralinguistic Ramification of Language Performance in Islamic Ritual," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 4: No. 1, Article 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1099 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Paralinguistic Ramification of Language Performance in Islamic Ritual Michael Frishkopf Ritual practice is a powerful social force logical, sociocultural, and spiritual impact? In molding psychological, sociocultural, and spi- order to answer such questions, we require, first ritual realities, capable of adapting to dynamic of all, a holistic, integrative understanding of the environments to maintain its multiple functions. ritual phenomena under consideration. As ritual practices trace paths across social space For Islam,3 that means comprehending the and time, changes are induced—intentionally or nature of the vocal performance lying at the core not—in response to different environments: the of every ritual. While such performance appears personnel and social context of performance, to exhibit features of both “speech” and “song,” language, ideology, and other cultural factors. it should not be classified according to these The result is a branching structure—what I call categories—not even along the putatively “ramification”—as ritual practices subdivide liminal continuum between them. Rather, such and localize, though, due to similar environ- performance should primarily be understood as mental conditions, as well as the impact of comprising the performance of language, fusing globalization, branches may converge or diffuse a linguistic-referential and a paralinguistic- widely as well. expressive component. That structure therefore maps those environments, both reflectively and forma- 3 In this article I use the singular “Islam” (with tively, as a model of and model for living in the “Islamic”) in a generalized sense, while underscoring 1 its encompassed diversity, fully cognizant of the oft- world. Analyzing and comparing rituals, we observed dangers of reifying a concept covering such deepen our understanding of their environments a vast scope of varied beliefs and practices. As an while illuminating the ritual process itself, in the anthropologist engaged in local ethnography, I might 2 refrain from doing so, or even affirm that there is no tradition of ritual studies. singular “Islam.” But from the perspective of What is the distribution of ritual practices, religious studies, and especially when engaging the and how can it be interpreted in relation to present topic, such usage cannot be avoided: I am attempting to understand patterns and connections individuals, performance contexts, societies, and across a coherent yet wide, even contradictory, range cultures? How does ritual achieve its psycho- of related ritual phenomena. A concise name is required precisely because such a connected diversity cannot otherwise be discussed or even recognized. In 1 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural my view, these connections—structural, semantic, System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected and historical, which are recognized by a global Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 93. community of Muslims, as well as contemporary 2 See, for example, Victor W. Turner, The Ritual discourse (of Muslims and non-Muslims alike)— Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: support its use. As Shahab Ahmed has noted, Cornell University Press, 1977); Catherine M. Bell, coherence does not presuppose essence, and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: proponents of the anti-reification “Islams” position Oxford University Press, 1997); and Roy A. have not explained how a plural can exist without a Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of singular; see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: 1999). Princeton University Press, 2017), 136. Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018) 5 The logic behind this imperative does not But application of the “speech-song” model stem from a familiar argument (frequently to Islamic ritual practice remains problematic invoked by ethnomusicologists) that “song” even when conceived etically. For this model should never be used to describe Islamic ritual distorts understanding by dividing a deeply simply because Muslims reject the concept as a interconnected network of vocal-linguistic-ritual descriptor of Islamic practice, as is well known phenomena through imposition of two cate- from the literature.4 For the most part (English- gories whose boundaries—however defined— speaking Muslims excepted, a category that until are largely irrelevant to the sonic ritual relatively recently comprised virtually nobody), phenomena under investigation, while mis/ it is not the English word song that is rejected, underrepresenting the intervening “liminal” but rather its (ostensible) synonyms in the many zone (reduced to a hyphen), as a one- languages of the Muslim world. Arabic- dimensional, uncharted negative space of speaking Muslims do not describe ritual vocal secondary importance between the terra cognita performance as ghināʾ (approximately, “song”); of the two poles. Such a model artificially to do so would be taken as not merely a separates related phenomena, while obscuring linguistic error but a moral one as well. the coherent category centered on the hy- One might, however, set out to use “song” in phenated middle, whose scope is marked by a purely “etic” sense, according to a “scientific” performed language, and which is central to definition, as a technical term to be shared across Islamic ritual as well. cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries, Widening the observational lens to its presumably without contradicting local classi- maximal aperture, one observes the ritual ficatory schemata. 5 A similar etic definition centrality of that category, what I call “language could be formulated for “speech.” performance,” 6 deriving from the theological Thus “song” could be taken to represent centrality of sacred texts and their referential instances of vocality displaying a minimal meanings. Language performance spans all degree of tonal and temporal consistency (lest ritual genres, each one combining linguistic “song” become “speech”), whereas speech (mainly referential, symbolic, discursive, would display maximal degrees of consistency cognitive) and paralinguistic (mainly non- (lest “speech” become “song”). We would referential, continuous, affective, expressive, thereby lose sight of the cognitive schema performative) aspects. Each genre exhibits implied by a local taxonomy of concepts, but we instances scattered throughout the “liminal” would also gain analytical and comparative space between “speech” and “song.” All are power. What could be the objection to that? inextricably linked to Islam’s originary sources, primarily Qurʾan and Hadith, and thence to each other. Linguistic and paralinguistic aspects of 4 See, for example, Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qurʾan (Cairo: American University in 6 See Michael Frishkopf, “Against Ethnomusi- Cairo Press, 2001), chap. 3: “The Samāʿ Polemic.” cology: Language Performance and the Social Impact 5 Cf. Alan Lomax, Cantometrics: An Approach to of Ritual Performance in Islam,” Performing Islam the Anthropology of Music (Berkeley: Distributed by 2/1: 11–43; and “Sufism, Ritual, and Modernity in University of California, Extension Media Center, Egypt: Language Performance as an Adaptive 1976). Strategy” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1999). Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 4, No. 1 (2018) 6 each ramified at some point in Islamic history. Islamic studies has, on the whole, neglected But whereas linguistic aspects—discretely ritual as compared to scholarship on history, law, encoding discursive principles of Muslim literature, philosophy, mysticism, theology, art, belief—tended to rigidify, paralinguistic aspects and architecture—despite the frequent obser- remained comparatively fluid, adapting to vation that Islam is a religion of orthopraxy environmental change without contradicting the more than orthodoxy.9 verbal foundations of faith. More critically, even when the scholarly Focusing on the contrast between linguistic focus, ritual appears primarily as a linguistic and paralinguistic aspects, rather than between form, neglecting paralinguistic features tran- speech and song, is thus of crucial importance in scending textual formulations. Scant attention understanding Islamic ritual. Yet Islamic studies has been paid to the situated ethnography of has devoted insufficient attention to the ritual performance, though performance is distinction between the two, and especially to absolutely central to Muslim experience and to the latter. the social significance of Islamic ritual as an adaptive