Consider the words of this hadith, which reports a saying of the Prophet Muhammad about the Qur’an:
From Abu Musa al-Ashʿari, may God be pleased with him:
Said the Messenger of God, may peace and blessings be upon him: “The likeness of the believer who recites the Qur’an is as the citron: its scent is fragrant, and its flavor is sweet. The likeness of the believer who does not recite the Qur’an is as the date: its flavor is sweet, but it has no scent. The likeness of the hypocrite who recites the Qur’an is as the water lily: its scent is fragrant, but its flavor is bitter. And the likeness of the hypocrite who does not recite the Qur’an is as the colocynth: its flavor is bitter, and its scent is foul as well”. (Tradition related in Bukhari and Muslim, quoted in al-Nawawī 1996: 15–16)
What exactly is the Qur’an in this hadith? Certainly, we cannot take it to be merely a physical book, printed on a page, its meanings the sum total of its discursive contents; it would fall far short of what the Prophet is describing here. The Qur’an – a book that is recited aloud, and heard – does not seem to fit this paradigm. Instead, considering the Prophet’s words, we might ask, what does it mean to know the Qur’an, to experience the Qur’an, or to sense the Qur’an? How does reciting the Qur’an shape the reciter? And the listener?
In this article, I argue that the Qur’an and Qur’anic studies have an important contribution to make to recent conversations about the categories of religion and secularity, and textuality, orality, sound, and the epistemological connections between these areas. Specifically, if we consider the ways in which modern understandings of religion and secularity might intersect with other intellectual categories such as textuality and orality, we learn that the example of the Qur’an would seem to rearrange these categories – it would seem to break the molds, and our assumptions. A thorough consideration of Qur’anic orality suggests that, in the case of the Qur’an, textuality and orality are not mutually exclusive opposing categories. Rather, they are intertwined. We cannot be said to experience them separately. Instead, hearing and knowing are similarly intertwined in a way that is both discursive and aesthetic. Qur’anic studies thereby has an opportunity to expand and reconfigure some of the key frameworks of knowledge undergirding modern humanistic thought.
In order to bring together the research on Qur’anic orality, I find it productive to think in two directions: first, how does the research situate the Qur’an historically? From what moment or direction does the research approach the Qur’an? And second, how does the research conceptualize orality? What kind of an idea is it? What kind of a category is it and how does it relate to other surrounding conceptual categories? Is it a process, an art, a cultural backdrop, a means of transmission, or something else? In order to synthesize some of the research on Qur’anic orality, I would like to situate some of the key works in this area with respect to these two modes of thought: historical and conceptual.
When we consider the orality of the Qur’an and its central role in ways of learning and knowing (pedagogy and epistemology) of Islamic tradition, we discover something that pushes back against the assumption of the ocularcentrism of the modern West, and related ways of knowing and learning. Similarly to how reflection on how the categories of religion and secularity reveal the particularity of their origins and formulation in Christianity, a reflection on Islamic ways of knowing grounded in the Qur’an reveals the particularity of assumptions of orality and textuality as mutually exclusive categories that are naturally opposed to one another. Qur’anic orality can help us expand our frameworks beyond and between the categories of religion and the sources and media of knowledge. It can reformulate relationships between our conceptual categories of religion and sense experience, and relatedly, orality and textuality.
Genealogies of Religion, Textuality, and the Reading Eye
In recent years, parallel conversations have been taking place in the study of the categories of religion, secularism, and tradition, and the categories of knowing and feeling that undergird formations of human subjects, and the ways in which those formations are historically and culturally specific. Numerous works in the interdisciplinary areas of sensory studies and sound studies have been addressing the ways in which sensing and feeling are shaped by both culture and biology, and indeed that those areas of influence are not separate and opposing. Even more, the contextually specific ways in which humans sense the world, and understand our sense experiences, also contribute to broader understandings of the formation of human subjects, and regimes of knowledge. What is knowledge and what does it mean to come to know, and how does that relate to our felt experiences in the world?
In religious studies and anthropology, a longstanding debate has been the definition of the category of religion and the extent to which that category can be meaningful and/or universally encompassing. Understandings of religion in the Western academic field of religious studies derive from an original theological understanding of the one singular religion – Christianity (Smith 2004). It was through the “discovery” of other peoples and cultures brought by the European colonial expansion that the idea expanded to a plural “religions”, as J. Z. Smith famously said, “in response to an explosion of data” (Smith 2004: 186). When confronted with this new “data”, the category of “religion” shifted from referring primarily to one thing, to one of a category of which the others are “like” the original to varying degrees. As many modern scholars have pointed out, the original resonances of the category of religion as referring to Christianity remain in ostensibly general or universal definitions. A byproduct of this is that often other traditions identified as “religion”, are misunderstood or misconstrued when viewed first and foremost through the lens of “religion (defined primarily with implicit reference to Christianity)”.
Paralleling this story is the development of the “world religions” paradigm in relation to European colonial expansion. As Tomoko Masuzawa describes, during the long nineteenth century, as European powers expanded their global reach, religion played a key role in the development of discourse of new categories of knowledge and “sciences” emerging at that time:
To examine the side of the three sciences for the West first, it stands to reason that political science, economics, and sociology should come into existence just at this time, just as politics, economy, and the social life of citizens were seemingly coming into their own, just as this society was becoming secularized. According to the narrative of secularization now eminently familiar, these spheres were emerging from the control of church authority and becoming increasingly liberated from the sphere of religion. In effect, the logic here seems to be that these new sciences became viable and effective as ways of understanding European society because this society had finally reached maturity, that is, had sufficiently developed in accordance with rational principles and established itself on the basis of the rule of law, instead of on some real or imagined supernatural authority. (Masuzawa 2005: 16)
By contrast, Masuzawa points out that the discourse of “religion” was used to describe ways of life in the non-modern and non-West, wherein religion was presumed to infuse every aspect of life and society. This contrast is in part what leads her to conclude that the vocabulary of religion was developed especially at this time as a “discourse of othering” (ibid.: 14). As fields of study emerged in the nineteenth century as scientific ways of ordering and understanding the world, Europe understood itself as the center of the system of rational knowledge that came to define the rest of the world, and to other it. And while a narrative of secularization lay at the core of this narrative, ironically Christianity and the discourse of Christianity took on a particular shape as a result as well. And by extension, as Masuzawa points out, ordering the world in taxonomic terms meant that when Europeans looked abroad, when there was not the religion of Christianity to be found, there had to be something “like it”, “in lieu of Christianity” (ibid.: 18).
The idea of “scripture” or a central text has also played a key role in the development of the world religions paradigm, and the extension of understandings of Protestant Christianity to other traditions. As Tomoko Masuzawa has also pointed out, one piece of the taxonomy of “world religions” is that “religion” is thought to have a book – a text – at its center, and that that text plays a central and authoritative role in the tradition in defining its key meanings and stories. When Europeans looked abroad and found that there must be another “religion” “in lieu of Christianity” when Christianity is not present, as an extension, one might look to other religions and identify a “Bible” or a scripture as well. One key example of this logic that Masuzawa discusses is F. Max Müller’s series The Sacred Books of the East (Masuzawa 2005: 260–308). This series combined the philological and taxonomic approaches of the colonial enterprise in “discovering” and studying religions across the globe as different iterations of the same human phenomenon. Just as Christianity has the text of the Bible as its core, so too must other religions have a text that would function similarly in their own context.
The Qur’an has served as a key example in illuminating the limitations of understanding scripture as a fixed textual category. For example, William Graham has argued in Beyond the Written Word that understanding scripture as a text that is read and engaged for its discursive contents is most specifically a modern Western Protestant Christian understanding of the Bible, which leads scholars to misunderstand the roles of analogous works in other religious traditions (1987). Key to Graham’s argument is the Qur’an and its orality and role in Islamic ritual life, in which its nondiscursive meanings (those meanings apart from the semantic, over and beyond the meanings of its words – such as its significance in tradition and ritual life, and Islamic theological significance as the word of God) can be inappropriately overlooked when approaching the Qur’an through the Protestant lens of scripture.
More recently, in his work Secular Translations, Talal Asad considers the role of the Qur’an as it is part of embodied practice and subjectivity in Islam. In the work overall, Asad explores the notion of translation as transformation, as religion is translated into modern liberal secularism. Asad’s starting point with the Qur’an is the oft-mentioned axiom that it is “untranslatable”. This claim, when harnessed or referenced, typically refers to the idea that the Qur’an is not the Qur’an when rendered in a language other than its original Arabic – a claim that both refers to the particularities of the original language and the difficulty of their translation, but is even more so about the theological status of the text in tradition. Ordinarily, it is thought that the Qur’an cannot be translated because it is understood as the words of God, and to render those words in another language changes them into something else – not divine language, but a human approximation of their meanings. Asad attests that yes, the original language is very difficult to translate, and yes, the text when translated does not accurately capture the way in which it is thought about in tradition. But he adds an additional layer – that of the role of the Qur’an in embodied ritual practice. Here, he points out that the Qur’an that cannot be translated is the full, embodied experience of the Qur’an.
My suggestion is that reciting the Qur’an in the original especially in a liturgical context is thought to be a particular (physical-emotional-cognitive) attitude, that its nontranslatability has a special significance intrinsic to this sense. It is not the Arabic language that is sacred but the enunciation of divine virtues in the presence of what is believed to be a transcendent, creative power. That is to say, it is the act of worship (not the Qur’anic text) that is nontranslatable, whose full sense is not given in a dictionary … but one that requires cultivation. (Asad 2018: 60)
As we will see, this sense of embodiment in relation to the Qur’an takes on a particularly acute form when we consider reciting and listening to the Qur’an, in relation to modern ideas about sound and listening and religion.
Here, the mismatch of understandings of “religion” as Protestant Christianity versus Islam can result in misunderstanding the roles and categories of texts in both traditions. The Qur’an and its role in Islamic tradition and practice is not exactly analogous to Protestant understandings and uses of the Bible. As Asad points out, “[the Qur’an] has to be approached on its own terms, and it is not always easy to determine what these are” (ibid.: 60). This is where the Qur’an’s orality and the practice of its recitation can expand on this idea even further. For Asad, the Qur’an, when “approached on its own terms” (ibid.: 60), includes not only the discursive meanings of the words, but also the practices of the Qur’an embedded in ritual. The most frequent point of contact with the Qur’an for devout Muslims is its sound – as recitation. When understood as “scripture”, in the Protestant Christian sense, the Qur’an is flattened to the sum of its discursive meanings; it is of value for what it says. But as Asad points out, when met on its own terms, it presents as a different category. It includes its discursive meanings, but it is also its embodiment in tradition and in ritual practice, and its “translation” from its role as a text or even a recitation to embodied states of a sensing body.
The interdisciplinary area of sensory studies offers a parallel conversation that can be brought together with the modern critiques of the categories of religion and secularism, and corresponding categories of scripture and textuality. As many have pointed out, modern ways of sensing and experiencing the world are historically and culturally constituted ways of being and feeling. Specifically, the sensory regimes of modern personhood have been shaped by the very same historical processes from which the idea of “religion” as a definable category emerged. It was through the processes of the Enlightenment, the large-scale change in understandings of knowing and being that took place in Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following the Protestant Reformation, that sight came to be understood as the sense of authority, rational distance, and empiricism.
Scholars of the senses have pointed out that sight has long been viewed as the “king of the senses”, with the roots of this narrative originating in classical thought. As Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, “For both knowledge and delight, the sense of sight was, according to Aristotle, ‘above all others’; it was the most developed sense, the clearest and most discerning, the one most able to bring ‘to light many differences between things’” (2000: 16). While sight has long roots as the dominant sense in Western thought, many have also observed that through the processes of the Enlightenment and with the advent of modernity, it took on a particular shape and meaning. Modernity has been understood by scholars of the senses as “hyper-visual” and “ocularcentric” (ibid.: 16–17). Even more, as categories of thought and ways of knowing were transformed through the processes of the Enlightenment, the sense of sight became associated with the increasing interest in empiricism:
Previously sight had constituted an important means of leading the soul to God, for example, through gazing upon the spires of a cathedral or the glowing colours of a stained-glass window. In this, however, it was not unique, as all the senses were considered able to perform the same function, to a greater or lesser degree, in their own ways. When sight became allied with the growing field of science, however, it began to be emphasized as the means of attaining knowledge of the world. Thus if the Dark Ages were in a sense literally dark because of the decline in the importance of sight, the Enlightenment was in a sense a literal enlightenment as vision came to provide the basic models for understanding the world. (Classen 1993: 27)
Through the revolution of Enlightenment thought, sight came to be understood as the sense of empirical rationality and distance, “if the supreme nobility of sight is thus deeply ingrained in Western religious and philosophical traditions, many nonetheless argue that this privileging of visuality reached its apogee only during the Enlightenment and its aftermath” (Schmidt 2000: 17). While sight has been privileged in Western thought since the classical age, through the transformational processes of the Enlightenment, it came to be not just dominant but dominant in a specific way. It took on a specific shape. Correspondingly, other senses came to be repressed (smell), or regarded with suspicion (hearing) (ibid.: 16).
As sight came to be understood as the sense of rationality and empiricism, and strongly so with Western thought, hearing came to be regarded with suspicion, associated with the irrational, the feminine, the non-Western, and the Global South. Scholars of sound studies Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes locate the association between sound and South as far back as the eighteenth century with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, saying “Ever since Rousseau, the South has been associated with sound, music, body, presence, nature, and warmth. The North, by contrast, sees itself as dominated by writing and vision – by a cultural coldness born of the snowcapped peaks of the Alps” (2019: 1). Steingo and Sykes point out that “sound and South are, importantly, relational figures”, which function only in opposition to their others (ibid.: 1–2).
Put another way, sight and hearing have come to figure as a key dichotomy underpinning modern Western thought. As Schmidt traces this arc,
The story of modern vision and hearing has been plotted [in two ways]: (1) a hierarchy of the senses, with sight vastly ennobled and hearing sharply diminished; and (2) a marked dichotomy between eye and ear cultures that has commonly drawn on racialized constructions of Western rationality and ecstatic primitivism. (Schmidt 2000: 21–2)
Sight and hearing, and notions of the image and sound, were transformed and placed into relational opposition through the reconceptualization of knowledge that took place through the Enlightenment.
This reconceptualization of sense perception and knowledge occurred hand in hand with the Enlightenment transformations of the categories of religion and secularity as well. And more precisely, religious ideologies underpin the modern conceptualizations of the senses. In The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne observes that “assertions about the difference between hearing and seeing usually appear together in the form of a list”, referring to this list as an “audiovisual litany”, including “hearing immerses its subject, vision offers a perspective”; “hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces”; and “hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect” (I am indebted to Steingo and Skyes for directing me to this source. Sterne 2003: 14–16). To this list, Steingo and Sykes also add, “South is Southern; vision is Northern” (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 2). Sterne argues that
the audiovisual litany is … essentially a restatement of the longstanding spirit/letter distinction in Christian spiritualism. The spirit is living and life-giving – it leads to salvation. The letter is dead and inert – it leads to damnation. Spirit and letter have sensory analogues: hearing leads a soul to spirit, sight leads a soul to the letter. (Sterne 2003: 16)
He asserts that religious epistemologies undergird the modern associations with the senses, particularly of hearing and seeing, and just as the modern category of religion has been shaped by the intellectual processes of the Enlightenment and the “discoveries” of colonialism, so has the understandings of sense perception and the ways of knowing that they provide. As Sterne points out, “to take seriously the role of sound and hearing in modern life is to trouble the visualist definition of modernity” (ibid.: 3)
To put it another way, modern conceptions of religion and secularity are inextricable from a corresponding dichotomy between sound and image, or hearing and seeing. While sight is associated with the secular and the rational, sound and hearing thereby correspond to South, to religion, and to the type of religion that is “noisy”. In describing the modern association of sound with religion (or bad religion) and irrationality, Charles Hirschkind asserts, “While sounds and gestures may accompany religious observances and modes of worship, they are to be viewed as inessential to, when not outright destructive of, those expressions of religious adherence” (Hirschkind 2015: 165). And similarly, “the modern concept of religion is founded upon a certain moral skepticism in regard to sonority” (ibid.: 165).
This formulation of the senses, their associated epistemologies, and the modern understanding of religion come together to shape particular understandings of engagement with religious language and texts, and the categories of orality, aurality, and textuality. Just as the modern understanding of religion developing out of the world religions model assumes a text or scripture at the center of a tradition, that text is assumed to function and be engaged in specific ways – via the eye, at a distance. And it is not a visual-aesthetic encounter with that text. Rather, the eye takes in the information of what a text says. It is thereby rendered meaningful as a material representation of meaning that is taken in discursively via the eye. It is meaningful for the discursive contents of its words. And this understanding of a religious text or scripture resembles a great deal the Protestant Christian engagement with the Bible that was also transformed through the period of the Enlightenment, and through the spread of print media and mass literacy (Graham 1987: 41–4).
Qur’anic Orality in Qur’anic Studies
It may be tempting, following this line of thinking, to claim that the Qur’an should be understood not through the visual, empirical, discursive sense of sight, but through the opposite – the ear, and the nondiscursive. Such an understanding would paint the Qur’an in the opposite terms of the Protestant Christian understanding of the Bible. The Bible is visual, and to be read silently in order to understand its discursive meanings; the Qur’an is sonic, and it is to be listened to and experienced aesthetically. This framework would pose the Qur’an opposite the Protestant Bible in a further continuation of Sterne’s audiovisual litany. In describing the narrative of sensory and other entwined dichotomies, Leigh Eric Schmidt asserts that “what such narratives demand is not a carnivalesque reversal – not a dethroning of the eye and a raising up of the ear; that would only perpetuate the hierarchic, oppositional convention” (Schmidt 2000: 22). Such a portrait would be incomplete, and this is where there is an opportunity for Qur’anic studies to complicate and overly simplistic narrative. And this is where the Qur’an and the study of its orality in Qur’anic studies can help decenter another uncritical binary in this tangled litany.
I propose that the study of Qur’anic orality has an important role to play in continuing to reframe the categories and conversations that I have discussed thus far. Specifically, the example of Qur’anic orality reframes the categories of orality and textuality both within and corresponding to the categories of religion and secularism and the roles of the sight and hearing therein. Its central role in shaping an Islamic epistemology wherein textuality and orality are intertwined, as are seeing and hearing, presents a powerful shift in categories and paradigms from the modern Western epistemic perspective. Qur’anic orality has been considered from many perspectives, but when it comes to the understanding of orality, the conversation in the subfield of Qur’anic studies has been scattered. There are different possible reasons for this, including the diverse disciplinary backgrounds and toolkits that we bring as scholars to the Qur’an.
In order to demonstrate this point, I consider Qur’anic orality and scholarship on Qur’anic orality in historical and thematic relation to the Qur’anic text: shifting categories of orality in the backdrop of the Qur’an, orality in the Qur’an, and orality in the tradition moving forward from the Qur’an. Some works situate Qur’anic orality with respect to the historical context prior to and surrounding the Qur’an, noting that this context was that of a highly oral milieu (Graham 1984, 1987; Graham and Kermani 2006). Pre-Islamic Arabia had its own rich poetic tradition characterized by poetry that was composed and performed orally. Spoken language was the language of poets and soothsayers, and it was also the language of power – supernatural, aesthetic, and political. And those are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories.
The Qur’an is understood by some as pushing back against or arguing with these genres. We can read the Qur’an itself telling us this – that it is not poetry, and that its recipient is not majnūn (meaning, possessed by jinn, as the pre-Islamic poets were thought to have been inspired). For example, in the fifth verse of Surat al-Anbiya’, “The Prophets”, the Qur’an reports speech of detractors of the Qur’anic message, “Yet they say: ‘These are only confused dreams’, or rather: ‘He has invented them’; or: ‘He is only a poet. Let him therefore bring a miracle to us as the earlier (apostles) were sent with’” (Qur’an 21:5), and in Surat al- Ṣaffat, “Should we abandon our gods for the sake of an insane [majnūn] poet?” (Qur’an 37:36) It is also understood by some as reflecting this context at the same time that it argues against these genres of speech and their key values (Kermani 2015). As Navid Kermani points out, the relationship of the Qur’an to the oral poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia is ambivalent, in that it is both an opposing ideology but also a mode of discourse that the Qur’an adapts and challenges at the same time: “In the customary Muslim view of the life of the Prophet, the Quran challenged the status of poetry in the society not only by its ideological orientation but also with regard to questions of stylistic quality” (ibid.: 28) The Qur’an insists on its rhetorical superiority to the poetic tradition at the same time that it does so in a format very familiar to the listeners of that poetic tradition:
The descriptions of the Quran as a fascinating break with the traditional norms of structured text refer both to its form and to its theme, which departed from the existing literary and social tradition. The revelation was felt to be not only beautiful but also true: it also moved people by the religious, social, and ethical moral or other aspects of its “content”. However, none of this detracts from the impression that the Quran was perceived and appreciated aesthetically, inasmuch as practically all works of literature are appreciated by the receiving community using a complex system of norms of various kinds. (ibid.: 29)
The orality prior to the Qur’an can be said to serve as a backdrop reflected in the resulting orality of the Qur’an. Here, orality is understood as an aesthetic mode, a social ethos, and a mechanism of power. It is either prior opposite or influential context, or some combination of these two.
There are also ways in which the words of the Qur’an can be read and interpreted as evidence showing orality in the sense of reflecting a process of oral composition. For example, to this end Andrew Bannister draws on oral-formulaic theory as a tool which, when applied to the words of the Qur’an, can demonstrate what portions or how much of the work was composed orally (2014). His approach consists of interpreting the words as evidence showing the method in which they were composed – so a type of looking back just prior to them, in a sense. Orality in this case is a method of performance but also composition, that leaves marks on the product that is produced.
Bannister draws on oral literary theory and oral-formulaic analysis that began with the works of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, growing out of debates about the coherence of writings of Homer such as the Iliad and the Odyssey (Bannister 2014). Turning then to the Qur’an, he treats a small sample of Qur’anic text in his analysis, focusing particularly on the narrative of Adam and Iblis, which appears in seven different locations in the text. He notes that although each of the versions of this story is “worked into the texture of the sura in which it is found”, all seven versions can also be considered as a group, without necessarily completely removing them from their separate contexts (ibid.: 2–3). His claim is that there is a common core to all of the Adam-Iblis stories in the Qur’an, with some degree of flexibility surrounding this core (ibid.: 28–9). For Bannister, this particular understanding of the relationship between the Adam-Iblis accounts in the Qur’an evidences the oral milieu and origins of the text, and as such, it is best understood through the lens of oral literary theory. Bannister’s study provides a new way to consider the Qur’an as literature in relation to other types of literature – both its most immediate literary-poetic milieu, but also those Islamic literatures that follow it in the Arabic and Islamic traditions. In considering the Qur’an in this way, the text is then seen as a product of a highly oral milieu, and this relationship can be shown through evidence within the Qur’anic text itself.
There are also other ways in which the words of the Qur’an can be understood as attesting to orality, although in this case orality is taken not as a process of composition that leaves a mark on its final product, but rather stylistic features that suggest use or practice in an oral context. A lot of this includes rhetorical textual features that can be read as evidence either that the words were to be used in a liturgical context (Neuwirth 2010) – so in that case, textual features are seen as suggesting that they were to be used in oral performance. In this regard, Angelika Neuwirth’s works on the liturgical use of the Qur’an and particularly the parallels to the psalms and their use in Christian liturgy strongly suggests a liturgical performative use of the text.
Additionally, certain rhetorical features such as the word iqraʾ! (“Recite!”) thought to be the first word revealed, and the places where the Qur’an directs its recipients and interlocutors to say things (“qul”, “say”) are also attested to as evidence of an oral aspect of the text. It occasionally commands its readers and listeners to repeat its words aloud in this way. The use of iqra’ (Recite!) at what is understood as the first sura revealed also ties recitation and written knowledge together in a key moment in a narrative of creation. As the sura opens it declares,
Read [iqra’, or as I have translated it, Recite, or read aloud] in the name of your Lord who created,
Created man from an embryo;
Read [iqra’]
for your Lord is most beneficent,
Who taught by the pen,
Taught man what he did not know. (Qur’an 96:1–5)
Here, at the opening of the words thought to be the first revealed, God creates humankind and immediately imparts knowledge. This is done in both an oral form (as attested to by the use of iqra’), and written, as indicated by the presence of the pen. In this way, knowledge at the very outset of the Qur’an is both oral and written. In her analysis of the sura, Hoda El Shakry points out,
The semantic ambiguity and polysemy of the word iqra’ within Islam’s spiritual lexicon lends the act of reading the embodied dimension of recitation. To “read” in the Islamic tradition, then, is to engage not only the faculties of the mind and spirit but also those of the body. (El Shakry 2020: xvi)
As El Shakry goes on to explain, this intertwining of oral and written, and the importance of embodied knowledge via recitation extends into “the centrality of pedagogy to Islam”, underpinning Islamic modes of learning and knowing (ibid.: xvi). This centrality of pedagogy is what has led Rudolph Ware to suggest that “perhaps Islam is best characterized not only as a ‘discursive tradition’, as anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested, but also as a dense web of fully embodied encounters” (Ware 2014: 76).
Furthermore, the Qur’an also discusses its own oral performance; it talks about recitation of its own verses and references recitation of other scriptures and stories as well (Osborne 2022). The words seem to be directing and referencing spoken language in a sense that suggests that it exists as a kind of discourse. There is a sense of back and forth in that way. And as Lauren Osborne has argued, the Qur’an’s discussion of its own recitation is a dynamic and shifting discourse, strongly associating the recited word with visual imagery, and also demonstrating comprehension and “attunement” on the part of its listeners, which I explore in the final paragraphs of this essay (Osborne 2022).
Discussion of listening is also ubiquitous in the Qur’an (Osborne 2019). The words can be seen as directing or prompting oral performance as well as emerging from (so both emerging from and producing) discourse. But also, oral performance and listening to oral performance come up a great deal in such a way that these are clearly valued. Listening in particular is so ubiquitous in part because God is described so frequently as “al-samīʿ”. Associating listening with the divine as a nae or refrain offered throughout the text strongly imbues that mode of perception with a sense of divine authority. But also similarly, and frequently alongside references to God as hearing (al-samīʿ), God is also called seeing, al-baṣīr, creating a strong association between the two senses.
The sonic features of the words of the Qur’an can also be seen as suggesting orality. A great deal of the Qur’an is characterized by patterns of rhyme, rhythm, and assonance. It rhymes a great deal, and even so much that the English language word “rhyme” does not quite capture it because that term so strongly suggests to us endrhyme at the expense of other sorts of sound patterns. There is a great deal of endrhyme of course, but there are also sound patterns that work across lines, and the rhyme patterns are often rhythmic as well (Stewart 1990; Sells 1991, 1993, 2000, 2007). The words of the Qur’an are shaped by persistent sound patterns, which many take as an aspect of the text that suggests that it should be pronounced out loud.
There are many, many ways in which we could look forward from the Qur’an into Islamic tradition and describe it as oral and aural through its development and use. It is often mentioned in this regard that the scant details on the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts suggest a primary orality (Graham 1987: 98). The sparse information on the earliest Qur’anic manuscripts as well as the story of the eventual codification of the written text well after the death of the Prophet Muhammad is what has led William Graham to describe the earliest written copies as serving as an “aide-mémoire” (ibid.: 98), meaning that only someone who knows the words and how they should be pronounced in full would be able to read that material evidence and know with a reasonable degree of certainty what the words are.
In general, when discussing the Qur’an in the early period and especially in relation to its codification and the development of variant readings (the qirāʾāt), orality is understood as a mode of transmission (Hilali 2016, 2021; Nasser 2020). And the research in this area shows orality and textuality as very much intertwined. When discussing these processes and this period, Shady Nasser refers to this as the “stabilization” of the Qur’an (ibid.: 1–2), which captures the fact that in the processes of canonization and codification of the Qur’an as well as its variant readings, both textuality and orality are implicated. Orality plays a key role in the early Islamic period and early development of the Qur’an, but it does not fade away thereafter, giving way to a silent, visual experience of the text.
As an extension of the central role of Qur’anic orality in Islamic tradition, the role of hearing and listening can and should be considered as a key Islamic method of learning and way of knowing. Spoken language is characterized by its discursive meanings, it can also serve performative functions of course, and it is by definition sound, and it does not have to be sound that exists in reference to a writing or the written word. How does one listen? What modes of listening do we find in Islamic tradition? What does one learn from listening, and what kind of person is the listener? There is much work yet to be done on the understanding of hearing and listening in Islamic tradition, and here I briefly consider two examples as possibilities to illustrate the breadth available in this regard. Here, I consider most specifically hearing as theorized by the medieval thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, as well as in the work on listening and affect in modern Sufi orders by scholar of performance studies Deborah Kapchan.
In Book 18 of his Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), “Kitāb Ādāb al-Samāʿ” (“The Book of the Etiquette of Listening”), al-Ghazali largely conceptualizes hearing and listening as they pertain to the debate about the permissibility of listening to music. In placing that question in a broader framework, he considers listening as such as something that exists first, or prior – in particular, prior to the sound one might listen to (al-Ghazali 1901a: 200). He observes that humans can experience all kinds of pleasant sensations via the senses, and that the pleasure of the experience of any given thing exists with the thing itself, rather than the mode of sense perception (ibid.: 208–9). As such, the pleasure or displeasure of perceiving any given thing is not determined by the perception, but rather, the thing. The recitation of the Qur’an serves as a key example in this regard, in that he points out that obviously given the virtues of listening to the Qur’an, listening itself clearly cannot be a bad thing (ibid.: 209).
While much of al-Ghazali’s theory concerning hearing and listening thus relates to the status of what is being heard, when he turns to the hearing subject, much hinges on the understanding of the listener as well as their moral comportment. Having established that the moral nature of the sound relies on the sound itself, al-Ghazali also asserts that the hearer is responsible for their own reactions to sound. For al-Ghazali, hearing takes place first as a neutral “physical impression” (1901b: 705). The second “condition” of hearing, after the physical impression, is understanding (ibid.: 705). Here, al-Ghazali points out that the understanding depends on what else the hearer may bring into conversation with what they have heard, and that true seekers will apply what they have understood to “the states of his own soul” in interactions with the divine (ibid.: 706).
As Charles Hirschkind has pointed out, al-Ghazali and certain other Islamic thinkers on hearing reveal the imprint of classical Greek thought on Islamic conceptualizations of the senses. And specifically, al-Ghazali’s theory of listening can be understood as a variety of “attunement”: “the development of capacities of moral discernment grounded in acts of ‘sensitive’ or ‘spiritual’ listening” (Hirschkind 2015: 167). Listening, and in particular repeated listening, can be seen as “tuning” an individual to their environment. Listening can be understood as cultivating ethical and moral sensibilities, as also demonstrated by Hirschkind elsewhere (Hirschkind 2006).
In her research with Sufi orders in Morocco and France, Deborah Kapchan considers the role of listening – especially listening that does not necessarily depend on comprehension of the discursive content of what is being heard (2015: 34–6). She describes the Sufi samāʿ as a genre of listening that is a kind of “listening act” in that it is transformative, and performative: “[listening acts] do not simply represent sound, as waves reach the ears and are relayed to the brain, but they transduce these sound waves, changing the waves, the body and the environment in the process” (ibid.: 35–6). For Kapchan, the results of this genre of listening represent a special variety of knowledge: sound knowledge, which she defines as “a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening” (ibid.: 34). We might extend this notion of listening to consider examples of reciters and listeners of the Qur’an who are not speakers of Arabic, for example. Al-Ghazali and Kapchan then, brought together, are useful in highlighting something that we learn about Qur’anic orality when we think about it through the lenses of sound and listening: discursive and nondiscursive coexist and are intertwined, as are textuality and orality. These are not categories that exist in opposition and they are not fully separate.
While Qur’anic studies as a sub-discipline has not yet contributed to the ongoing conversations about sense perception, the category of religion, and the epistemologies embedded in modern conceptions of textuality and orality, a detailed consideration of Qur’anic orality can add another layer to this discussion. We can begin to think further from this position about the modes of learning and knowing and Islamic thought and practice, and in the study of religion more broadly. We have seen here that orality and textuality, or sound and vision, are intertwined in the Qur’an, and considering these categories in a nuanced way in relation to the text can help us think critically about their places in modern discourses of religion, secularity, and sensation. I contend that the role of orality, recitation, and the spoken word is central to Islamic practice not just as an art form, or a ritual that can be strictly bounded and set off in time and space from “the rest of life”, but is a foundational way of knowing and forming human subjects in Islamic tradition. Face-to-face aural transmission, listening, reciting, and carrying the Qur’an in one’s memory and voice is a central mode of knowing in Islamic practice. The Qur’an as both text and recitation, and reading and hearing, extends forward in Islamic tradition and shapes an Islamic epistemology that is characterized by this set of relationships. A thorough consideration of Qur’anic orality shows us that the modern, post-Enlightenment formulations of orality and textuality are also so bound up in the modern category of religion and its implied epistemologies.