Loudspeaker Effects on Prayer: Ulama Discussions of the 1950s

In Alat-e Jadida ke Shari'i Ahkam (The orders of the Shari'a on modern inventions) (1996), the well-known Pakistani theologian Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi (1897–1976) informs us that the question of whether it was correct to use loudspeakers, or mukkabir-e sawt (literally, instruments that amplify sound), in prayer was first posed by South Asian pilgrims returning from the hajj (pilgrimage) in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. During that period the Saudi Arabian government had begun to use loudspeakers to announce the azan and broadcast the instructions of the imam to the millions of hajjis (pilgrims) gathered there.Footnote ⁴ Pilgrims concerned about the validity of their prayers asked the ulama of their home countries whether use of such technology was permissible according to the shari'a.Footnote ⁵ Their inquiries initiated a volley of fatwas by the ulama in Pakistan that spanned a decade, but also drew upon earlier individual fatwas on the topic issued by famous ulama such as Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi.Footnote ⁶ Muhammad Shafi's book tried to be the decisive word on the topic.Footnote ⁷

Typically, on such occasions as the Friday prayer, the imam shouted instructions to the congregation. If the congregation was very large, a few were selected to transmit the imam's instructions down the lines. Placing a loudspeaker close to the imam ensured that everyone could hear his instructions and obviated the need for such human transmitters (muqabbirin). The first, most important concern raised regarding loudspeakers was about the status of the voice that came over them. While the religious instructions on prayer clearly indicated that one could only be lead in prayer by someone who was mature and of sound mind, the possibility that the voice over a loudspeaker might not be the original human voice raised the worry that one was taking the lead of a machine over a human, which was unacceptable. Mufti Muhammad Shafi recounts, “In the early stage we had declared the loudspeaker unlawful because at that time we were not sure whether the voice coming over it was the original voice or its duplicate.”Footnote ⁸ In an interesting hint of the authoritativeness of scientific knowledge in settling theological issues, this matter was first resolved on the basis of scientific studies that asserted that the voice over the loudspeaker was the original.Footnote ⁹ Later, the matter was once again thrown open when another alim (scholar) circulated a scientific article that showed how the voice over a loudspeaker was phonetically different from the original.

A variation of this concern was the question of whether the duplicate was similar to an interjection from outside. Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, a famous Deobandi scholar, referred to it as a luqma (literally “a morsel”), which would compromise the integrity of prayer because it would be as though an agent external to the prayer was leading it.Footnote ¹⁰ Or was the sound over a loudspeaker an echo (sada-e bazgasht)? This was the contention of the Deobandi scholar Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi, who ascertained that a loudspeaker transmitted sound through the collision and concatenation of sound signals and the production of echo effects.Footnote ¹¹ If so, then the consciousness, purposiveness, and directionality of the imam's instructions stood to be significantly compromised.

These were all serious challenges, and Mufti Muhammad Shafi considered each in turn. He provided a litany of the second-order “harms and evils of the use of the loudspeaker in namaz (prayer).” These may be grouped into its effects on the correct sequence of prayer, and on the state of mind necessary for prayer. He claimed to have observed several instances when chaos broke out in prayer when a loudspeaker failed. Not only was this situation deplorable since it made the prayer worthless and necessary to repeat, but it also indicated the danger of devotees relying excessively upon technological props to aid their practice. Such reliance further suggested that devotees were less-than-actively present in prayer, since they had to be alert to making necessary adjustments to ensure that prayer continued despite extenuating circumstances.

The second significant objection that Mufti Muhammad Shafi raised against imams' using loudspeakers was that it reduced the state of humility (khushu o khuzu) vital for prayer. He fretted that imams would compromise prayer due to their concerns for the quality of the sound reverberating throughout the mosque and the need to position themselves so the microphone could best catch their voices. The humility of worshippers would also be jeopardized since they would have to cast their mind outside of their prayer to determine which broadcasted instructions were coming from the imam of their mosque, to follow a single thread of instructions through intermingling stereo effects:

While Muslims have long been concerned with maintaining proper concentration in prayer (Parkin and Headley Reference Parkin and Headley2000; Bowen Reference Bowen1993), the loudspeaker's introduction magnified the challenge considerably.

This matter was resolved temporarily by Muhammad Shafi's warning that, due to the objections of some ulama, it was preferable to avoid loudspeaker use in prayer and revert to human transmitters. However, he said, given the ambiguity that still attended the voice over a loudspeaker, that is, that it could well be the original human voice, and the beneficial service rendered by loudspeakers in broadcasting those pious sounds that Muslims were enjoined to listen to—such as the azan, tilawat (Qur'anic recitation), and sermon—prayer conducted over a loudspeaker was valid and did not need to be done over. We see a hint of Muhammad Shafi's dissatisfaction with this resolution in his parting word that if further research gave more insight into the status of the voice over the loudspeaker, then the question would be revisited. In leaving the matter unresolved, he left open the possibility that the sound heard over a loudspeaker might not be imbued with human presence.

This dialogue has continued into the present in fatwas issued in various religious seminaries, posters on mosque walls, and polemical booklets in wide circulation in Pakistan. In it we see a consideration of the effects associated with the loudspeaker outlined in Murray Schafer's Reference Schafer1977 classic, The Tuning of the World. This work provides useful terms by which to analyze the material effects of loudspeakers upon sound. Schafer's preferred terms are: transduction, amplification, multiplication, interference/noise, and schizophonia. Transduction refers to the loudspeaker's conversion of electrical signals into acoustical signals or sound, and the work of loudspeakers is the amplification of sound. A crucial aspect of Schafer's project was to show the multiplication of sounds to which the proliferation of loudspeakers contributes. The loudspeaker also introduces interference or unwanted sounds in the form of hums and hisses. The overall sound that a loudspeaker produces may also be perceived as noise, depending on the recipient. Finally, in line with his attempt to show that the modern soundscape with its high concentration of sounds produces cognitive dissonance, Schafer developed the concept of schizophonia: “Original sounds are tied to the mechanisms which produce them. Electroacoustic sounds are copies and they may be reproduced at other times or places. Schafer employs this ‘nervous’ word [schizophonia] in order to dramatize the aberrational effect of this twentieth-century development” (Truax Reference Truax1999).Footnote ¹²

The discussions of the ulama I have just sketched are best characterized as a long deliberation on schizophonia, or the loss of bearing associated with the separation of a sound from its source. I found a striking example of this loss of bearing in a fatwa in Kaifiyat-ul Mufti, another classic collection of Deobandi fatwas by Maulana Kifayatullah Dehlavi of India, in print in Pakistan (Dehlavi Reference Dehlavi1972). Under the section on the azan, the mufti (religious legal scholar) was asked whether a blind man bombarded with azans from mosques near and far was obligated to go to the mosque whose azan reached him most clearly, but which was a great deal farther away than his neighborhood mosque, whose azan he could not hear. While the mufti's response was that the disabled should do what was easiest for them, one gets a vivid sense of how the sound projected over the loudspeaker can disrupt depth perception. Furthermore, the amplification and multiplication of sounds associated with loudspeakers, while beneficial in the case of the azan, Qur'anic recitation, and sermon, were considered to undermine prayer. Transduction, or the transformation of electrical to acoustical energy, raised the gravest anxieties since it produced questions about the humanness of the sound heard. In this instance, interference/noise internal to a loudspeaker could be seen as a further obliteration of human presence or, worse, intervention from an external mechanical agent. Thus, the loudspeaker stood to compromise the significance attributed to human presence, which informs Muslim relations to their textual tradition (Messick Reference Messick1993).

Prefiguring the Loudspeaker: The Colonial Politics of the Azan in the 1920s

In the deliberations of the ulama we see a constant concern with the material effects of the loudspeaker and their theological entailments. Before we consider how these entailments ramify in political and religious life in postcolonial Pakistan, let us consider how the sounds associated with ritual, specifically the azan, came into public focus as noise that could be disciplined by authorities in colonial India. The colonial-era fears concerning ritual sounds provide a useful prefiguration of the ulama's concerns about the loudspeaker.

It is noteworthy that in colonial India the azan was never a blanket sound to be regulated as unwarranted noise. It was by and large unregulated because the call to prayer did not fall under the rubric of “religious insult,” a concept that colonial authorities employed to try to regulate contentious relations between Hindu and Muslim communities. If the azan was controlled, it was mostly in local settings where the contending parties seemed all too knowledgeable about the inner workings of the azan.

A comparison with colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) will elucidate the different approaches the British government employed toward sounds in ritual practice, reflecting the differential intensities of communal politics in India and Ceylon. Writing about British rule in Ceylon, Michael Roberts says, “The control of unacceptable forms of noise was an integral dimension of the British regime, as pertinent as the control of crime and disease” (Reference Roberts and Das1990: 175). The Police Ordinance of 1865 helped the British to classify as noise sounds central to ritual, such as tom toming in Buddhist practices, and to impose institutional constraints upon such noise. Muslims in Ceylon took Buddhists to court for violating the tom toming laws. Roberts described the Buddhist response: “There seems to be little doubt that, severely disadvantaged as they [the Buddhists] were by the Police Ordinance, some Buddhist parties deliberately indulged in intensive sabda puja [worship by chanting] in front of offending churches or mosques in order to insult the Catholics or Muslims. At these moments, sabda puja became noise rather than puja” (ibid.: 168). The demand for bureaucratic uniformity required that different sounds be arbitrarily grouped together, Qur'anic recitation with Buddhist tom toming, for instance (ibid.: 166). In this way, sounds from different traditions were held to a single standard of acceptability.

The context of colonial India demanded a different handling of the problem. Rather than isolate ritual sounds, the British created a broader category of offenses called “religious insults” (Thursby Reference Thursby1975). Grouped under this rubric were acts as diverse as hate speech, music played before mosques during prayers, desecration of places of worship, and in some cases, Muslim sacrifice of cows considered sacred to Hindus. This led to a diverse range of legal measures more far-reaching than Ceylon's Police Ordinance. These included press and publication acts, public safety ordinances, and judgments that addressed specific sources of conflict, such as “music before mosques” or “cow sacrifice,” to adjudicate contentious relations between religious communities, recast as the problem of “communalism” (Pandey Reference Pandey1990).

Although the azan was rarely entangled in such colonial measures to regulate space and speech, we can examine the few instances in which it was in order to understand who was regulating its sound levels, in reaction to what perceived threats. One representative example is found in the Punjab Legislative Assembly proceedings. In 1938, Member Malik Barkat Ali of the Punjab Assembly posed the following question:

He was furnished with the following response by “Government”:

In this example, we see how the regulation of the azan was largely determined by local perceptions of what constituted the “public” and “proper” calling of the azan in “a low voice.” The case points to the nature of the enmity amongst Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in that it suggests a deep familiarity with one another's religious practices, which let them fashion effective blows against one another.

Other examples of this intimate enmity can be found in more common instances of violence among the communities, such as that sparked by the aforementioned “music before mosques” or “cow sacrifice.” Although local demographics and politics were key factors in violence between communities (Tejani Reference Tejani2007), there also emerged a complex of interrelated communal issues that proved capable of moving across large territories and settling upon specific sites and locales. This complex exuded an existential fabric which, when cast over a setting, made intolerable previous conditions of daily co-existence. Issues such as “music before mosques” and “cow sacrifice” were constitutive elements (Datta Reference Datta1999). Datta writes of instances in which Hindu processions passing by mosques during prayer times were not viewed as particularly disruptive because many Muslim musicians participated in them. However, once the issue of “music before mosques” took root, all sounds before mosques became intolerable and could spark violence. Conversely, while Hindus may have cast a blind eye to sacrifices of cows by Muslims and others in the past, once sacrifice acquired its communal meanings it became impossible to tolerate its continuation under any circumstances. These antagonisms had a knowing feel to them; antagonists knew what was meaningful for the other and what was most likely to hurt or provoke (ibid.).

When Sikhs sought to have the azan subdued in their neighborhoods, they may have done so with full knowledge that it was not intended simply to inform Muslims of the time for prayer, but also to deal death to what Muslims perceived to be idolatry and to invite non-Muslims to Islam (Hashmi Reference Hashmi1999). In his memoirs, Shahabnama (Reference Shahab2005), Qudratullah Shahab, a respected Urdu writer in Pakistan and a high ranking civil servant during President Ayub Khan's era, recounts an occasion from his boyhood in a rural village in Kashmir on which he immobilized a spy and possible telltale who saw him duck out of school by chasing after him while calling out the azan. The spy retreated in terror with his hands clasped over his ears, which suggested to Shahab that he conceded the azan's power to create havoc in the constitution of a non-Muslim.

Shahab writes that, in the 1920s, Muslim daily practices such as calling the azan were newly ascendant due to the efforts of roaming preachers working to reform Muslims who lived lives indistinguishable from non-Muslim neighbors. He hints that it was through the reactions of non-Muslims to such emergent practices that Indian Muslims came to understand the powers latent in them. It is no little irony that it was in Muslims' relations with those from whom they sought to differentiate themselves that they came to appreciate the force of the divine in the azan, a force non-Muslims could only regulate by treating the azan as noise that had to be produced in a moderate tone.

The 1965 Ordinance Regulating Loudspeakers: The Postcolonial Search for Political Voice

In postcolonial Pakistan, this innate forcefulness attributed to the azan and other ritual sounds was thrown into question for the ulama by the introduction of the loudspeaker, with its attendant effects of transduction, amplification, multiplication, interference, and schizophonia. These disruptive effects did not impinge only on the divine within sounds, but also provoked regulations of loudspeaker use in the domain of politics, and these carried ramifications for everyday religiosity as understood by leaders of religious political parties.

As we saw for the colonial period, while the azan was rarely treated as noise, the concept of noise as something that required regulation was already present. As unwanted sound in the context of nationalist movements and communal tensions, noise carried political connotations. That is to say, colonial authorities wielded the power to regulate noise in order to stifle political voices, or offset communal antagonisms. The power to regulate noise became a prominent means of deterring political expression.

In 1956 the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army, Ayub Khan, took over the leadership of Pakistan through a military coup. By 1964, he had implemented a constitution that favored a presidential form of government and overhauled the electoral process. In 1965, confident of his success, Ayub Khan called for presidential elections. To his surprise, he found the opposition parties had entered into an agreement to put forward a single candidate, Fatima Jinnah, whose candidacy carried great emotional charge among Pakistanis because she was the sister of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Ayub's regime had already placed strong curbs on the press through its 1960 amendments to the Press and Publication Ordinance. At this opportune moment, the government tried to instate an ordinance to regulate loudspeaker usage on grounds that it was spreading and amplifying sound without check, and thus contributing to noise pollution.

One of the earliest attempts to pass “The Punjab Regulation and Control of Loudspeakers and Sound Amplifiers Ordinance” was in 1963. It stated that those wanting to use speakers had first to secure permission from the district commissioner. The ordinance was challenged in the Lahore High Court through writ petition and struck down as unconstitutional. The court explained that since the loudspeaker was generally used to communicate one's ideas to a voluntarily assembled crowd, any attempt by the government to control its use would amount to censorship and violate the right of free speech upheld by the Constitution of Pakistan. The government tried to pass a second, very similar ordinance in 1964, but it too was challenged in the High Court and the government withdrew it before judgment could be passed.

In 1965, the Ministry of Law introduced a differently worded ordinance. Under its terms, use of loudspeakers did not require the district commissioner's permission, but in the event of any public complaints against specific instances of their use, the police were authorized to confiscate the equipment and file charges against the offenders. This ordinance was successfully passed in the Punjab Provincial Assembly amidst angry protests by the opposition, comprised of the Muslim League, the National Awami League, and the religious party Jamaat-e Islami (Punjab 1966).

The protestors saw this ordinance to be politically motivated. The debate in the assembly ran along two opposing tracks. Those in the opposition parties took apart the ordinance for being vaguely worded. What was meant by “moderate tone?” How was moderateness to be determined, and by whom? They vigorously protested giving the police force such broad legal powers to confiscate loudspeakers. To give them an authority previously reserved for the district commissioner would delegate surveillance to local levels of the bureaucracy that were considered more corrupt, and encourage the rampant misuse of power. Furthermore, members of the Jamaat-e Islami were incensed to find that the standard of moderate tone was extended beyond political rallies and private functions to include any religious speech other than the khutba (Arabic sermons) delivered at the time of the Friday congregational prayer. This was considered disgraceful since it would deprive the public of the benefits of learning from such speeches. So while the opposition conceded that there were instances of loudspeaker misuse, they asserted that for the government to muffle the speech of millions, or deprive them of the benefits of technological advances, was unwarranted.

Supporters of the ordinance argued that it was well phrased, for everyone knew that moderate tone meant that one ought not to speak in a high volume that would disturb others, nor use speech to hurt the feelings of others. Thus moderateness was understood both literally and metaphorically. While conceding to the opposition that political voice was also at stake, supporters contended that, given the religious diversity of the country, it was appropriate to impose a standard of moderateness on religious speeches. They reminded the assembly that the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, such as that of speech, had recently been qualified by the Supreme Court as restrained by “public decency” and “morality.” At any rate, they assured their opponents, those aspects of obligatory worship for which loudspeakers were required were not to be subject to restrictions, since, to quote the 1965 ordinance, “Nothing in this section shall be applicable to the use of loudspeakers or sound amplifiers for the purpose of Azan, prayers, or of Khutba delivered on Fridays or at the time of Eid prayers in a moderate tone.”

Restrictions upon loudspeakers were extended to those aspects of religious and political life, such as rallies and speeches delivered in mosques, which fell outside a strict definition of daily religious obligations. Thus the ordinance took a very narrow view of what constituted religiosity. For the opponents of this ordinance, the restrictions on sound amplification could only mean further encroachment by the government into politics, and it deprived the polity of their voice. No one was surprised when Ayub Khan overwhelmingly won the 1965 presidential elections.

Loudspeaker Broadcast of Sectarian Difference: A Natural History of Muslim Fragmentation

It is noteworthy that the 1965 Loudspeaker Ordinance exempted sounds very explicitly associated with ritual practice, such as the azan, prayer instructions, and khutba. Despite the fears of religious leaders in the Punjab Provincial Assembly, the ordinance was only loosely applied in the case of religious speeches. The consequence of this has been a soundscape skewed towards religious sounds and speeches. If this meant that the polity was not entirely deprived of a political voice or the benefits of religious speech, the relatively free use of loudspeakers that resulted brought a new set of anxieties about the loss of religious unity.

Those members of the Punjab Assembly who argued for the regulation of the use of loudspeakers usage pointed to the fact that they would multiply sounds and broadcast religious differences, aggravating divisiveness. Many elderly people with whom I spoke about the changes they had experienced in the soundscape of Lahore mentioned that they first became aware of differences amongst Muslims once the azan began to be delivered over loudspeakers. Variations within the azan seemed to multiply as the number of mosques increased within the city, with differences in both their appearance and the sounds issuing from them. For instance, a highly decorative mosque with “Ya Allah,” “Ya Muhammad” written in calligraphic style on its façade was identified as being Barelwi, a second pathway within Sunni Islam in Pakistan different from the Deobandi.Footnote ¹³ “Ya,” used in Arabic to address someone who is physically present, in this context signaled that both Allah and his Prophet were present in the world around us, particularly in the space encased by the mosque. This expressed the Barelwi point of view that the spirit of the Prophet, as well as the spirits of other prophets and holy men, oversaw and guided the lives of ordinary people. Deobandi mosques, by contrast, were conspicuous in their lack of ornamentation and the absence of such first-person greetings. This was in keeping with the Deobandi mandate to subject customary and ritual practices to authentication, that is, origination in the Prophet's time with his approval. Anything in excess of what was the Prophet had approved was deemed bid'a (unlawful innovation).

Excess and its lack, decoratively wrought, were expressed aurally as well. The azan from Barelwi mosques started with the durud (prayer dedicated to the Prophet) and sometimes ended with loud zikr (repetition of Allah's names) and na't (poetry in praise of the Prophet). The azan from Deobandi mosques, as well as those associated with the Ahl-i Hadis, a third pathway within Sunni Islam in Pakistan, were notable for the absence of durud, zikr, or na't. “Only” the azan was called from these mosques. I put “only” in quotation marks because an azan was increasingly recognized by its adornment or lack thereof.Footnote ¹⁴

These variations in the calling of the azan prompted polemics from religious scholars of different pathways. Let me briefly outline one such tract by a mufti named Abdul Sattar, titled “Bilali Azan ya Bid'ati Azan” (Bilali azan or azan with innovations), which was enclosed, undated, in a file on loudspeaker usage in the district commissioner's office. The inclusion of this tract within this particular file is important since it suggests the government was either concerned that its tone might aggravate public sentiment or relied upon it for intelligence purposes. While the tract was not particularly harsh, it did provide an interesting theory of the fragmentation of the Muslim community in that Mufti Abdul Sattar portrayed difference, once introduced, as naturally leading to further differences. Although the loudspeaker was not blamed for originating sectarian difference, it was implicated as a powerful force behind advertising these differences and congealing them into established practices.

Mufti Abdul Sattar was undoubtedly a Deobandi scholar given his criticisms of the additions of durud, zikr, and na't to the azan, which were generally acceptable to Barelwi ulama. He tells us that the original azan, the one revealed by the angels, taught by the Prophet, called by Hazrat Bilal, and followed by all the rightful successors of the Prophet, started with “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar” and ended with “La Ilaha Illallah.” That is, it neither began with the durud nor ended with zikr. “An emperor of the eighth century, a worshipper of love,” by whom the author mockingly referred to those who professed passionate love for the Prophet in the manner of the Barelwi, “introduced the saying of the durud in praise of the Prophet in the azan.” Once introduced, this innovation, albeit motivated by the purest of intentions, produced the possibility of two kinds of azan, and thus laid the foundation for sectarian difference. In time, the mufti continued, the use of loudspeakers spread these differences, and now this practice had become so entrenched that, “No Muslim may call the real, Bilali azan in the mosques of the innovators for fear of losing his life.” This doleful proclamation suggested the heightened tensions around ritual differences in everyday life in Pakistan.

The mufti tried to end on a reassuring note, saying that a circular distributed in government offices and institutions by President Zia-ul Haq in the 1980s on the correct manner of saying the azan seemed a noteworthy attempt to purify practice. Among other measures President Zia instituted to Islamize Pakistani society was the transmission of the azan over television and radio,Footnote ¹⁵ but this only added to the differentiation in azans by introducing the notion of national styles. Thus, azans over the television came to be identified as “Saudi azan,” “Misri azan” (Egyptian azan), or “Pakistani azan.”Footnote ¹⁶ Mufti Abdul Sattar's insight, that any effort to stay the course of difference only produced further differentiation, led him to decry the loss of the spirit of Islam within religious practices:

He used his discussion of the multiplication of sounds over the loudspeaker as an occasion to bemoan the disintegration of the Muslim community in Pakistan, or rather the failure to unify into one.

Everyday Experiences of the Azan: The Ambiguity of Self-Possession

In the late 1990s, while investigating how people experienced the sounds from mosque loudspeakers, I encountered a variety of lively reactions from Lahori Muslims. Some found the call to prayer fundamental to marking space as Muslim. One upper-middle-class Pakistani woman spoke of feeling disoriented during a diplomatic visit to Tibet until she heard the azan over a loudspeaker. She immediately relaxed, imagining those with whom she might identify living nearby. Another middle-class family in Lahore, whose house abutted a mosque, did not agree that the sound over loudspeakers felt shorn of human presence. Rather, in their experience, the voice of the imam so saturated this sound that they said they could almost feel flecks of his phlegm upon them.

Those who lived in denser, poorer neighborhoods in the city were subject to a wider variety and higher volumes of sounds than were those in Lahore's spacious suburbs. Here too, I heard of an interesting range of experiences of the azan. A close friend of mine, somewhat less observant than he would like to be, spoke of waking once to the thunderous sounds of multiple morning azans with his heart beating fast and his mind scrambling to catch up to his body. In the second before he realized what was happening, he felt as if he were in the darkest grave, with angels delivering to him the baleful news of God's unfavorable judgment of him. “If this experience doesn't set me straight,” he said, “nothing will.” He began working hard to be more observant.

In another instance, Farooq sahib, my pious Urdu teacher, told me that on the days the azan did not wake him or his family from their sleep he felt excused from the missed prayer since he thought that the onus for awaking him lay with the azan. Missing prayer under such heightened auditory circumstances could only mean that he and his family were more tired than usual and were meant to keep sleeping. Their sleep was a boon from Allah.

Nonetheless, pious sounds that were free to issue from anywhere in volumes far in excess of what was healthy for the human body produced uncertainty as to how one ought to respond to them. I sensed this anxiety that the azan over loudspeakers may be confounded with noise when I spoke with a doctor of environmental science who conducted studies on noise pollution for the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency. This expert said that when she went out in her van to take readings of sound levels in different parts of Lahore at different times of day, she was careful to turn off the meters when the azan was broadcast from mosques. She said this was because it was inappropriate for a Muslim to consider the azan noise. She added that if the meters were left on, their readings would be off the charts. The volume at which the azan was called would exceed the scientific standards for safe sound levels set by the World Health Organization.

The doctor was expressing anxiety that the azan might be inadvertently recorded as noise by a machine that could not distinguish between meaningful sound and noise like that of ambient traffic. To me, her anxiety spoke to the ulama's concerns with schizophonia as the disorientation introduced by the loudspeaker within worship, but it was different in that it suggested that a distracted condition not conducive to worship might no longer be restricted to prayer time; it had become a generalized condition. Having learned to tolerate pervasive noise, the pious Muslim may become like her machine, unable to distinguish pious sound from an unpleasant noise. The doctor's anxiety spoke to the worry that people may no longer have the self-awareness or the full possession of a self to strive to be better Muslims.Footnote ¹⁷

The Azan and the Lingering Question of Human Presence

In the introduction to his book Faza'il-e Azan o Iqamat (Virtues of azan and iqamat) (1999), Habibur Rehman Hashmi, an imam of the mosque of the reputed Nishtar Medical College in Multan, Punjab, says that he wrote the book for the young medical students in his college who confessed to him that they were too embarrassed to give the azan before saying their prayers while traveling abroad to sit for their certification examinations. The book attempted to redress this embarrassment about calling the azan by describing the world called into being by it. He urged that all Pakistanis read his book so that they could restore the azan to its unique place of importance within Muslim lives.

Insofar as Hashmi's descriptions of the power of the azan are saturated with an awareness of the existence and ubiquity of the loudspeaker and its effects upon ritual practice, I read his book as a possible rejoinder to people's aforementioned disappointments with their efforts to be Muslim in Pakistan. It reasserted the power of ritual sound above that of mechanical amplification, specifically in how the trace of the divine within the azan can attend to the dispossession of the self and the disintegration of the community that amplification has brought into awareness, perhaps into existence. The author's sense of the carrying power of the azan was arguably a consequence of loudspeaker usage in its amplification of pious sounds. Yet, in considering how the azan came to interpellate others, the author suggested the azan's power exclusively as sound.Footnote ¹⁸ In other words, he read the acoustic quality of the azan back upon the textual traditions.

Hashmi relied upon modern geography to suggest that the azan never ceased to sound as it roped its way around the world's longitudes and latitudes. In an excerpt titled, “The Voice that Reverberates around the World at All Times,” he wrote that just as the azan ceased in one city it began in another, moving from country to country on its continuous path: “Have you ever realized that not a second passes in our world without thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of muezzins announcing the singularity of Allah and the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace be upon Him)” (1999).

Yet, Hashmi said, even as the azan traveled it remained embedded in the local, specifically within the concerns of neighborhoods and nations. He recounted Ibn-Sirin's thirteenth-century text on the Islamic interpretations of dreams, in which the dreamer giving the azan was crucial to the dream's importance. If one heard an azan or saw oneself giving an azan in a known place, then one was destined to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. If the dreamer saw himself delivering the azan while lying on his bed, it meant that he loved his wife a great deal. If he saw himself give the azan in a narrow street, he would be a spy. If he saw himself giving the azan without his wits about him, he was lovelorn. If an impious man saw himself giving the azan, he should consider himself forewarned that he would be caught in the act of stealing. Should a person see himself give the azan in his toilet, he would become a munafiq (hypocrite to his faith). If he saw himself giving the azan from a mountaintop, his king or leader would speak the truth and be led toward God. Even as the azan brooked no opposition in traversing space, it was simultaneously caught in the filaments of marital fidelity, passionate love, neighborhood loyalty, and national sentiments. Interesting in this account of azans in dreams is that the actual words of the call and their effects upon its listeners—which Hashmi provided an eloquent account of elsewhere in the book—were rendered unimportant. The key was the specific locale in which the azan was sounded, which provided the means to interpret the dream.

At the same time, we are told that the azan was an arrow of time in the space of being. In these examples, the azan gained efficacy from its sonorous qualities, and Hashmi culled several instances from Islamic textual traditions in which it did so. He spoke of the practice, common in many parts of the Muslim world, in which the azan was called into the right ear of a newborn baby so that the sound would constitute the baby, a tabula rasa, into a Muslim, inaugurating a Muslim life. Here we sense the crowd of competing claims upon the baby and the necessity of dealing a swift blow to these claims through the expeditious calling of the azan. Shortly after the calling of the azan into the right ear of the baby, tradition bid that the iqamat be said into its left ear. The short span of time between the two callings was to suggest to the baby how brief life on earth was in comparison to life hereafter.

Hashmi recounted other noteworthy instances when the azan was to be called. It should be called into the ears of invalids to put them at ease. The euphonious sounds of the azan would temporarily eliminate discomfort through the suppression of satanic whispers (waswase). Another hadis quoted by Hashmi prescribed speaking the azan into the ear of the human or animal whose behavior had lapsed and who was in need of reform.

Hashmi also recounted occasions on which it is forbidden to say the azan. It was never to be said over a dead body or at a funeral. This is because, as Hashmi reminded us, the azan is intricately connected with life. If slumber is the closest experience people have to death, then the morning call to prayer effectively awakens people to life. When the call washes over people during the course of the day, it awakens in them the impulse to act, to take charge of their spiritual life.

In a curious excerpt in Hashmi's book, “The Life-Affirming Message of the Genuine Lovers [of the Azan?]”—curious because it is one of the few instances in a book devoted to a positive appreciation of the azan in which he disparages non-Muslims—I find support for my claim that the experience of the loudspeaker produced a particular awareness of the sound quality of the azan. In arguing why the azan was the most effective means to call devotees to prayer—over cymbals, bells, drums, or fire—Hashmi describes how the azan puts to best advantage the capacity of the human body to be a sound-bearing apparatus: “What better instrument (saaz) is there to convey sound than the human body's voice box? When the voice from this apparatus ascends, drawing the power and beauty of ‘Allahu Akbar’ within itself, it creates turbulence in the heart of the kafir (infidel), at least momentarily, and even the kalisa (church) is overtaken by fury” (1999: 38). This is at once an equation of the human body with an instrument and a demotion of the loudspeaker in favor of the human body as the preferred instrument, as the most effective means of broadcasting the azan. It suggests how pervasive the loudspeaker is, to enable such a conception of the body. Hashmi's words also suggest that it is as a sound that the azan stands to affect the hearts and constitutions of non-Muslims otherwise closed off to its message. Elsewhere he notes the efficacy of calling the azan to strike fear in the hearts of the enemies of Islam before charging into battle (see Padwick Reference Padwick1996).

The possible entanglement of an appreciation of the sonic powers of the azan with the experience of the loudspeaker meant that the question of the continuity of human presence across media technology, that of transduction, was present but differently posed within Habibur Rehman Hashmi's text. For him, the question was not whether it was the same voice from the azan's origin to its reception, but rather whether the forcefulness of the azan transmitted through the apparatus of the human body was of divine origin or retained any divine powers. His historical account of the advent of the azan within Islam allowed him to bring the aspect of its divine nature into sharp focus.

Ahadis presented by Hashmi tell us that the idea for issuing a call to prayer from the highest point in a settlement came to the Prophet's companions when other such details of worship were being worked out under Prophetic guidance. A human call was felt to compel one to listen more than did bells, horns, or fires. Since the latter were already in use by other religious communities, the advent of the azan hints at an attempt to differentiate Islam at its beginnings, or at least to read distinction back upon the azan from a later point in time. Moreover, the call would serve as yet another felicitous occasion to praise God and the Prophet, because the iteration of the shahada, the fundamental article of faith in Islam, was integral to its content (see note 1). Broadcasting the shahada would also serve as a complete invitation to Islam, as if serving up the entire tradition in miniature. As time went on and the space of prayer was consolidated into the mosque form, and mosques acquired tall minarets, then the muezzin began to call the azan from the minaret (Khan and Holod Reference Khan and Holod1997).

These historical details did not distract Hashmi from the hint of the divine within the azan. The call was not of divine origin; it was not sent to the Prophet in the form of a revelation. However, as ahadis tell us, it retained a trace of revelation since it came to one of the Prophet's companions, Abdullah bin Zaid, in a dream. While it is unclear at what point in Islamic history dreams began to be thought of as a fraction of revelation (Mittermiaer Reference Mittermiaer2007; von Grunebaum and Caillois Reference Von Grunebaum and Caillois1996), we do know that the azan's emergence through dreams, at a time infused with the light of revelation and under Prophetic guidance, gained it its enduring claim to divine sanction. In some accounts of the Prophet's Tradition, the man in green who appeared in dreams to provide guidance on the new mode of calling Muslims to prayer is represented as an angel, or the enigmatic figure of Khizr who appears in the Qur'an (Cheetham Reference Cheetham2005).

Clearly, the azan provides a link between human history and the divine, but its expanded range of effects also suggested to Hashimi how the divine worked in mysterious ways. He produced examples from the ahadis in which the azan gave life to the inanimate and the non-human. He referred to several ahadis that urged Muslims to deliver the azan prior to their prayer even if they were in a desolate area. While the azan would invite other human beings within earshot to join the worshipper, more importantly it would alert stones, animals, and vegetation to bear witness to the pious act of solitary prayer on the Day of Judgment. It would also hasten Satan's departure from the scene of prayer.

Hashmi presented his valorizing account of the azan in the face of Pakistani Muslim youths' ignorance of their religious tradition. Yet, given that he noted their ambivalence to the azan in a period when loudspeaker usage was fully entrenched in Pakistani society, when multiple loudspeakers were affixed to the humblest mosque, I cannot help but feel that his effort was also targeted at lingering worries over the pious sounds delivered by means of technology. His contribution was to reaffirm the agential nature of pious sounds, specifically the azan, by asserting that these sounds have powerful effects that transcend any effects of their medium. The details he marshaled suggested that if one takes the force of the divine into consideration, then the question of human presence will be rendered superfluous.

In Conclusion, an Unexpected Affirmation

Thus far I have explored how the loudspeaker introduced a field of specific effects into the South Asian religious milieu, a field designated by the terms transduction, amplification, multiplication, noise, and schizophonia. In following the lead of these effects, I traced how transduction led Deobandi ulama to meditate on the presence of the human and the non-human in prayer. In examining the problems of noise related to loudspeaker usage, both as interference internal to the mechanism and as the perception of sound over the loudspeaker as noise, I showed how it raised concerns among the ulama about the possibility of undue influence and external manipulation in prayer. These worries that the loudspeaker stood to compromise Muslim religiosity were prefigured in earlier colonial struggles over noise, which suggested that non-Muslims recognized the latent, divine possibilities within the azan. Considering the promise of amplification and the multiplication of sounds offered by the loudspeaker, we saw how the ulama were favorably but not unambiguously disposed to these benefits. In post-colonial Pakistan, this amplification was rendered metaphorically as the voice of the people that the Ayub Khan government sought to quiet, while the multiplication of sounds was bemoaned as sectarian fragmentation. Finally, schizophonia was vividly rendered by the ulama's descriptions of the confusions produced in prayer by the introduction of the loudspeaker, while the ongoing threat of schizophonia in a sound-saturated world was seen in the environmental expert's anxiety that the modern self no longer had possession of itself. This field of ripple effects from the loudspeaker led Habibur Rehman Hashmi to reassert divine presence in the call to prayer.

In following these loudspeaker effects across different times and multiple constituencies, I have attempted to show how each of these material effects not only introduced newness into the milieu, but also served to bring to light earlier conversations on sound, from the historical past and religious tradition. These effects were continually revisited in connection with subsequent developments. I have also highlighted what I perceive to be the shifting contours of striving to be a better Muslim within everyday life in Pakistan. I have shown that this striving is enlivened by the quests to live one's life fully in the presence of the divine, to protect political voice, to safeguard tradition from schisms, and to try to be the master of one's self.

The vignettes I have presented, ranging in context from the 1960s to the 1990s, were marked by disappointment that such quests had been unsuccessful. Yet this did not lead people to give them up. For instance, though unhappy with the introduction of loudspeakers into prayer, the ulama demonstrated a heightened sense of obligation to provide the most authoritative guidance to their questioners. Faced with youth indifference to the azan, a concerned religious leader wrote a book richly describing the sonic world of this call to prayer. Fully aware that their efforts to contest an insistent ordinance would likely be futile, opposition members successfully fought it twice before it was passed in the third round. What these examples show is that disappointment was crucial to further action.

I end this paper with the ulama with whom I began, whose resolution regarding the matter of loudspeakers in prayer suggests the importance of small gestures in affirming everyday life in the face of anxieties, such as those expressed by Mufti Abdul Sattar about the self-perpetuating nature of sectarian differentiation, and by the environmental expert about the loss of possession of oneself. In discussing the ulama's concerns over the loudspeaker in the 1950s, Mufti Muhammad Shafi expressed a real quandary about whether he should pronounce prayers over loudspeakers to be valid or invalid. To declare them invalid would throw the ordinary worshipper into confusion, for how was it that an act acceptable in Saudi Arabia, the fount of Islam, was not so in Pakistan; it would risk further fragmentation of an already divided community. He also recognized that the loudspeaker was useful, and beneficial to many, especially women who most often prayed at home, since it enabled them to hear the sounds of the azan, khutba, and Qur'an tilawat.

Finally, a piece of writing from Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi from the late 1930s led Maulana Muhammad Shafi to decide that prayer over a loudspeaker, while not commendable, was not forbidden. Maulana Thanawi noted that prior to the introduction of loudspeakers it was not the actual voice of the imam that directed the worshippers within any congregation. Rather it was the barest hint of a change, the rustle of congregants, a shift in light, the whisper of a new line of prayer that alerted worshippers to the necessity of moving to the next position, and the next:

In other words, Maulana Thanawi suggested that perhaps it was nothing more than echoes that made people keep time in prayer, but echoes were everything in making the prayer a collective experience. I take this appreciation of the faint lines of interconnectivity among the congregants to be an affirmation of the force of the ordinary that tied them together, a force so fragile that it was easily questioned in the first place. This affirmation enabled Muslims to pray together, temporarily free of anxieties. It made prayer a transductive experience, here in the sense that Stefan Helmreich (Reference Helmreich2007) suggests, entailing immersion in the flow of things rather than a transfiguration of the human voice into electrical signals.