A RECITATIONAL REVIVAL AND A MADRASA AT THE MARGINS OF THE STATE

During one of my early visits to the madrasa and my first encounter with the director, Shaykh Yahya al-Madghari, I noted that there seemed to be growing interest in recitational disciplines like tajwīd and the qirā’āt. “Indeed,” he confirmed, “there is today, in Morocco and worldwide, a recitational revival (nahḍa tajwīdiyya),” his use of nahḍa evoking the 19th-century renaissance in Arabic literature and thought. When I returned the next day for a more formal interview with al-Madghari, I used the same shorthand of al-nahḍa al-tajwīdiyya, only to be corrected by the shaykh himself. Saḥwa, he offered instead, “there is a ṣaḥwa tajwīdiyya.” In effect, the shaykh had traded his original term denoting elite, literary awakening for one with broader social and political resonance through its association with a broader Islamic revival (ṣaḥwa Islāmiyya).Footnote ⁹ Although I came to notice the discourse of ṣaḥwa occurring more in subsequent discussions with recitation specialists, this slippage seemed to me an inadvertent acknowledgment of both elite and more popular trends in this recitational revival, as well as anxiety about the broader social relevance of the former.

Sound media have been crucial to both elite and popular trends in recitational practice. Throughout the 2010s, tajwīd-related programs have proliferated on the two state-funded religious TV and radio channels, Qanat al-Sadissa (Channel 6) and Mohammed VI Qur'anic Radio. How-to-recite manuals appear regularly on the shelves of bookstores in urban centers. All of these productions emphasize tajwīd over application of melodic modes and other aesthetics of performative expressiveness, and in many cases employ a call-in format as a sort of mediated pedagogical space that allows lay practitioners to receive feedback on their Qur'anic performances from experts on air.Footnote ¹⁰ In emphasizing tajwīd, these programs also highlight a localized recitational variant known as riwāyat Warsh, Abu Ru‘aym al-Warsh's oral transmission (riwāya) of the reading (qirā’a) attributed to his teacher, Imam Nafi‘, reciter of Medina in the second Islamic century.Footnote ¹¹ The differences between the seven readings and fourteen oral transmissions amount to phonetic subtleties and do not affect matters of Qur'anic interpretation per se, nor are they directly related to the complex application of melodic modes (maqamāt, or more often ṭubū‘ in Morocco).Footnote ¹² Nonetheless, riwāyat Warsh differs from the more common riwāyat Hafs ‘an ‘Asim in ways that even a novice might hear, for example in omitting the second-syllable hamza on mu'minūn (believers) for a smoother rendering as mūminūn.

Since tajwīd and the qirā’āt are intimately linked, the state also has taken an interest in reviving study of the latter, for example by founding in 2014 the Rabat-based Mohammed VI Institute for the Qira'at and Qur'anic Studies (Ma‘had Muhammad al-Sadis li-l-Qira'at wa-l-Dirasat al-Qur'aniyya), which offers graduate-level study in the application of the seven qirā’āt and fourteen oral transmissions. In short, the institute seeks to develop a new generation of specialists in this discipline who can serve as stewards of the more popular tajwīd revival and help ensure mass adherence to riwāyat Warsh. The Ibn al-Qadi school for study of the qirā’āt, named after the qirā’āt scholar Abu Zayd ‘Abd al-Rahman Ibn al-Qadi (d. 1671), plays a central role in this more elite revival, although its links to explicitly state-funded trends are somewhat more complicated. Several Ibn al-Qadi faculty teach across the river at the Mohammed VI Institute, and the school's founder, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Sharif al-Sahabi, himself covers its most advanced qirā’āt classes.Footnote ¹³ Shaykh al-Sahabi also enjoys a close relationship with King Mohammed VI, evidenced by a photo of the two hanging in the school's lobby, and is credited with soliciting the king's support for qirā’āt study. But the Ibn al-Qadi school operates somewhat independently from the state under the umbrella of a larger Islamic social services organization, or jama‘īyya. State pedagogy is also authenticated through al-Sahabi's own scholarly genealogy, which he traces through some of the luminaries of Morocco's recitational past (including Ibn al-Qadi himself). In fact, Shaykh al-Sahabi's renown was so total that some other Salé residents I spoke with knew the madrasa not by its official name but as “Sahabi's school” (madrasat Saḥābī).

Additionally, the Ibn al-Qadi school runs a plethora of media initiatives whose robustness rivals the array of tajwīd-related programming funded by the state, but which speaks, distinctly, to a much more specialized audience. During one of my interviews with Shaykh al-Madghari, we talked not only about the studio production process—outlined in more detail below—but also the school's dedication to using the traditional writing board known as the lawḥ, whereas many other institutions learn recitation from the printed Qur'an (mashaf). “We use all media!” (nsta‘malū kull wasā’il), al-Madghari declared, making a distinction between what he called traditional media (wasā’il taqlīdiyya) and contemporary media (wasā’il ‘aṣriyya).Footnote ¹⁴ By the latter term, the shaykh meant primarily the studio recording project, but he also could have been referring to other projects for which Rashid is primarily responsible. These include producing video recordings of special school-related events, such as weekly lectures by faculty or end-of- term exams; documenting national and international engagements of al-Sahabi and other shaykhs through photo and video; and distributing these materials through the school's Facebook page and dedicated YouTube channel. “Traditional media,” meanwhile, figure into depictions of Moroccan heritage (turāth) in qirā’āt study. When representing Morocco at a Qur'anic studies exhibition in Kuwait, the Ibn al-Qadi school displayed a number of the aforementioned writing boards (alwāḥ, sing. lawḥ), writing utensils, and old manuscripts under the heading “the media used by Moroccans in memorization of the Qur'an.”Footnote ¹⁵

All of these media practices occupy slippery spaces between pedagogical use and cultural display, and between elite scholarly cultivation and wider social outreach. As such, they problematize prevailing conceptualizations of Islamic media, which either situate the problem of authority in the democratizing potential of mass circulation or stress the continuity of forms of Islamic discursive authority through new media. Other anthropological engagements with Islamic sound recordings and radio, for example, foreground the ability of such media to uphold an Islamic “recitational logocentrism” that attaches authority exclusively to vocal utterance.Footnote ¹⁶ Patrick Eisenlohr in particular cites a “paradigm of isnad” to explain the preference of Mauritian practitioners of na't (a genre of sung praise poetry) for sound recordings since recordings more fully capture the voices of esteemed practitioners than textual media like songbooks ever can.Footnote ¹⁷ Although Eisenlohr's work arguably represents the deepest theoretical engagement with Islam-oriented sound recordings, his argument actually collapses the problem of authority's relationship to media form. In contrast to the isnad paradigm, for example, Emilio Spadola shows how the ritual efficacy of Qur'anic talismans meant for healing relies on the secrecy of their “mute letters” rather than their (more public) vocal utterance.Footnote ¹⁸ Therefore, the notion of digital sound recording and traditional writing tools as wasā’il that function as a means to some pedagogical end raises questions about Islamic scholarly authority at the convergence of human and technological agency.Footnote ¹⁹

REPRISING AURAL AUTHORITY: STUDIO PRODUCTION AND THE LAJNA ‘ILMIYYA

The remainder of the article tracks problems of expertise and authority ethnographically across three different dimensions of the Ibn al-Qadi recording project. Although previous ethnographies of Qur'anic recitation note the importance of recording and other sound reproduction to Qur'anic pedagogy and performance aesthetics, few stress the production process behind such media objects.Footnote ²⁰ Anne K. Rasmussen goes further than others in noting the “limiting and liberating” potential of sound recording technology among Qur'an reciters in Indonesia but quickly turns her attention toward the role of loudspeaker amplification in constructing an aesthetic of ramai—what we might think of as “noise as power.”Footnote ²¹ But if mediated sound can carry such social power, what are the technological processes that give a vocal performance such aesthetics? As Louise Meintjes points out in her ethnography of studio recording in Johannesburg, South Africa, sound engineers do not so much capture or reproduce sound as “manipulate waveforms in order to give the impression of weight, density, movement, and space.”Footnote ²² If sound engineers are producing sound as much as they are reproducing it, then technological mediation should not be taken as an assumed aftereffect of Qur'anic performance, but examined closely as crucial to its very emergence.

In the case of the Ibn al-Qadi project, the difficulty of studio production is intensified by the nature of the mediated performance itself. The final aim of this project is a recorded vocal performance of the entire Qur'anic text (al-maṣḥaf al-kāmil), incorporating all seven readings and their corresponding fourteen oral transmissions (riwāyat, sing. riwāya). Since a given riwāya may differ, sonically, from its corresponding qirā’a, practitioners have a potentially dizzying number of variants to apply when grouping them into a single performance. To apply the variants in this way, the Qur'anic text is divided into shorter phrases, each known as a waqf, and the number of variants that apply to that particular phrase must be exhausted on that phrase before the reciter moves on. The result is a wavelike, undulating style of reciting, with each Qur'anic phrase heard multiple times with different tonalities and rhythmic inflections. The matter of variant ordering (tartīb) within each phrase is an important subtopic of ‘ilm al-qirā’āt, and a distinctive Moroccan method (al-ṭarīqa al-Maghribiyya) of performance takes a particularly complicated approach to this problem that will be outlined later. Thus, whereas a typical vocal performance of the Qur'an in a single riwāya can run anywhere from eight to twenty hours, the added variation on such a performance of al-qirā’āt al-saba‘a means that the final recording being produced at Ibn al-Qadi might easily exceed one hundred hours. Given this massive scale of the project, it is no surprise that one of the school's primary motivations in establishing an on-campus studio, according to the director, al-Madghari, was to avoid the commercial model (namūdhaj tijārī) most other recording studios follow, in which recordings must be completed within a determined time frame based on an hourly fee.

Participants add to this complexity by pushing the recording into new domains of recitational performance. In a separate interview, a younger shaykh at the Ibn al-Qadi school as well as at the aforementioned Mohammed VI Institute praised the “disciplinary and vocal capabilities” (mu'ahhilāt ‘ilmiyya wa ṣawtiyya) of the reciter, Dawud. A graduate of the Mohammed VI Institute and thus an expert al-qirā’āt, Dawud also spent his younger years studying in Casablanca with one of the esteemed masters of the more dynamic, expressive style of Qur'anic recitation known as mujawwad.Footnote ²³ He is a fixture at public performances where mujawwad is demanded, from the superogatory late-night Ramadan prayers known as tarāwīh to festival and competition stages, and brings a level of melodism and expressiveness to the recording project that is not usually heard in other performances of al-qirā’āt al-saba‘a, for example those one might hear in the classroom at the Mohammed VI Institute. The avoidance of commercial constraints is all the more crucial given that the recording is not intended for sale or even wide distribution, but as a reference (marji‘) for future students of the qirā’āt. Nonetheless, the expressiveness and Melodicism that Dawud adds to this project is clearly part of his appeal and makes the yet-unfinished recording novel in both realms of recitational practice. This raises potential questions about its reception that I return to in the conclusion.

To incorporate such performative complexity, the Ibn al-Qadi project unfolds through a painstaking process of piecemeal construction similar to other studio recordings, even those known for their particular sense of “liveness.”Footnote ²⁴ Shaykh al-Madghari described this process by outlining four distinct stages of authoritative review, or what he called lajnāt (sing. lajna) in Arabic. The first lajna is what other studio professionals would call the tracking stage, during which the reciter performs passages under the supervision of two different shaykhs while Rashid, serving in his role as sound engineer, records the passages for later compilation and editing. Either one of these shaykhs can stop the reciter if he hears a mistake and ask him to repeat the phrase. In this way they wind up with numerous recordings (tasjīlāt muta‘addida), essentially an accumulation of recorded clips. Rashid had in fact invited me to peek in on one such session just before this early interview with the shaykh. One shaykh sat on a chair in the back of the studio, using a second swivel chair as a stand for a copy of the Qur'an and a number of other texts of reference. On the computer screen was the waveform visualization of a recorded track, a familiar sight from my own studio experience as a guitar player, displaying the vertical splicing marks that indicated it was already a composite, or “comp,” of separately recorded clips (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Waveform visualization of a recorded track, Ibn al-Qadi school. Photograph by the author.

Al-Madghari went on to explain that the second lajna again involved two shaykhs, preferably a different group than those from the previous session, listening back to the previously edited comp and writing down notes about mistakes on a prepared comment sheet, as depicted in this article's opening scene. This is preparation for a third lajna, when the reciter returns to the studio to undertake correction (tasḥīḥ) of all mistakes noted on the comment sheet, again under the supervision of two shaykhs. Studio producers generally refer to this kind of work as punching in, when a small, usually corrective clip is recorded and inserted, or punched in, to the comp. On other visits to the madrasa I caught faintly audible flashes of this process through the studio door, the alternation of short, recited phrases and moments of silence or barely audible discussion gesturing to this dialectical rhythm of phrase-by-phrase recording and review. The shaykh alluded, finally, to a fourth review step, perhaps still somewhat speculative in this early stage of the project, in which the recording would be reviewed by qirā’āt specialists at other institutions and perhaps even outside of Morocco. Although al-Madghari referred to each of the four stages as a lajna, the younger shaykh I interviewed employed the term slightly differently, referring to the supervisory role of the shaykhs over the entire process, from tracking to outside review, as al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya.Footnote ²⁵

The director's summary clearly foregrounds the role of the shaykhs in the process. Although al-Madghari refers to Rashid as the producer (mukhrij) of the project, it is the shaykhs who serve a role akin to producers in the popular music recording industry, aurally evaluating the recorded performance as it comes into being to ensure it adheres to a particular standard.Footnote ²⁶ In doing so, they reprise a centuries-old form of expert listenership inscribed repeatedly in biographical compendia—known in Morocco as tarājim (sing. tarjama)—by way of the ijāza, a document certifying a student's ability to teach a particular text or field of Islamic scholarship.Footnote ²⁷ Whereas ijāzas in discursive fields like Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) were often given if a student had memorized or otherwise mastered a particular text or pedagogical canon, in the case of ‘ilm al-qirā’āt the student earned an ijāza based on a demonstrative performance known as the khatma, or seal of the student's training (Fig. 2). The typical ijāza in ‘ilm al-qirā’āt, then, would include the shaykh's report of such a performance, beginning with his declaration that the student “recited for me” (qarā’a ‘alaya or talā ‘alaya) such-and-such number of khatmas, in accordance with such-and-such variants. In this way, the shaykh's inscription not only validates the student's performance and ability to teach the qirā’āt; by extension it also reaffirms his own ability to evaluate such a performance—what I call his aural authority.

Figure 2. A student's khatma recitation of riwāyat Warsh with Shaykh al-Sahabi. Youtube, accessed 19 April 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjN-J0bMNYM.

The ijāza granted by Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Bu‘nani (d. 1653) to his student Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Sharqi (d. 1669), and reproduced in ‘Abd al-Hadi Hamitu's massive seven-volume history, The Nafi‘an Reading among the Moroccans, offers a representative example.Footnote ²⁸ It begins, as many other ijāzas of its time do, with invocations to God and statements praising the student, before commencing the report of al-Sharqi's recitations of the Qur'an for al-Bu‘nani. The master declares that his student, “Recited all of [the Qur'an] for me [talā ‘alaya jamī‘ihi], two khatmas from beginning to end, and a third time from where the Almighty says ‘wa abtalū al-yatāmi’ until the end of the Qur’ān, combining the qirā’āt of the seven well-known imams, God's grace upon them.” The author al-Bu‘nani continues that the student had furthermore demonstrated his incorporation of the known riwāyat of these seven variants, and that all of this was in accordance with the important primary texts in qirā’āt study of the day.Footnote ²⁹ Whereas al-Sharqi's performance consists of two recitations combining the seven main variants, other performances might include different combinations. For example, in an ijāza written for his son ‘Abd al-Rahman, Idriss al-Munjra (d. 1724) states that he listened to a total of twenty recitations, three of them including the seven qirā’āt and fourteen riwāyāt, nine times applying only riwāyat Warsh, the preferred variant in North Africa, and the remainder featuring other combinations of variants.Footnote ³⁰ Insofar as the shaykhs at Ibn al-Qadi exercise a form of auditory expertise consistent with this historical model, their listening practices differ crucially from those associated with sufism or the “pious counterpublics” of the Islamic revival.Footnote ³¹ The shaykh's evaluation of his student does of course embody a form of aural literacy, but one oriented less toward the project of religious self-making. Rather, the shaykh aims at an objective evaluation of his student's performance and its sonic adherence to the authorized models of ‘ilm al-qirā’āt.Footnote ³² This suggests that we might think of ‘ilm much more broadly as encompassing not just textual, rational, and discursive forms of knowledge but also experiential modes more commonly associated with the concept of ma‘rifa, or “mystical” knowledge.Footnote ³³

But the comparison also reveals important shifts in how aural authority is remediated. In its older form, inscribed in the textual medium of the ijāza, the subject of aural authority is relatively singular: by verifying the quality of his student's ijāza-earning performance, the shaykh not only verifies a model of performance for future practitioners (much like the goal of the Ibn al-Qadi recording); he also reasserts his own aural authority and inscribes its trace in the text, often buttressed by dating and “witnessing” conventions endemic to Islamic jurisprudence.Footnote ³⁴ By contrast, al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya hearkens back to this mode of aural authority while reenvisioning it as the collective manifestation of a committee (lajna) tasked with overseeing the recording's production. The younger shaykh's distinction between the reciter's disciplinary capabilities (mu'ahhilāt ‘ilmiyya) and vocal capabilities is telling in this regard, opening the door to the possible inclusion of new forms of vocal performance. Although the reciter Dawud is a graduate of the Ma‘had and thus possesses the practical knowledge—the ‘ilm—necessary to teach the qirā’āt, it is the shaykhs who provide the disciplinary oversight necessary to ensure the recording's adherence to ‘ilm al-qirā’āt and its specific Maghribi tradition. The voice-‘ilm distinction foregrounds the importance of ‘ilm while recognizing other features that might not fit within the bounds of al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya, and subtly acknowledges the limits of aural authority in a way that destabilizes its subjective grounding in the textual tradition.

“I HEARD A MISTAKE”: THE TECHNOLOGIZATION OF AURAL AUTHORITY

Although al-Madghari's description already reveals an important shift in how aural authority unfolds, it is refashioned further within the technical and social space that Eliot Bates calls the studio assemblage. In his ethnography of recording studio culture in Istanbul, Bates points out how the emergence at the beginning of the millennium of all-in-one digital recording programs like ProTools have made incredibly sophisticated recording approaches affordable for a wider, global creative class. Thus, Bates argues, digital technologies allow Istanbul music producers to reconstruct supposedly lost or forgotten folk performances into “an arranged tradition” that, given the impact of the shift toward digital technologies, is ultimately a digital tradition.Footnote ³⁵ These advances particularly benefit small operations like the Ibn al-Qadi school, which uses a similar software program known as Cubase 5 that also features vast multitracking capability and a panoply of onboard effects. In this context, however, where participants regard the technology as wasā’il—pedagogical means—this digital infrastructure offers new possibilities for aural authority's enactment, to sometimes striking effects.

The Ibn al-Qadi studio space is small and simply equipped, yet more than adequate for the task of single-voice Qur'anic recording. Like most studios, the space is divided into a recording booth, equipped with Sennheiser condenser microphones and a seat for the reciter; and the control room, containing a mixing board and a rack of preamps and effects, plugged into a Mac desktop and feeding a pair of small monitor speakers. Rashid referred to these respective spaces in Arabic as bayt al-tasjīl and bayt al-taḥakkum—best translated as recording room and control room, respectively. Although Rashid suggested this latter space could be shortened to simply al-taḥakkum, at other moments he seemed to use al-taḥakkum to refer to the entire assemblage of mixing board, computer, speakers, and other hardware that allowed the engineer to control sonic inputs and outputs. When I took a picture of the recording booth (Fig. 3), Rashid was quick to point out that the space was not in order (māshī murattab). However, this disclaimer seemed to encompass two senses of order (tartīb): first, the correct placement of microphones and other elements of the studio's technological infrastructure; and second, more qualitative elements of place-making, such the embroidered cloth that I saw during tracking sessions draped over the reciter's chair, similar to the elaborate kursīs used in Qur'an festivals and competitions. This suggests that participants ascribe religious and cultural meaning to the technologized activities that reproduce the Qur'an sonically, and not merely to its circulation and public reception as God's message to humankind.

Figure 3. Recording booth, Ibn al-Qadi school. Photograph by the author.

The studio's central placement also facilitates its integration into the Ibn al-Qadi school's social rhythms. The studio itself sits in between the office of the director, Shaykh al-Madghari, and the main staircase leading to the mosque and classrooms on the second floor. Opposite the studio on the other side of the director's office is a second administrative office shared by a number of the other shaykhs. Whenever work is going on in the studio, the sound of the reciter's voice drifts through the soundproofed door, reverberating into the school lobby or the director's office next door. Anyone going to or from prayer or class inevitably passes by the studio and hears some resonance of the work taking place inside. When Rashid leaves the door open during an editing session, something he does frequently, students and faculty often stop by on their way to or from other activities to chat with him and check up on the project. Although al-Madghari did not comment on the intention behind the studio's placement, it is worth noting that a more peripheral placement on the campus would have given the studio a greater degree of sonic isolation suitable to its technological function as a hermetically sealed, neutral “non-space.”Footnote ³⁶ Having its own studio not only freed the school from the financial constraints of commercial production, it also allowed studio labor to take on the general cultural contours of the school as a whole and reinforce a collective sensibility crucial to al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya.

A more extended look at the review session evoked in the article's opening gives a greater sense of this collective labor, and the opportunities the studio offers for focused, isolated listening. Sitting down at the back of the control room, I quickly noticed that the waveform visualization on the computer screen bore the vertical editing lines of a typical vocal comp—the result of what al-Madghari would call accumulated recordings (tasjīlāt muta‘addida) spliced together. As the shaykh and Rashid worked side-by-side, the former would often ask the sound engineer to repeat a certain phrase so he could listen again. Early on, the two had an extended two- to three-minute discussion regarding the pronunciation of the Arabic letter lam: the shaykh had heard an open lah sound, he said (as in the English “lock”) in a Qur'anic context where it should be closer to the laa sound in the English word “lamb.” They replayed and listened to the phrase a number of times, and when Rashid made his first exit from the studio session I had an opportunity to ask the shaykh about this particular performative issue. He elaborated using terminology germane to tajwīd: like many other letters, lam can be restricted (muraqqaq) or emphasized (mufakhkham) depending first on the sounds around it, as well as the specific qirā’a or riwāya. However, he explained, the aṣl, or natural state, of lām in riwāyat Warsh is muraqqaq, whereas he had heard it the other way.

Eventually we were joined in the studio by another older shaykh, introduced as a specialist in rasm, the discipline of Qur'anic orthography that is often taught in tandem with tajwīd. This shaykh took the other seat next to me at the back of the control room, tea and cookies were served, and work continued with the younger shaykh at the controls. The two worked in tandem, listening to long stretches of recorded material, or replaying shorter passages several times in a row, always attuned to the most minute deviations. “I heard a mistake according to Warsh,” the younger shaykh declared at one point. The older shaykh immediately sat forward in his seat, peering at the younger shaykh's handwritten text. The younger shaykh replayed the phrase in question a number of times before he was satisfied enough to make a note of this mistake in the comment sheet. At issue, clearly, are minute matters of vocalization—the subtle inflection of lam or the timbre of another syllable according to riwāyat Warsh. Expert listeners like these shaykhs certainly can catch such mistakes in a more “live” setting; indeed, in classrooms at the aforementioned Muhammad VI Institute, where I also conducted fieldwork, I often heard teachers ask students in similar terms to repeat a particular phrase they had initially mispronounced. But the Ibn al-Qadi studio offers a more isolated listening environment and virtually limitless playback opportunities, both factors that assist the shaykhs in their aural evaluation. The expansion of onboard effects allows engineers greater sonic control, and enhanced sound definition overall makes performative mistakes more apparent. In addition to being cheaper than old-fashioned tape, digital recording affords seemingly limitless capture of multiple takes, edits, and corrections. Although the younger shaykh catches the mistake on the first listen in the example above, he clearly uses the playback features to verify the presence of the mistake in consultation with his senior colleague.

After roughly an hour of this playback and note-taking, the younger shaykh took his comment sheet across the hall to one of the administrative offices and gave it to another shaykh, also a teacher at the Muhammad VI Institute and, I would find out later, the main scholarly overseer of the recording project. A handful of other faculty and madrasa staff also were in the office, gravely discussing some matter with this shaykh, but he immediately turned his attention to the sheet that had just arrived. He reviewed the comments and even occasionally recited passages in question softly to himself. After making a few minor additions of his own to the comment sheet, he expressed his satisfaction with it and added it to an existing folder in the office, to be used in a later session of corrections. Indeed, when I saw the reciter Dawud a few days later making a guest appearance at Mohamed VI Qur'anic Radio, I asked if he had seen any of the comments, and he confirmed he did have “a lot of corrections” to make on the recording.

This admission suggests that studio recording solicits forms of aural authority in which mistakes are not merely heard or “caught,” but actively listened for with the intention of future correction. This is a very different type of listening subjectivity than the “relaxed attentiveness from which one can nonetheless expect an ethical therapeutics.”Footnote ³⁷ The affordances of digital studio recording therefore infuse the collective labor imagined by al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya with what we might call a more “technologized” model of aural authority. Although aural authority was always attuned to technical imperfections in vocal performance, studio recording transforms the listening practices underpinning aural authority into what Jonathan Sterne calls audile techniques: “a set of practices of listening that were articulated to science, reason, and instrumentality and that encouraged the coding and rationalization of what was heard.”Footnote ³⁸ The glossing of this shaykh review process as al-lajna al-‘ilmyya seems to play across the dual meaning of ‘ilm in contemporary standard Arabic, evoking both the classical Islamic disciplines (‘ulūm) and ‘ilm al-qirā’āt's transformation into a precise, technologically informed vocal “science.”

Moreover, although featuring a single voice, the performance that is being constructed piecemeal from accumulated recordings is a result of the convergence of different forms of expertise. The lajna al-‘ilmiyya itself is of course already conceived in relational terms, with different shaykhs evaluating different stages of the production. But their aural authority is complicated by its encounter with the reciter Dawud's vocal capabilities (mu'ahhilāt ṣawtiyya). Although relegated to the role of performer and subservient to the shaykhs who act as producers, Dawud nonetheless elevates qirā’āt performance with elements of melody and dynamic expressiveness that overflow al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya. Additionally, Rashid's knowledge of microphones, preamps, amplifiers, and recording software—essentially absent from Shaykh al-Madghari's account—is crucial, first, for capturing a clear rendering of Dawud's voice; and, second, for rendering accumulated clips into a coherent performance that can be evaluated. In fact, as we saw in the opening, although al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya rests primarily on the shoulders of shaykhs, they are somewhat dependent on Rashid's technical aptitudes—until those aptitudes are transferred to the shaykhs.

Rather than a singular authority emanating from a central author of the project, then, I suggest that we might reconceptualize authority here as accumulating through a convergence of human and technological agency. This is not to suggest that Islamic authority was ever or is anywhere completely singular: as Muhammad Qasim Zaman points out, religious authority in Islam is best examined through its relationality, perhaps best exemplified in the jurisprudential concept of consensus, or ijmā‘.Footnote ³⁹ But although ijmā‘ may imagine authority as contested, the subjectivity underpinning authority's reproduction is never in doubt, since it continues to emerge out of a confrontation between identifiable authors and their opinions. The crisis of authority narrative of Islamic media transformation is ultimately still rooted in such a model, even if the networked field of such a confrontation is now more diffuse. Here, by contrast, a technologized form of aural authority relies so heavily on the affordances of digital recording as to no longer be rooted exclusively in the subject shaykh. In fact, the qirā’āt performance is no longer mediated exclusively by the shaykh's ears, but is stored in the digital recording itself; meanwhile, the trace of the shaykh's aural authority is displaced from a medium of circulation, the ijāza, to the predetermined comment sheet confined to the school's private archive. The following section highlights further the dispersal of aural authority through Rashid's role as an expert listener, as well as his visual and tactile arrangements of the qirā’āt.

EDITING WITHOUT SOUND: DIGITAL TACTILITY AND VOCAL “ARRANGEMENT”

In addition to his reduction of Rashid's role in the four-stage structure of recording production, Shaykh al-Madghari's summary also omits an entire potential stage in which Rashid works relatively unencumbered. Editing—al-taḥrīr, as Rashid referred to it—might occur in between any of the other production stages outlined by the shaykh. In fact, we have already seen how editing is in some ways a part of the tracking stage itself. But Rashid also might reedit this accumulation of clips prior to a playback session like the one analyzed above, or following a corrective recording session, integrating the reciter's punch-ins into the existing comp. I want to linger on this productive stage in this final section because the tactical structure and visual references of audio editing suggest both surprising affinities with the core qirā’āt tradition as well as conceptual challenges to the aural authority that has grounded it historically.

These editing sessions, or ḥiṣṣās al-taḥrīr, are characterized by repetitive, mind-numbing work (Fig. 4). To help us both pass the time, these sessions became an opportunity for me to ask Rashid about certain details of the recording and editing process, or simply about the Arabic terminology used to describe such operations. I was particularly struck, on one occasion, when Rashid referred to his sound engineering work as mu‘ālija, an Arabic term that can mean, generally, processing or handling, but in other verb forms especially carries a deeper resonance of medical treatment or a cure. Rather than a characterization of editing specifically, I took this notion of treatment to be a qualitative self-reflection on Rashid's manipulation of sound, and a contrast to other preferences for transparent sound reproduction.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such treatment necessarily required nuanced application of various effects to the recorded signal. The most important for this project, Rashid pointed out, were vocal compression and reverb. Once, Rashid took a momentary break from his editing work to subject the given track to roughly a dozen different reverb presets that came with the Cubase software to give me a sense of how they affected the reciter's voice. The version used on the recording seemed to be one of these presets, meaning that at least part of the recording's aesthetic was determined by the parameters of the technology itself.

Figure 4. Editing session, Ibn al-Qadi school. Photograph by the author.

Meanwhile, although Rashid did not elaborate on vocal compression, a sound engineer I spoke with at Mohammed VI Qur'anic Radio characterized it as absolutely essential for Qur'anic recitation, and I found it quite noticeable on the Ibn al-Qadi recording. As the term itself suggests, if certain dynamic peaks in a given vocal performance pass a certain threshold, the effect will reduce or compress these variations to give a more uniform volume across the entire performance. For many listeners, this can have the aural effect of making dynamic peaks seem thicker or “punchier.” This has particular advantage for the reciter, Dawud, since it allows his natural strength in the upper-midrange frequencies to stay rich and resonant, rather than pinched, during the application of nasalization (ghunna). Aesthetically, this performative effect helps accentuate the sense of ḥuzn (sadness) that is sought by many reciters of Qur'anic verses with weighty topics.Footnote ⁴¹ But there are pedagogical advantages as well. Since compression lowers the volume of such peaks, sound engineers are able to raise the volume overall and bring more subtle vocal nuances to the fore. In terms of the Ibn al-Qadi project, this would aid the shaykhs in discerning even the smallest missteps in the reciter's application of tajwīd—like the slight mispronunciation of the lam syllable referred to above. Therefore, Rashid's ability to not only capture but also shape the sound of the unfolding Qur'anic reproduction is essential to the constitution of al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya and the aural authority on which it is based.

What struck me most about Rashid's work, however, were the visual referents he relied on to shape this sonic project. In his ethnography of Istanbul recording, Bates points out that a crucial aspect of the all-in-one digital audio workstations (DAWs) that come with recording software programs like ProTools (as well as the Cubase 5 program that Rashid uses) is the way they translate the ebbs and peaks of sonic vibration into the graphic medium of digital waveform images. Since each of the tracks in a given workflow are differentiated from the others through color coding, Bates notes that observing studio engineers edit a given track was like watching them “moving around colored blocks,” and many seasoned pros undertook fairly complex editing tasks by sight alone, notably “editing the timing of a part without even listening to it.” On a number of occasions Bates recalls engineers from another studio visiting a given session and, looking at the waveform image (but not having heard it), declare that the recording “looks finished!”Footnote ⁴²

Rashid often worked in similar fashion. He would begin a typical editing session by opening up the project in Cubase 5, generally whichever Qur'anic chapter or subsection participants had tracked previously. At the beginning of the session, the project file would be visualized on the computer screen as an empty first track at the top, and a sort of bank of recorded clips compiled at the back of the third or fourth track. Each clip might vary in length, from a single syllable to an entire waqf—the largest subsection of Qur'anic material to which a set of qirā’āt variants might be applied. Rashid would grab each clip one-by-one by clicking and holding with the mouse and dragging it to the beginning of the first track to start building his composite performance. Along the way, he would leave a slight space in between each clip that he would go back to later and fill in with a crossfade (takhfīḍ or takhfīḍ al-ṣawt).

Sometimes, but not always, he would listen to each clip before moving it from the bank to the composite track. His aim, however, was clearly only to affirm nothing was wrong with the clip, not to subject it to the kind of intensive review exercised by the shaykhs. Rashid often carried out this work without listening to the clips at all, relying entirely on their visualization on the computer screen. “Editing without sound (tahrīr b-la ṣawt)”? I asked on one such occasion. He shrugged simply, suggesting that this was apparently not all that rare. This visuality was also the main focus of discussion the one time I saw the school's founder Shaykh al-Sahabi drop in at the studio, as Rashid and I were finishing up. As Rashid explained which section he had just finished editing as well as plans for future tracking sessions, al-Sahabi seemed much more interested in Rashid's monitor setup. “You have two [‘andak jūj]?” the Shaykh wondered. “Yes, two screens are necessary [jūj shalshalāt ḍarūrī ],” Rashid replied, beginning to power down the electronics. “One screen is used for the editing and the other to control the effects [mu'athirāt al-ṣawt],” he continued. “Sometimes I might work from one screen, but I would be constantly switching between the two programs. This way is easier.”

What distinguishes Rashid's work from what Bates calls digital multi-track arrangements of Turkish folk music, however, is the way a linear form of arrangement dovetails with a principle of variant ordering (tartīb) that is deeply rooted in the history of qirā’āt practice. In the Maghribi method in particular, the order of variants within a given phrase or waqf changes according to a principle of temporal abbreviation (ikhtiṣār). Since any given qirā’a or riwāya may agree with—or in emic terms abbreviate (yakhtaṣiru ‘alā)—some variants but not others on a given phrase, the order of variants is changed from one phrase to another to obtain the shortest possible performance overall. Although in practice, the phrase-by-phrase tracking and subsequent editing did not necessarily map onto distinctions between qirā’āt variants, theoretically each variation might be dealt with as a distinct clip. Therefore, any one of the shaykhs might conceivably request a reordering of variants within the recorded track at any time in the production process, in accordance with the principle of ikhtiṣār. This is a striking feature of the Ibn al-Qadi recording, for it shows that the domestication of sound recording is conditioned less by the theological implications of the medium and more by the way digital editing affords new engagement with the problem of qirā’āt ordering.Footnote ⁴³ In short, digital recording is employed in a particular way because ‘ilm al-qirā’āt is already an arranged tradition.

Despite these affinities, Rashid's role in the production process and the visuality of variant ordering refashions ‘ilm al-qirā’āt and aural authority in yet more ways. For one thing, we have seen how Rashid plays an important role not only in capturing but, indeed, in shaping vocal sound in ways that aid the auditory techniques of the shaykhs. His intervention and his reliance on the sonic affordances of digital recording therefore complicate the problem of agency underlying aural authority. In fact, the “Qur'anic presence” no longer relies exclusively on the shaykh's “mnemonic possession” of the text; rather, a collective form of aural authority involving Rashid as well has helped produce a sonic manifestation of the Qur'an stored exclusively in the sound recording, or more precisely the software's digital code.Footnote ⁴⁴ Second, DAW waveform visualizations complicate aural authority further by offering Rashid and the shaykhs a parallel visual reference for qirā’āt performance, even the means to alter variant orderings (or other aspects of the performance) without sound. Like aural authority itself, however, the visual reference is transferred to the digital waveform, and therefore concealed exclusively within the means of production. On the whole, then, aural authority is refashioned not only by new audio technologies, but more broadly by “a distinctive digital sensorium and sensibility that results from a strategic synesthesia between listening, visualization, and kinesthetic tactile control.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Although aural authority was never strictly an aural discipline, interpolating a textual architecture related to the history of tajwīd and qirā’āt practice, digital recording transforms aural authority into an intersensory and instersubjective discipline of audio production.