Authority with Textual Materials – Power of the Written Qur’an

Abstract

The article studies the performance of Islamic authority through texts. It combines this with a close investigation of the textuality of these texts—that is, their letterforms as well as shapes of words and sentences—and their material affordances. Given that Muslims understand the Qur’an to be powerful, this article argues that it is the concrete possibilities that textuality provides which feed into Islamic authority. This article takes an ethnographic encounter in Zanzibar Town in which I was repeatedly prompted to visually follow the textual aids of my interlocutor, Hakimu Saleh, in order to gain access to that which is “hidden between the words” as starting point. I investigate how Hakimu Saleh used these occasions to perform his authority as a knowledgeable Islamic healer through “material citations.” I then explore the singularity of the Qur’an to examine the textuality of kombe, a practice in which the Qur’an is used as a decidedly textual artifact to be washed off for patients to ingest. In doing so, I show how practices tapping into the power of the materially textual Qur’an feed into other practices with material text, including those that support the performance of authority in an Islamic context.

Keywords: :

• text
• authority
• Islam
• Qur’an
• materiality
• Zanzibar Town

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kjersti Larsen (2019) shows how in Zanzibar, the Qur’an’s power can be materialized in different ways, such as speaking its words or uttering Qur’anic praise particles, but also through kombe. While I focus on the Qur’an’s materialization as text, I second her observation that Qur’anic materializations are not confined to ritual contexts, but merge these contexts with everyday life, especially with regard to medicine.

2 The Swahili version is published by Darussalam: Tafsiri ya maana ya Qur-ani Tukufu Kwa Lugha Ya Kiswahili. The English version is translated by Muhammad Muhsin Khan and Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali. On Swahili translations of the Qur’an, see Lacunza-Balda (1997) Topan (2019), and Zadeh (2021).

3 The Sufi approach to textual materials, including to Sufi writing, is shaped by ambiguities. Zachary Wright describes it as the “paradox of Sufi writing,” that is “putting the ineffable experience of God into words,” and moreover, that “[w]hatever the blessing or lofty purpose of a Sufi text, the reader […] should not forget the suspicion with which Sufis have generally ‘treated writing’” (Wright 2010, 109, 123).

4 See for example Francis Robinson’s article (2009) in which he traces how the interpretative authority of the ulama has been changing for the past 200 years.

5 Hakimu Saleh’s reliance on material texts that are usually printed and not hand-written, is in itself an interesting development within the history of Islamic practices of authority. See Robinson (1993) and Messick (2018).

6 I have not been able to do justice to this exchange and am still searching for a good way to navigate, in writing, the multiple implicit agendas that framed the encounters between Hakimu and myself.

7 Hakimu Saleh did not, however, belong to any Sufi brotherhood (tariqa) as far as I know (see Fujii 2010 on tariqas in Zanzibar).

8 I have, however, come across teachings on how to treat the Quran and questions about purity (see also Katz 2002).

9 I take the word “mysterious” from Hakimu Saleh who, in English, employed it in this context. See also Graham and Gilsenan who both note the inability of academic texts to capture this “miraculous source of the umma” (Gilsenan 1982, 16), its “religious meaning that may exist apart from rational, discursive meaning - and, indeed, apart from mystical or esoteric meaning as well” (Graham 1987, 112; Watts 2015). Furthermore, see Larsen (2019) who frames the authority of those knowledgeable in Islamic literature to their ability to tap into “hidden dimensions and mysticism.”

10 For a historical study of this solidification see Zadeh (2009, 466).

11 In fact, Watts speaks of three “dimensions” of scripture. However, I replace Watts’ term “dimension” with “aspect” since I will engage with “dimensions” in a different way below.

12 A few studies have already shown the merits of such an approach. See for example Thomas Kirsch (2011) for textual practices in a Zionist Church in southern Zambia. For a non-religious example see Matthew Hull (2012), who, similarly to Kirsch, shows how texts become meaningful not solely as constituting communication, but also as objects of palpable management of material text as that which is entangled with practices of authority.

13 This is of particular importance considering the commodification of printed copies. Suit states that “[f]rom an aesthetic perspective, a mass reproduced mus.h.af loses the aura of authenticity rooted in scholarship, calligraphy, and hand-production. But removing the same mus.h.af from these aesthetic concerns enhances the Qur’an’s authority with individual readers through multiplication” (Suit 2015, 198). With reference to Hakimu Saleh’s practices with such a printed msahafu, I find it rather remarkable how much this debate about the shift from handwriting to print is absent in contemporary practices in Zanzibar.

14 This line of thought could be developed further, including the entanglements with academia: As reader of this text, you are interested in the contents, ready to underline, highlight or place big question marks and critique in the margins. As reader of this text, you also consume the layout, typography, the whiteness of the paper or the brightness of your screen. You take into consideration how you received this text in the first place and which other texts it comes connected to. Focusing on the semantics, you do not only perform this text as part of a gigantic academic corpus of texts, but are affected by its iconicity.

15 Note how with kombe, the “oral” ingestion of the “textual” Qur’an provides a different understanding of the relation between “texts” and “orality.”

16 Although I focus on my fieldwork in Zanzibar, this liquid is prepared in many other regions. The name and the details of its preparation and use might differ, but writing and liquefying Qur’anic verses for ingestion appears to be as widespread as Islam. See for example Lambek (1993, 142), O’Connor (2004, 176), Flueckiger (2006), Lemons (2010), de Stoop (2011, 47, 60), or Tocco (2014, 131–132).

17 In Hakimu Saleh’s case, however, he uses various other textual practices to “materially cite” and solidify his situated authority as Islamic healer in his neighborhood.

18 Similarly, in her research about Islamic calligraphy, Alina Kokoschka engages with the “close connection in Islam between script and material objects, or things” (2019, 257). She is interested in how the line of Arabic script both forms and disguises legible words and how the delay in readability carries meaning beyond that which the words carry semantically.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hanna Nieber

Hanna Nieber is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is interested in how people live concepts and how this affects academic practice. Her PhD dissertation is an ethnography about the practice of drinking the written Qur’an in Zanzibar Town. Taking a material religion approach, she has investigated how text meets body and how this practice feeds into Muslim-Christian relations in Zanzibar. Currently, she is developing her new project on astronomy in Madagascar, asking about connectivities between sky and ground.

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