The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco

Notes

143 Notes Introduction 1. The best-known and most studied Muslim association for daʿwa is the transnational Tablighi Jamaʿat—“tabligh,” meaning “communication” of God’s message. It has been used synonymously with “daʿwa” only in the twentieth century (Masud 2000, xxi). National Islamic political parties and their publications foregrounding daʿwa include the Algerian “People of the Call,” the Iraqi “Party of the Call,” and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s party newspaper (al-Daʿwa). “The call” is equally thematic in state-sponsored and private religious media: from the Nation of Islam’s Final Call, to radio broadcasts in Iran (The Call of Islam Radio) and Saudi Arabia (Nidaʾ al-Islam), to Egyptian satellite television preachers (“The New Callers” [duʿa al-judud]), to the Moroccan state-sponsored Islamic journal (Daʿwat al-Haq). On Muslim daʿwa organizations more broadly, see Masud 2000 and Racius 2004. 2. In some ways Mahmood’s emphasis on Muslim embodiment has worked against this interpretation . Mahmood’s work, while drawing on theories of performative enactment, emphasizes piety as submission to and reproduction of Islamic norms. It is also clear that part of the practice entails refusing to enact and reproduce the norms of “secular” Egyptian society. Islamic daʿwa acts to oppose this all-encompassing call and therefore indeed involves efforts to disrupt dominant structures . In denying ritual as a signifying practice and eliding revivalists’ disruption of other dominant (that is, secular Egyptian) practices of signification, she effectively idealizes the interior effects of practice at the expense of its significance as communicative act, whether the subject intends it to be or not. See Hafez 2011 and P. Anderson 2011, for critiques of Mahmood’s de-emphasis of social and cultural conditions. 3. For some Cairene callers, it seems secular culture and capitalism summons; in South Asia and Nigeria, Christian proselytizers summon (Masud 2000; Larkin 2008, 2012); in Niger, Sudan, and Morocco, spirits summon otherwise pious Muslims into states of irresponsibility and idolatrous ritual expenditure (Soares 2007; Masquelier 2009). Indeed, in Niger and Nigeria, the predominant reformist movement izala—Jamʿat izalat al-bidaʿ wa iqamat al-sunna—explicitly aims to “remove” Sufi innovations (izalat al-bidaʿ) as the basis for reestablishing proper Islam (iqamat al-sunna). 4. According to the modernist Al-Azhar University scholar Mahmud Shaltut, “Thanks to radio broadcasting it became possible for the ritual practices of the people, their contractual affairs, and the customs and traditions to which they adhere to be in accord with God’s principles” (Messick 1996, 310). 5. For media scholars with this expansive view of media, including scholars of religion and media, see Morris 2000; and the collections of DeVries and Weber 2001; Meyer and Moors 2006; and Behrend, Dreschke, and Zillinger 2013. Of these, Rosalind C. Morris’s (2000) pioneering work on spirit mediumship and mass mediation in Thailand, in particular, has sparked an expanding critical discussion of intersections of corporeal ritual media and its technological extensions. Following Morris, such conjunctures are “increasingly taken as the starting point by scholars of religion to think about religious mediation in the age of globalization, mass media, and the circulation of socalled small media” (Zillinger 2010, 224). See also Mazzarella 2004. 6. The traditional biographies of Muhammad record his first revelation as Qurʾan 96, which begins: In the Name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate 144 | Notes to Pages 5–14 Recite! Recite! In the name of your Lord who created Created humankind from a blood clot. Recite, for your Lord is the most kind, Who taught by the pen, Taught humankind what it did not know. (Qurʾan 96:1–5) 7. On a small scale, classical Islamic jurists, like Christian clergy, took the sound of the call (or church bells) and the distance it traveled as a simple delineation of community. To hear the call from the mosque defined the pious Muslim as physically present and thus literally responsible to Islamic duty and community. Baber Johansen cites the nineteenth-century Damascene faqih Ibn Abidin’s list of nine Hanafi definitions: “7. the distance at which the voice of the Muezzin can be heard; 8. the distance at which a voice can be heard” (Johansen 1999, 93–94n6). On a large scale, the domain of the Muslim umma (the dar al-Islam) is defined by the political limits imposed on God’s call to humankind. 8. The power and authority of one medium or another classically focused on the relationship between writing...