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" The Voice of God: History, Technology, and Authority in Morocco’s “Recitational Revival” "
VanderMeulen, Ian
Gilsenan, Michael
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1054957
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| Doc. No
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TL54074
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| Main Entry
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VanderMeulen, Ian
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| Title & Author
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The Voice of God: History, Technology, and Authority in Morocco’s “Recitational Revival”\ VanderMeulen, IanGilsenan, Michael
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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367 p.
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| Abstract
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Can humans reproduce God’s “voice”? This question, relevant for many religious adherents, is particularly pressing for those Muslims who regard the Qur’ān as the literal “Word of God,” revealed through the Prophet Muhammad. Muslim elites throughout history have thus relied on tajwīd, a system of phonetic rules governing the text’s vocal performance, to ensure consistency—sonically as much as semantically—with this divine origin. But variations in tajwīd application have been acknowledged from early on, and technological advances have further revolutionized who has access to this embodied knowledge. In Morocco, for example, transnational media circulations have stoked anxiety about a localized tajwīd variant known as riwāyat Warsh. The Moroccan state has thus responded by leveraging recordings, mass media, and new brick-and-mortar schools to promote adherence to this variant and “Moroccan” styles of pedagogy—part of what religious scholars call a “recitational revival” (ṣaḥwa tajwīdīyya). If reciting the Qur’ān is thought of as an individual act of reproducing God’s Word, how does this effort unfold under such political pressure? And how do particular media forms facilitate the consolidation—or contestation—of state power? The following study engages these questions both historically and comparatively across different media forms, drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic and archival research across sites in Morocco, France, and the U.S. Recognizing an affinity in the way classical Islamic discourses and media production practices think about the Qur’ān’s sonic reproduction, I posit a concept of recitational technics to engage the intertwining of embodied, vocal techniques; written and mechanical technologies of sound reproduction; and technical discourses that authorize action in both domains. The first two chapters utilize textual sources in Arabic and French to problematize the state’s “revival” narrative, arguing that “Moroccan” pedagogical approaches to tajwīd and the seven variant recitations (known as the qirā’āt) emerged out of shifts in textual production over several centuries, and the “technologization” of the human voice through reference to sound recording and new medical knowledge. The remaining chapters compare recitation pedagogy at three ethnographic field sites: Rabat-based a state-funded school for advanced studies in application of the seven qirā’āt; Qur’ānic studiesa Salé-based school for , working to digitally record a comprehensive performance of the qirā’āt; and tajwīd programs on state-controlled Qur’ānic radio. This interdisciplinary approach highlights a paradox at the heart of the contemporary revival. While technologies like sound recording in one sense build on longstanding Muslim efforts to preserve scholarly knowledge, the sonic intricacies of a discipline like tajwīd also acquire particular benefit from what I call the pedagogical affordances of newer media: the ability to listen back, repeat phrases, and edit existing recordings—all enhanced and made more accessible through digital formatting and mobile communication. I argue that such technological manipulation thus makes the perfect reproduction of God’s Word seem more imminent, but in doing so also posits new models of Qur’ānic “perfection” that are increasingly difficult for humans to match—a paradox that I link to a problem of latency in media production generally. In the final analysis, this latency allows for new modes of state intervention in religious life: faced with ideal models of God’s Voice that are increasingly unattainable, subjects defer this personal perfection in favor of a “voice of the state” enabled by wide media dissemination.
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Cultural anthropology
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Foreign language learning
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Mass communications
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Middle Eastern studies
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Religion
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Theology
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Gilsenan, Michael
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New York University
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