Review of Charles Hirschkind’s Ethical Soundscape

Excerpt

Before publication of the present volume, English-language scholarship on contemporary Muslim homily was restricted to an eclectic array of articles and books, most significantly among them Robert Gaffney’s The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (1994) and Richard Antoun’s The Muslim Preacher in the Modern World (1989). Drawn from the author’s field research in Cairo during the mid 1990s, The Ethical Soundscape provides a timely update to this important genre of Muslim expression. Hirschkind’s contribution is especially valuable not only for investigating the ways preachers have used the audiocassette medium in recent decades, but for assembling a masterful and complex argument for re-assessing the significance of listening for Muslim reformers and for scholars of modern Islam in particular. If post-colonial studies of modernity have helped situate rationalism and secularism historically, within the West, as well as cross-culturally, Hirschkind generatively extends such work by exploring the novel genre of the ‘cassette sermon’ in relation to discourses of virtue, pious fear (taqwa), and ethical activism (da`wa) among 20th and 21st Century Muslim reformers. …