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The Experience of the Recited Qurʾan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2016

Lauren E. Osborne
Lauren E. Osborne*
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Wash.; e-mail: osbornle@whitman.edu
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Extract

In this thought piece, I use the recited Qurʾan as a case study for asking what it may mean to feel sound—and more specifically, “religious sound,” or sound in a religious context. A range of scholars, including myself, have asked related questions about what the recited Qurʾan sounds like, and why it may sound the way(s) it does. Here I consider the sound of the Qurʾan on the level of experience or nondiscursive meaning, asking what the recited Qurʾan feels like.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 124 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Denny, Frederick M., “The Adab of Qurʾan Recitation: Text and Context,” in International Congress for the Study of the Qurʾan: Australian National University, Canberra, 8–13 May 1980, ed. Johns, Anthony H. (Canberra City, Australia: South Asia Centre, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1981), 143–60Google Scholar; Denny, Frederick M., “Qurʾān Recitation: A Tradition of Oral Performance and Transmission,” Oral Tradition 4 (1989): 5–26Google Scholar; Frishkopf, Michael, “Mediated Qurʾanic Recitation and the Contestation of Islam in Contemporary Egypt,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Nooshin, Laudan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 75–114Google Scholar; Gade, Anna M., Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qurʾan in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Graham, William A., Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Nelson, Kristina, The Art of Reciting the Qurʾan (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Lauren E. Osborne, “From Text to Sound to Perception: Modes and Relationships of Meaning in the Recited Qurʾan” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2014); Rasmussen, Anne K., Women, the Recited Qurʾan, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Abrahams, Roger, “The Theoretical Boundaries of Performance,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on Form in Performance: Hard-Core Ethnography, ed. Herndon, Marcia and Brunyate, Roger (Austin, Tex.: Office of the College of Fine Arts, University of Texas, 1975), 18Google Scholar.

3 I considered this question with respect to the use of pitch and melody in “From Text to Sound to Perception: Modes and Relationships of Meaning in the Recited Qurʾan,” chap. 5.

4 Q 30:21.

5 The second verse of the sura is usually understood as referring to these events when it says ghulibati al-rūm (Rome was defeated).

6 ʿAbd Allah Yusuf ʿAli, The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾan, 10th ed. (Beltsville, Md.: Amana Publications, 2001), 1006–7.

7 Clarity of pronunciation and repetition of phrases is typical of the older Egyptian reciters in the murattal style, such as Husary; Minshawi also performed in the murattal style, but he is known for melodically florid mujawwad-style recitation.

8 Richard Bauman, “The Theoretical Boundaries of Performance,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on Form in Performance, 28–44.

9 Mahmood, Saba, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of ‘Ṣalāt,’” American Ethnologist 28 (2001): 827–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Victor Witter, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

10 Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual,” 828.