Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (review)

In this groundbreaking ethnography, Anne K. Rasmussen describes the contemporary role of women in the expressive and ritual culture of Indonesian Islam. Her compelling work broadens understandings of Muslim practices in the Islamicate world by considering how orality and aurality are embedded in pious practices and by engaging with the complexities of cultural relations between the Middle East and Indonesia. Rasmussen focuses on aurality in order to show how individuals and institutions have shaped the religious production of sound and soundscapes in Indonesia as dynamic, communal, and tolerant of diverse voices. She demonstrates how women embody, encode, and enact the sound of the recited Qur'an in ways that transmit knowledge of Islamic texts and aural experiences of the divine through female subjectivities. Rasmussen then contextualizes women's participation in these pious practices by suggesting how their involvement emerges from egalitarian gender relations that are deeply embedded in Indonesian society.

Rasmussen traces her interest in Qur'anic recitation to an encounter that prompted her to reconsider established perspectives on the exegesis of sound in Islamic contexts. In the late 1990s in Jakarta, she attended a "party for the recited Qur'an" that was "extraordinarily musical" (xiv). In Indonesia, the art of tilawa, a melodic and often virtuosic style of recitation known as mujawwad in Arabic, is often practiced alongside the Islamic musical arts, referred to as seni musik Islam in the Malay language. Noting that the simultaneous performance of these genres may be regarded as atypical, and perhaps impermissible, in other Islamic contexts, Rasmussen was inspired to map out the institutional contexts that foster the practice of tilawa in Indonesia: Islamic boarding schools, Islamic universities, and religious festivals and competitions that feature Qur'anic recitation.

Tilawa practice both departs from Arab recitation practices, which tend to adhere to Egyptian stylistic norms, and is modeled after classical Arab musical forms. Rasmussen argues that this paradox hinges on a productive tension between the global flow of Arab musical aesthetics and the processes of oral transmission by which these are localized. Aesthetic ideals of recitation are shaped by both the spontaneous yet precise elocution of Qur'anic prosody associated with the performance of tajwid and Indonesian constructs of tempo and meter associated with irama, or Javanese poetic meters. At a khatam al-Qur'an, a ritual event in which the Qur'an is recited as a collective oral performance by thirty qari'as (female reciters) in under an hour, a "tapestry of human voices" (83) produces heterogeneous textures of sound. The performance does not emerge from collective metricity and phrasing, such as that which produces group solidarity in Egyptian religious contexts, but rather from a "dense cacophony" (83) of disparate reciting tones that emphasizes the Javanese aesthetic of ramai, or "busy noisiness." During classes held at the Institut Ilmu al-Qur'an (IIQ), students imitate and repeat melodic fragments of Qur'anic text through didactic exercises that are modeled on Saudi modes of recitation rather than Egyptian melodic modes. Thus processes of oral transmission at once index the heterogeneity of Arab aesthetic influences and indigenize Arab aesthetics within Indonesian webs of meaning.

Through dynamic and reflexive ethnography, Rasmussen relates aesthetic distinctions between Arab and Indonesian practices of Qur'anic recitation to ethical values associated with women's vocal performance. She argues that women's voices embody that which is biasa saja, or unremarkable, rather than index loci that may be decreed aurat (shameful) according to certain Islamic edicts. Qari'as therefore shape a gendered sphere of public discourse that contributes to the egalitarianism associated with Indonesian Islam. Yet the final section of the book implicitly questions this egalitarianism through a compelling analysis of the double marginality of Islamic feminism beyond the Arab Middle East. Islamic feminists regard empowerment through Muslim practices as a form of cultural resistance to "state ibuism" (227), a coercive set of nationalist policies that promote the naturalization of female labor within the private sphere. One...