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ABSTRACT
This article proposes ways how to access emotions in Islamic preaching. Conceptually, it brings together the often-juxtaposed spheres of body and mind; nature and culture; aesthetics and religion. Based on extensive research on Islamic sermons in Bangladesh between 2012 and 2015, it stresses the form of public speech as the means to access the emotional potentials of oratory. It argues that a focus on emotions allows us to gain a deeper understanding of Islam as an aesthetic and political formation while at the same time emphasizing processes over static ideas of identity and complicating ideas of political participation. Sermons offer listeners emotionalized roles that are not reducible to state or party narratives and reorient the relationship to nationalism as much as other parts of subjectivities, such as masculinity, sense of justice, or imaginations of the future. The article shows how these debates can be linked to emotions engrained in the vocal qualities of Islamic preaching. To make this argument, it intervenes in debates about the concepts of emotions and affects. It furthermore stresses the role of humour in making emotional potentials transcend a private or literary sphere rather than, as has been done in previous literature, a merely relaxing aspect of oratory. From this perspective, Islamic preaching gatherings evolve as communicative practices that crucially shape configurations of community, extends of the political, and gendered subjectivities.
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Notes
1. Hansen, “Passionate refrains”; and Orsini, Love in South Asia.
2. For a good summary on discussions of the Public Sphere, see Ingram, Scott, and Tareen, Imagining the Public; for a rare case of analysing political rhetoric, see Bajpai, Speaking the Nation.
3. Minault, The Khilafat Movement; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics.
4. For a study of how literary idioms can assume political valence, see Bate, Tamil Oratory.
5. On sermons in general, see Cummins and Stille, “Religious Emotions.”
6. For more details and examples that take more space than an article, kindly refer to Stille, Islamic Sermons.
7. For Bengal, see Ahmed, “Muslim-Christian Polemics.”
8. Cf., e.g., Gould, Hindu Nationalism, chapter 2.
9. Bhadra, “The Mentality of Subalternity,” 61.
10. See ibid., 62.
11. Sen, History of Bengali Language, 589–90.
12. Bhadra, “The Performer,” 249.
13. A similar dearth even holds true for scholarship on South Asia as a whole, despite the region being home to roughly one third of the world’s Muslim population. For some exceptions that however hardly focus on sermons specifically, see Jones, Shi’a Islam; and Howarth, The Twelver Shî’a, for Shiite sermons; and Mian, “Surviving Modernity”; and Ghose, “Politics for Faith,” for Sunni sermons.
14. Huq, “Women’s religious discussion.”
15. Huq, “The Politics of Belief; and Huq, “Reading the Qur’an.”
16. For an overview of genres in Bangladesh, see Stille, “Islamic Non-Friday Sermons.” For the emotions in the Urdu sermons of an important preacher, who remains hugely influential in Bangladesh as well, see Pernau and Stille, “Obedient passion.”
17. Chowdhury, Paradoxes; Butler, Notes.
18. Quoted, e.g., in Khan, “Ahˡmed Chaphā.”
19. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism.
20. Abiśwāś, “Oẏāj māhˡphiler.”
21. Jones, The Power of Oratory, 243.
22. Ibid., 107.
23. Ibid., 244.
24. Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.
25. Qutbuddin, “Khuṭba.”
26. Qutbuddin, “A Sermon on Piety.”
27. Next to Hirschkind, see, for example, Khan, “The Acoustics of Muslim Striving.”
28. See the introduction for references such as Abu-Lughod and Lutz, Language; and Frevert, Emotions in History.
29. For South Asia, see for example Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue; Orsini, Love in South Asia; and the following special issues: Pernau, “Emotion Concepts”; Pernau, “Feeling Communities”; and Chatterjee, Krishnan, and Robb, “Feeling Modern.”
30. For a critique of affect theory, see Leys, “The Turn to Affect.”
31. Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam.
32. Stille, “Between the Numinous.”
33. On the dimension of multilingualism, see Stille, “Communities of Code-switching.”
34. Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014.
35. Stille, “Conceptualizing Compassion.”
36. See Bhadra, “The Performer,” 251.
37. Fish, “Literature in the Reader”; and Iser, The Act of Reading.
38. For a detailed analysis of an exemplary passage with charts explicating the correspondences between rhetorical and musical structures, see Petievich and Stille, “Emotions in performance,” 86–97.
39. Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call.
40. Ibid., 54–58.
41. It seems that Millie underestimates the affective semantics of the translated Arabic text.
42. The excellent work of Patrick Gaffney also relies on a similar association of affect with the familiar and homely, see Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit.
43. Stille, “Dialectics of (De)Mobilisation.”
44. Stille, “Sufism in Bengali wa’z mahfils.”
45. See note 43 above.
46. Ahmed, What Is Islam? 103.
47. Ibid., 200.
48. Ibid., 304.
49. Ibid., 285.
50. The scholar most comprehensively asking about interfaces of different media and even within these is Lotte Hoek. See, for example, Hoek, Cut-pieces.