The Ethics of Listening: Cassette‐SermonAudition in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. In focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self-improvement, [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam] American Ethnologist 28(3):623-649.

Prayer and pedagogy: Redefining education among Salafist Muslim women in France

“…Finally, recitation and memorization are not merely mechanical, as some scholars have shown. They require the development of sensibilities that in turn act on the heart and soul (Hirschkind 2001). When done collectively, students actively invest in each other's efforts and successes and work through peer support and pressure.…”

Religious revelation, secrecy and the limits of visual representation

“…To be sure, the question of the adequacy of old and new media to mediate God may give rise to vehement disagreements, as for instance in the case of Protestants' iconoclasm which sought to replace the Catholic worship of images by a textual approach centered on the Bible -a stance reminiscent of Protestant missions' attitude towards so-called heathens in Africa (see later in this article). Likewise, as debates about the suitability of radio to read tafsir so as to mark the end of Ramadan in Northern Nigeria (Larkin, 2001), the use of cassette sermons as new means of inducing Islamic piety (Hirschkind, 2001), the appropriateness of video and TV as adequate vehicles of the Holy Spirit (D'Abreu, 2002;De Witte, 2003, 2005aOosterbaan, 2005), or the possible threat posed by visual media to maintaining secrecy (Ginsburg, 2006;Van de Port, 2005 suggest the availability of new mass media may provoke critical deliberations about their potential to generate and sustain authentic experience and forms of authority within existing religious traditions. Technology thus never 'comes in a "purely" instrumental or material MEYER Religious revelation form -as sheer technological possibility at the service of the religious imagination' ( Van de Port, 2006: 23), but needs to be embedded into the latter through an often complicated negotiation process.…”

“…This is certainly the case in relation to religion, as this article will show. Rather than assuming what modern mass media supposedly do to religion once they have been adopted, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which religions negotiate new media (see also Hirschkind, 2001; Van de Port, 2006). Far from mistaking the adoption of mass media by religions as an entirely new phenomenon, I suggest that media are intrinsic to religion (De Vries, 2001;Plate, 2003;Stolow, 2005;Van der Veer, 1999).…”

Visualizing the sacred: Video technology, “televisual” style, and the religious imagination in Bahian candomblé

“…With no religious guidelines that might inform attempts to visualize the realm of the sacred, and with no traditional iconography on which to build, cultists come to depend on the modes of perception and appraisal that they have cultivated as modern media consumers (Hirshkind 2001). 4 In doing so, they have given increasing credit to new authoritative voices-people who may know little about the fundamentos but who know all about "looks," about what a good video production should look like, or a photograph, or an article.…”