The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims 9781800411388

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The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Founding Editor: Viv Edwards, University of Reading, UK Series Editors: Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia. Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. What are the implications for language education of new ‘semiotic economies’ and communications technologies? Of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions? Of new cultural, regional and national identities and practices? The New Perspectives on Language and Education series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. New proposals, particularly for edited volumes, are expected to acknowledge and include perspectives from the Global South. Contributions from scholars from the Global South will be particularly sought out and welcomed, as well as those from marginalized communities within the Global North. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 88

The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims Andrey Rosowsky

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/ROSOWS1371

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Rosowsky, Andrey, 1956- author. Title: The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims/Andrey Rosowsky. Description: Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2021. | Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 88 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines the wide range of multilingual devotional performances engaged in by young Muslims in the UK today. It evaluates the contemporary mosque school in the UK and contrasts this with practices from the past and with prevailing discourses (both political and other) which suggest that such institutions are problematic”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048466 | ISBN 9781800411371 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800411388 (pdf) | ISBN 9781800411395 (epub) | ISBN 9781800411401 (kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Muslim youth—Great Britain. | Muslim youth—Great Britain—Social conditions. | Islam--Great Britain—Social aspects. | Prayer—Islam. Classification: LCC BP65.G7 R67 2021 | DDC 305.23088/2970941—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048466 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-137-1 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2021 Andrey Rosowsky All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India.

Contents

Figures Acknowledgements Foreword Bernard Spolsky

vii ix xi

1

Introduction

2

Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices among British Muslim Youth

11

The Research of Ultralingual Practice in the Community: A ‘Gentle Ethnography’

33

4

Ultralingual Language Practice in Devotional Settings

48

5

Ultralingual Devotional Performance in 2000 and in 2019

79

6

‘Al-Qur’an’: The Sacred Text and its Centrality (Mosque School A)

91

3

7 8 9

1

The Qur’anic Supplementary School in a Superdiverse Setting (Mosque School B)

109

‘Naat and Nasheed’: The Performance of Devotional Songs and Poetry (Mosque School C)

124

Leaving ‘the Mawlana and the Child’ Behind (Mosque School D)

141

10 ‘Binding and Shifting’: Language Continuity and Linguistic Change in Ultralingual Devotional Practices

160

References

169

Index

180

v

Figures

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 5.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5 Figure 9.1

Layout of three fully pointed verses from the Qur’an Layout of a typical musical score A professional Qur’anic reciter with his Egyptian audience An extract from the Madani Qa’idah, a typical primer for mosque schools available in the UK Roman transliteration of an H-Punjabi naat Cover of Biblical Hebrew primer for children Teaching layout in Mosque School A based on field notes from 8 September 2014 Typical Indo-Pak Qur’anic script Typical Uthmani Qur’anic script Typical mosque school bag Children’s work displayed on wall of Mosque School C Page from a Qa’idah with Roman transliteration and English explanation The Muslim boys choir of Mosque School C Harris J’s YouTube channel A page from a British Muslim song edited by Abdul Hakim Murad (2005) Wajid Akhtar’s YouTube channel Teacher S from Mosque School C Plastic stands designed for reading the Qur’an and other religious texts while sitting on the floor

vii

58 59 63 66 73 89 94 95 96 107 115 117 125 129 130 132 136 152

Acknowledgements

First of all, this book acknowledges the young Muslims and their teachers of the four mosque schools which are at the heart of this study. Without them this book could not have been written. In my heart, I hope that their admirable prowess and substantial expertise in the rich art of multilingual and ultralingual devotional practice, whether through this book or in other ways, becomes better known and appreciated. I would also like to express my appreciation to my publisher, Multilingual Matters, for whom this is my third modest offering. I thank them for their support and encouragement and the confidence they have placed in me to produce something worthy of their rich and extensive catalogue. Many readers will know, also, that I owe a great debt to my mentor, friend and colleague, the late Tope Omoniyi (1956–2017). His early departure from this world left me and countless others bereft of his wisdom and insight into language, religion and society. His influence on my thinking, my research and my outlook on the world (academic and other) was enormous. Together with his mentor, the late Joshua Fishman, he helped initiate the Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR). I hope this book makes a useful contribution to that ongoing project. wa min allahi at-tawfiq [‘ultimately, all success is from God’]

ix

Foreword

In a number of pioneering studies, Andrey Rosowsky has been exploring the relations between language and religion. This present volume, the result of two decades of ethnographic observation, focuses on the devotional practices of young British Muslims, who have blended a nonWestern religion and its traditions with the modern life and language of an immigrant community. This is a significant addition to the study of diasporas, a term originally used for the Jewish communities outside Israel which flourished as early as Temple times, but which were the main location of continuing Jewish life for 2000 years. The term was later applied to non-Jewish ethnic and nation communities. Safran (1991) was among the first to propose a set of criteria for all diasporas. They were, he said, ‘expatriate minority communities’ characterized by: dispersion from a homeland to two or more foreign regions; maintenance of a common memory of the homeland; varying degrees of isolation from the host society; a continuing desire to return to the homeland when conditions are right; a belief that they should be committed to the maintenance of the homeland; and collective solidarity built on a personal or vicarious relationship to the homeland. Using this definition, he said, it would be appropriate to speak of the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Cuban, Greek and ‘perhaps Chinese diasporas at present’, and the Polish diaspora of the past. And, as a result of the current chaotic state of Islamic countries, one would add the rapidly growing Arabic-speaking diasporas in much of Europe, which face a demographic and religious change of gigantic proportions. An inevitable effect of diasporas is the development of what Grosjean (2015) labels ‘bicultural bilinguals’ – individuals with uneven proficiency in at least two language varieties and the related ability to function in two different cultures, forming the controversial mixture that is now labelled as ‘hybridity’ (Kalra et al., 2005). Diaspora communities are made up of complex mixtures of plurilingual individuals who vary in their degree of proficiency and use of both their languages, the result being fuzzy and debatable patterns. And when more than two varieties and cultures are involved, as occurs with people who have a history of conquests and expulsions, the situation that emerges shows many influences.

xi

xii

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

The Muslim community in Britain constitutes an important example of this hybridity. Now seen as ‘a dangerous, socio-cultural threat’, ‘a problematic outsider’, ‘the enemy within’ and the target of growing Islamophobia, British Muslims have ‘contested their “othering” through practices of assimilation, integration and hybridization’ (Ansari, 2004). It is hybridization that Rosowsky investigates in this study, focusing not just on language but also on the added dimension of religious otherness. While the British public is increasingly marked by secularism, as witnessed by the large number of deconsecrated churches one notices when walking through the countryside, Muslims in Britain, many of them from nonArabic speaking south Asia, are identifiable not just by trilingualism in their heritage languages, their learning of Arabic for religious purposes and their addition of environmental English, but also by their continuing acceptance of Islam and the resulting ties to mosque and madrassa. Rosowsky in this book sets out to describe the religious practices and performances of young British Muslims. A number of studies in Omoniyi and Fishman (2006) have explored the way in which religion has contributed to language maintenance. For Islam, Rosowsky (2006a) reminds us of the distinction between liturgical literacy and the spoken varieties of Arabic. He notes that the Muslim communities of Britain, many of south Asian origin and speaking many different languages while maintaining Arabic as their liturgical language, continue to believe in the high status of Qur’anic Arabic. At the same time, these communities and especially the younger members are assimilating linguistically and culturally to their British environment, producing a multilingual and culturally diverse hybridity that Omoniyi (2006) identified and explored. With the continuing and growing multilingual communities and plurilingual individuals produced in Europe by the growing number of migrants and asylum seekers from so many countries, studies such as this of the developing hybrid communities are of great significance. The issue of religious influence on sociolinguistic repertoires is not new: studies of classic Jewish diasporas showed the adoption and adaptation of languages other than Hebrew, and the maintenance of liturgical and literary Hebrew over the generations (Spolsky, 2014); and the way in which Persia and Turkey accepted Islam and Arabic liturgy while maintaining their own languages showed multilingualism resulting from religious conversion. South Asian nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh, when fi nally liberated from British colonial rule, also adopted liturgical Arabic alongside their own national languages. There have been many migrants from these countries. The UK is home to the largest Pakistani community in Europe, with the population of British Pakistanis exceeding 1.17 million based on the 2011 census; in the census, another 450,000 respondents reported Bangladeshi origin (ONS, 2012). Migrants from these countries to Britain added English to their individual and community repertoires, building the

Foreword xiii

linguistic, cultural and religious hybridity that Rosowsky has been studying. The way the young members of this large immigrant population adapt to their mixed environment, drawn towards the new language while home and mosque offer two other significant languages, offers important clues as to the effects of the major demographic developments. The children of migrants regularly face the challenge of acquiring at least two languages – the heritage language favoured and still used by their parents, and the environmental language of the surrounding community, presented to them by peers and schools. In religious communities, Muslim or Jewish or Christian, there is a third language involved, as parental support for traditional liturgical languages is implemented by supplemental or community schools. All of this produces a kind of linguistic and cultural hybridity, a concept developed by Bakhtin (1981) and now studied as a feature of postcolonialism. With the enormous increase in asylum seeking and economic migration from many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, understanding the nature of these new arrivals is of increasing importance to the societies in which they are now living. Rosowsky’s research is an important contribution to this urgent task. Bernard Spolsky Bar-Ilan University

Ahmed ibn Hanbal (786-863 CE) recounted a dream that God bestowed upon him, saying: ‘I saw the Lord of Power (God) in my sleep and said, “O Lord, what is the best act through which those near to you draw ever nearer?” And He replied, “Through reciting My Word (The Qur’an), O Ahmed”. I asked “With understanding or without?” And He answered, “Both, with understanding and without”’ (author’s emphasis)

1 Introduction

Fishman (1970) reminded us that sociolinguistics is only ever interested in change and variety. Omoniyi (2006), in the same spirit and drawing on Fishman, reminded us that the interface between language and religion, or between linguistic resources and religious resources, is a rich site for the exploration of diversity within human behaviour. These two founding ‘fathers’ of the Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) project loom large in the writing of this linguistic ethnography which explores the multilingual devotional practices of young British Muslims in the early part of the 21st century. In June 2002 at Roehampton, at the inaugural colloquium of the still fledgling sub-discipline, the SLR, I shared data which revealed the multilingual contexts of UK mosque schools off ering children liturgical (Qur’anic) literacy acquisition. The colloquium was organised by one of the SLR’s twin founders, Tope (Sky) Omoniyi, and also provided the platform for Joshua Fishman’s fi rst public outing of his Decalogue for an SLR (see Chapters 8 and 10). The data in question, gathered at the end of the 20th century, suggested relatively stable but nevertheless complex patterns of language use including code-switching, decoding, memorisation and localised diglossia involving both established H and L1 (Ferguson, 1959) community languages, a ‘religious classical’ (or sacred 2) language and a range of registers in the majority language, English. This research later appeared in Rosowsky (2008). Nearly two decades later, data from similar UK contexts often present quite contrasting linguistic profi les with: (a) less stable and much greater linguistic diversity; (b) the more widespread – in some cases, the dominant – use of English in hitherto heritage language contexts; and (c) the ever-increasing publication and use of bilingual teaching resources and practices. Adding to this complexity is the relatively recent but widespread revitalisation of interest among young British Muslims in the performance of devotional poetry and song employing an equally varied linguistic repertoire. This book, therefore, attempts to bring up to date research into liturgical literacy and these other devotional practices in such settings, by sharing new data drawn from field notes and interviews with young 1

2

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

British Muslims, recently gathered across a range of mosque schools and other faith-based settings in a northern city in England. These fi ndings suggest more fluid and dynamic linguistic landscapes informing and impacting upon faith-based supplementary schools and their extended communities in the UK. New configurations of language and identity resulting from changing patterns and directions of human mobility (forced and otherwise) are here complexified by the inclusion of the languages and literacies traditionally associated with faith practices. A number of the precepts from Fishman’s Decalogue are relevant in this book, particularly (i), (ii) and (vi) (see pp. 161–162), but most are applicable to some extent (see Chapter 8 and, particularly, Chapter 10). It is also impossible to analyse such faith-based devotional practices outside the politically charged context within which they are enmeshed. Although comment in the public and media domains relating to such practices within the Muslim community is often reduced to simplistic notions of ‘rote learning’ and ‘unquestioning compliance’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 13), a wider lens reveals a more complex, more varied and richer picture. A central element within this complex variety is, of course, language. In line with recent sociolinguistic studies tracking the dynamic and fluid patterns of language use in ever-increasingly multilingual spaces, the interface between religious and language practice reveals similar degrees of complexity and fluidity. At the same time, however, the presence of practices centred on ancient sacred texts and their languages (‘religious classicals’, Fishman, 1989), while adding to this complexity, also serves as a more stable reminder of continuity amid the fluidity and mobility of language practice surrounding it. Another aim of this book is to present a community at ease with its multilingualism in the face of a politicised and mediatised climate of monolingualism. The range and variety of rich and artful linguistic practices manifested through devotional practice provide a necessary balance to the reductive manner in which the community and mosque schools in the UK are viewed by many in the public domain. The recent association of the community by some policymakers with extremism often takes a linguistic form through an insistence that a lack of English in the home leads to radicalisation. That such a description of family language practice was not generally true even 20 years ago (Rosowsky, 2018b) makes no difference to prevailing views about language in the community. Perhaps as part of that curious mixture of suspicion about other languages and the taking of vicarious pleasure in English being a global lingua franca, the rich variety of language practices engaged in by these young people are at best ignored, and at worst misrepresented and disparaged. In non-religious minority language contexts this is true, but in the charged discourse that presently surrounds Islam in the world this misrepresentation can take on more sinister forms. Recent sensationalist reporting of incidents where the use of languages such as Arabic has been considered a threat form part of

Introduction 3

this discourse. When reading a non-Roman script on a smartphone on a plane can trigger irrational responses from passengers and over-zealous reactions from security staff (Ullah, 2016), there is a strong sense that language attitude can enact a violence where respect for the Other is transformed into fear of the Other (Žižek, 2005). Furthermore, and in the same vein, much of the literature, policy and otherwise (media commentary, for example), appearing over the past two decades purporting to deal with the ‘issue’ of Muslims in the UK, and especially young British Muslims, has been about ‘discourses and conduct of government’ (Jones, 2013: 558). This has left less space for ethnographic research which examines actual lived practices, as if determining ‘moderate’ from ‘radical’ positions among young Muslims (if that is even a legitimate question) can happen without a thorough consideration of practice. [A]s fields of research, religious practices and the production of religious knowledge among Muslims have suffered from programmatic concealment and downright neglect. (Sunier, 2014: 1142)

The devotional practices described and accounted for in this book are, among other things, linguistic practices. They happen because individuals or groups of individuals choose to express their devotional feelings in language. The book is less about beliefs, although the latter do often influence practice and there will be occasions when it is necessary to draw attention to the link between practice and belief. However, primarily, the book deals with linguistic matters. Language practice, in accordance with much sociolinguistic research over the past 50 years, sees language fundamentally as ‘situated’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2009) or ‘local’ (Pennycook, 2010) social practice inasmuch as the linguistic practices linked to devotional acts cannot be merely analysed formally. They require an analytical gaze that takes in their social and cultural contextualisation. The acquisition of liturgical literacy and the performance of devotional song and poetry do not operate in a linguistic vacuum. They take their place among other language practices which surround them and are equally shaped by the social processes and contexts within which they are situated. An important category of language for this book is ‘devotional language’. Keane (1997) defi nes such language as the language needed ‘to know and interact with an otherworld’ and signals the complex issues that arise when trying to account for the ‘source of words, as well as the identity, agency, authority and even the very presence of participants in an interaction’ (Keane, 1997: 47). The young people in this book are fi nding their way both religiously and linguistically through the devotional practices they take part in or have an interest in. The origin, status and nature of the texts they make use of and revere remain, in many cases, well established and part of their respective religio-literary

4

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

heritages. Their relationship to these texts is also twofold. They relate on a faith level to the meaning of the texts or, when this is absent (‘ultralingual’ – more on this below), to their knowledge of their origins and status. They also relate on a language level to the registers and styles they acquire through the phonology and the collocation of the words they decode and memorise. The attempt to interact and communicate with an unseen presence is what lies at the heart of all devotional language. It is shaped by what Keane (1997: 47) observes as ‘the subjective experience of an invisible presence’, and he poses a set of questions which are useful guides in any account of the linguistic dimension of devotional practice. Keane’s Set of Questions on ‘Religious Language’ •

By what means can we, and in what manner ought we to talk with invisible interlocutors? • How can we get them to respond? • How should we talk about them? • By what marks do we know that some words originate from divine sources? • Are these words true, fitting, efficacious or compelling in some special way? (Keane, 1997: 48)

These questions will be answered (some in more detail than others) during the course of this book as we present and analyse the multilingual devotional practices of young British Muslims. We will explore the variety of linguistic forms, genres and registers deployed and account for their current contextualisations, modifications and transformations in specific temporal and spatial circumstances. This book reports on a ‘gentle’ ethnography which has taken place over the past 10 years or more. The author has had the opportunity and the privilege of being able to live and learn among young British Muslims in two large cities in the north of England. At the risk of an over-simplistic generalisation, these young people trace their origins, at least ethnolinguistically, to the original South Asian settlements established in the 1950s–1970s in a number of areas of the UK. As young Muslims of, mainly, the third generation, many of them actively seek to forge their identities in the wellsprings of their religious (but not always cultural) heritage. This has important ramifications for their linguistic identities too, as devotional practice almost always entails some form of language practice. As noted above, this book has two main themes which are on occasion treated separately and elsewhere together. The reason for this will be obvious as we proceed. When I embarked on this ethnographic journey (without initially realising it was one), central to my thinking, as a teacher of

Introduction 5

reading in UK mainstream schools, was describing and accounting for the particular variety of reading learnt and practised in UK mosque schools. 3 Early research therefore focused on the pedagogy and literacy practice of reading sacred texts. It gradually became apparent to me that it was difficult to maintain such a relatively restricted focus in the face of the complex linguistic settings in which this reading practice took place. This early research thus took on an ethnographic character once this was realised, and a richer and thicker (Geertz, 1973) account of how Qur’anic literacy was contextualised within the community was undertaken (Rosowsky, 2008). The theme, therefore, of Qur’anic practices forms one of the principal contexts for exploring the identities of these young Muslims almost a generation later at a time when the sociolinguistic context has been transformed rapidly and significantly. Within a social context described by some as ‘superdiverse’ (Creese & Blackledge, 2018; Vertovec, 2007), these mosque schools have had to adapt to fast-changing linguistic demands. Whereas once they served relatively stable speech communities, often comprising communities of citizens and their descendants originally from South Asian Commonwealth countries (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh), changing social conditions brought about by political change at home and, especially, abroad in the late 20th century onwards means that mosque schools often now cater for a diversity of children from a range of different linguistic and national backgrounds.4 Adding to this complexity is the gradual shift from minority language to majority language (English) among the third generation of these former more stable communities. This has had two main consequences. Firstly, the main language of wider communication in the community, and thus in the mosque school as well, is increasingly English. Secondly, the teachers in the mosque schools are also often mainly English speaking (fi rst-language English speakers) with many of them being educated in the UK and having experienced both systems of learning – mainstream school and mosque school. An obvious implication here is that the sacred text, the Qur’an, and its language, Classical Arabic, 5 are mediated and taught through English rather than through one of the community languages such as Urdu, 6 as was the case 20 years ago. The second theme of this book emerged gradually from the first and has chronologically coincided with what I have described elsewhere (Rosowsky, 2011, 2015, 2017, 2018b, 2018c) as the relatively recent ‘renaissance’ among young UK Muslims of an interest and participation in those more artful Islamic devotional practices which draw on both heritage and contemporary sources. These practices centre on an interest in and performance of devotional poems and songs in a range of languages, drawing on varying language resources for their enactment. Many young people are engaging (as performers and as listeners) in the performance of poetry from their literary and religious heritage in languages such as Urdu, Punjabi and occasionally Persian, together with, on the part of some, a

6

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

turning to similar genres in Classical Arabic. Additionally, the recent development of English language devotional practices has led to yet further variety and complexity in the language choices, patterns and usages taking place among this young community of Muslims. In general, the performance of devotional poetry is a universal religious practice in Islam (and in many faith traditions) and is found in numerous genres and multiple languages. Although not absent in the fi rst two generations of this diaspora, this practice was often limited to particular individuals and confi ned to specific occasions and was the preserve of older members of the community. In the past 20 years, a new generation of British Muslims has embraced this practice in a variety of ways. This renaissance has implications for both religious and linguistic identity. The former, briefly, connects to doctrinal distinctions in the faith very loosely characterised as ‘Sufi’ 7 and ‘Salafi’ (sometimes ‘wahabi’), with the former characterisation mainly associated with Muslims who may have affi liation with a more traditional (i.e. pre-1900) devotional practice, and the latter, again very roughly, representing a more literalist and austere interpretation of Islam which has come to pre-eminence in the Muslim world in the past two centuries or so.8 It is the ‘Sufi’-oriented interpretation of Islam that has given rise, by and large, to the extraordinary wealth of devotional poetry and song that constitutes the repertoire of not only ancient poets and reciters but also their contemporary imitators. Names of poets and scholars known outside the Muslim world such as Rumi, Jami, Hafez, Algazel (Al-Ghazali) and Ibn Arabi (known as Doctor Maximus in medieval Europe) are testament to this wealth and its renown. Later we will see how songs sung and poems recited by young British Muslims in the early part of the 21st century can have their origins in the very early history of Islam.9 Jones (2013) writes of how New Labour in the UK sought to harness aspects of this religious revival through a series of generously funded projects in the first decade or so of this century. [N]ew initiatives in Britain have sought to bypass imported South Asian forms of Islam, counter ‘youthful radicalism’ and facilitate the Islamic tradition’s cultural and political integration within British society precisely by ‘reclaiming’ Islam’s traditional classical heritage. (Jones, 2013: 551)

The subject matter of this book, on one level, is a counter-example to such top-down approaches and reflects a more autonomous (bottom-up) and dynamic set of social, cultural and linguistic processes which seek not to reject a culturally inflected Islam (there can be no a-culturally inflected Islam, or religion, anyway) but to combine it with a (re-)discovery of the classical literary and linguistic heritage of the faith and adopt and build upon it in authorised and novel ways. Linguistically, because of language change over time and because of the spread of Islam to non-Arabic speaking territories throughout its

Introduction 7

1400-year-old history, we are left with devotional repertoires which, although they have always been multilingual to a certain degree in their history, are now, especially in the various diasporas and globalising contexts of the present day, inevitably and richly multilingual. This multilingualism and how it is manifested in the practices of devotional song and poetry sits alongside the relatively more stable conventional practice of acquiring liturgical literacy. These, then, are the two principal but related themes of this book. Finally, and more generally, this embrace of a wider cultural and linguistic repertoire links to what McLoughlin (2013: 34) has termed ‘a growing consciousness of an overarching “Islamic” identity [which has] been growing in recent years. Its focus is feelings of belonging to, and participation in, a one billion-strong Muslim community (umma) world’. And although diaspora is certainly still a useful concept for many of the themes of this book, there is a strong sense at the present moment that the practices now forming part of young British Muslim lives draw on more complex wellsprings and ‘metaphorical spaces’ (McLoughlin, 2013) than those drawn upon by their grandparents. These experiences are leading to a more nuanced and dynamic set of parameters when addressing questions of identity – religious, linguistic and generational. Already, in the brief discussion in this Introduction so far, it is clear that this book has an interdisciplinary character. When researching literacy practices 20 years ago in a similar setting, it soon appeared impossible to account fully for such practices through the perspectives of one single theoretical paradigm (literacy studies) and I found myself drawing on both sociolinguistics and anthropology to make sense of the young people and their literacy practices. In this book, my net is cast wider as I draw on a range of other theoretical perspectives and fields of study in order to provide a fuller and more encompassing account of multilingual devotional practices. These perspectives include those from linguistic anthropology, religious studies and ethnomusicology as well as from sociolinguistics and performance studies. As with much interdisciplinary research taken on by one individual, the recourse to different disciplinary perspectives and approaches is inevitably more broad than it is deep. There is also possibly the need in a book of this nature for making more tentative and potential connections across these disciplines. It is hoped that this broader approach may mitigate to some degree the lack of depth in some of these disciplinary excursions. A Note on Gender

This book is predominantly about Muslim boys’ practices. I make no apology for this although I do acknowledge that a significant omission in this account of multilingual devotional practices is the presence of girls’ practices. All personal visits to the settings in this book were always to the male sections of the institutions or to male-attended events. I was aware

8

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

that there were female sections in each mosque school where girls were being taught, I assume, in a similar way to the boys, although I have only anecdotal evidence for this. The hustle and bustle of children coming to and from the mosque school was very much a mixed crowd. In celebratory or devotional events a female audience would always be present, but cloistered and, generally, beyond my ethnographic gaze for both physical reasons and reasons of etiquette. Anecdotally, also, I learnt that girls and young women have an equally strong interest in listening to, learning and performing devotional poetry and songs as the boys in Chapter 8. Researchers working in gender-sensitive settings such as those often found in religious ones have to adopt the given protocols and etiquette of the religion in question or, more precisely, those of the particularised and lived practices of the communities and individuals involved. This is never carried out in a reluctant or dismissive manner but retains the features of the ‘gentle’ ethnography described elsewhere in this book. A male attending a female-only setting or even asking to attend such a setting is likely to touch on sensitivities about gender appropriateness that would impact on the broader nature of this ‘gentle’ approach. This is not to dismiss or marginalise girls’ multilingual devotional practices, but it does suggest clearly that there is further, complementary, work to be done in this respect – ideally by other, female, researchers. Nevertheless, there are accounts elsewhere that do focus on female engagement with multilingual and ultralingual devotional practices in different settings from those described here. Rasmussen’s (2010) in-depth account of how Indonesian Muslim women engage with a range of devotional practices takes an ethnomusicological approach to both liturgical practices (i.e. the recitation of the Qur’an) and more artful expressions of devotional piety through song and other musical forms. Her work shows admirably how many of these women use their agency in respect of their devotional practices to negotiate a place within the religious elite of Indonesian society. Gade (2004), a female researcher like Rasmussen, also working in Indonesia, focuses more narrowly in her work on the artful, emotional and pious recitation of the Qur’an and is able in her ethnography to explore female participation as well as male. Morris (2019), in his account of Islamic music in the UK, deals with young Muslim women adopting different genres of popular music to enact their devotional piety, in particular those of hip-hop and neo-soul. He shows how the combined taboos of music and the overt participation of females in public performance (two age-old issues of contention in the Islamic world) are being challenged in certain contexts. In respect, therefore, of the themes and context of this book, there is an urgent need to reproduce in a similar manner to what has been explored for males a companion study that accounts for female multilingual devotional practices. The book consists of ten chapters. The fi rst three deal with establishing the context and the field of study and present the background to the

Introduction 9

chapters that follow. Chapter 1 is the Introduction and not only argues why such a book is necessary and how it is relevant to a number of academic disciplines, but also presents a case for its consideration to policymakers and opinion makers. Chapter 2, through a series of narrative and descriptive vignettes and explanatory commentary, provides the reader with a narrativised overview of the respective practices with which this book deals. Chapter 3 describes the methodological approach adopted for the data appearing in the book and argues that a ‘gentle’ ethnography can often be achieved depending on the positionality of the researcher and his or her relationship to the field and its inhabitants. In brief, this argues for an approach to gathering data that relies on ‘the moment’, depends on extended duration in and familiarity with the field, is often unavoidably subjective and idiosyncratic and, importantly, is unabashedly sympathetic. Chapter 4 reviews relevant theoretical principles that help understand and position these devotional practices within a range of fields of academic enquiry, including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, literacy studies and music. Chapter 5 provides an overview of these devotional practices in the light of significant social changes that have taken place over the past two decades. The next four chapters (6–9) are the ‘heart’ of the book. Each taking a different theme, they focus, although not exclusively, on one of the five settings from where data has been sourced. The centrality of the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy to the mosque school is explored in Chapter 6, the superdiverse mosque school is the topic of Chapter 7, the links between liturgical literacy and other devotional practices feature in Chapter 8, and Chapter 9 is about the emergence of English as an increasingly acceptable ‘Islamic’ language. Chapter 10 summarises the practices of Chapter 6–9 and, while clarifying the distinction between these linguistic practices, discusses the tensions that are present in the coexistence of ‘traditional’ and time-honoured practices with more contemporary and often novel instantiations. It also returns to some of the theoretical orientations of Chapter 4 and reappraises these in light of the data presented. It concludes the book with a summary of its fi ndings, suggestions for further research and implications for policy and practice.

Notes (1) I have used Ferguson’s distinction between societal prestigious language varieties and local spoken vernaculars whereby ‘H’ represents ‘Higher’ prestige and ‘L’ represents ‘Lower’ prestige. (2) After a number of years using Fishman’s (1989) ‘religious classical’ as the generic term for the archaic languages used for liturgical purposes, I now follow Bennett’s recent defi nition of ‘sacred language’ for this linguistic code. See Bennett (2017: 1–18). (3) Throughout this book and in my other work I have chosen to use the phrase ‘mosque school’ to denote the site where much of the learning relating to the sacred text, the Qur’an, takes place. I am aware of other terms in use, the main one being ‘madrassah’

10

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

(sometimes spelt ‘madrassa’). However, these terms are also used in other contexts to denote very different places of learning; for example, the religious day and boarding schools in Pakistan are known as ‘madrassahs’. In the Arabic-speaking world, ‘madrassah’ means a ‘school’ of any kind. Furthermore, some ‘mosque schools’ call themselves ‘madrassahs’ but some do not. From an emic perspective, many young people talk mostly of ‘going to the mosque’, ‘I’ve got mosque’ or ‘I’ve been to mosque’ when referring to attending their evening classes. I acknowledge that alongside the pioneering establishment of mosques within the South Asian heritage community, there was a parallel establishment of mosques serving the much smaller Arabic-speaking diaspora communities. These were mainly in London or in the port cities of Cardiff, Liverpool, Bristol and Hull where Yemeni communities were set up from the 1950s onwards. There are also similar communities in industrial cities such as Sheffield and Birmingham. A similar pattern, on an even smaller scale, can be found in the Somali community. On the whole, however, these are much smaller communities in scale compared to the major Muslim community which remains the South Asian community. It needs to be said that the Classical Arabic of the Qur’an is a particular variety of Classical Arabic. Classical Arabic more generally is the language of Islamic literature and scholarship of the past 1400 years and consequently has a much wider lexicon and different discursive range. As the main Muslim community in the UK, and in this study, is Pakistani in origin (and predominantly Mirpuri), the majority of my language examples reflect this fact. However, references to Urdu and community-spoken vernaculars such as Pahari and Pothwari have their equivalents in other smaller Muslim UK communities originating from Bangladesh (Bengali and, for example, Sylheti) or India via East Africa (Gujarati and, for example, Kutchi). The gradual breakdown (or persistence) of this ethnic divide in terms of language and religion, however, is one of the themes of this book. This word is problematic as it has a range of, often contestable, defi nitions. I use it in this book to denote practice, belief and institutions that are, to a greater or lesser extent, associated with teachers of the spiritual ‘path’ (tariqah) in Islam known in Arabic as ‘tasawwuf’ (or sufism). This book is primarily about the linguistic implications of devotional practices and will not devote much space to doctrinal matters except where it is necessary to provide the reader with relevant context, such as here. For our purposes at this early stage of the book it suffices to mention that perhaps the most popular of all songs sung nowadays is ‘Tala` al Badru `Alayna’ (‘The Full Moon Rises Over Us’), which is reported to have been sung by the residents of Medina (then Yathrib) on the arrival of the Prophet Muhammed after his emigration from Mecca in 622 ce. There is some dispute over whether this happened on this occasion or on another but what is important is that the song is possibly over 1400 years old.

2 Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices among British Muslim Youth

This chapter contains a number of vignettes that attempt to depict the lives of young British Muslims and the role of devotional practices within their religious and linguistic identities. These vignettes include incidental demographic and historical data about the participants in order to situate them within the discourse of superdiversity. The linguistic repertoires and language resources many young British Muslims deploy are described through detailed accounts of the relevant devotional practices. These include their sources, their texts, their languages and the various performance genres these young people are embracing and developing in both traditional and innovative ways. The vignettes will be accompanied by an explanatory and contextualising narrative in order to pave the way for the chapters that follow. A note about vignettes

In ethnography, the vignette is often used as a device to provide the reader with an instant and accessible ‘way in’ to the principal practices being analysed. Like a snapshot, they present a moment which, while fictional inasmuch as they are often composite constructions (Humphreys & Watson, 2009), can serve as what van Maanen (2011) calls ‘personalised accounts of fleeting moments of fieldwork in dramatic form’. They also represent how the ethnographer makes sense of what happens in a narrative sense. In this chapter, the vignettes will also prepare the reader for the more circumspect and careful analysis of the five settings that undergird the structure of the book as a whole. Unlike autoethnographic vignettes (Pitard, 2016), these five vignettes are predicated on the imagined experiences of young British Muslims informed and confirmed by their participations observed and described. They are thus written in an omniscient 11

12

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

‘narrator’ third-person mode. These five stories, it is suggested, are representative, albeit they remain somewhat stereotypical and necessarily incomplete. Vignette 1: ‘goin’ t’mosque’1

Munir is 12 years old and attends a local state secondary (high) school. He also attends a mosque school2 on three evenings a week from 5pm until 7pm. He comes home from school at about 4pm and has a quick snack prepared for him by his grandmother, his father’s mother, who lives with his family. She speaks to him a few words in Pahari and he nods and responds in English. The reason he knows what she is saying, even though he knows very little Pahari himself, is because she says more or less the same thing every day – usually something about studying hard, eating well or saying his prayers (she actually uses the term ‘reading’ instead of ‘saying’) – her three favourite topics of conversation with him. His mum arrives from work and talks to him in Urdu and a little English (code-switching). She was born in Lahore and married Munir’s father, who was, unlike her but like Munir, born in the UK. Munir knows more Urdu than Pahari as his mum has spoken to him in Urdu from birth and for the years of his infancy it was literally his ‘mother’ tongue. However, now he only ever talks to her in English and this is the case for his siblings (two younger brothers and a younger sister) as well. He is nevertheless hoping to take Urdu GCSE at school when he gets to Year 10 (age 15). They tried to teach Urdu at the mosque school a few years ago but this didn’t last. The mosque school is a couple of streets away and is a purpose-built mosque with large green dome and two minarets which dominate the skyline in the local area. At 4.50 he walks there with his younger brother (Shazad, aged seven) and his slightly younger sister (Munira, aged 11). On the way, they pass an assortment of shops catering for a wide variety of customers. A supermarket announces it provides Indian, Chinese, Asian, Polish, Caribbean, Russian, Turkish and Kurdish products. A variety of takeaways from Middle Eastern shawarma to Vietnamese noodles line the main street. The names are in English although there is plenty of evidence of other languages and scripts in this landscape. As they enter the mosque school, Munira filters off to the girls’ class, Shazad is taken to the beginners’ class by Munir and Munir then makes his way to the hifz class which he has just started attending. He exchanges a few comments in English with some of his classmates before taking off his coat. Munir has been at the mosque school for four years and in that time has learnt how to decode the Classical Arabic script and some of the basic rules of recitation. He was identifi ed by his teacher as someone who might do well at memorisation and with his parents’ permission has joined this class. He is memorising the 30th and last section of the Qur’an

Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices

13

(‘ juz’’) and has started in reverse order, beginning with the shortest chapters. He sits at a plastic floor desk where he places his copy of the sacred text and begins to practise what he has memorised. The teacher has given him a section to learn in the previous lesson and will be checking his progress at some point over the next two hours. Other boys are doing the same. An audible hum starts up as the boys begin to recite their respective sections in anticipation of being called to recite them by heart to the teacher who sits at the opening of a tight horseshoe formed by the boys who sit on either side. This hum gathers momentum and volume as concentration increases and the natural rhythm of the recitations synchronise. This continues for a few minutes. Without warning the hum peters out as one or two boys pause and the coordination is lost. But just as unexpectedly, the hum soon resumes and the boys continue with their individual recitations. Munir gets lost in his recitation as the sounds he utters (regular rhymes, intonation patterns, stresses and pauses) fill the space around him. As he recites from memory, he sometimes wonders where the recitation comes from. Indeed, occasionally he will try to attend to the words he utters and the stream of memorisation comes to a halt. As he proceeds with ‘rehearsing’ his section, he waits for his turn to recite to the teacher. In this vignette, a number of pedagogical and sociolinguistic observations can be made that link to later chapters. Munir attends the mosque school three evenings a week. In the past, mosque schools tended to operate a standard five evenings a week pattern of attendance. A recognition of child fatigue and the importance of homework issuing from mainstream schools are two factors that have resulted in this reduction of time in the mosque school. Munir belongs to a speech community that no longer has the same relatively fi xed parameters that it had for his father or grandparents. Pahari (sometimes alternatively called Pothwari – although some linguists categorise them as separate varieties; Hussein, 2015; Lothers & Lothers, 2010; Rehman, 2005), has undergone significant language shift (Fishman, 1991, 2001) since the 1960s and the younger generations (third and fourth) are largely fi rst-language English speakers. Depending on their age, grandparents may not have progressed much beyond elementary school in Pakistan before their departure to the UK during the 1950s and 1960s and so would not consider Urdu as their fi rst language. The dominant language of this first generation from the Mirpur area of Pakistan would be Pahari/Pothwari. Munir, however, has a working knowledge of Urdu because his mother was born and raised in Lahore not Mirpur. Anecdotally, the phenomenon of UK-born males marrying Pakistani-born females, although decreasing, often results in different family language practices, with the children being supported in their acquisition of Urdu, the prestige language of Pakistan and its diaspora, rather than in the spoken language of Pahari (see Rosowsky, 2018b). The Pahari Munir manages to speak with his grandmother is therefore

14

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

minimal and has been acquired alongside the more stable English in the family home. Like many Muslims of South Asian origin, ‘prayer’ is often understood as ‘reading’, thus reinforcing the connection in Islam between devotional practice and sacred texts. In a similar vein, the call to prayer is often referred to as ‘reading the azan’ (the Urdu word derived from the Arabic adhan [call to prayer]). The reinforcement of English in the home is often driven by siblings who form English-only enclaves in the complex sociolinguistics of these multilingual and multivarietal (Fishman, 2006) families. The role of siblings in the acquisition of literacy practices is well attested in similar communities and this extends, obviously, to language practices as well (Gregory, 2001). In the mosque school, the division of children into age and gender classes reflects the now significant size of many mosque schools which offer many classes and thus employ a greater diversity of teachers – although they still depend to an extent on volunteers. Gender separation begins from an early age although some mosque schools operate a mixed-gender class for the very youngest. The opportunity to extend his study into memorisation provides Munir with extra motivation and some prestige but draws on a tradition quite at odds with what he encounters in his mainstream school. Recent research into the impact of such activity on mainstream learning practices suggests there are potential benefits for learners that transfer across these different contexts (Berglund & Gent, 2018). The exchanges Munir has with his classmates signal that the main language of interpersonal communication in the mosque school is English and indexes the language shift that has happened in this generation. However, this is rarely Standard English and reflects the variety of English used by these and other children in the local area. Standard English, when heard, is spoken mainly by the UK-born and UK-educated teachers in their more didactic moments when addressing the class as a whole. The same teachers adopt the local variety when engaging in more informal interactions with their students, including the one-to-one lessons with their young memorisers. The main presence of Standard English is in its written form in the bilingual and often trilingual teaching materials being used in the mosque school. In these materials the target language is the variety of Classical Arabic that appears in the Qur’an. In this mosque school, it appears in the variety of Arabic script, sometimes known colloquially as subcontinental or Indo-Pak script. This differs considerably from the more common Uthmani script found in most Arab-published Qur’ans. This difference adds to the complexity of the print environment of the mosque as much of the wall calligraphy follows the same script or sometimes even the stylised nastal`iq script used for Persian and Urdu poetry. A fi nal comment should be made about the oral/aural aspect of this reading practice. Often surprising to Western ears and eyes, reading in the mosque school is frequently a very audible event with all students reciting

Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices

15

aloud whether reading from the page or from memory. The story of how reading has moved from an oral/aural practice to a silent practice is one that features predominantly in many Western or European histories of reading (Manguel, 1996; McLuhan, 1962; Ong, 1967, 1982). An accompanying assumption is that ‘proper’ reading is now always a silent activity. It is doubtful that this is even true in Western contexts (ask any English school teacher ‘reading round the class’), but in religious contexts, particularly those where a sacred text is central, reading is very much an oral/ aural practice. The ‘hum’ heard in Munir’s mosque school is replicated in cheders, gurdwaras and temples throughout the world. Vignette 2: ‘Bluetoothing their way to identity’

In a mid-terrace house in the former working-class district of a northern UK city, a large group of young men have gathered to commemorate the moment in Islamic history when the Prophet is said to have ascended to Heaven, a journey where he met with previous prophets, mighty angels and even God himself. The evening consists of the reading aloud of a narration dating back over a thousand years, translated into English and read out by various readers in turn. The reading is broken up into sections (the narration is over 30 pages long) and songs and poetry are recited during these intervals, again by different reciters and usually with choral sections where others join in. The songs and poetry are either in Classical Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi or English or some combination of these. The average age of the group of about 25 young men is around 20, with some older participants perhaps in their 30s and some as young as 11 or 12. Many of these young men have mobile phones with them. As songs are sung and poetry recited, mobile phones are used to either record what is being performed or follow what is being recited, or used as a script for recitation itself. In addition, discreetly, the boys ask one another to download each other’s texts (transcripts and translation as well as recordings) onto their own phones using the devices’ Bluetooth functionality. In this way, the mobile phone is used as a depository for each young attender’s growing repertoire of songs and poetry. The genre of these devotional performances varies from very traditional and quite ancient genres such as the Arabic qasidah to the very modern nasheeds composed by the young people’s contemporaries and very often in English. In between, you can hear Punjabi qawwali and Urdu naat. The boys read and follow on their phone the songs and poems being performed and join in with choruses where appropriate. The words they follow, if not in English, are often either not understood or only partially understood as, being third generation, they have not all inherited their parents or grandparents’ languages. If the words are in Classical Arabic, there is no reason why they should know them, as Classical Arabic is not the heritage language of anyone at the gathering. But even

16 Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

if it were, the archaic and stylised Classical Arabic of 1000-year-old poetry would be challenging even for fluent Arabic speakers. The words on their phones, however, are all transcribed in Roman script which allows the boys to follow and approximate an authentic recitation. All of the boys have experienced learning to read the Qur’an in their local mosque schools and the ability to recite in a language which is not understood in a referential way is not something they find disconcerting. Their following and reading of the multilingual poems and songs share this characteristic. For some, meaning blazes out of some words and phrases, but for others meaning is experienced more in the sound and melodies of the recitations which they readily associate with gatherings such as these. One of the boys, Naveed, is invited to perform solo for the others. He sits cross-legged on the floor with his mobile phone in his hand displaying the screen with the words to be recited. During the performance, he scrolls the screen to reveal more of the script. The poem is an Urdu naat and although Naveed relies on the Roman script on his phone, this is more aide-mémoire than auto-cue for he shows how familiar and confident he is with the words of the poem by lifting his gaze from the screen to take in the audience or to merely close his eyes. Although he has read through a translation of the poem at some point in the past, memory of this is incomplete and distant and he recalls only a few key words here and there. Nevertheless, to anyone listening, Naveed is performing with intensity and ‘meaning’. There is emotion when particular sounds or words are articulated and varied in pitch at moments that appear to the untrained and trained ear to be appropriate. Part of his preparation and learning of the poem has been to listen to online professional performances of the same poem performed by artists who make a living reciting and performing at formal concerts and larger scale versions of the gathering in the house. He has memorised not only some of the words but also the melody, pitch, emphasis and phrasing of these performances which he is able to reproduce. This lends his performance a degree of authenticity as some of the older attenders with knowledge of Urdu in this case can comprehend what is being recited. His younger peers, however, understand little of what he recites but nevertheless join in with the key parts of the poem that they know, in the hope that one day they will know enough of the poem to recite it themselves. When Naveed has finished and another, older, performer takes his turn, one of his friends asks him to share the poem he has just recited and Naveed, this time, sends him the link via WhatsApp. This vignette sets the scene of the second major theme of this book – the wider multilingual devotional performances participated in by these young British Muslims. The gathering described is typical of regular informal meetings that take place in Muslim homes in these communities throughout the calendar year. The terrace house setting is typical of the inner-city environments much of the South Asian Muslim diaspora has

Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices

17

settled in over the past 50 years. The ages of the attenders are symptomatic of the youth revival that has happened more generally in Islam in the world (Carvalho, 2009) and in the UK (Lewis, 2007) but, importantly for the purposes of this book, embodies the linguistic diversity now present within the community. These are young people of the third and fourth generations who have experienced language shift from their heritage languages to L1 English. Their knowledge of those heritage languages varies from individual to individual along a continuum from absolute absence to general conversational fluency. Spoken Pahari/Pothwari, Urdu, Arabic and H-variety Punjabi are known to varying degrees which, together with English (both Standard and the local variety of English spoken in the former industrial districts where they live), form the linguistic repertoires they enjoy and which they draw upon in their devotional performances. These gatherings mirror to an extent some of the more formal events held in mosques, but as these are often aimed at the older members of the community, where exclusive use of Urdu and/or Punjabi is commonplace, there is often no place there for English or Arabic recitation, apart from the Qur’an. These two types of gathering exemplify in their own ways the linguistic contrast more generally present across the generations, something that will be explored more fully later on in the book. I have attended informal gatherings such as the one described in the vignette where the parents of the host are kept in a back room away from the youngsters performing (quite happily I might add and, I suspect, secretly pleased that their son is hosting such an event, albeit one his father fi nds a little alien). The use of technology to support devotional performance has been commented upon by a number of writers (Campbell, 2013; Pandharipande, 2018; Rosowsky, 2018a). However, this relatively recent development is merely the latest in a series of strategies used by reciters. Not so long ago, these same young people were using pocket-sized notebooks and handwriting their lyrics, using them in the same way as the mobile phones, turning pages rather than scrolling (Rosowsky, 2010). The broader question of the role of meaning in these devotional practices will be discussed regularly throughout the book but suffice it to say at this point that, apart from the English nasheeds which may be part of these gatherings, referential (or propositional) meaning is often absent from the performers’ points of view. Even when there is vestigial (or better) knowledge of the heritage languages, this is often of little use when trying to comprehend the highly literary language of these poetic genres. That is not to say that there is absolute absence of referential meaning. There may be attenders who have learnt H-variety Urdu and who may be able to follow the archaic lyrics of the Urdu naat when performed by someone else, but these individuals are generally in a minority. With Classical Arabic, access to referential meaning is even less likely, for Arabic is not a heritage language of the boys in this gathering. At present, there is less evidence of similar practices being developed among young

18

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

people in the Arabic-speaking diaspora (although older Yemenis in the same city once engaged in similar devotional performances). This is sometimes a doctrinal issue, with many of the recent migrants from the Arabicspeaking world and their families doctrinally more distant from the Sufi practices common in many South Asian diaspora communities. However, there is a growing place for the use of Classical Arabic in these youth gatherings as some individuals gravitate towards the fi rst language of Islam and the language of the revelation, the Qur’an, for more than the need to recite the sacred book itself. An interest in devotional poetry composed in Classical Arabic is a significant dimension to these devotional performances. This is quite different from the type of gatherings that their parents and grandparents may have attended, where poetry would have been in Urdu (and possibly H-variety Punjabi and even more occasionally in Farsi3). Chapter 8 explores this contrast in more detail. The moves towards Arabic on the one hand and, to a lesser extent, towards English on the other, are therefore two important dimensions of this youth revival of devotional performance of songs and poetry and contrast it with any earlier practices participated in by earlier generations in the same community. What was already a relatively rich multilingualism (hidden largely to the outside host community) encompassing devotional performance in Urdu, Punjabi (H-variety), Farsi and the specialised recitation of the Qur’anic Arabic has now become richer with the addition of English and the Classical Arabic of poetry. This development is an example of changing practices revived and spearheaded by young British Muslims and has resulted in a very different language dynamic operating within the community and in these gatherings. As an essential part of the dynamic and vibrant nature of this revival, multilingualism is here manifested in a rich and varied repertoire of songs and poems from the Islamic literary (and musical) heritage. In the following chapters I explore the language implications of these multilingual performances in more detail but, briefly, here I will only point out that such multilingual virtuosity is, in the present UK context and elsewhere in the West, a marginalised and misrepresented practice. Political commentary prevailing at the time of writing (Blunkett, 2006 4; Cameron, 2016; May, 2015) would have us believe that this is a community riven with language conflict, where a reluctance to integrate linguistically (by speaking English – always ‘speaking’ – as if the community was still at a pre-literate stage) and a stubborn adherence to heritage languages are not only socially debilitating but are conditions that might lead to violent extremism (Rosowsky, 2018b). This social-political context, boosted by a mainstream media often eager to exacerbate community tensions, contributes to a side-lining of the linguistic virtuosity of these young people within a reductive discourse which casts knowledge and use of English as the only sensible choice for cultural, social and political participation. Against a backdrop, also, of community suspicion and

Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices

19

Islamophobia, this linguistic privileging adds to the potential alienation of many of these young people. The young people who perform at and attend these richly linguistic and literary gatherings demonstrate a linguistic sophistication which needs recognition and validation rather than disapproval and misrepresentation. Vignette 3: ‘Singing at the “uni”’

The lights dimmed and after a few words from the event’s presenter, a group of 12 young Muslim boys (aged 7–13) in white robes and skullcaps rose from their seats in the front row of the university auditorium and formed two short rows of six on the stage. A choir. Their teacher remained sitting in the front row rather than joining them on stage but was close enough to maintain eye contact with his students for guiding, prompting and encouraging. It was an autumn evening and the choir was the first act of an event featuring multilingual devotional performances arranged to accompany a two-day university academic event focusing on performance and faith. The choir had been getting ready for this performance for a number of weeks. The author had visited a local mosque school where he was a friend of one of the teachers and together they had chosen and prepared the boys for their performance. A range of ages was selected and participation was mainly dictated by behaviour, with ‘good students’ being preferred. A repertoire was decided on and as part of their daily lessons at the mosque school time was set aside for learning, practising and rehearsing. When the evening came, a minibus was booked, the choir was driven to the university by their teacher and they spent the hour before the concert enjoying pop and cakes in a room set aside for that purpose. Great excitement and nervousness were in evidence! Many parents were in the audience; for many of them it was the first time they had visited the main university in the city where they lived. One older boy, Imran, introduced the choir and said he would begin by reciting a verse from the Qur’an in Arabic. When he had finished, he introduced the first song. This was an Arabic song known throughout the Islamic world and the boys sang it fluently and passionately. No-one knew what the words meant, however. There was the possibility that no-one in the audience knew either. When they had completed the song, they all repeated a formula in Arabic which is generally understood as signalling the end of a song or poem. This was repeated for each song sung that evening. The second song was in Urdu. Equally sung with gusto, it possibly had a little more resonance for some of the boys who, regardless of their Urdu proficiency, would be more aware of the language and might recognise words and phrases. The Urdu song had an Arabic chorus, however. The third and final song, although sung as well as the first two, had an added element, as being in English and in fairly simple English too, it was understood by both singers and

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Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

audience. Whether this added something for those involved is diffi cult to judge. After each song there was a round of applause from the audience which consisted of parents, academics attending a colloquium relating to language, faith and performance, and members of the public. The boys sat down in their seats and remained to listen and watch the remaining performers – a Jewish storyteller, Rumi’s poetry translated into English accompanied by dance, a whirling dervish and a qawwali ensemble, all from the local area. Preceding the concert, one of the boys, Imran, together with his teacher, had been interviewed by the university’s media team and his interview later appeared on Apple’s university platform, iTunes U. Their performance, too, was later uploaded to the same platform. Later that year, the boys were invited to reflect upon their visit to the university and remembered it in great detail and with obvious delight. Imran again said that the performance had been seen over 3000 times and compared that favourably with the interview with the whirler which had only received 88 views. Yet the boys regretted that their performance had not been recognised by their school or their teachers. Indeed, there was the feeling, possibly unjustifi ed but no less genuine for that, that such activity would not have been of interest to the mainstream school. The only time one of the boys, Ali, had had any interest shown in his recitations was when he was in isolation for behaviour issues in the classroom and his behaviour mentor talked to him about his life outside school. Music teachers, specifically, were singled out as teachers who were not very interested in the boys’ prowess in singing in a devotional way. A local initiative led by the university’s languages department had done a good job in promoting the city’s heritage languages among young people but had omitted to mention the multilingualism of devotional performance as evidenced by children attending mosque schools. Much of the heritage language activity promoted was generated by the project itself, but neglected the existence of regular community-generated performance in faith contexts. The boys, in their own way, were experiencing the marginalisation of their community and its languages shared by faith-based devotional performance more generally. The event described in the vignette was unusual for two reasons. Firstly, it was rare that these boys would perform their devotional songs and poetry away from their local settings (in their local mosques or in their homes). Secondly, bringing devotional performance into the secular heart of a British university was a unique event (unlike in the United States, the UK higher education sector does not have a wide range of faithbased universities). Although there was a rich programme of music at the university, some of which may have had religious origins (such as Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion which was performed in November 2018), acts of devotional performance – and there were aspects of the boys’ performance that were devotional – were rare. The university’s chaplaincy activities are often perceived as pastoral oriented. Its mission statement, ‘Our Chaplains

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and Religious Advisers offer care and support to people of all faiths and none. We work with communities with a strong sense of belonging, and we offer opportunities for worship, prayer and spiritual exploration’, suggests a separate zone of operation from that of the academic departments, which is where this devotional performance was situated. The academics in the audience all had a strong research interest in the relationship between faith and performance and many of them had a confessional interest too. In Chapter 8 I will explore more fully a useful framework through which the choir’s performance can be understood. Here, though, I will focus on the reaction of the boys to their appearance at the university and the disappointing response of their schools. How did you feel when performing at the university?5

A bit shy … Why? Because of the audience … Nervous … Anything else? Happy … Did you wish perhaps you weren’t there? No. [emphatic] I was happy I was there. He [their teacher] said there were going to be two million people but there wasn’t. This short exchange gives some support to the excitement these boys experienced. It was an opportunity to share not only their very personal faith identities but also their linguistic ones. In much political debate, a primary religious identity before a national or ethnic one has been identified as somewhat problematic, with the suggestion that this is something disloyal (Blunkett, 2006; Cameron, 2016). However, in two recent identity surveys carried out within the Muslim community in the UK (Maxwell, 2006; Thomas, 2009), ‘Britishness’ as an identity category was not considered less important than the religious category. This suggests that political debate is still inflected with stereotypical attitudes towards the ‘Other’ living within. This opportunity then was welcomed by the boys as it gave them a chance to have their performances – and their lives – validated in a prestigious setting. When they took that sense of achievement and pride back into their schools, there was less recognition that this was something worth sharing. Have you ever had the chance to do something like this at school?

No. Never. In school someone ages ago, I didn’t go to the school, I saw this on YouTube, Pine Valley’s Got Talent, this boy he sang like X-factor, and he won, singing, like, naats,6 but that was ages ago, in 2009 I think. He’s at university now.

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So do your teachers know you can sing in Arabic, in Urdu and in English? In RE, they just teach beliefs and they sing songs at Xmas. I don’t like singing them because I’m a bit shy … so the white community they sing, like the Christians, they sing the Xmas songs and last time we sang a song which was, like, a long, long time ago, and our class had to sing it at the Town Hall. So the teachers never ask you about the mawlid7 or things like that, poems and singing? No. Do you ever mention it yourself to your teachers? No. I think I have. I don’t know. Even when you were at the university? You didn’t tell them? Some of us told them. They just said they were happy. That was when I was at primary school. Apart from saying ‘they were happy’, there was little positive response to such an achievement. That the boys all attend schools with decades of experience in teaching young British Muslims from a similar background suggests such marginalisation is deep-rooted and hard to shift. The monolingualism of mainstream schools (and their accompanying monoculturalism) leads to such missed opportunities. Ironically, the most positive experience of school and this practice came from one of the boys who related how he had been in trouble and assigned special staff to mentor his behaviour. Yeah. You know when you have a behaviour problem. I had that and then I had two teachers who mentored me and when we were sitting down they made me laugh and we had a chat. They told me to read and then I read an Arabic naat. Only to those two because I felt positive about it. I told them about the university event and I read over there. (Tariq, 11)

A link here between positive validation and behaviour, although only one case, appears obvious. There will be other places in this book where we need to pause and reflect on the persistent and seemingly intransigent attitudes to linguistic diversity, particularly when performed in a faith context. Vignette 4: ‘Shahe Mardan’

On the same evening as the boys’ choir performance, and after the fourth act, the whirling dervish, had left the stage, there was a brief interval as the stage was reconfigured to allow the next and last performance. Microphones were lowered to floor level, two oriental-style carpets were brought in and laid on the stage and a number of musical instruments including a harmonium and several tablas were place on the carpeted

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floor. After some sound checks were carried out by the sound engineer, eight colourfully dressed individuals came onto the stage and sat down. This was Shahe Mardan, a local qawwali ensemble. Four of the ensemble were boys aged 13 and younger and the other four were men aged from their mid-30s to their 50s. The men and one of the boys wore turbans, white or different shades of green. They began with a slow musical introduction accompanied by rhythmic handclapping which lasted quite a long time before the main singer, Hajji Zahir, began to intone in deeply rich Punjabi lyrics. Much of the early singing was a repetition of certain phrases which were taken up by some of the other members of the ensemble. ‘Ya Habeeb!’ (‘O Beloved One’) was a regular (Arabic) phrase in the first song. With the exception of the four older men, two of whom, the eldest, had been born in Pakistan and were first-language Pahari speakers, the Punjabi sung in the performance would have only been partially understood by the younger members of the group and those in the audience sharing the same linguistic background. The highly rhythmic and hypnotic sound of the qawwali filled the auditorium and built up to a crescendo, with the audience clapping in time, until the song either slowed down or ended all of a sudden. It is quite likely this was the first time such a sound had been heard at the university. The highly religious content of the songs would have been missed by most of the audience but there was no doubt that a certain feeling – call it spiritual or emotional – was an important part of the performance. The qawwali songs were sung in Punjabi and although many in the audience would have associated the ethnic community from which the performers hail with Urdu, this was a reminder that the Punjabi language played an equally important cultural role within devotional performance. Fast forward a year and the same ensemble (enlarged in size by even more young members, including one with a saxophone) were sitting on the floor of a London dargah (a Persian word, although also used in Urdu, Bengali and Turkish, denoting a centre for Sufi activity incorporating a mosque), performing for a multilingual and multi-ethnic/national audience in honour of a guest scholar and spiritual guide (murshid) from Turkey. They were wearing even more extravagant and colourful clothes as befitting their growing popularity on the alternative and world music circuit. The two main languages of wider communication of this centre are Turkish (particularly its Cypriot variety) and English, although Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and Sylheti are also represented among the congregation. Unlike in many other cities in the UK, there are relatively fewer ethnic8 mosques in London, for obvious reasons. The performance was much longer on this occasion and included a fuller repertoire of qawwali songs. The main singer from the university event was joined by a much younger man also with a harmonium. Here, the performance was more devotional than at the university and mirrored the practice of qawwali singers performing regularly at the shrines of saints back in the

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Punjab – there was no shrine as such here but the dargah was named after a particularly famous Muslim saint who had only recently died. Again, the multilingual character of this devotional performance was dominant as although the singing was in Punjabi, most communication from the ensemble and within the audience was in English or, when appropriate, conducted in any one of the languages mentioned earlier. However, in the same way as the four young members of the ensemble at the university knew little of the literary qualities of the Punjabi lyrics, even fewer of the audience in London could understand what was being sung. For this group of Muslims, and for many others, such a disjuncture between language performance and language comprehension is not experienced as something disconcerting. Much devotional performance occurs in such a way – across faiths and contexts. In Chapter 8 there will be more detailed discussion of the role such devotional performance (which we will call ‘ultralingual’ performance) plays in the multilingual identities of these young people. This vignette, however, allows us to digress a little and explore one particular aspect of multilingual devotional performance. Shahe Mardan would consider the qawwali first and foremost a means of enhancing their devotional practices, a way of bringing them closer to the Divine, as so many of their songs reiterate. These songs often date back to the 13th–14th centuries when the accepted founder of the genre, Amir Khusrow, composed qawwali originally in Persian. Persian, or Farsi, devotional verse, not only by Khusrow but also by such poets as Rumi and Hafez, is the source of most of the qawwali repertoire, although there are also many texts in Punjabi and Hindi. Songs in Urdu and Arabic, which are fewer (but increasing) in number, are relatively recent additions to the repertoire. Shahe Mardan, whose name is a Persian title for the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammed, Ali ibn Abi Talib, would acknowledge this Persian legacy although most of their repertoire is in Punjabi. However, this is not the spoken Punjabi which is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan (and if some regional varieties such as Pahari, Pothwari and Hindko are added, it is even more widespread). This is the less prevalent H-variety of Punjabi, a prestigious and literary variety of Punjabi used in poetry and other stylised formal genres. As the young people involved in Shahe Mardan may be first-language English speakers, and even if they know Punjabi, it will be a spoken variety like Pahari or Pothwari and be quite linguistically distant from the often archaic forms of H-Punjabi, their connection with Punjabi is what has been called a symbolic one. In respect of linguistic repertoire, a symbolic language often plays an important part in identity where the ability to use or communicate in the language is not necessary in order to claim an allegiance. This is embodied in the sometimes heard complaint and somewhat paradoxical statement, ‘I can’t speak my language’. Whether or not a turn to the heritage language via devotional performance can turn into

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proficiency in that language remains to be seen and might even be seen as unnecessary given the symbolic value placed upon it in linguistic identity. In contrast, other members of the community see a turn to Arabic, particularly Classical Arabic, as a means of enhancing their devotional practices. This generally takes the form of certain young performers choosing to perform some of the Classical Arabic repertoire as well as or instead of songs and poems from their heritage. Thus, in the second vignette, some of the attenders may have performed the Classical Arabic qasidah, ‘The Burdah’, composed in the 13th century by the poet, Muhammed Busiri (1211–1294). Indeed, the boys’ choir in the third vignette have also performed this on other occasions. This turn to Arabic is particular to the younger generations who have often accompanied their own religious renewal with a preference for devotional performance in what could be seen as the ‘more authentic’ language of the faith, Arabic. An extreme example of this ‘turn’ is illustrated by a group of young British Muslims from the same South Asian community but from a different region of the UK, specialising almost exclusively in the inshad repertoire of the devotional singers of Jordan and Syria. The ensemble, with its splendidly blended glocal name, the Keighley Munshids, 9 have built a reputation for singing their devotional repertoire in authentic Levantine styles. Similar to the H-Punjabi used in the qawwali, the Classical Arabic performed in their qasidahs is of a literary and archaic quality which would challenge even scholars of the language. Nevertheless, these linguistic (and literary) challenges, whether taken up or not, matter little when weighed against the ‘spiritual’ value these ‘ultralingual’ performances represent. The term ‘ultralingual’ will be used in this book in order to suggest a use of language which is ‘beyond’ or ‘on the other side of’ conventional referential meaning (more on this in Chapter 4). The terms ‘multilingual’ or ‘bilingual’ capture the plurality of the named languages in devotional performance but do not differentiate between the often extremely contrasting usages and purposes of any two or more of these languages. In devotional performance (and in some artistic performance), the formal aspects of language are emphasised over and beyond referential usage. Bauman’s theories on performance in the verbal arts are germane here and will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 4. The use of H-Punjabi, for example, particularly in a diasporic context, is an ultralingual event where the language of performance is not usually one of semantic communication but is a means to transcend it through the formal features of the language. This is the same with children acquiring Qur’anic literacy (Vignette 1), young performers reciting Urdu poetry using Roman transliterations on their smartphones (Vignette 2) or the boys’ choir reciting a Classical Arabic song at the university (Vignette 3). In all of these settings the languages involved are ‘performed’ in the sense that the emphasis is on faithful adherence to the lyrics articulated in as authentic manner as possible with careful attention to pronunciation,

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tone, melody and pitch. ‘Getting it right’ is a key element in this sort of language use but not so that comprehension is enhanced but so that the original and subsequent iterations of the song or poem are entextualised in these new contexts. Placed alongside a desire to emulate in their performance the ‘authentic’ heritage of the Islamic world, meaning becomes something ‘beyond’ the literal or even metaphorical sense of the words uttered or recited. ‘Ultralingual’ is a way of denoting this ‘beyond-ness’ of the language practice. Furthermore, as such language performance is so ubiquitous and established, across a range of faiths and cultural practices, it is useful to coin a term that can capture such an important language practice. In a number of contexts throughout the rest of this book, the term ‘ultralingual’ will be employed with this sense of meaning. Banani (1987) in his work on Rumi uses the term to denote the other-worldly sense of ‘beyond’ and which ‘disposes with language in its discursive sense’ (Banani, 1987: 35). Other examples that can be mentioned in relation to young people are the existence of boys’ choirs based in Oxbridge colleges (e.g. Kings College, Cambridge, ‘the Choristers’) whose repertoire includes much Latin, including Lotti’s Crucifixus which, despite its regular repetition, would task the linguistic skills of a Latin scholar. The bar mitzvah rite of passage undergone by most Jewish children as they reach puberty involves the recitation of a portion, or part of a portion, from the Torah. Sikh children recite from the Guru Granth Sahib which was composed in a variety of languages including Sanskrit and Old Punjabi which, to a large extent, are only accessible by scholars. All these examples are ultralingual practices. Vignette 5: ‘The mawlid’

On the last Thursday of each month in a northern city in the UK, a group of young Muslims, mostly from the Pakistani heritage community whose parents and grandparents originated from the Mirpur region of north-eastern Pakistan, meet up in the city’s central mosque to celebrate the mawlid. Literally, ‘mawlid’ is an Arabic word which means the birthday and particularly the birthday of the Prophet Muhammed (or the birthday of an Islamic saint). However, it has come to be synonymous with a series of devotional practices that can be performed at any time of the year. And although there is a specific date in the lunar year for the Prophet’s anniversary, and indeed more mawlid celebrations take place at this time than at any other, it is also common for a mawlid to be held at any time and this young community have been holding a mawlid on the last Thursday evening of every month for the past five years. It is led and organised by a slightly older member of the community. Imran is in his mid-30s and works as a teacher in a local school, but convenes the monthly mawlid for his peers and their younger friends and

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relatives. All present are predominantly first-language English speakers, having experienced language shift in their families across the last two succeeding generations. The older members of the mosque’s congregation (the ‘elders’) do not usually attend. From the point of view of practice and, importantly, language, this youth mawlid is a very different affair from that which the elders are used to in their own heritage tradition, where mawlids are held, but usually only once a year and where the language of performance is predominantly Urdu (with little or no English language contribution). Many of the young people, boys and girls and young men and women (there is a separated space for the latter in a balcony overlooking the main prayer hall), would claim that they are following Sufi practices and, indeed, another occasion for a mini-mawlid would be the occasional visit by a Sufi teacher. These practices normally include devotional song and poetry. Whereas not long ago such devotional performance would be exclusively monolingual – and this is still the case in the ethno-cultural heartlands of these communities – in the diaspora among young Muslims such events are inevitably multilingual. The evening begins with all participants sitting in a large circle and Imran leading them in a particular Sufi practice known as the ‘dhikr’. This is carried out in Classical Arabic and includes various Qur’anic recitations, certain litanies and repetitive chanting (particularly of the Classical Arabic phrases, ‘la ilaha ill Allah’ [‘There is no God but God’] and ‘Allah’ [‘God’]). After this devotional performance, which lasts for around 30 minutes, a brief pause is made for supplications. These are first said in Classical Arabic, generally by an individual who has memorised a sequence of Classical Arabic supplications, and then usually in English, where the supplications are usually spontaneous and follow no established tradition. Apart from some general instructions, this is the first time an element of referential meaning has occurred during the evening. The dhikr and supplications are followed by the ‘mawlid’ proper. A small group of young men emerge from the circle and form a group next to Imran. They gather around a microphone holding various booklets and sheets of paper and begin to sing. Their songs are selected from a famous collection of songs known as the Mawlid ad-Daybài, compiled by Shaykh `Abd ar-Rahman ad-Dibay`i who was born in northern Yemen in the 15th century. Obviously, all the songs in this collection are composed in a highly sophisticated Classical Arabic and without an accompanying translation they would mean, referentially, little to the young performers or their audience. A translation of the mawlid texts has been published and this is what the performers hold in their hands as they recite. The texts of each poem are in Classical Arabic script, a formal Roman transliteration of the Arabic words and the English translation. Some of the boys follow the words using the Arabic script, drawing on their knowledge of Qur’anic literacy; others rely on the transliteration.

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Despite knowing how to decode and recite aloud Qur’anic Arabic, not everyone is familiar with the different vocabulary and phrasing of the Classical Arabic poems. Part of becoming a fluent reciter of the Qur’an is becoming familiar with its lexicon, its syntax, its rhythms and its cadences. As a Muslim is encouraged to read regularly, these phonological features imprint on the individual to the extent that he or she instantly recognises something as being Qur’anic. Even though some of the Classical Arabic of these poems draws on the Qur’an and the language of the Prophet, the overall shape and sound of the poems is very different and a knowledge of Qur’anic Arabic is not always very helpful in decoding the poem’s verses. The boys sing the mawlid texts and where appropriate the audience joins in with verses or choruses they know. Occasionally, the mawlid leads to a Sufi practice known as the hadrah – where the congregation stand and move their upper bodies in a swaying or rocking motion to a combination of the mawlid singing and Imran’s intoning of key words designed to create a beat or rhythm – words such as ‘Allah’, ‘Hu’ (‘He’ – as in ‘He is Allah’) or ‘Hayy’ (‘Life’). This practice moves beyond referential language and constitutes ultralingual activity. This can be an ecstatic practice with participants becoming very involved in the beat of the mawlid, shown by their exaggerated bodily movement. Tonight, however, the mawlid does not enter the hadrah. There have been some disagreements with the mosque’s elders who have objected to the hadrah on doctrinal grounds (a not uncommon reaction in many Muslim contexts here and around the world). Instead a number of participants are invited to recite individual naats. These are usually in Urdu but occasionally in H-Punjabi. Naveed, one of the mawlid singers, and Tariq, from the audience, sing respectively in these two languages. As these two are older than most of the congregation, an understanding of what they sing is present. Again, many in the audience, particularly the younger boys and girls (as well as the odd attender not from this language community), will not comprehend but will occasionally recognise the particular naat and even sing along in the choruses, when the choruses are in Arabic as is sometimes the case. More rarely, there will be a song or two in English. However, despite the growing popularity of devotional songs and poems composed in English, these rarely feature in the formal context of the dhikr/mawlid/hadrah. (In Chapter 8 there will be further mention of contexts where this does occur more frequently.) The evening ends with another supplication, usually in English, and a meal is served for all attenders and all conversation is in English. Chapter 8 focuses more specifically on the devotional performance of songs and poetry in a range of contexts, including online ones. For this vignette, it is interesting to dwell briefly on the fusion of established traditions from the heritage and ethno-cultural heartlands of Islam and the way they are recontextualised in diaspora settings, particularly among

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young people. Pandharipande (2019) writes of how young US Hindus recontextualise their devotional practices through the English language and Western musical forms and genres. Soldat-Jaffe, in the same volume, records how young American Jews recontextualise their Yiddish and Jewish heritage using hip-hop and quite different language performance (Francophone African voices) to lay claim to new and renewed identities as Jews in the 21st century. The partial rejection of an exclusively culturally tinged Islam for these young people is made by the turn to Arabic. In the past, few members of the community would have had knowledge of and made use of Arabic beyond the particular need to decode the Qur’an. An imam could have performed all their duties to the community with a solid knowledge of Urdu. There were exceptions, particularly when this involved part of the imam’s training taking place in an Arabic-speaking environment, but this was not the general rule, at least in many diaspora contexts. The turn to Arabic made by the younger generation, as mentioned before, is allied to a wider rejection of their parents’ and grandparents’ culturally tinged version of Islam. Driven to some extent by Sufi practices, much of the devotional performance is influenced by the growing popularity of Sufi teachers coming from the Middle East and North Africa rather than from South Asia. This leads to an equally growing propensity to adopt Classical Arabic as the language of choice for devotional performance. The poems and songs performed in the mawlid are sourced from the substantial and rich heritage of Classical Arabic devotional poetry, as in the Mawlid ad-Dibay`i, a compilation of poems and songs with an accompanying narrative and litanies from the 15th century. The script used by the boys in the mawlid is an abridged version of the original, with much material removed, the inclusion of translation and transliteration and the addition of texts relating to the main tariqah10 followed by many of the boys (Kabbani, 2006). Another popular source for the mawlid is ‘The Burdah’ (mentioned in Vignette 3 above), a qasidah poem written in the 13th century ce and performed in most of the Islamic world. This poem has rooted so well in different places that there are now different identifiable melodies that localise a particular performance. A North African version of The Burdah would sound very different from an Egyptian or Turkish one which in turn would be quite distinct from a performance in South Asia, where despite the predominance of Urdu and Persian for devotional literature, a special place is reserved for the Arabic performance of The Burdah. Interestingly, the version of The Burdah that can be heard sung in Southeast Asia is very similar to the versions sung in Arabia and Yemen – a testament to how Islam spread to that part of the world many centuries ago. It is almost redundant now to say that The Burdah, when sung in Classical Arabic, is rarely understood in its entirety, even by Arabic speakers. Such is its ubiquity and popularity, however, that it features as part of most mawlids in one way or another.

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This can consist of a few verses to a full rendition. The verses that are commonly used in South Asian mosques (verses 34–36 and to a lesser extent verses 153–161), which many of the elders would recognise, are often not even associated with The Burdah, such is their regularity and independent character. Nevertheless, the young men attending the mawlid, especially those that lead it, are aware of the poem’s standing in the Islamic world and include it as part of their repertoire. A number of translations into many diff erent languages including ‘Urdu, Pashto, Khorezmian Turkic, Persian, Malay, Turkish, Berber, Chinese, Uzbek and even numerous versions in English and other Western languages’ (Aslan, 2008: 3) have been made of this poem. This includes a recent English singing one (Azaam, 2016). This has yet to make its appearance in the monthly mawlid, but in light of the emergence of English as a language of devotional performance in Islam (see Chapter 8), this could soon be a feature. One of the obstacles to the appearance of English poetry in the context of the mawlid is its relatively ‘alien’ sound compared to much Islamic devotional performance. This is particularly the case with the first- and second-generation Muslims in the UK and in the Muslim diaspora in other English-speaking parts of the world. Much of this may be down to the association of English with the secular world – in the colonial history of the ethno-cultural heartlands – but another reason is no doubt the present quality of English devotional poetry where it exists. Much of the language of the songs – the nasheed – when performed in English can sound quite trite and clichéd and, although the motivation of their (usually) young authors cannot be criticised, the lyrics are not yet at a poetical level to match the literary qualities of the Classical Arabic and Urdu repertoire. This is almost counter-intuitive given that much of that repertoire is inaccessible from a meaning point of view. However, such is the nature of ultralingual performance that such inaccessibility for many merely adds to the other-worldly quality of the devotional performance. You get the feelings, special feelings through the words that you can’t get in English. Maybe in 50 years or so there will be a poet who writes naat in English … that when people read it they will feel that love coming out of the words … but you can’t get in English at the moment what you get in Urdu or Arabic. (Shahid, 23, naat performer)

Another factor militating against devotional performance in English is that where there are accomplished Muslim poets, they tend to write in a modern style and genre (for example, blank verse, meaning privileged over metre [where that even is present], no rhyming scheme and so on). By contrast, all the texts used in devotional performance in the contexts described in the vignettes are highly stylised, characterised by substantial attention to metre, regular rhyme and other formal considerations. It is very much like putting a sonnet of Shakespeare alongside a poem by Carol

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Ann Duff y (this is not a criticism of Carol Ann Duff y; it’s just that you can sing a Shakespeare sonnet [and may have done] more readily than you could one of her free, conversational, poems). The linguistic complexity of the mawlid, as in the other four vignettes, is clear. It arises, in turn, from a complex set of factors. These young British Muslims enthusiastically seek their religious identities through different pathways from those followed by their parents and grandparents. The embracing of these new pathways leads to language choices determined largely by the teachings and practices they encounter. At the same time, there is a trend, more commonly held among young Muslims not only in the diaspora, to locate and shape these identities in what they understand to be ‘authentic’ practices and beliefs. The linguistic implication of this trend is the turn to Classical Arabic. More broadly, the community to which these young people belong has undergone significant language shift during the course of settlement (1950s– present), from its heritage languages of L-Punjabi varieties such as Pahari and Pothwari and H-varieties such as Urdu (and Persian in a performance context) to the majority language, English. To a degree, this latter phenomenon is not particular to this community and forms part of the regular pattern of minority language shift to majority language in conditions of diaspora. The presence, however, of a range of languages and registers for devotional performance makes for a multilingualism that outlasts the fragility of those original heritage languages. Language scholars have regularly observed the capacity of sacred languages and their accompanying practices, in conditions of marginalisation such as diaspora, to outlast their congregation’s minority spoken languages. As reported elsewhere by many other scholars (Fishman, 1989; Ferguson, 1982; Safran, 2008), in many faith contexts, the sacred language has a staying power and resilience that spoken vernaculars, particularly in diaspora settings, do not appear to have. It would appear that the combination of language learning, sacred text and religious context work together to ensure this stability. (Rosowsky, 2019c) Notes (1) ‘going to the mosque’ – the [t] for ‘to’ + glottal stop [?] is a typical variant of ‘the’ [ðə] in the local variety of English used by many of my young participants. (2) See Introduction, note 3. (3) The famous Pakistani Naat Khawan, Owais Raza Qadri, who is a regular guest performer in UK mosques, includes Farsi naat in his repertoire. (4) Originally published as ‘What does citizenship mean today?’, The Guardian, 15 September 2002. (5) Researcher questions in bold. Boys’ responses in italics. Square brackets used for author clarifications. (6) See Chapter 5.

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(7) See pages 26–32. (8) A mosque attended by Muslims predominantly of the same ethnic heritage. See Chapter 5. (9) Keighley is a West Yorkshire town in the north of England, while ‘munshid’ is an Arabic word used for a performer of inshad. (10) ‘Tariqah’ (Arabic, plural ‘turuq’). Literally ‘path’ or ‘way’ but often translated, as a legacy from Orientalism, as ‘Sufi Order’ (for example, Trimingham, 1971).

3 The Research of Ultralingual Practice in the Community: A ‘Gentle Ethnography’

This chapter describes and explains the process by which data for this book was collected. It stresses that this ethnographic study has not been time limited but has been taking place intermittently, involving varying durations in each setting, over a relatively extensive period of time. Due to the writer’s open-ended participant observer role in the various settings over a period of nearly 20 years, the data have been gathered in informal ways as much as in formal ones. Often deliberately eschewing conventional strategies such as formal interviews, questionnaires and observations, the data in the book are best characterised as co-generated through a combination of regular conversations with participants and equally regular visits to settings, and co-interpreted between the writer and those involved in the performance practices. The ethics of such an approach are also examined in this chapter. The chapter also presents relevant demographic data of the young British Muslims who feature in this book and a brief overview of the nature of the different ultralingual devotional performances many of them practise. The methodology for this study can be characterised as one of ‘gentle’ ethnography. This is an approach to understanding sites without deploying on the part of the researcher or the research team the usual gamut of questionnaire, survey, interview and observation schedules. In fact, there are no data-collection tools in the conventional sense. Once permission was obtained for being at the site, the researcher’s role was to be as unobtrusive as possible. Unscheduled and informal conversations took the place of interviews, unstructured or otherwise; discreet observation took the place of clipboard/notebook hustle and bustle. Importantly, one’s ears took the place of digital recording devices (however discreet), and thoughtful reflection before, during and later was the main mode of being during the researcher’s sojourn at the site. In such ethnographic research, there 33

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Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

needs to be an immersion in the site which cannot happen quickly and which needs to involve all the human senses and sensitivities. Understanding naturally grows slowly, with only occasional unexpected insights, and time is the most important resource for the researcher. Such an approach needs a considerable amount of time. Indeed, in some cases the sojourn never ends and the researcher’s involvement with the site may continue for many years, even decades. This, of course, is an approach only available to some researchers in some contexts. But practitioner researchers from all walks of life can recognise that this is a facet of their professional lives most of the time, even if they rarely have the opportunity to take advantage of it. Outsider researchers can fi nd such an approach a considerable challenge and, given an outsider’s unavoidable propensity for entering and then leaving a site after a fi xed period, maybe even impossible. It goes without saying that being a participant observer (with the emphasis on participant) is a major advantage in a gentle ethnography. Indeed, gentle ethnography is often adopted because there is a mutual affinity between researcher and participants, who are deemed to be in the category of ‘fellow travellers’ rather than research ‘subjects’. The aims of the project are only loosely articulated at first as, in their sharing, the project becomes jointly owned. They can sometimes take on the characteristics of redressing perceived and actual wrongs in terms of representation and understanding. This, of course, makes the research value laden from the outset. There is no attempt to disguise the researcher’s purposes from the participants or from any later audiences, academic or otherwise. In contexts experiencing marginalisation and misrepresentation, the role of the researcher often becomes one of an advocate. Moreover, there is no suggestion that the site or sites are tightly representative of wider contexts. Nevertheless, without quantifying the field in any way, it is still possible and indeed necessary to proceed as if the site or sites are in some way typical. To do otherwise is to marginalise further the activity that takes place and the issues that emerge from the ethnography. Gentle ethnography is a dialogic process involving dialogue with site members and dialogue with oneself. Thus it is a very reflexive approach which leads to the researcher understanding themselves as much as understanding others. As a Muslim researcher, I was a participant observer and thus able to participate in prayers and other devotional acts when required. This blurring of roles as a researcher and as a fellow worshipper was critical. Although access was negotiated with mosque school administrators and permissions gained from teachers, students and their parents in the conventional ethical manner (Aston et al., 2015; Mercer, 2007), there was still the hard-to-resolve factor that my presence in the research setting could also be justified on matters of faith alone. The mosque school often took place in the main prayer hall of the mosque itself and, as a Muslim, I needed no permission to be there. Nevertheless, I endeavoured to

The Research of Ultralingual Practice in the Community 35

separate the two roles as best I could. A consequence of this blurring is that it is almost impossible to separate my own experience as a worshipper in each setting from the data collected more conventionally (Mercer, 2007); my analysis inevitably reflects this. Having said that, it is this blurring that has allowed for the much gentler approach to data gathering than had been the case 20 years earlier when, although still a participant observer, less familiarity with the field sites led to the adoption of more formal data-gathering tools. The data in the chapter that follow consist mainly of observations captured in field notes, conversations with teachers remembered and/or transcribed from audio-recordings and photos taken in situ of teaching materials (Pole & Morrison, 2003). Therefore, in this study, the mosque school remains the locus for learning and socialising while the researcher participates in as much of the activity as possible. The only obstacle to full participation is occasional lack of expertise in some of the teaching methods. When the boys are reading their Qur’ans individually, the researcher will also be doing the same. Although the boys have a routine where they will be monitored by the teacher, the researcher may instead consult the teacher about particular issues of recitation or meaning at a mutually convenient moment. Choosing the right moment is an important part of gentle ethnography. Such interactions need to be genuine and as spontaneous and unobtrusive as possible. In any one teaching session (usually taking place some time between 4.30 and 7pm), there is likely to be scheduled one of the canonical congregational prayers. The researcher joins in the prayer with the teacher, the boys and other attenders. Although this may appear as a key element in ‘blending in’ to the research setting, it is not done for that reason. Gentle ethnography, as much as possible, should avoid doing anything for any other purpose than its true purpose. The researcher prays because he has to pray in the same way as a teacher has to teach or a doctor has to practise, regardless of how that helps engage with the field in question. Of course, not everything can be carried out in such a dispassionate manner. Being in one mosque school at a particular time rather than in another obviously entails choices made in advance. However, it is possible to mitigate some of this selectivity by, for example, attending congregational prayers in the mosque at a time when there is no mosque school. In such a way, the gentle ethnography approach extends beyond the parameters of a traditional research study with its fairly fi xed and identifiable entry and exit points. Although this approach may appear impractical or even impossible to some researchers, I am confident that, at least for practitioner researchers, some of this is indeed feasible and they will recognise in my description how a gentle ethnography can be part of their own methodological approach if it is not already present in latent form. It also, I argue, removes much of the anxiety and occasional guilt about preparing extensive and intrusive data-collection tools that are inappropriate in such an approach.

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Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

Relevant Demographic Data for the Young People

The UK 2011 Census, usefully, had a question about language for the first time in its history and, together with the more regularly collected data on ethnicity and religion, provides a reasonably fair, if broad, depiction of this religious community (ONS, 2012). In general, out of all religions, the Muslim community in the UK is growing the fastest. Moreover, given the proportion of young people in the community, this is likely to continue. In terms of minority religious groups (counting all Christian groups as a whole to be the majority), the Muslim community is by far the largest, with Hindus, the next biggest group, being only one-quarter the size of the Muslim community. In terms of ethnicity, Muslims of South Asian heritage are the vast majority (at just under 2 million out of total of 2.71 million). The largest group is the Pakistani and, in particular, the Mirpuri community, whose original settlers came to work in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. The most relevant statistic from the latest census data is that the Muslim community is the largest growing religious minority in the UK (from 1.55 million in 2001 to 2.71 million in 2011) and, in addition, is becoming more and more diverse. The ‘Other’ category for ethnicity among UK Muslims increased from 56,000 in 2001 to just under 300,000 in 2011, a six-fold increase. The devotional performers in this book are the children and grandchildren of this much greater diversity (Ballard, 2001). Linguistically, the heritage language of the largest Muslim community (represented by two of the four settings researched for this book) is a spoken variety of Punjabi variously known as Pahari or Pothwari, with some significant proficiency in spoken and, more commonly, written Urdu in some families. There is significant shift to English particularly among grandchildren (third generation). Classical Arabic is acquired in a limited way in the local mosque schools (or at home) and Standard English is encountered at school. The performance practices described in this book reflect this multilingualism to varying extents with, however, less use of the spoken varieties of Pahari and Pothwari,1 more regular use of Urdu and Classical Arabic and a growing use of English. The other two settings featuring in this book reflect the growing ethnic and linguistic diversity of the present moment in the city. One of these mosque schools was originally set up by one of the smaller ethnic communities in the city but, because of its inner-city location, it now has a more diverse congregation due to the recent arrival of economic migrants and asylum seeker/refugee individuals and families. The other one has another diverse congregation made up of university and hospital employees, a local ethnic community, a growing number of ex-postgraduate students who have been able to claim asylum or secure employment in the city, plus university students here for the duration of their studies. The languages of these two settings are therefore diverse and, as a result, English is becoming the principal language of the mosque school.

The Research of Ultralingual Practice in the Community 37

Socioeconomically, the communities still tend to be situated in urban districts with high levels of social and economic deprivation (the fourth setting is less deprived). The original industries that employed the original settlers and some of their children have almost all disappeared and many now fi nd employment in service industries such as taxis and takeaways. Many in the third generation have moved through the UK secondary school system and have either graduated or are passing through higher education. This contrasts with the higher education access of other groups. Asian (not including Chinese) student participation is increasing at a higher rate (47% in 2018) than in other groups (36% in 2018, excluding Chinese), although fi nal outcome in terms of degree classification still lags behind other groups (Gov.uk, 2019). This is relevant in respect of the mosque schools, as the personnel in terms of organisers and teachers are shifting from the elders’ generation to the latest, educated in the UK, generation. For example, the director of one mosque school in this study is a UK-educated and trained ophthalmologist. Another is a university technician, while teachers are invariably, male and female, graduates of UK institutions. In one mosque school, two of the teachers are also mainstream school teachers. We will see below what impact this social change in the social and educational demographic has had on the development of the mosque school in the UK. In addition, most of the mosque personnel in the sites attended for this study are fi rstlanguage English speakers with no or varying degrees of their community languages. This, too, has important implications for the performance practices they and their students engage in. My participants for the first theme of this book (ultralingual Qur’anic literacy acquisition and practice) were students in the mosque schools, their teachers and other mosque school personnel. For the second theme (the practice of ultralingual devotional poetry and song), the participants were organisers of devotional poetry events, performers of devotional poetry and their audiences. Often, they were the same individuals. Ultralingual Performance Practices

In Chapter 2 we introduced, in a mainly narrativised way, the practices that form the subject matter of this book. Below, we provide relatively brief overviews of the main devotional practices in question before reaching the detailed ethnographies in Chapters 6–9. Liturgical (Qur’anic) literacy

The principal performance practice of the community in terms of numbers of participants and time invested in its teaching and learning is the practice of learning how to decode and recite the sacred text of the Qur’an. The process, socialisation and methodology of this acquisition

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Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

has been described in the literature by many (Gade, 2004; Gent, 2011; Moore, 2006; Rosowsky, 2008; Wagner, 1993). The traditional methods employed and described, until recently, have changed little through the centuries. This book will show how, with the contextualisation of the mosque school and its participants into new superdiverse settings, some of the established and time-honoured approaches have been modified or transformed pedagogically and linguistically. In a complex example of the cosmic dance between the old and the new, this book shows how all language practice evolves and recontextualises, regardless of the apparent fi xity of the texts at the heart of the textual practices. Schachter (2010), in a detailed description of how Jewish children acquire Biblical Hebrew literacy, shows how, in a different faith setting but one that still features a sacred text at its heart, teachers and parents negotiate contemporary resources to mediate the learning of an archaic language for their children. Such examples are testimony to the universality of sacred text practices but also to the inevitability of novel solutions to these new contextualisations. The centrality of liturgical literacy is due to one thing – the need for the young to be inducted into the standard practices of worship for their faiths. In Islam, all formal worship takes place in Classical Arabic. In Judaism, despite some moves to vernacularise prayer in some traditions, prayer is carried out in Biblical Hebrew. The fact that prayer might be considered illegitimate in non-sacred languages creates an imperative on the part of the teachers and learners that helps justify and motivate their acquisition. I don’t mean that it can ever be right for individual worshippers to mouth Hebrew words without understanding what they mean; that would be an offence against their own integrity as well as an affront to the One being worshipped. But during a service lasting an hour or more, it is permissible occasionally to relax, and allow the sound of the Hebrew, read by the Reader or sung by the Cantor or Choir, to ‘wash over’ one without attending to, or even necessarily understanding, the meaning of every word, so that, released from the rigour of propositional logic, the spirit is free to roam and to soar. (Rayner, 1993) The second part of this quotation relates very much to the sonic qualities of a sacred text and its emotional impact on the listener. This example of what I am calling ‘ultralingual’ experience or performance exemplifies Bauman’s idea of the enhanced experience for the audience and the attention to external form that constitutes for him performance in the verbal arts (Bauman, 1975). The fi rst part of the quotation, however, is not always as vigorously supported as it is here. While there is significant anxiety and occasional regret expressed about a separation between performance and comprehension, and a regularly uttered associated sentiment that comprehension will come later, there is no suggestion that accurate and melodious decoding does not, in itself, also constitute an act

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of devotional practice regardless of the level or nature of comprehension present. For a Muslim reciter, there is value in the act of reciting. In all honesty, it is quite a big ask to expect the everyday non-Arabic speaking, or knowing, Muslim to reach the level of understanding expected by the speaker in the quote above, particularly when the vast majority of learners are children. This is not to say that many non-Arabic speaking, and knowing, Muslims do not reach an understanding of the sacred text. Some do and some reach a level equal to or even exceeding their Arabic-knowing co-religionists. 2 Nevertheless, the majority of Muslims never reach a level of comfortable comprehension of the sacred text. This is not usually considered ‘an aff ront to the One being worshipped’, although it might be seen as a weakness on the part of the Muslim, who is described in the Qur’an as having been created ‘weak’. A fundamental principle for the Muslim in his relationship to his Lord is to recognise his or her weakness so as to rely on His Attributes of Mercy, Forgiveness and Forbearance. This is often a concept that non-Muslims, or those with no comparable terms of reference, fi nd difficult. From the reading authority of Frank Smith (1994: 7) – ‘Reading without meaning? What is the point of that?’ – to orientalists drawing unfavourable comparisons with Western approaches to learning in their comments about ‘rote learning’ (Singer, 2001), to Muslims themselves characterising Qur’anic literacy as ‘bored and alienating’ (Rosowsky, 2008: 222), liturgical literacy practices have had a bad press. Furthermore, it is not just a question of ‘bad’ pedagogy. In other contexts, the practice of decoding, memorisations and recitations have been interpreted as ‘vain repetitions’ in more general arguments about the nature of faith and practice. Calvin and others in the 16th century, drawing on Matthew 6:7, 3 used their critique of practices regarding recitations and litanies learnt by heart, a fundamental part of pre-Reformation Christianity, to undermine the Catholic faith itself, arguing that referential meaning should not only be foregrounded (not an invalid wish) but should also replace the ‘vain repetitions’ of worshippers. Yelle (2013), drawing on this historical example, shows how similar opposition to Hindu mantras and other orally transmitted traditions, this time led by European orientalists and their supporters in the British Raj, led to a shift in emphasis from an oral faith culture to one where the written word – in its vernacular form – held sway over practice. The central paradox of liturgical literacy is that, despite the presence of a sacred, written text, the practices through which and with which it is associated are mostly oral. If we remove the solitary pursuit of the religious scholar, most traditions involving worship and, indeed, learning of the sacred text are oral ones. One of the most fundamental shifts caused by or correlated with the Reformation in Europe and colonialism elsewhere is the shift from orality to literacy. In the faith community in its practices, and in the mosque school in its pedagogies, these oral traditions

40

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

are maintained. However, we cannot ignore the contextualisation of an oral tradition into settings where the written word is predominant. This has implications for pedagogies, the understanding of language and, ultimately, in faith settings, one’s experience of the faith itself. One relevant example of this shift, which has taken place over the past 250 years, is the observation made by some that the bookshelf of a medieval scholar of religion can now be found in a regular worshipper’s bedroom (or at least on their computer). Oral tradition often made literate teachers an elite (not necessarily a welcome outcome). The democratisation of literacy, some would argue, makes everyone a scholar (perhaps still not necessarily a welcome outcome). Ultralingual naat4 recitation

The second theme of this book, ultralingual devotional poetry and song, is broken down here into three separate sections although, in practice, the practices described in each section often occur together. Before accounting for the interest in naat performance within the third generation, it is necessary to point out that naat performance is a tradition that journeyed from the naat heartlands of Pakistan and India to the diaspora of the UK and elsewhere with the first settlers and is not by any means an innovation within the community in general. Events in mosques and other public events, local radio stations and publications (mainly imported but increasingly published locally) have all supported this devotional practice within the community from its early days. However, similarly to other speech communities in diaspora settings, this interest and practice has, until relatively recently, been associated with the older generations and, in standard theory of language shift (Fishman, 1991, 2001), was likely to end at some stage in the future once this generation disappeared. Therefore, to write about ‘revival’ or ‘renaissance’ and similar terms is to mean, more precisely, a revival in the collective memory of the community rather than individual revival. It is the community itself that is at risk of losing some of its devotional language practices and it is a new generation that may be being instrumental in reviving it. Most of the young people in this book are not, therefore, renewing interest in these devotional practices as individuals for they probably never knew them in the fi rst place. Intergenerational transmission is not, in the main, how these practices have been passed on or revived. Rather, what appear to have happened to these young British Muslims are identity choices regarding pathways within their faith which, in turn, have stimulated interest in devotional practices which are extra to the acquisition of liturgical literacy the majority of them would have experienced as children and young people. This collective renewal is a counter-example of the usual trajectory of diaspora minority languages. Fishman’s GIDS 5 proposes a stage in

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language shift (Stage 7) where it is exclusively the older generation that takes part in ‘rituals, ceremonies, concerts, lectures, contests, readings, songfests, theatrical presentations, radio and television programmes and publications’ in the minority language (Fishman, 1991: 397). Once this generation dies away, and with no accompanying intergenerational transmission of the language (Stage 6 on the scale), these cultural practices disappear with them. In the settings described below, it is the third generation who are spearheading the revival by learning and performing naat and, importantly, using the power of the internet to provide material, role models and opportunities to develop their interests. Examples will be given in the book of how this particular devotional practice takes its place amid a range of diverse linguistic practices to contribute to the rich multilingual environment in which these young people live their lives both publicly and privately, offline and online. The language resources at the heart of naat performance are predominantly Urdu with some H-Punjabi. On very rare occasions, Persian, a language that once permeated much of Indian cultural practice, may also be used, but this is usually down to visiting performers. I consciously use the term ‘language resources’ here because for many young people their knowledge of Urdu or H-Punjabi may be limited to an ability to decode (and often from a Roman transcription rather than a Perso-Arabic one) and authentically articulate the verses (ultralingualism). This deployment of language resources is a characteristic of multilingualism in the early 21st century, especially when societies are becoming superdiverse patternings. Ultralingual qasidah recitation (‘inshad’)

Another direction for young British Muslims interested in devotional performance through poetry is in Classical Arabic. A feature of many young British Muslims is a turning to the original language of the faith and the heritage of that language in terms of texts. For some, this may be a scholarly path, studying 10th century texts from the Golden Age of Islam such as those of Al-Ghazali or the even earlier texts of the four Imams of jurisprudence, the fuqaha 6 of the four madhahib.7 For most, though, the encounter with these ancient texts is through Classical Arabic sacred poetry. Many of the same young people performing naat will also perform in Arabic, although observation shows that there tends to be a degree of specialisation. The turn to Arabic is part of a broader turn to what is perceived as a more authentic turn in religious behaviour within Islam (Carvalho, 2009; Esposito et al., 1991; Lapidus, 1997). One of the contributory explanations for this ‘turn’ has been the presence of Muslim minorities living in the West. The disruption to cultural norms exacerbated by diaspora conditions means that a degree of lassitude is offered

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Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

when setting out on a religious lifestyle. For example, in more fi xed communities characterised by Gemeinschaft, young people are more likely to adopt the cultural norms of their parents and communities. In the often fragmented circumstances of diaspora communities living in Western societies, young people can feel an extra enfranchisement in looking beyond their cultural heritage by seeking what may appear more ‘real’ or ‘genuine’. Thus, many young people participate in devotional practices with Classical Arabic texts as a way of expressing this orientation. An interest in Classical Arabic verse may only amount to a pleasure and proficiency in decoding and intoning correctly (ultralingualism). It may also turn into something more substantial, with language learning taking place more deeply alongside this performance practice. For many, though, it may be as minimal as memorising a few choruses in Classical Arabic, perhaps aided by a Roman-transcribed aide-mémoire. Obviously, the young performers’ experience and expertise in decoding the liturgical text of the Qur’an will assist them in their engagement with Classical Arabic in other genres – although the depth and range of vocabulary in Classical Arabic verse is of a different order and requires substantial time and effort to achieve familiarity. However, as a language resource, Classical Arabic in its devotional poetry guise is another element in these young people’s linguistic repertoires. Ultralingual and English language nasheed recitation

The last category of devotional performance featuring extensively8 in this book is the genre of nasheed. This is perhaps the broadest category of devotional practice, for nasheeds can be performed in any language and are not tied to any particular style or mode, unlike the Urdu naat or the Classical Arabic qasidah. It is also the genre of devotional practice that is most accommodating to the English language, and as a consequence it is a vehicle for bilingual and multilingual recitation within the same text. The range of forms and modes pretty much spans most musical and poetical genres. To what extent nasheeds are always devotional is a challenging question. On the face of it, some nasheeds, particularly those in modes that come close to the genres of modern popular music, might be better understood as anthems of identity. Their lyrics and performances reflect and narrate stories of identity which, with their notions of pride, selfawareness and confidence, do not always fit the frame of pious devotion. Nevertheless, examples of a range of devotional genres will feature in this book as they all contribute to the language resources these young people deploy adroitly in living their religious lives. It is also worth pointing out in this summary that the term nasheed is understood in various ways. In its original Arabic meaning it comes from the Arabic verb inshad, which is sometimes rendered by the English ‘intoning’ and in an Arabic-speaking context is limited to religious

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‘songs’ – although there is another word for ‘songs’ in the conventionally Western sense, aghānī. This distinction between nasheeds and aghānī marks a separation between the sacred and the secular. In the diaspora and by extension in the new world of globalised Muslim ‘music’, nasheed can now mean any religious song. In the UK, nasheeds can even be used popularly as an umbrella term for all types of performing devotional verse regardless of the genre or language. Morris (2019) describes in detail the extent to which Muslim music in the UK has developed during a similar timeframe to that of the collection of data for this book, i.e. the past 20 years or so. It is no surprise that there is considerable leakage from the Muslim music scene into devotional practices and vice versa. The famous nasheed artist Sami Yousef has popularised certain nasheeds which young performers bring to their own events in order to perform them themselves. At the same time, well-known texts from a thousand years ago such as The Burdah of Busiri are integrated into the repertoires of young performers. Although not a central theme of this book, it is the case that it is the nasheed that allows more musical accompaniment. Instrumentation apart from a modest drum (and even that is frowned upon in some contexts) is rare in the naat and the qasidah. In the nasheed, by contrast, the full gamut of musical instrumentation can be found. This carries with it its own controversy, as devotional practice is often considered too pure to admit what some might consider secular and even ‘satanic’ influences. When much nasheed performance in the English-speaking settings of the diaspora is also performed in the English language, this combination can be too much for some, who express disapproval and even incredulity that devotional performance in Islam can be carried out in English using Western musical accompaniment. It is also, though, an exception to the more general ultralingual nature of devotional performance in these contexts. ***

These multilingual devotional performance genres, together with the performance of liturgical literacy in Classical Arabic, form a central part of the young British Muslim’s linguistic identity. Their nature, their interplay and their contextualisation are what this book is about. We will explore how these young people deploy a rich and varied range of language resources linked to their devotional practices which are not on the periphery of their lived lives but are central to their lives as British citizens. In places, we will be obliged to reflect on why such diversity is considered by many to be a problem or something alien to traditional British values. None of the practice described here happens in a vacuum. The political and social landscape within which much of this practice is contextualised is often suspicious of multilingualism and non-Christian religious practice. At best this might lead to the young people and their practices being

44

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

marginalised or ignored. At worst, the practices themselves and the institutions that nurture them can come to be seen as a potential security risk leading to increased political and media scrutiny and police surveillance. The former scenario is perhaps best exemplified by reflecting on the other South Asian faith communities in the UK such as the Sikhs and Hindus, whose practices rarely become a matter of public interest. The latter scenario is very clearly that of the UK Muslim community which has had to withstand a battery of negative press and adverse political commentary over the past two decades. To what extent such pressure impacts on the practices of the young people in this book is probably impossible to answer. I suspect it impacts less than we imagine, as the drivers for performing in a devotional way are not usually oppositional or resistive. Although there are nasheed genres, for example, that valorise jihad and those that take part in it, this is very much a minority activity in comparison to the mainstream performance of devotional literature. Some of the more eclectic identity-oriented music and verse may reflect an oppositional stance to the majority society – some Islamic hip-hop lyrics come to mind. However, by and large, most young British Muslims that engage in devotional performance do so in order to seek meaning in their chosen religious pathways and to satisfy the human desire for the aesthetic in what is perceived as a pure or halal way. As so much of the musical entertainment that is available in the majority society may not conform to certain parameters of Muslim modesty, the opportunity to follow a parallel path in musical and literary practice is an enticing prospect. Five Settings: The Heart of this Study

The five sites for this ethnography are, firstly, four mosque schools in the city where I live in the north of England. I had existing personal contacts in three of the sites and one of them was a new venture for me. I frequented each site as a member of their congregation and as an ethnographer. I prayed regularly in the mosques to which the mosque school was attached (and often shared its space), attended the Friday congregational prayer and often merely sat in the mosque reading and reflecting. I was or became known to my fellow worshippers and often spent time talking to them on a range of matters, only occasionally talking about the ethnography I was developing. The mosques differed in a doctrinal way from one another, with two of them loosely following practice originating from their founders’ ethnocultural heartlands in South Asia and, for want of better terms, predisposed to a sympathy with ‘traditional’ 9 and ‘Sufi’ Islam. One of them was clearly more comfortable with what some call a ‘Salafi’ approach to practice and creed, while the fourth had been closely associated with the city’s universities for many decades and had an ethos that reflected Islamist sympathies often brought to the city from the Middle East and North

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Africa, and dating back many decades. To a large extent, such doctrinal differences are not relevant to this study, although certain emphases in learning in the four mosque schools may be indirectly associated with them. The fi fth ‘site’ is not a specific place or setting. Rather, it is the loose network of young Muslims in the two cities who are spearheading a revival of devotional poetry and song. Although these young people are linked to the mosque school network, with many of the participants working as teachers in them, this fi fth research site emerges dynamically whenever there is occasion for devotional performance. This can be in the mosque but it can equally happen elsewhere. One of the major innovations of this revival among Muslim youth more generally is that such performance is now regularly visible and audible in non-institutional settings. Public performances of devotional poetry and song can happen in family homes, at conferences, during Eid celebrations in public places such as local parks (and even Trafalgar Square in London), at regular music venues in the cities, and at festivals of various types. There is an outreach element to these performances which is not only aimed at reaching different audiences but also carries within it a confessional objective to at least present the faith in a positive and aesthetic way to non-Muslims. The practice of devotional poetry and song involves not only performance itself but also the preparatory research and rehearsal that take place around it. This community of practice (Wenger, 1998) relies heavily on sharing material (often located online) with fellow performers, identifying, transcribing, translating and discussing lyrics, practising styles and melodies and organising performances. This site is, therefore, a very rich setting for exploring the role of multilingual poetic genres in linguistic repertoires with a range of language varieties and resources occurring at many gatherings. ‘Accessing’ this particular site has involved, on the part of the writer, not only attending as an audience member, but also participating. This has taken two main forms, one more regular than the other. In most gatherings of performance poetry of this type, there is cause for individual participation in terms of choruses and other forms of audience response. Many devotional poems and songs have choruses that are easy to remember and repeat. Relevant to the themes of this book, these choruses can often be in a different language from the main verse lyrics. More rarely, I have participated as a sole performer with my limited repertoire of Classical Arabic devotional poetry. These experiences, part of the ‘gentle ethnography’ described above, have given me a special and personal insight into the experience of devotional performance. It has also, obviously, helped to secure my acceptance by the community into its practices. The age range of this devotional poetry network is relatively broad. Some of the performers of devotional poetry can be as young as eight

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years old. I arranged for a Muslim choir to appear at my university whose ages ranged from eight to 13. Others can be somewhat older and are often the young parents of the younger performers. This adds an intergenerational dimension to the practice. In general, however, participants come from the third and fourth generations of the original community. Elsewhere I have described how role models for devotional performance of song and poetry are an important element in the developing community of practice (Rosowsky, 2018c). As just suggested, this can be older peers and even parents, but on occasion celebrity performers from the ethno-cultural heartlands can be invited to gatherings to demonstrate their expertise and repertoire. These role models provide inspiration to the young performers, who pick up new repertoire and imitate or adapt styles of performing. One of the most telling moments in this ethnography was when a very well-known Pakistani naat reciter10 attended a local home in the city and performed an English song for the young attenders (Rosowsky, 2018c). This was quite a surprise as his repertoire is usually Urdu, Punjabi and Arabic. He decoded and sang the lyrics from a sheet of paper in the same way as a young British performer would decode their Urdu or Arabic lyrics from a transcribed aide-mémoire. On a more local scale, very young performers may thus imitate their older peers. A young local performer was briefly very popular through CDs and an extensive YouTube presence. He sang in English and one of his songs was used by a much younger performer to win a school talent show which was itself broadcast on YouTube. Although we will be addressing this topic in more detail in Chapter 8, this is a clear example of how electronic communications, particularly social media platforms, facilitate and support the performance of multilingual devotional poetry and song through a dynamic community of practice. This site is also transnational. Apart from the appearance of role models from overseas in UK settings, there is much evidence of performers making full use of the transnational pathways already in place within Islam’s global presence. Thus, in addition to the use of the internet to locate and discover material, whether that be in Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic or English, many performers align themselves to particular transnational networks such as the Sufi turuq11 (plural of singular tariqah) ‘paths’ and use these to identify opportunities for performing and learning. A number of Pakistani-heritage young people have spent time in the Middle East learning the authentic techniques of inshad with master teachers. They have come back and now perform a genuine inshad repertoire in Classical Arabic for British audiences. Another group of performers with members as young as 10 years of age have embraced the Punjabi devotional genre of qawwali and perform locally to both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. Both groups are tied closely to a particular Sufi path. There will be more on these new directions in later chapters.

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Notes (1) A form of literary western Punjabi, referred to here as H-Punjabi, and transcribed in a script known as shahmukhi, is sometimes heard being recited for devotional poetry. Ironically, if this language was stressed as the community’s prestigious language rather than Urdu, it is likely that there would be greater retention given its greater affi nity with the spoken varieties. Urdu is, linguistically, a more distant relative. (2) Islamic early history is full of examples of saints and scholars for whom Arabic was at least their second language and who ended up producing some of the most important Arabic texts the Islamic world has known. Al-Ghazali and Al-Bukhari were probably fi rst-language Persian speakers. (3) ‘But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking’ (Holy Bible KJV, 2011 [1611]). (4) The term ‘naat’ (Persian, and subsequently Urdu, lit. ‘ode’) is commonly used for more formal Urdu and H-Punjabi recitations and, as a poetic form, is reserved particularly for odes to the Prophet Muhammad, although other topics do occur. (5) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Fishman, 1991, 2001). (6) Plural of faqih – a scholar of jurisprudence. (7) Plural of madhhab – an Islamic School of Jurisprudence (the four main ones are the Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanafi and Hanbali schools). (8) There will be mention here and there of other devotional practices (e.g. Punjabi qawalli ensembles), but these do not constitute the major activities in this area. (9) Using this word is perhaps controversial as most doctrinal orientations in Islam can claim they are the ‘traditional’ way. Here, I mean it to very broadly denote approaches to belief and practice that seek to obviate either: (a) modernist approaches that attempt to reconcile Islam with modern European science and philosophy; or (b) the Salafi approach which seeks a return to what it considers the primary sources and resources of the religion dating back to the three ‘Salaf’ generations succeeding the Prophet (600–700 ce). The difference between a ‘traditional’ and a Salafi approach would be the latter’s selective and exclusive approach to Islamic scholarship of the past 1000 years. Both approaches, however, revere the Salaf generations. (10) This was the well-known naat reciter (or in Urdu, naat khawan), Shahid Mahmood. (11) Sometimes translated as ‘Orders’. The more literal ‘path’ is preferred here as the former has unhelpful Orientalist associations.

4 Ultralingual Language Practice in Devotional Settings

This is a mainly theoretical chapter focusing on how reading or reciting in devotional settings can be understood through a number of different theoretical lenses. Most of these lenses draw on the language disciplines (mostly sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology), but there will also be an opportunity in this chapter to show how an understanding of devotional language performance can be enhanced through consideration of some non-language approaches such as music, ethnomusicology and religious studies. I will also endeavour in this chapter to introduce and begin to develop the concept of ultralingual performance in order to fill a gap in the explanatory apparatus available to sociolinguists when describing those relatively common bi- and multilingual practices that choose to overstep referential or propositional meaning (also referred to as ‘discursive meaning’, Osborne, 2016; or simply ‘semantic meaning’, Patel, 2008). There will also be an opportunity to explore how devotional language performance can be understood through more recent theoretical approaches to language use in the fluid circumstances of greater human mobility and intensely transnational electronic ubiquity (Appadurai, 1996). A significant cluster of theoretical ideas regarding language in use in a superdiverse society has been developed in recent years to explore this complexity, even though less has been published so far that refers to religious practice per se. When language (Blommaert, 2010) or communicative (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011) resources rather than discrete language totalities are the subject of the analytical gaze, the level of analysis is refi ned and more comprehensive. Both established and more recent ideas about language in use such as repertoires (Busch, 2012; Gumperz, 1964), translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014) and metrolingualism (Otsuje & Pennycook, 2010) can help to understand the communicative processes underpinning language practices in these complex social and religious settings. At the same time, drawing on the work of Fishman and others, the role of language performance in religious 48

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settings is discussed with a view to exploring how sacred1 languages and the co-sanctified use of other languages can contribute to the related issues of language maintenance and language shift. The set of established sociolinguistic concepts relating to these issues, including reversing language shift (RLS), can help identify trends in language use (Fishman, 1991, 2001). Thus, there will be discussion below of how minority community languages exist alongside the majority language, English, in an unequal relationship leading to language shift and language loss. The role of devotional practices in the potential reversing of such language shift will also be explored. Language and poetics – an aside

The analysis of language in performance modes has been a controversial area. A large body of scholarship on language would deny or limit the impact of poetics on natural language development and therefore dismiss it as unworthy of scholarly attention. Austin (1962) is famous for having declared such language as ‘parasitic’, ‘hollow’ or ‘void’, and not ‘serious’ in contrast to other modes of linguistic communication. An actor saying their lines, according to such a view, is somehow an ‘etiolation’ (Austin, 1962: 22) of authentic language use. Thankfully, such an extreme opinion on the value of poetical language no longer holds sway, although there is still only a relatively small body of research in this area (see Jakobson, 1960, for an exception to the general trend). This function [the poetic] cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function. (Jakobson, 1960: 6)

Although this book will not be about the poetic qualities of the sacred and devotional texts as such, at the heart of the practices it describes it does acknowledge that language that is considered poetic, or artful, is not a mere sideshow in respect of regular human communication. In religious settings, the poetics of utterances characterise, in part, their sacred and devotional status. Language and Performance in the Verbal Arts

An important theoretical foundation for this book is the lens of performance in respect of the ‘verbal arts’ articulated by Bauman and others (Bauman, 1975, 2000; Bauman & Briggs, 1990). Notions of ‘full’ (Bauman, 1975) or ‘high’ (Coupland, 2011) and virtuosic language performance will be explored in order to distinguish the thrust of this analysis from that of variationist sociolinguistics with its emphasis on everyday speech. Associated terms such as entextualisation and contextualisation

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which are relevant to the ‘transportability’ of sacred texts will also be defi ned and explained in this chapter. The performance framework of Bauman was developed in the main to account for more secular forms of the verbal arts such as storytelling. However, this framework and its conceptualisation of how verbal arts are framed into performance by certain culturally agreed conventions are directly relevant to understanding the performance characteristics at the heart of sacred text literacy and devotional practice. My personal journey to this theoretical orientation started some time ago when, as a secondary school teacher of English in the UK, I was prompted by a hunch that reading for referential meaning could not be the sole or main purpose for reading experienced by the young Muslims in my school when they were engaged in their daily sacred text practices at the local mosque school. Given that so much of their reading in the mosque school was decoding, not only in the recitation of the Qur’an but also in the occasional recitation of poetry and song, motivation, from a narrowly ‘reading for meaning’ point of view, was surprisingly always present. Among their non-Muslim peers, on the other hand, once meaning became inaccessible due to the comprehension level of the books they were reading, motivation for continuing to read (decode) usually ended. In a related study (Rosowsky, 2001), which explored reading for meaning and reading accuracy among primary school aged Muslim children and their peers, it was found that the same Muslim children who were well accustomed by that age to read without meaning in the mosque school (decoding), rarely found it disconcerting to read in a similar way in English (in their library lessons, for example) in their mainstream schools. This took place even when the reading comprehension levels of the books they chose were too difficult. Their decoding skills, by contrast, were well developed (indeed, in some cases, precocious). By contrast, their non-Muslim peers reading at the same comprehension level were quick to abandon decoding once their level of comprehension had been exceeded. Reading as decoding therefore seemed to have an intrinsic value for the Muslim young readers which was not available to their peers who had no experience of valorised decoding in another context. What might account for this value? Growing proficiency in accurate pronunciation, fluency in blending and combining syllables into words and then into phrases and verses, followed by the acquisition of the conventions for recitation in an artful and melodious manner (which Bauman would term the ‘paralinguistic features’) – these are all part of what Bauman considers the ‘getting things right’ aspect of performance in the verbal arts. This is as true for an actor learning his lines, a singer her lyrics or a speaker making a prepared speech as it is for these young British Muslims in their development as reciters of the Qur’an. The external form and conventions of language are no longer incidental or arbitrary and a means to an end of successful communication. Rather they become, often, the end in themselves.

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In addition, Bauman (1975) suggests two dominant characteristics of verbal performance that help in an understanding of the value of sacred text recitation. On the one hand, verbal art performance demands attention from both performer and audience to the way language is presented, often to the peripherisation of the referential meaning. This entails an emphasis on the accurate rendition of verbal utterances in terms of pronunciation and recitation conventions. This ‘getting it right’ aspect is added to by an enhanced concentration on communicative skill or beauty. The other dominant characteristic, which is evoked by the first, is the enhancement of experience of the audience. The latter experiences the performance not only through an intellectual and semantic understanding of what is being performed (where this understanding is available), but is also emotionally moved by the communicative power and/or beauty of the performed utterances. Furthermore, Bauman reminds us that performance always entails some form of evaluation or assessment from an audience. How an actor ‘delivers’ their lines, a singer ‘manages’ a phrase or a speaker articulates the words of their speech are all often assessed above and beyond the referential content of what is being uttered. Bauman would consider this an essential aspect of performance in the verbal arts. It is this characteristic of ‘beyond-ness’ that suggests that ‘ultralingual’ might be a useful term with which to describe the performance practices described in this book. Ultralingual

There are a small number of different but related uses of the term ‘ultralingual’, all of which lend support to the notion of something that suggests ‘beyond’ the language being used. For example, Cook (2008), from the world of photojournalism and cuisine, uses ‘ultra-lingual’ to denote how commercial culinary outlets operating in superdiverse contexts often rely on images to ‘span or sidestep’ the bounds of written language. [W]here language fails, an image can succeed, as with his photographs of ultra-lingual restaurant signs around the city. (Cook, 2008, emphasis added)

Sneller (2013: 306) uses ‘ultra-lingual’ as a way of characterising Derrida’s annotations to the 13th century Andalusian and Jewish mystic philosopher Abulafia, consisting as they do of ‘scribal oddities’ and ‘pictorial aspects of letters and letter combinations’. What we fi nd in Derrida is not this particular attention paid to letters’ numerical weight: our Latin alphabet, as opposed to the Hebrew, does not dispose of that property. But we do fi nd in his texts, as we just saw, attention paid to the pictorial, ultra-lingual or extra-communicational aspects of letter or of letter combinations. (Sneller, 2013: 315, emphasis added)

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In addition, making a useful link to another important area of ultralingual performance, vocal music (see below), techno artist Metrobox (aka Berten De Beukelaer) has been identified as someone who believes vocal music to be ‘one of our strongest ultra-lingual means of establishing human connection and mutual understanding across borders, cultures and class’ (Metrobox, 2017). Although there are differences in the way Cook, Sneller and Metrobox understand ‘ultralingual’, what their meanings share is the propensity for language to be either ‘inadequate’ (Cook) or a means to communicate something beyond referential meaning (Sneller). Music, for Metrobox, achieves communication (‘mutual understanding’) across or beyond the limitations of linguistic meaning. This quality of ‘beyond-ness’ is what allows them all to use the term ‘ultralingual’. In the music world in particular, there are many obvious examples of such ‘ultralingual’ performance even if the term is not explicitly employed. The crossover compositions of Karl Jenkins stretch the notion of ultralingual performance to the limit by including ‘lyrics’ which only mimic human language. 2 His now famous anthem, Adiemus, has convinced many since its fi rst performance that its lyrics were in one language or another. heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee….. adie adie mus ta de adie adie a mus ta adie na ta mus ta me adua adie adie tu e ma de adie adie tu e ma adie adie tu e made…. adie adie mus ta de adie adie a mus ta adie na ta mus ta me adua adie adie tu e ma de adie adie tu e ma adie adie tu e made… ademade tu e made ha ade made tu e ma hade made tu e ma cora, hade made tu e ma cora ( haye , waye….) hade made tu e ma cora ( haye , waye….) ha une wa en , ha un wa hee e (2x) (Adiemus lyrics, Jenkins, 1995)

This technique is mirrored by the singer and composer Lisa Gerrard in her compositions which, like those of Jenkins, mimic human language through an idioglossia 3 approach (Papazova, 2015). Her most famous composition (with Karl Zimmer) is probably Now We Are Free from the Ridley Scott fi lm Gladiator. Both Jenkins and Gerrard use recognisable pseudo-language forms rather than real language in order to communicate through their music. These are ultralingual performances where meaning lies beyond the language forms (pseudo or other) uttered or sung. Despite their non-confessional nature, many of Jenkins’ and Gerrard’s performances have been seen as having a spiritual and/or religious association by their audiences (Gnoosic, 2003–2007; Iaţeşen, 2017).

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Perhaps the nearest, at least in spirit, to the usage I am proposing to use in this book is how Banani (1987) accounts for the language of the Persian mystical poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Banani refers in a number of ways to how ‘words’ can themselves ‘transcend words’. Quoting from Rumi’s best known composition, the Mathnawi, he writes of how the poet’s words are inadequate to communicate the ‘ultralingual experience of love’ disposing of language in ‘its discursive sense’ (Banani, 1987: 113–114). Illuminating though is the account of words, Yet more lucid the tongue of the wordless love. As the pen was racing along its path, Or split through, as it came upon love. Even in these lines, which stress the limitations of language in mediating the ineffable raptures of the soul, Rumi’s transverbal techniques are already at work … The fi rst line apparently assesses the scope of the spoken ‘tongue’. The second line, however, turns to speculate on the state of the written language, when it comes to coping with the problem of conveying the unconveyable. The dramatic encounter of the ‘rushing’ pen with ‘love’, while allegorising the predicament, also obliquely suggests paradoxically nonverbal means through which the tongue and the pen may achieve their ends. (Banani, 1987: 114, emphasis added)

Although I am not suggesting that the ultralingual performances I am describing in this book are due to the inadequacy of language to convey ‘the unconveyable’ in the Rumi sense, I am perhaps rather drawing attention to how using language which is not understood in a referential manner, or ‘its discursive sense’, can nevertheless express meaning in a different way. Research in the field of music and language is useful here. Ultralingual Performance and Music

Faudree (2012), for example, argues that the field of ‘language-music’ is socially and culturally constructed. The boundaries between language and music, between speech and song, are not particularly meaningful and do not map onto standard categorical distinctions between music and language. (Faudree, 2012: 520)

Rather than viewing music and language as discrete categories of experience and meaning, she suggests that we should see both as socially constructed categories carved out of a ‘total semiotic field’ (Faudree, 2012: 520) or as something originating in the capacity of humans for meaningmaking. Such a view is very relevant for the language-music world of devotional performance. Later, in Chapter 8, we will see how in Islam the category of ‘music’ as generally understood in the West is rarely applied emically to those ritual performances that to a Western ear would sound ‘musical’.

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This relationship between language and music presents itself as a rich field of enquiry which allows us to draw parallels with what we are here calling ‘ultralingual’ performance. Zbikowski (2012: 125), for example, suggests some performances ‘push against the boundary between speech and music’. This seems most relevant to vocal music, but an interesting example of ultralingualism manifests itself even in non-verbal communication systems. Agawu (1988), in the context of drumming as means of communication, describes quasi-ultralingual performances in areas of Ghana where non-Twi speaking Ewe drummers recite (drum) ‘Twi phrases’ which they do not understand (Agawu, 1988: 85) because the drummers do not have access to the referential meaning of the Twi phrases. However, it is in the area of meaning that music-related research does most to support the notion of ultralingualism. We have already referenced Bauman’s definition of artful language performance as something that can sideline referential meaning in its pursuit of accurate and heightened expression. In the philosophy of music, Kivy (2002) has argued that the concept of ‘“meaning” should be reserved for the linguistic sense of reference and predication’ (cited in Patel, 2008: 304) and that ‘meaning’ and even ‘meaningless’-ness, if understood purely in a linguistic sense, cannot be applied to music (for Kivy, this would be a category error). However, he does recognise that music can have ‘“significance” and “logic” (in syntactic terms), and that music can express emotion’ (cited in Patel, 2008: 304) Elsewhere, I have argued that when performers recite or perform in a language that they may be unfamiliar with in a referential sense, meaning, in the sense of significance, is not absent and what is communicated or experienced can be interpreted as something more holistic and even transcendental. … it is perhaps more as a cultural and religious activity that these literacy practices should be understood. Few of the young people involved in these learning activities will go on to be comfortable and regular decoders of their sacred texts. Yet, the activity itself is not therefore meaningless. As a means of participating in an ethno-religious and ethno-linguistic practice, it engages with important aspects of self and group identities. It is as an identity affirming process that learning to read one’s religious classical becomes meaningful. The success or otherwise of the instruction is incidental to that process. Attending religious classical classes is as much a part of being a Sikh or a Jew or a Muslim as attending various ceremonies or following dietary laws. (Rosowsky, 2013a: 76)

And also, When Domingo sings the role of Hermann4 in the original language at La Scala or Covent Garden, he is decoding the text as he sings. Does he communicate meaning, and is meaning communicated to the non-Russian members of the audience? The answer must be yes. Yet through the art

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form of opera a meaning is communicated which transcends the literal meaning of the words sung. The same is true, only more so, for the member of the professional choir, who may be asked to sing, and initially read, texts in a number of languages, both living and dead, including the High Latin of masses and the vulgar Latin of Carmina Burana. Whilst agreeing with Smith’s statement, ‘What is the point of any activity if there is no understanding?’ [Smith, 1994: 7], one has to admit to the possibility that our defi nition of understanding must be sufficiently broad to accommodate those reading activities which appear, on the surface, to be divorced from meaning. (Rosowsky, 2001: 60)

Patel’s (2008) comprehensive review of the relationship between music, language and the brain begins with: At fi rst glance, it seems that linguistic and musical meaning are largely incommensurate. Indeed, if one restricts ‘meaning’ to semantic reference and predication, then music and language have little in common). (Patel, 2008: 350)

He proceeds, however, to cite Nattiez’s useful consideration of meaning as ‘signification in the broadest semiotic sense’ (cited in Patel, 2008: 304) and that language should not be viewed as the default ‘model of signification’. This retains elements of Kivy’s ‘significance’ but expands it. Instead, he supports Nattiez’s suggestion that meaning exists when ‘experience of an object/event brings something to mind other than the object/event itself’ (cited in Patel, 2008: 304). Although this is still relatively close to a defi nition of referential understanding, where words denote not themselves but their referents, it is still sufficiently broad to allow for a nonlinguistic interpretation. In the same way that music ‘can bring something to mind other than itself’, ultralingual performance can bring something to the mind other than itself (because the referents of the words are not usually available). Of course, at the same time, this quality sits alongside the other key element of ultralingual performance – its attention to the correct and artful articulation of linguistic form (‘getting things right’, as Bauman would put it). This dual nature of ultralingual performance – its quality of evoking beyond referential meaning and its heightened formal quality – is what characterises it best and, as we can see, is not dissimilar to musical performance. Patel adopts this broader view of meaning, which encompasses language and music, and hints that recent cognitive and neural research supports such an approach (Patel, 2008). Possibly the nearest comparable secular context, in terms of process, to ultralingual devotional performance is in vocal music. Classically trained singers and choirs often perform in languages that may be quite distant from their spoken language repertoires (Mossop, 2013). Although many professional opera singers have the opportunity in their training – where it features as an important component – and in their international careers to develop spoken competency in a much wider range of languages

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than most of us acquire, there are still many occasions where singing takes place in languages outside a singer’s linguistic comfort zone. And even when there is knowledge of the language being sung (native or acquired), ‘the libretti (texts of opera) are often written so long ago (especially for operas in Italian) that even native speakers may not understand every word’ (Jiaqi Duan, 2015). To illustrate further the ubiquity of ultralingual performance in secular as well as in devotional contexts, below are a series of pertinent quotations taken from a variety of sources (mainly online discussion boards or blogs for professional singers or for fans of vocal singing): I am not an opera singer but I studied music in college and had to sing in other languages. Pronunciation was very important but most of the time we had no idea what we were saying unless the choir directors explained it to us, which they would do if we were not conveying the proper emotions. (RitaCunas, 2015) Slightly off topic – not opera singers, but I knew quite a few Germans who performed in American/British musicals professionally. When you heard them sing, you would think they were born in the US or UK, but after the show when you would ask, ‘Where did you learn to speak English so well?’ they couldn’t answer the question, as they did not speak enough English to understand what you were asking. (DMark, 2010) I used to be very involved in vocal competitions. At these competitions, we had to perform either traditional Christian hymns or secular arias. So the songs were in either Latin, Italian, German or French. I’m a monolingual English speaker as were most of the other kids in the choir department at school. We learned to sing in other languages by listening to the songs, mimicking the pronunciations, and studying the linguistic components of the languages. If you study pronunciation rules, it’s not hard at all to pronounce words in other languages even if you don’t know what the words mean. Latin is a ‘dead’ language which no-one actively communicates in anymore, but we know the pronunciation rules and so we have no problem singing kyrie eleison in excelsis deo or what have you. (Ash Trowel, 2016) An opera singer does not have to fluently speak a language in order to sing an opera in that language. However, the singer must know the diction of the language. Also the singer must, or at least should, know what they are singing about. So when a singer performs in a language he or she does not speak fluently, that singer must work hard at learning and remembering the translation of the role being sung. Only a small percentage of all opera singers fluently speak all the languages in which they sing, whether they be aspiring singers, young artists, or seasoned professionals. (Webb, 2018) I’ve always enjoyed singing in other languages. I’d go as far as to say that English is not my favourite language for singing. I’d probably put German at the top, followed by Latin, then Italian. I don’t speak any of those

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languages, other than a bit of holiday vocab here and there, so when I want to sing something in a foreign language, I have to study. (Victoria Hopkins, director of Total Choir Resources, n.d.)

There are also a wealth of resources that discuss this issue in the context of popular music. I have records in more than a dozen languages but only speak English fluently, understand some Central American Spanish and far less Portuguese (of either sub-dialect). So if I’m listening in French, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Welsh, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, or an African dialect I have to try to get to the emotion of the vocal delivery to have a clue as to what they are singing about. (Saldana, 2016)

As well as the lack of familiarity or knowledge of a language, there are also certain acoustic reasons why the words sung might not be understood and therefore might lead to an ultralingual experience for the listener (if not the singer). Recent research has shown how sopranos often sacrifice comprehensibility when seeking high notes. Sopranos can sing at frequencies that are rather higher than the normal values for the lowest resonance of their vocal tract, but failure to use this resonance would reduce both their vocal power and homogeneity in timbre. We have directly measured the resonance frequencies of the vocal tract of sopranos during singing, and fi nd that, towards the top of their range, they consistently increase the frequency of the lowest resonance to match that of their singing. This significantly increases the loudness and the uniformity of tone, albeit at the expense of comprehensibility. (Joliveau et al., 2004: 116, emphasis added)

This phenomenon is such that, in opera houses that provide surtitles, they are even used for operas sung in the native language of the audience (Joliveau et al., 2004). Finally, it is worth noticing the clear parallels that exist between preparing or rehearsing to sing in another language and the practice of devotional sacred text acquisition. In her work on strategies to achieve authentic pronunciation when singing in another language, Merlino (2014) clearly stresses the important relationship that exists between language and music in vocal performances. Peculiar to the activity of singing (vs. other music performances) is, among other things, the manipulation of linguistic resources and the adjustment of language to music: as a matter of fact, the way in which words are pronounced and segmented is functional to musical relevancies such as melody, intonation and rhythm and, more broadly, to singing itself. (Merlino, 2014: 420)

If we were to roughly substitute the words ‘singing’, ‘music’ and ‘musical’ with ‘artful recitation’ and ‘devotional performance’, in the sense that they are used in this book, the sentiment in the quotation would be fairly

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similar (but perhaps not so ‘peculiar’). Both language and ‘melody, intonation and rhythm’ combine to realise devotional acts of worship. [T]he score includes both the musical features (rhythm, notes, etc.) and the lyrics to be sung: it is the ‘written source’ of the linguistics items that in our data are at the core of the correction sequences. Second, it is a physical object towards which participants orient, not only manipulating it but … also gazing at it (as opposed to the director and to the other musicians). (Merlino, 2014: 423)

There are parallels between the layout and functions of a musical score and those of a sacred text. If we take the example of the Classical Arabic of the Qur’an, for example, we notice immediately that the script of the text, compared to most other texts in that language (old and new), is supplemented not only by diacritical marks differentiating consonants, doubled consonants, vowels and diphthongs, but also by other symbols indicating rules of recitation and prosody such as compulsory or optional pauses, vowel elongation and elision. This generally provides the reader with all they need to know to decode accurately and recite artfully following all necessary conventions. Fully pointed scripts in Classical Arabic (such as the Qur’an) are read right to left but also partially vertically when the conventions of recitation are included (Figure 4.1). In the same way, a musical score allows for the reader to follow accurately the symbols denoting notes, together with other symbols denoting clefs, keys and tempo instructions (allegro, grave, etc.), reading right to left and vertically up and down the staves (see Figure 4.2; this, of course, is a musical score in a Western tradition).

Figure 4.1

Layout of three fully pointed verses from the Qur’an

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Figure 4.2 Layout of a typical musical score

The following strategies used by a director when preparing a choir are very similar to how mosque school teachers work with their students (see Chapter 6). [T]he director can open and close a correction sequence in the choir’s performance by focusing on the pronunciation of a word: the correction is realised through different resources – contrast pairs, explanations, repetitions of the selected item (realised both verbally and gesturally) – that expand the sequence and show that correcting here is fi nalised to and can expand into modelling, thus soliciting singers to pronounce words as the director does. (Merlino, 2014: 425) This is something quite peculiar to pronunciation sequences in the context of choral rehearsals where participants learn how to perform a song and where correction is done not for the sake of participants’ comprehension but for the sake of the performers’ learning. (Merlino, 2014: 428).

This attention to both formal features of language and elements of prosody – decoding, pronunciation, pitch, rhythm, rhyme, vowelling, elision – is similar to the attention given by teachers and students when acquiring sacred text literacy and learning the conventions of devotional poetry and song. These are the features that Bauman (1975: 293) insists create ‘the act of expression on the part of the performer’ and which an audience evaluates ‘for the way it is done, for the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer’s display of competence’. And the relative skill that a performer displays in their articulation ‘is marked as available for the enhancement

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of experience, through the present enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression itself’ (Bauman, 1975: 293). Performance thus calls forth special attention to and heightened awareness of the act of expression, and gives license to the audience to regard the act of expression and the performer with special intensity. (Bauman, 1975: 293)

Despite Bauman’s suggestion that verbatim recitation or memorisation is not overly widespread as a linguistic phenomenon (‘of certain communities’, Bauman, 1975: 303), I would argue that in both secular and religious contexts this form of artful sound making is almost universal. Secular art forms such as scripted theatre and vocal music and devotional practices such as sacred text and poetic recitation are found in cultures and locations throughout the world and through time as well. The philosopher Berkeley saw fit to draw attention to the ultralingual practices of his ‘popish peasant’, not understanding the ‘propositions he hears at Mass in Latin’ which nevertheless signalled ‘an Humble Implicit Faith’ (Berkeley, 1989 [1871]). Although Hymes would dismiss such language behaviour as ‘performance in a perfunctory key’ (cited in Bauman, 1975: 298), there is ample evidence to suggest that ultralingual performance in whatever context carries significant value and meaning for those participating and those listening. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Austin (1962) in How to Do Things with Words – which introduced the notion of performative language – similarly dismissed poetic language as ‘etiolation’ vis-à-vis naturally occurring language, arguing that a performative utterance would be ‘hollow’ if said by an actor or if introduced in a poem and ‘parasitic’ upon normal use. However, in some religious contexts, the opposite of this is sometimes true when ultralingual performance takes place. When a convert to Islam is asked to recite the testimony of faith before witnesses (which is always articulated aloud in Classical Arabic), he or she may not have an understanding of the individual words that make up the phrase and thus may recite merely by imitation. However, in these circumstances, the performative utterance retains its illocutionary force regardless of the level of comprehension. Obviously, the convert knows the implications of what they are uttering but on a word semantic level they do not. The use of Latin for Mass in the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church would have fulfi lled a similar performative function, again, for many, using ultralingual means (O’Leary, 1996). Bauman’s other useful observation is that performance is intended to enhance the experience of an audience and that performance is not in itself a transactional communicative process designed to achieve comprehension, agreement, consensus, ordering, advising or any number of purposes of human communication. Instead, performance is always reflexive and self-referential (Bauman & Briggs, 1990: 73). It calls attention to itself of an audience who are expected to respond not just to the referential

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meaning of what is being said or recited (when in fact that is possible, which it is not always) but also emotionally and affectively. This aspect of performance is, of course, tinged with something extra in a religious context. Alongside emotional and intellectual enhancement, there is religious or spiritual experience which, from the participants’ point of view, is every bit as real as feelings and thoughts and may often transcend these. The literature on religious experience is vast (James, 2007 [1902]) and not the subject of this book. However, when attempting to explain the value of performance in religious settings such as those in this book, it is impossible to ignore its role in enhancing audience experience. For this reason, this book is also about performers and their audiences. Although a significant amount of devotional practice takes place privately, audience is always assumed. In other verbal art performances, reciting alone or singing alone is more likely to be rehearsal rather than authentic performances. In liturgical practices, performance of individual prayer or solo recitation always implies a transcendent audience. This will be explored more fully in Chapters 6–9. Ultralingual Performance and Qur’anic Literacy Acquisition

Elsewhere (Rosowsky, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2016) I have sought to establish how Qur’anic literacy can be understood as an act of performance rather than reading for meaning in the conventional sense. As a ‘verbal art’ (Bauman, 1975; Bauman & Briggs, 1990), sacred text recitation can be accounted for by using Bauman’s useful heuristic of the performance continuum. At one end of this continuum are verbal/oral performances that are heavily scripted to the extent that at one pole performances are verbatim renditions. Towards the other end of the continuum are performances that are only loosely predetermined and that at the extreme opposite pole constitute improvisation. Bauman’s examples are principally in the field of storytelling and more secular forms of verbal art performance. However, sacred text performance with its emphasis on verbatim reproduction and attention to ‘getting it right’ certainly matches the two characteristics of (a) language performance above and beyond referential meaning and (b) the enhancement of audience experience. Added to these characteristics, for much Qur’anic recitation, is its ultralingual nature. Much of the time spent both in initial Qur’anic literacy acquisition and in more advanced forms of liturgical learning such as hifz (Gent, 2016) is spent acquiring accurate letter-sound correspondence, the construction of syllables and the blending of longer strings of sounds leading to complete words and utterances, adherence to established conventions of pronunciation and recitation, and learning prosodic features of utterances such as intonation, tone, rhythm, cadence, stress, pausing and correct breathing. Once these skills and conventions have been acquired,

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performance is the dominant mode whether an individual is performing before others or alone, for even in the latter case, for the Muslim, there is the transcendent audience. In daily and congregational prayers, sacred text is performed in a manner that emphasises the external form and accurate rendition of the sacred script. Even for those understanding the meaning of the Classical Arabic text, accurate form can still predominate and meaning be suspended even if only temporarily. One of the characteristics of the most appreciated professional reciters is when recitational conventions in the sense described here and meaning coincide in the performance so that the reciter is himself moved and as a result moves others (Nelson, 2001). That the default mode of recitation and of listening to Qur’anic recitation is often one of attending to the externals of performance explains the many exhortations in Islamic tradition to attend to the meaning of the Qur’an (‘Should I focus on memorization or understanding?’, Khan, n.d.) When recitation takes place before an audience (either in one of the three congregational daily prayers where the Qur’anic recitation is required to be made out loud) or in a recital outside of prayer, the requirement to enhance the experience of that audience is fulfilled by the attention to accuracy and the aesthetic quality of the recitation. The Prophet, after all, is reported to have said that only someone with accurate knowledge of the Qur’an should lead others in the congregational prayer. In public recitations, particularly in the Muslim world, Qur’anic recitation is a key art form and performers become known for their recitations and are highly sought after for public events (Nelson, 2001). Here the enhanced experience of an audience is probably at its most obvious. In Figure 4.3 I have used two screenshots taken from a video only moments apart to try to convey some of the emotion of an audience listening to a well-known Egyptian qari. 5 The first screenshot allows the reader to notice the attention being given by members of the audience to the reciter. The second screenshot, taken seconds later, shows their emotion after the qari has completed a particular phrase they are familiar with. In their faces one can perhaps identify elements of joy and engagement characteristic of ‘enhanced experience’. Now, not all Muslims, not even most of them, aspire to recite in such a way. However, in their daily practices, where recitation of the sacred text – even silently or sotto voce – is a requirement, the need to ‘get things right’ from a recitational or performance perspective is always present. Likewise, an audience is always present. Alone, the sole worshipper is a ‘listener’ to his or her own performance and there is an understanding that a transcendent audience too is not far away. Bauman draws on Goff man (1974) and Bateson (1972) to frame his conventions for performance. He reminds us of how we should always recognise the culturally specific understanding of what constitutes

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Figure 4.3 (a and b) A professional Qur’anic reciter with his Egyptian audience (Source: Screenshots from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCBoTBtl8eA&t=191s.)

performance in any setting and gives as an example one set of communicative means that key in a performance: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

special codes special formulae figurative language formal stylistic devices special prosodic patterns special paralinguistic patterns appeal to tradition disclaimer of performance (Bauman, 1975: 295)

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These constitute the conventional devices which, in many (but not all) social and cultural contexts, key in a performance frame in and through which to understand performance as a communicative act. However, the culturally specific nature of these devices means it: is ultimately of limited utility, for the essential task in the ethnography of performance is to determine the culture-specific constellations of communicative means that serve to key performance in particular communities. (Bauman, 1975: 295)

In a series of examples, including storytelling in various traditions and ceremonial speech, Bauman explains how these conventionalised devices can help identify how performance and its texts are different and distinct from everyday spoken and written communication. This extractability characteristic of texts is an important element in accounting for performance as a communicative practice. In terms of practices centred on sacred texts, in this case the devotional recitation of the Qur’an, Bauman’s list is only partially applicable. However, it is also the process by which sacred texts and their associated practices are recontextualised from one setting to another. To take these conventions in turn, the language of Qur’anic recitation is an obvious ‘special code’ and is an example of what Fishman (1989) terms a ‘religious classical’ and Bennett (2017) a ‘sacred language’. It therefore enjoys a prestige and status originating from its sanctified origins similar to Biblical Hebrew, Ecclesiastical Greek, Sanskrit or Pali (Bennett, 2017). Linguistically, the language is archaic, reflecting not only the Arabic of 1400 years ago but also what Muslims would claim to be its inimitability and miraculous uniqueness due to its divine origin. Thus, the lexicon, morphology and syntax draw on the spoken and poetic norms of the variety of Arabic used in a certain region of Arabia (mainly the Hijaz area) in the 6th/7th century ce, enhanced, however, by what Muslims claim to be the mu’ jizah, the miraculous nature of the Revelation. Special formulae to announce openings and closings are a regular feature of both devotional practices using the Qur’an and specific performance events involving Qur’anic recitation. Recitation in prayer is always signalled by the phrase in Arabic, ‘`audhu billahi min al shaytan al rajim’ (‘I seek refuge in God from the accursed Satan’), which is considered necessary in any recitation to immunise the reciter and those present from demonic influence. In prayer this will be recited silently, and in public recitation usually aloud. The next convention is the recitation of ‘bismillahi al Rahman al rahim’ (‘In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’).6 This may be recited audibly depending on context. The end of a public Qur’anic recitation independent of prayer is generally signalled by the phrase ‘sadaq allah al azheem’ (‘God Almighty has spoken the truth’). These phrases not only signal the opening and closing of the performance mode but also enact the liminal (see below) act of entry into and

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exit from a sacred space in which the text is recited. In the boys’ choir performance in Vignette 2 from Chapter 2, all poems, regardless of language, began with a Classical Arabic formula signalling the start or close of the performance.7 Formal stylistic devices are emphasised as much for their mnemonic as for their aesthetic value as various forms of parallelism such as rhyme, assonance and repetition serve as mechanisms for familiarisation and memorisation of the text. The opposite is also the case as repetition and, particularly, repetition of non-identical but similar phrases and verses in the text present considerable challenges to reciters and memorisers (huffaz). These are sometimes known as the mushkillat of recitation, which Gade (2004) describes as ‘passages or phrases that are repeated with a slight variation’ and which ‘are among the most difficult for the memorizer’. These are also obvious aspects of language performance that demand special attention to the way language is presented above and beyond referential meaning. Linked to the stylistic devices inherent in the text itself are paralinguistic elements such as tempo, stress and pitch. In Qur’anic literacy acquisition, the word used for learning the conventions of pronunciation and recitation above the basic decoding of the script is tajwid. Two styles of tajwid are mujawwad and tartil, the former being a slow and artful recitation almost always used in public recitals. Tartil, on the other hand, is a brisker and less artful recitational style used by reciters in prayer, for memorisation and in non-public recitations. Importantly for this book, it is the style most children are taught in the mosque school. Both styles have their conventions for recitation, some of which are quite distinct. Voice quality and vocalisation, although essential ingredients for successful public recitation, are also stressed from the very initial stages of learning how to recite the Qur’an. Children are taught to follow very precise linguistic and paralinguistic conventions. Figure 4.4 uses a number of technical terms for sound-letter correspondences – ‘Huroof Leen’, ‘Wao Sakinah’, ‘Ya sakinah’, ‘zabr’. 8 These are rendered into Roman script using an Indo-Pak transcription rather than a formal transcription from Classical Arabic. I have written elsewhere about the competing Roman transliteration/transcription systems that currently exist for rendering Classical Arabic. Depending on their derivation (national, linguistic and other), a number of formal and informal systems can be found, particularly online and in the world of self-publication (Rosowsky, 2018c, 2019a). Therefore, of the eight communicative devices listed to help frame performance, five of these are pertinent to the recitation of sacred texts, at least in an Islamic context. If the acquisition and learning are taking place in a setting where referential meaning is also accessible (i.e. the Arabicspeaking world mainly but also among those who have reached advanced stages in their learning of the Qur’an to the level of comprehension), a recognition and appreciation of figurative language could also be included.

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Figure 4.4 An extract from the Madani Qa’idah, a typical primer for mosque schools available in the UK Source: Author photo.

One of the Qur’an’s central teaching strategies is the presentation of worldly similitudes to enable understanding of more spiritual ideas. Two more communicative devices, however, can perhaps be added to Bauman’s example list which are specific to the sacred text tradition. One is that sacred text performance rarely, if ever, takes place in isolation. It is invariably part of a series or cluster of performances within which it sits. This is the case in the low-key performance of an individual praying or in the high-profile public recital of a famous reciter. One might call this communicative device the interrelationship of performance genres within any one performance event. An individual praying carries out, both performatively and as a performance, a ritual ablution in advance of the prayer itself, accompanied by recitation before, during and after the rite. The prayer cycle (the rakah) is preceded by the expression of intention, aloud or silently, which is again likely to be in the sacred language although it can be also said in the vernacular. The prayer is initiated by the phrase Allahu Akbar and it and the rest of the prayer are always carried out in the sacred language apart from perhaps some silent personal supplications at the end of the prayer. The recitation itself takes place in the standing position at the beginning of each stage of the cycle (each cycle has two recitation moments). This is generally preceded by a different recitation, usually of words of glorification (transmitted from the Prophet). Thereafter each movement of the cycle is accompanied by silent recitation of short liturgical passages. In the mosque school, all of these passages are learnt orally by heart very early on in the course of study alongside the

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process of learning to decode. It would take too long for a child to learn how to decode accurately enough everything that he or she needs to memorise for prayer. Once an individual prayer is completed with its own closing formulae (‘Salaam alaykum w rahmatullah’), more recitations and supplication in the sacred language will usually follow. The more personal these are, the less they share in the conventional devices for performance, but there is always a minimal performative element within each supplication. Even when the vernacular is used, certain stylistic devices, elements of prosody and vocalisation can be employed. Ritual prayer considered as a language performance event, then, includes a number of performance genres: liminal announcements such as ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Salaam alaykum w rahmatullah’; exaltations before the recitation and at each physical movement; recitations; supplications at the end; and various litanies afterwards. It should be noted that most if not all of these performance genres also occur in other faith traditions, if not necessarily in the same sequence or structure (see Lysaght, 1998, for a detailed study of how litanies, specifically the rosary, are used in some parts of Ireland). This clustering of performance genres appears to be indicative of the interrelationship between different facets of worship. A modification of one of Bauman’s conventionalised devices is the liminal switching that takes place in devotional performance. Liminality, as outlined by Turner and others (Schechner, 1988; Turner, 1982), is a term that can be used to denote the uncertain interspace that occurs when the sacred is approached or retreated from. Whereas a Bahamian storyteller, as Bauman relates, can key performance with one word, ‘Bunday’, sacred text performance moves from secular space to the sacred in a much more considered manner. This can be exemplified by mentioning a range of contexts when Qur’anic recitation is not allowed or is discouraged. This would include spaces considered impure such as in toilets and bathrooms, or when one is at any other stage of the prayer cycle, or when one is ritually impure. It appears as if much more has to happen from a performative sense to make the liminal crossing into sacred space. Entextualisation

The other key characteristic of performance in the verbal arts presented by Bauman but developed by many others (Groenewald, 1998; Park & Bucholz, 2009; Rosowsky, 2013b, 2016) is the process of entextualisation. This conveys the notion that textual practices are inherently extractable. Here, ‘textual’ is used in a very broad sense to denote any demarcated and identifiable stream of discourse that is understood in a unifying sense. This means that verbal or oral ‘texts’ which do not appear in writing, or were not so originally, are nonetheless texts. The etymology of the English word ‘text’ comes from the weaving together of words (cf. ‘textiles’) and

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so has no indivisible union with writing.9 In contrast to the emphasis on written language (philology) in the 19th century, much of the academic study of language and literacy in the past half-century (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972) has, rightly, foregrounded the wider parameters of language behaviours, acknowledging that language does not occur in a social, cultural or psychological vacuum and that language is constitutive of social and cultural practices. Sociolinguistics, pragmatics and linguistic anthropology are all predicated on language in use rather than language as mere form. At the same time, there has been gradual recognition that context is not a fi xed and unresponsive ‘backdrop’ to language behaviour, chipping in with the occasional, but still detached, influence on language choice or style, but rather is to be understood in a dynamic and fluid way that suggests a processual operation rather than a fi xed and stable one. This has been termed ‘contextualisation’ as a contrast to ‘context’. This emphasis has been necessary as a way of confirming that language is a social process rather than one of mere form and function and, importantly, that text cannot be fully understood or grasped apart from its context and ‘is anchored in and inseparable from its context of use’ (Bauman & Briggs, 1990: 73). Nevertheless, there has been a recognition that ‘text’ as something circumscribed and recognisable (a play, a joke, a story, a sermon, a ritual, a political speech, etc.) is something that is ‘extractable’ from contexts, something that can be ‘de-contextualised’. At the heart of the process of decentering discourse is the more fundamental process – entextualisation. In simple terms, although it is far from simple, it is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. (Bauman & Briggs, 1990: 73)

This valuable insight of Bauman and Briggs allows us to return more circumspectly to considerations of form, or at least to those social and culturally determined conventions (Bauman, 1975: 295) that frame them, without abandoning the rich and nuanced understandings of context that are necessary to account for communicative processes more fully. Thus, certain performance genres such as storytelling are to be understood not only in terms of the form, style and context of the text – the story – but also by those conventions that determine how something constitutes a story in that particular sociocultural setting. Entextualisation can play with those conventions so that an extractable stream of discourse from one time and place recontextualised into another time and place may maintain, modify or lose some or all of these culturally specific conventions. In terms of performance, such conventionalised ‘metacommunication’ (Bauman, 1975) can be carried over from one performance context to another (as in the repetition of performances) or transform the

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performance into a different communicative genre, i.e. rehearsal or learning of a performance text. In these situations, the entextualisation becomes another performance or something different. Sacred texts can be understood primarily as entextualisations. Those traditions that claim a divine origin for their texts (unlike the preserved, and human, words of a living prophet or saint, for example) are in a sense claiming an entextualisation from the divine into the world of materiality. Divine discourse is here extracted from one – divine – context into another – the material world. The question about what makes verbal art, or poetics (Jakobson, 1960), eminently extractable despite the obvious anchoring effect of context is answered by Jakobson in two ways: (1) metalingually, discourse has the reflexive capacity of being able to turn in on itself and be self-referential, to become ‘thing-like’; (2) the poetic function of discourse draws attention to the way formal features are manipulated in order to emphasise how the discourse is structurally organised. The Qur’an is a highly self-referential text with verses regularly referring to itself as ‘The Book’ or ‘The Qur’an’ (‘recitation’), drawing attention to its entextualisation. Moreover, in Islamic sacred tradition, it is said that the Qur’an is part of Divine Speech and originates in the ‘Mother of the Book’ – a primordial divine origin for the Qur’an which has been made available to the world of forms. This topic, more generally, has been one of intense debate within the Islamic world for nearly a thousand years. Indeed, an inquisition (the mihna) took place in the 9th century ce involving scholars and authorities regarding the divine nature of the Qur’an (Nawas, 1994). Historically, the Qur’an, originally an oral text and orally transmitted, was simultaneously transcribed (initially informally, later formally; see Lings, 1983) and constituted the key entextualisation in the history of Islam. Decisions about when and how to do this are part of Islamic history, but in any transcription of a sacred text, decisions about script, diacritics, order, pagination and preservation came out of the cultural and social conventions and material resources of a particular time and place. As Bauman and Briggs (1990: 73) point out, ‘[e]ntextualization may well incorporate aspects of context, such that the resultant text carries elements of its history of use within it’. Most of these decisions still have their ramifications today. Children learning how to decode the sacred text in mosque schools are, largely, following conventions established a thousand or more years ago. Reading a cursive script, reading from right to left, identifying letter-sound correspondences, blending syllables and word recognition – all these skills, to an extent, have been preserved in the subsequent entextualisations of the text. Paralingual elements of the text linked to recitational conventions such as tone, stress, intonation and other aspects of prosody contribute to these entextualisations. These elements are part of the culturally specific conventions linked to the performance frame. At the same time, in the world of professional recitation,

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conventions can change from one era to another. The still universal popularity of the Egyptian school of recitation is being challenged in recent decades by the Gulf school of reciters (Nelson, 2001). In the world of texts comprising most of the world’s major religions, this ‘transportability’ of a text from one context to another is an everpresent potentiality. This is a matter of time as well as place. The sacred texts that have come down to us through the ages have been entextualised in particular places at particular moments. Whereas in Christian tradition the authentic text of the scriptures is often said to infuse the various translations that now exist (Griffiths, 2011), in the Islamic tradition the community claims that its sacred text is the same version that was originally revealed to Muhammed 1400 years ago in Arabia. Even so, conventions in script and book technology have developed that make a modern Qur’an look quite different from the earliest surviving texts. What Muslims would claim, however, is that the ‘text’ is in reality an oral, or recited, text and it is this that has stood the test of time through the centuries. Entextualisation, then, can mean a number of things in the sacred text context. Firstly, sacred texts tend to have been originally oral texts and, as such, each new recitation that takes place afresh on each occasion is an entextualisation subject to the potential impact of the context. The recited Qur’an can sound very different from one part of the Islamic world to the next, and although this does not entail difference in the written text itself, aspects of pronunciation and prosody can differ quite significantly (as indeed they do from one individual to another). Obviously, once the oral text is written down, another entextualisation takes place, this time drawing on the cultural resources of its context for its writing scheme and manuscript, and later print and electronic texts. Ultralingual Performance and Devotional Poetry and Song

Finally, it is important to take note of significant recent developments taking place within some mosque schools and, particularly, the communities of youth that are associated with them. On the one hand, practices involving the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy will always be paramount among the objectives of the mosque school wherever they may be situated in the world. Recent reports on UK mosque schools have failed to recognise the centrality of this activity, blaming an over-emphasis on Qur’anic literacy acquisition for a skewed ‘curriculum’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a). However, without this centrality, mosque schools would largely lose their raison d’être. On the other hand, alongside this traditional focus, many young Muslims in the UK are now spending a considerable amount of effort and time in the practice and performance of devotional song and verse in various genres. Often, the same young teachers in the 21st century mosque schools are inducting their students into devotional singing at the same time as they are teaching them the Qur’an. However, it is probably

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true that much of this resurgence in devotional music and verse is being pursued outside the mosque school. Of the four mosque schools featuring in this study, teachers and students in two of them are seriously and regularly engaged in these practices which form part of a much wider practice of devotional and confessional song in Islam (Hill, 2016; Jouili, 2014; Morris, 2016a, 2016b, 2019; Rosowsky, 2018b, 2018c). This important performance practice, then, engaged in by the same young people – the practice of devotional song and poetry – can be characterised as a rebirth, discovery or innovation, depending on which aspect of the practice one chooses to highlight. From a diasporic community perspective, with links to the ethnocultural heartlands, this practice can be interpreted as a rebirth of interest and passion in a neglected genre of devotional verse spearheaded by young performers taking their role models from back home. The recitation of naat, in particular, usually in Urdu but also in H-Punjabi and even occasionally in Persian, has become a regular feature of performance events, with young Muslims identifying, learning and performing these religious odes in public. Although to an outsider’s ears these performances may seem like ‘singing’, they are not usually deemed to be ‘singing’ and ‘songs’ in the conventional Western sense. This parallels much devotional practice in the Islamic world, where ‘singing’ is often equated with secular performance rather than religious and is often frowned upon for sacred purposes. Earlier on in this chapter, I shared research from the anthropology of music which argued for music and language (music-language) to be understood as culturally constructed categories (Faudree, 2012). This is particularly relevant when discussing these terms in Islamic contexts. For example, in the Arabic-speaking world, inshad (‘intoning’) and nasheed (‘hymn’) are terms used to denote what in the West would be interpreted as ‘singing’ and ‘song’. The Urdu naat, which has now been given a new lease of life in the diaspora precisely because it is spearheaded by the young, is considered to be read or recited rather than sung. However, as with Qur’anic recitation, a set of culturally agreed conventions are in place to shape the performance, with paralingual features such as rhyme, tone, pace and other aspects of prosody carefully defi ned for naat recitation purposes. This particular practice had not been absent among the fi rst-generation settlers but had faced the prospect of disappearance as this generation aged and died off. This would have made them what Fishman calls ‘the Last Mohicans’ (Fishman, 1990: 94) and represents Stage 7 on his scale for assessing language shift (the GIDS10). This stage represents a minority language and its associated texto-cultural practices which are only used by the older members of a speech community where intergenerational transmission (Stage 6) is no longer, or only exceptionally, taking place. Less usually, according to theories on language shift, the current generation of young Muslims is driving this renaissance in naat recitation and, as a result, rekindling language knowledge,

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particularly in the prestigious varieties of Urdu and H-Punjabi. This practice will be described in more detail later but has much in common with the way many young people engage with music in the digital age. Listening online using a range of devices (increasingly, a smartphone), identifying naat material, downloading files or bookmarking online locations, sharing fi les and links, transcribing lyrics (or, increasingly, fi nding transcriptions online), rehearsing and memorising, and performing, privately or publicly are the regular activities fuelling this practice. Much of this activity, however, is not necessarily ‘rebirth’ or ‘rediscovery’, as many of the young people involved are discovering this devotional heritage for the fi rst time. It constitutes a rebirth mainly in terms of the collective memory of the diasporic community. On a small scale, it parallels the process involved in the revival of Hebrew. This language, which had disappeared as a spoken vernacular within the Jewish community for a thousand years or more and only remained as a sacred or scholarly variety, was revived as a spoken language by a generation with an uncertain linguistic heritage in respect of Hebrew. In terms of Urdu, the situation is made more complex by the absence of its use as a spoken vernacular by any of the previous generations (where Punjabi varieties such as Pahari and Pothwari were more common). This, therefore, is a revival of a prestigious language, with rich and deep roots in the ethno-cultural heartlands, obviously, but which had never been the spoken language of choice of the majority of fi rst settlers. However, we also need to be cautious about linguistic over-claiming for Urdu and H-Punjabi in respect of language revival. An interest in and the performance of naat does not, in most cases, lead to conversational usage of the language, and proficiency may only remain at the decoding (ultralingual) level – and that may also be via Roman transcription (Figure  4.5). Comprehension may be absent in a similar way to how decoding takes precedence over meaning in the early stages of Qur’anic literacy acquisition. However, for some young people, an interest will lead them to engage with the lexicon of the language as they attempt to inject emotion and sense into their recitations. We will mention this later on, but in the general world of artistically ultralingual devotional performance (Rosowsky, 2001), proper nouns (names, place names, events) often stand out in the streams of discourse being recited. Baker (1993) writes of how the Tidorese of Indonesia in their recitations of the Qur’an highlight what he calls ‘the presence of the name’ (meaning proper nouns) to anchor their recitations in meaningful communication. Similarly, these young UK Muslims when reciting or listening to naat in Urdu, even when their language proficiency is limited to phonological awareness and some vocabulary, will recognise familiar proper nouns such as the names of the Prophet, other Prophets, saints, places and events. Likewise, their Qur’anic recitations will include familiar words and nouns (this is, in fact, an experience of all Muslims when reciting to a greater or lesser extent)

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Figure 4.5 Roman transliteration of an H-Punjabi naat Source: Author photo.

which can resonate with them in the act of recitation or when listening. Therefore, an increase in knowledge of the lexicon, although not facilitating conversational proficiency in a major way, results in the maintenance of the language among individuals and the community more widely. There are two more ways in which ultralingual devotional song and poetry are being made central to the religious practices of these young people. Firstly, many young British Muslims are adding to their performance repertoires by turning to the heritage of Classical Arabic verse and recitation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, many young British Muslims live their religious lives in a globalised world. Partaking in the twin drivers of cultural globalisation identified by Appadurai (1996) – ubiquitous electronic communication systems and enhanced human mobility – these young people often look to the heart of the Islamic world,

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the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa, and its devotional literary heritage for their inspiration and role models. This entails a linguistic turn to Classical Arabic rather than to Urdu or Punjabi. The latter, for some, is associated with the religious practice of their parents’ generation which they sometimes view as too culturally inflected, and thus engaging with Classical Arabic, the language of the Prophet, his immediate successors and the early history of Islam, is a means to circumvent parental culture and reach back to something they might consider pure and authentic. Young British Muslims may therefore start to learn, usually independently, Classical Arabic, either to reach a minimal proficiency allowing them to perform ultralingually, or more formally and deeply motivated by a wish to immerse themselves in the primary language of the faith. For many who have followed a course in Qur’anic literacy acquisition, this transition to the qasidahs and nasheeds of the Arabic language can be reasonably smooth. Where tashkeel (‘diacritics’) are provided for the lyrics, decoding is straightforward, although the same familiarity as there is with the Qur’anic text is missing. There are examples of some young UK performers journeying overseas to study with authentic munshidin in the Arab world and forming ensembles for performance as a result of their acquired expertise (see page 25). Many of these performers are of third-generation Pakistani origin and are sidestepping their own cultural heritage to engage with the devotional heritage of the Arab world. Often this wish to perform the inshad of the Classical Arabic tradition, including the works of Classical Age poets such as Ibn Arabi, Ibn Farid, Al Hallaj and Hassan Al Shadhili, is inextricably linked to an adherence to one of the Sufi fraternities which attract many young British and American Muslims. For some, entry to these mystical groups demands a significant linguistic investment, as much of their material, teaching and tradition is via the Arabic language. The linguistic repertoires of these youngsters match the sociolinguistic descriptions made elsewhere by others (Blommaert, 2010) and which, seen from one vantage point, appear to be a key characteristic of the superdiverse world we all currently inhabit. They have a non-monolingual patchwork of language resources which they deploy variously and fluidly in their lives and which form part of their hybrid identities as global citizens. They are mostly first-language English speakers (local and standard varieties), with spoken, vestigial or better, varieties of Punjabi (Pahari or Pothwari, but could be other South Asian languages too – Sylheti, Pashto, Gujerati, Bengali), prestigious South Asian languages such as Urdu and H-Punjabi, Classical Arabic and elements, for some, of spoken Arabic. As these young people have all been to school in the UK, they also have varying proficiencies in school-taught languages such as French, German or Spanish. The fluid and varying levels of proficiency of these languages can sometimes make Blommaert’s description of language as ‘bits and pieces’ quite apt. However, from another vantage point – a historical one – it is

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not difficult to find parallels with such linguistic complexity in times far removed from the present. Whenever religious practice is at the heart of people’s lives, other languages often play a significant role. We have already referred to the archaic nature of many sacred texts and this is hardly a contemporary phenomenon. The most famous sacred languages (‘religious classical’, Fishman, 1989) such as Pali, Sanskrit and Biblical Hebrew were often ancient and archaic languages even millennia ago. Even when they were still languages of wider communication, it was not long before the religion outpaced the language of its original adherents and had to adapt linguistically to other linguistic contexts (Bennett, 2017; Ostler, 2017; Spolsky, 2014: Foreword). Adherents of these different faiths therefore developed a range of linguistic modes which they deployed for their ultralingual practices – reading as decoding for the sacred texts, and other devotional practices such as singing in other languages (the singing of Latin still takes place widely in the Western world even though Latin is a co-sanctified language rather than a sacred one).11 It is difficult to envisage a uniform monolingual profile of the world’s major religions once they became mobile. The adoption and manipulation of ‘bits and pieces’ of language were very much part of the linguistic experience of worshippers from time immemorial (Ostler, 2017). It is also important to take note of the religious motivation, or lack of the same, for preserving or learning sacred languages. Some faiths have actively promoted the learning of their primary language and consider it the exclusively authentic linguistic approach to the tenets of their faith (Islam and Classical Arabic, and Judaism and Hebrew are examples, although the latter admits of Aramaic as a very close second to Hebrew). Other faiths appear more conciliatory to other languages. The two main Asian faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism, although having primary sacred languages (Sanskrit and Pali), have historically adopted other languages as vehicles of the faith. Christianity is probably the quintessential example of this phenomenon, with the original languages of the sacred texts at best considered problematic and at worst, from a linguist’s perspective, irrelevant. The young people featuring in this ethnography are all language learners and users and their religious practice is very much a driver for the multilingualism they represent. A third group, or at least a third development, are those young Muslims who turn to the majority language, English, for their devotional practices. The increasing relevance of the Muslim music scene is now being recognised as a key factor in the lives of many young British Muslims (Morris, 2019). It is likely that the mode of devotional performance that lends itself most to the English language is that where more popular musical forms are adopted and developed. There is also little doubt that the fastest growing devotional practice in Islam in the West at present is the explosion in devotional material in the English language. Reflecting the linguistic reality of mainstream

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language shifts from minority community languages to English on the one hand, and the growing confidence and salience of the Muslim youth community in Western settings on the other, the emergence of Englishlanguage devotional practices now competes with more traditional devotional practices employing the traditional languages of the faith (Classical Arabic, Urdu). Morris (2019) sums up this emergence as follows: The Muslim soundscape in Britain is crisscrossed with diverse forms of music and performance, inflected with global, diasporic and transnational sounds, that mesh and intermingle popular culture with Islamic poetic traditions and transnational cultural influences from across the ‘Muslim world’ (from Punjabi bhangra to American hip hop). Yet since the late 1990s there has been the emergence of a sound culture that might be seen both as distinctly ‘Muslim’ and self-consciously ‘British’. It is characterised by English-language music and performance poetry that draws on British national experiences and perspectives, fused with Islamic piety, ummatic belonging and a sense of British Muslim self-consciousness. (Morris, 2019)

This ‘Muslim soundscape’ is primarily one of devotion and, as Morris suggests here, is a variegated and complex phenomenon. The emphasis on English-language performance, while reflecting an inevitability and, for its performers and audiences, a welcome referentially meaningful contrast to ultralingual performance as decoding, also suggests the linguistic reality of language loss and shift. Resistance to English-language performance can take a number of forms. Firstly, there is the dislike of English, the archetypal anti-Muslim language, tinged with its colonial past and neocolonial present (Pennycook, 1998; Phillipson, 1992), appearing in contexts traditionally sanctified by other languages. Secondly, there is the view that English is an unsuitable vehicle for carrying the spiritual and devout messages of the faith, given its association with material and ‘dunya’12 culture. Thirdly, there is a view that much of the English-language devotional material can sound trite and child-like in its level of sophistication. Finally, there is the associated idea that sacred texts are identified with their language. In the Islamic context, this notion originally relates to the untranslatability of the Qur’an and the use of Classical Arabic exclusively in formal acts of worship. Many will express the view that certain languages carry with them a sanctity that disappears in the act of translation or even in the act of original composition in another language. Specific languages are related to specific cultures and to their attendant cultural identities; and that ‘the specificity of the linguistic bond of most cultural doings’ … makes the very notion of a ‘translated culture’ so inauthentic and even abhorrent. (Fishman, 2001: 3)

By contrast, some would argue that similar obstacles to assigning devotional status to these innovative genres were also present in the

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original encounters of the faith with peoples and communities in the growing Islamic world in the early centuries of the faith. With time, however, these linguistic obstacles have disappeared and devotional practice, with the exceptions of the central sacred text, the Qur’an, and the language of canonical prayer, began to appear in other languages (Ostler, 2017). The co-sanctification of certain registers of Persian and Ottoman Turkish probably did not happen overnight (Ostler, 2017). It is claimed that the same is true for English which, with time, will also develop genuine and acceptable devotional forms in Islam. Central to this book, therefore, are the performance practices of a large community of young British Muslims. This group of young people is not homogenous and it is not claimed that they are representative of all young British Muslims. Others may have little or no interest in the practices described in this book and do not consider them as part of their identities as Muslims. For example, a significant minority of young British Muslims are attracted to Salafism, which is considered by some as a more austere and literalist approach to the faith characterised by careful scrutiny of textual sources and a very selective use of Muslim scholarship of the past 1000 years. In some circles, this movement is perceived as having links with Islamist groups and possible militancy, although its leaders would deny such an attachment. Others may become disenchanted in their religious faith and practices and still others may lead a very secular lifestyle. In general, however, most of the young Muslims from the Pakistani heritage community would have at least followed a course in Qur’anic literacy acquisition when they were younger and be familiar with performance practices ensuing from this. Being the largest Muslim community in the UK by heritage means that similar practices can be found in the major cities and towns of the UK, and the practices described and explored in this book will be familiar to many readers outside the immediate area covered by the research sites. Notes (1) After a number of years using Fishman’s (1989) ‘religious classical’ as the generic term for the archaic languages used for liturgical purposes, I now follow Bennett’s recent defi nition of ‘sacred language’ for this linguistic code. See Bennett (2017: 1–18). (2) This is different from scat singing which does not employ pseudo-words. (3) Glossolalia has also been used to describe her vocal music. (4) The leading male role in the opera The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky. (5) Professional reciter. (6) Whether this is recited audibly or not is part of Islamic jurisprudence where there are differing views. There are also differing views as to whether the ‘bismallah’ should always be recited when commencing reciting the Qur’an in the middle of a chapter. (7) This was the stock phrase ‘Allahuma salli w salim w barik alay’ ‘O Allah, bless, grant peace and exalt him’ (Muhammed is assumed). (8) For our purposes, it is not necessary to explain fully these terms. They are there to highlight the level of technical terms sometimes used in the acquisition of Qur’anic

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literacy. ‘Huroof leen’, or ‘soft letters’, is equivalent to ‘diphthongs’. There are two diphthongs in Classical Arabic, /aw/ and /ay/. (9) ‘Orature’ has sometimes been suggested as an alternative to oral text (Akande, 2018). (10) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Fishman, 1991, 2001). (11) I share Fishman’s (2006) distinction here between ‘sacred’ and ‘co-sanctified’, with the former meaning the language associated most closely with the origins of the faith (Classical Arabic in Islam, Sanskrit in Hinduism, for example) and the latter languages that have assimilated sanctity or holiness from use in faith practices. These are languages such as Latin and Ecclesiastical Greek in Christianity, Persian in Islam and Classical Tibetan in Buddhism. This aligns with the 4th and 5th principles of Fishman’s Decalogue. (12) Arabic word for ‘this life’, ‘the material world’.

5 Ultralingual Devotional Performance in 2000 and in 2019

This chapter will set the parameters for the present study. It does this by revisiting the principal outcomes of the study into Qur’anic literacy acquisition from two decades ago and then bringing the focus up to date by describing the practices and the settings to be explored in this book. It will also report briefly on the related research that has appeared since. The fi ndings from literacy research carried out two decades ago in UK mosque schools identified a number of issues of contention within and across the research sites visited at the time (Rosowsky, 2008). The fi rst of these was the recruitment of teachers. The three mosque schools researched at that time served relatively well-established and longstanding Muslim communities originating predominantly from Pakistan. In the period of data collection (1997–2001), it was clear that it had been regular practice to recruit teachers for the children from ‘back home’. If teachers were not directly from the home region of the community (mainly Mirpur), they were at least from Pakistan, although when this occurred it created its own communication problems on the part of the teacher and his students. Home-made, UK-educated teachers were very much a rarity, though, and sometimes treated with suspicion by congregations and mosque elders alike, or at least unfavourably compared to those from Pakistan. Credentials considered appropriate at that time were a suitably accredited route through a course in a Darul uloom1 in Pakistan. For example, one of the few locally UK-educated imams at that time felt he needed to go to Pakistan to study for the appropriate qualification although by then there were at least two UK-based institutions where he could have qualified (Rosowsky, 1999). Knowledge of Urdu, I suspected at the time, was the first priority, quickly followed by the ability to recite and teach the Qur’an. If the teacher, usually also the imam, was a hafiz, 2 so much the better, but it was not a sine qua non. Knowledge of English and, just as importantly, of English cultural and social norms, was not considered as essential. As a result, there was often a communicative dissonance in the mosque school between the teacher and his3 students. As 79

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at this time much of the congregation were fi rst and second generation, this was not so much of an issue and Friday sermons and weekly lessons for adults carried out in Urdu (and occasional code-switching to Pahari/ Pothwari) constituted, linguistically, the main language presence. Dyke’s (2009) report into UK mosques ‘indicated that 44 per cent of mosques do not include English in their Friday sermons, preferring instead Punjabi, Bengali or Guajarati’ (Dyke, 2009: 14), which meant that imams elsewhere in the UK were also being recruited from the ethno-cultural heartlands. Parents interviewed at the time often commented on the communication problems of the teacher and the imam who, given his duties as imam and teacher, was left with little time for learning English. In the community, the presence of now third-generation boys and girls reflected a language shift from the community’s fi rst language (mainly Pothwari – sometimes called Mirpuri or Pahari; see pp. 41–42) to English. So even if the imam when teaching was able to speak the community language, some children would still fi nd it hard to respond and often resorted to codeswitching. Where the imam had been recruited from another region of Pakistan (in one mosque at the time the imam was from Karachi4 and spoke no Pothwari) and spoke only Urdu, the communication problems for the students were multiplied as their vestigial community language was useless. In some cases, though, some children had a knowledge of Urdu through their families. This was, however, exceptional. Thus, the mosque school at that time had a multilingual dimension quite different from that which prevails today, as the data in the following chapters will show. In fact, two of the three mosque schools featuring in the earlier study had a tendency to recruit imams from South Asia regardless of their linguistic origins. In the time I had known them (from 1985 onwards), the first mosque had had a Pushto- and then an Urdu-speaking imam with a brief interlude with an English-speaking and UK-trained imam which had not been a success. The essential qualification for both of the overseas imams was to have been trained at one of the prestigious Darul uloom in Pakistan and to have fluent command of Urdu. Knowledge of Arabic tended to be scholarly rather than conversational. In the other main mosque school setting, the imam was for a time a Gujarati-speaking Indian. None of these three imams had conversational level Pothwari, and they communicated via Urdu. As said before, this was just about tolerable for the first- and second-generation members of the congregation but it led to communication issues with the younger third generation. In addition, lack of knowledge of the cultural and social mores of the UK exacerbated these communication difficulties. Lewis (2007), in his detailed study of South Asian Muslims in the UK using data collected from an era similar to that of Rosowsky (2008), reports on how at the beginning of the 21st century a climate prevailed that left parents and teachers ill-equipped to contextualise their faith from back home into the lives of their children and students:

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[M]any parents and religious leaders, imported into Britain’s mosques from the [South Asian] religio-cultural world, are often at a loss to help their children answer questions about Islam posed by school friends, teachers or youth workers. (Lewis, 2007: xvii)

Relevantly, he states that these parents and teachers fi nd it hard or impossible to ‘connect with [the] lived experience [of] British Muslims whose first language is English’ (Lewis, 2007: xvii). The second significant fi nding identified by parents, students and some teachers at that time was that, in addition to the communication issues between the teacher and the students, English had to become a much more regular presence in both the mosque and the mosque school. Whereas some of the elders appeared content to have a mosque school that mirrored to a degree practice from back home 5 where the Qur’an was taught via the medium of Urdu (Xish via Yish6 ), diaspora parents were clamouring for the mosque to up its game linguistically by recognising the social, cultural and linguistic context in which the mosque school was situated and the needs of their children to learn about their faith in a more meaningful manner. This tension often manifested itself in a struggle between young parents of school-aged children and their own parents or at least the generation who had set up the mosques and mosque schools in the first place (the ‘elders’). The investment these original settlers had put into this aspect of community life cannot be overstated and was possibly the reason why things have taken some time to change. There were occasional exceptions to this situation. I reported a few years later (Rosowsky, 2006b) on how younger female members of the congregation in the absence of a suitably qualified female teacher took it upon themselves to teach their younger peers using English (‘we used to speak mixed’), importing techniques and approaches (grouping, for example) from their experience of mainstream schooling. The two women reported on the success of their time teaching, putting a lot of the success down to being ‘near their age and knowing English’ (Rosowsky, 2006b: 540). The parental call for the greater use of English in the mosque school was a recognition that language shift was taking place in the community. As touched upon earlier, the vast majority of first-generation settlers in the UK from Pakistan during the 1950s and 1960s were from the region of Mirpur (Ballard, 2001). Many of them were educated at a time when Urdu was yet to be declared the national language of the new nation-state and so had had little exposure themselves to Urdu at school. Many of them had only experienced elementary education anyway. The language of choice in the first decade or so of settlement was variously called Pothwari or Pahari (or sometimes simply just ‘Punjabi’). As spoken languages only, they had little status outside the community and were often compared by their speakers very unfavourably (‘a language of the hills or farmers’) with Urdu, which was a language of prestige often encountered more substantially and acquired as adults in the diaspora setting. Their children to a

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greater extent and their grandchildren to a lesser extent inherited these spoken languages. Urdu was known by these later generations as a formal learnt language rather than as a language of wider communication. The first generation worked predominantly in industrial environments doing unskilled and semi-skilled manual work, often in very noisy settings. There was less opportunity to develop fluent English in such places. I remember visiting a work experience student7 at a large glass and bottle manufacturers in the mid-1990s where many fi rst-generation settlers worked, and leaving with the impression that oral communication and interactions were almost impossible due to the high level of industrial noise. A prayer room had been provided for the men by the factory management which, on the one hand, was a very enlightened approach for that time but, on the other hand, lessened opportunities for interactions with non-Muslim English-speaking workmates. As a result, Pothwari remained the spoken language of the community. When wives joined their husbands and children were born, 8 this language was transmitted to the next generation. This second generation were often the first to use English regularly and to attend UK schools. With time, and with the arrival of third-generation children and grandchildren in the 1980s onwards, English has gradually become the language of choice of succeeding generations and language shift has taken place particularly among those aged 40 and below. Occasionally, there are exceptions where the community language has been maintained. This has usually been facilitated by the greater involvement in family life of grandparents and ex/endogamous9 marriages taking place with relatives back home (Ballard, 2001). Therefore, in 2001 when the earlier study concluded, with language shift to English taking place and with teachers in the mosque school unable to communicate effectively, parents had strong linguistic reasons for demanding change. The central linguistic element of the mosque school is of course the acquisition and use of Classical Arabic in the context of learning how to read and recite the Qur’an. Against a background of fluid language practice involving language shift, code-mixing, spoken vernaculars and prestigious literary varieties and local and Standard varieties of English, the maintenance of the religious classical and its manifestation in liturgical literacy practice appeared reasonably stable throughout this period. Granted, the evening mosque school, in the eyes of parents, teachers and mosque administrators of all generations, had as its primary aim the induction of children into reading the Qur’an, and so it might be expected that such an investment of money and, particularly, time would result in such stability. However, as reported elsewhere by many other scholars, the ‘religious classical’ (Fishman, 1989) or ‘sacerdotal language’ (Safran, 2008), in many faith contexts, has a staying power and resilience that spoken vernaculars, particularly in diaspora settings, do not appear to have. It would appear that the combination of language learning, sacred

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text and religious context work together to ensure this stability. In the Jewish cheder, in parallel diaspora settings in the UK, the only language learning taking place on a regular basis is the acquisition of Biblical Hebrew literacy, with Yiddish having long disappeared from the community and only sporadic learning of vernacular Hebrew. In the ethnographic data of the time, the only linguistic element linked to Qur’anic acquisition that was regularly identified by the parents and the students was a wish to see more attention paid to the comprehension of the sacred text through the use of English. Parents expressed frustration that so much time was devoted to learning how to decode but so little attention was paid to understanding and basic knowledge. There was a clear separation in view between the parents of school-aged children and the elders of the community who were often in positions of authority in the mosque management structure. The latter felt that the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy, albeit in a restricted sense, was enough as an educational aim. Parents, seeing the mosque and its school as an oasis of belief in, as they perceived it, a desert of unbelief and materialism, felt that more was needed by way of induction into the faith. Although Urdu was sometimes mentioned as a something valuable and worth teaching in the mosque school alongside Qur’anic literacy, in my experience this was never a high priority and usually took a back seat to Classical Arabic and demands for English. To complete this recap of the community’s linguistic dynamic of 20 years ago, it is important to reflect a little on the spoken language – which, usefully, has received more scholarly attention since then (Hussein, 2015; Lothers & Lothers, 2010, 2012; Rehman, 2005). At the beginning of the century, however, there was still a high degree of stigma attached to the language by many of its speakers. Considered by some to be ‘slang’, a ‘dialect’, ‘like Yorkshire’, ‘village language’ or ‘rustic or worthless’, there was a reluctance on the part of many of my participants to name their language. I used ‘Mirpuri-Punjabi’ in my conversations with them, but was rarely challenged on my use of the term or made aware that Pothwari or Pahari might be more accurate. This had consequences for mainstream schooling too, as although there are close linguistic ties between Urdu and other South Asian languages such as Punjabi, Pothwari and Pahari, they are not mutually intelligible in all contexts. Teachers in local secondary schools in particular wanted to encourage the teaching and learning of Urdu among their children of Pakistani descent and were often frustrated to discover that a knowledge of spoken Pothwari did not translate into an equivalent proficiency in Urdu. Again, it needs stressing that there were exceptions to this profi le and some students did very well in their Urdu studies. This, though, was usually down to certain favourable family circumstances in respect of Urdu. An observation made at the time but not widely commented upon by parents was the nature of the teaching resources used in the mosque

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school. Almost universally, text materials were monolingual Arabic or bilingual Urdu/Arabic. This was also the case for environmental print, particularly in the case of display materials and wall coverings. The development of innovative bi- and multilingual teaching resources and the changing format of environmental print is explored in Chapters 5 and 8. At that time, linguistically, a typical interaction in the mosque school would therefore involve the teacher speaking Urdu, using Arabic or Urdu/ Arabic materials, to a student with possibly fi rst-language Pothwari but increasingly English-dominant language proficiency. This is an example of what Fishman, in the context of minority language maintenance, has called learning Xish via Yish, where Xish is the minority language being acquired (in this case Classical Qur’anic Arabic) and Yish is the majority language. Now, at this time, the majority languages of the teacher(s) and the older members of the mosque were Urdu in formal contexts (and there were plenty of such contexts in the routine of the mosque – sermons, prayers, speeches, poetry recitation) and vernacular Pothwari for all informal settings. The student may have been learning Xish via Yish, but quite likely was learning Xish via another Xish (i.e. Urdu, which he or she may not have acquired in the home). This rather complex state of affairs was at the same time impacted upon by the shift in the community to English among subsequent generations. Pedagogically, therefore, the process of learning was often uncertainly mediated as language differences and insecurities impeded successful acquisition. Having said that, another fi nding of the earlier study was that, by and large, the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy, in the limited sense of being able to decode and recite Classical Arabic text from the sacred text, was successful and most children could effectively recite the Qur’an and would have memorised at least enough of it to perform their daily practices by the time they stopped attending the class (this varied but would be around the age of 14). They would have completed a reading of the entire text monitored by their teacher at least once and often more than once. Thus, this was the profi le, from a linguistic perspective two decades ago, of a setting that one might describe as ‘old’ diversity. In other words, this was a fairly well established Muslim community with roots in the New Commonwealth (Pakistan/India/Bangladesh) whose early settlers had arrived in the two decades after WWII to fill the UK’s need to rebuild and renovate its heavy industry, mainly in what was at the time the British industrial heartland of the north and midlands of England.10 These settlers (almost all male to start with) worked in the steel, textiles and glassmaking industries where a plentiful supply of unskilled workers were needed, often working unsocial hours such as night shifts. This diversity was predicated on a fairly homogenous community in terms of class (mainly rural backgrounds), faith and language. The minority languages of Pothwari/Pahari and, to a lesser extent, of Urdu, in time came to interact with the majority language English, usually in its local varieties, and

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with the Standard variety once children began to attend school. The mosque school reflected this stable pattern of language use. The characteristics of these communities were reasonably fi xed and predictable for a while. This was a time when social policy in the UK rarely recognised multilingual or bilingual realities in its cities and towns.11 The discourse of difference focused largely on race or physical differences such as skin colour. This was the time described by Barker (1982) as ‘old’ racism. Markers of diversity such as religion and language were yet to achieve their contemporary salience (Allen, 2011). Ultralingual Devotional Performance in 2019

This book marks a moment during a period of significant social change in the UK and elsewhere which Vertovec (2007) and others (Creese & Blackledge, 2018) have characterised as ‘superdiversity’. This has coincided with a move in sociolinguistics away from notions of fi xed and stable language codes and speech communities towards a preference for discussing language practices and networks operating with and within multiple language resources considered to be fluid, flexible and mobile. Concepts such as ‘language disinvention’ (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), ‘translanguaging’ (García & Li Wei, 2014), ‘flexible bilingualism’ (Blackledge & Creese, 2010) and ‘metrolingualism’ (Otsuje & Pennycook, 2010) have been variously deployed to account for this lack of stability, rapid change and fluidity of practice. The particularised setting of a faithbased supplementary school is a rich environment for tracking how such fluidity has impacted on the language practices of a significant faith and linguistic minority in the UK. The move from race to ethnicity to markers of religion and language is reflected indirectly in the mosque school historically as its preoccupations have changed in line with this trajectory. The early mosques and their associated schools were established very much along ethnic and doctrinal lines with a congregation unified as much by ethnicity and language as by faith. ‘Pakistani’ mosques or ‘Yemeni’ mosques were not inaccurate descriptions, and these monikers apply to some extent today as well. Recently, these fi xities with their ‘village-kinship, tribal, ethnic and sectarian affiliation[s]’ (Ansari, 2004: 343) have been disrupted to a degree and it is now not unusual to fi nd mosque schools with children from a range of ethnic/national and linguistic backgrounds. One of the four mosque schools in this study could well be described as a multicultural or multilingual environment, where the languages involved are neither Arabic (apart from its particular use in the reading of the Qur’an) nor Urdu. Another has a dominant community but with a sizeable minority of children from diverse backgrounds. The two others at fi rst glance might be seen as very similar to the mosque schools from 20 years ago. However, a more considered observation would reveal that students, teachers and

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teaching materials and the environment use language in quite different ways from their predecessors. The superdiverse environment in which these mosque schools exist, therefore, is fully manifested in the activities taking place within them as regardless of the apparently more stable presence of the sacred language, it is impossible for the fluid and mobile linguistic ambiance outside of the mosque school not to leak into the traditional setting of the mosque school. I have shown elsewhere how the relative centrality of acquiring Qur’anic literacy is situated within a very fluid and mobile set of other linguistic practices involving language shifts and translanguaging pedagogies. (Rosowsky, 2015, 2018b)

This book, then, will show, in detail, how some particular faith-based settings do not represent a throwback to a bygone age and something that might be resistant to innovation and the communicative dynamics of the present age, but instead negotiate their language practices afresh amid the ever-evolving linguistic interactions of those attending them, either as worshippers or as students. It will trace the subsequent trajectory of the three significant fi ndings of the study from 20 years ago – teacher recruitment, use of English in the mosque school and community language shift – and show how the superdiversity of the present moment has led to very different devotional language practices in the mosque school in terms of teachers, students, materials and the physical spaces and, of course, the way these elements combine to transform the educational experience of the young people involved. However, as with all communicative evolution, there is no hard and sharp contrast between the two periods of time. As there are the seeds of eventual change in the practices of before, there remain aspects of past practices doggedly persisting in the practices of today. Indeed, in certain examples, it may be a case of identifying different emphases rather than distinct differences. Recent Relevant Research

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there have also been developments in the quantity and quality of published research in this area. Previously, the small amount of literature available came overwhelmingly from the anthropology of language practices. Thus, Street’s (1984) seminal study on the autonomous and ideological models of literacy drew on his research in Iran into Qur’anic literacy practices. A subsequent edited volume (Street, 1993) featured other writers drawing on the same tradition (Bledsoe & Robey; Lewis). Boyarin’s (1993) collection on the ethnography of reading included a number of chapters devoted to forms of liturgical literacy from a range of faith contexts (Baker; Boyarin). Wagner’s (1993) survey of pre-school kutab in Morocco was perhaps the first work

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of any significance to focus on the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy within early years settings. Gregory and Williams (2000) had given brief accounts of Qur’anic literacy practices in their detailed study of literacy in the East End of London. In sociolinguistics, Ferguson (1982) and Fishman (1989) had both written about the role religious classical languages play in communities without necessarily describing in detail the practices involved. Since then, there has been a slow increase in the amount of attention given to this topic and some of that attention has not always been for the best of scholarly reasons. Given the increased scrutiny and creeping securitisation surrounding the Muslim community in general since the events of 2001,12 it was almost inevitable that the mosque school would become a setting of interest for politicians, policymakers, media agencies and researchers alike. As Seddon comments: [I]t [the stigmatisation of young Muslims] materialised … through the suspicion of madrassahs (Islamic schools13), which were perceived as places where extremism could be infused into young people, and therefore key sites which the Government planned to intervene in by closing the ones deemed extreme and proscribing a standard curriculum for the rest. This is reminiscent of Britain’s colonial era in India, when the British authorities established their own madrassahs to ensure Muslims were being educated ‘the correct’ way. (Seddon, 2004: 24)

There have been a number of regional and national policy studies carried out by UK government departments and centrist think tanks into the way mosque schools are run. Cherti and Bradley’s (2011a, 2011b) twin papers examining madrassa practice and madrassas in the media in the UK adopted a rather problematising approach, listing perceived issues with the sector and showing less understanding of the central element of mosque schools – the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy. Indeed, this centrality was deemed a problem in respect of ‘rote learning’ and little recognition was made of the value of such acquisition. As this has been the primary purpose of all mosque schools since their establishment in the UK, and irrespective of parental wishes for greater emphasis on referential understanding, any diffusion of this key activity is likely to be resisted. This represents a mismatch between outside expectations of the supplementary school sector and the reasons why such schools are set up by their communities. For example, elsewhere in the reports are suggestions for greater external monitoring and incorporation of mainstream school subjects into the ‘curriculum’. There is no focus on language. Indeed, the only publicly expressed position on the language of the mosque school and of the Muslim community in general has been the regular fear that the community is not speaking English enough (Blunkett, 2006; Cameron, 2016). That this was not even an issue in 2001 has been made explicit in Rosowsky (2008, 2017), where parents at the time were more worried that their children were losing their community language than not learning or acquiring English.

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In the field of religious education research, Gent (2011, 2016) and Berglund and Gent (2019), centring their research in the wider issue of faith-based supplementary school and mainstream school rapprochement, have explored the specific practice of memorisation of the Qur’an. In their work there are interesting observations made on the language practices involved in learning the sacred text by heart and how young people are able to transfer skills from one educational context to another. Although there is an aim of identifying learning strategies across the two settings of mainstream and supplementary Qur’anic schools, the studies offer wider observations on the religious and cultural value of Qur’anic literacies. Interestingly, for this study, apart from the Arabic of the Qur’an, all language practice around it was in English. The majority of the young people featuring in Berglund and Gent’s study were born in the UK and so were likely third generation. Languages such as Urdu, Gujerati and Sylheti were part of their repertoires but, as in other communities, language shift had taken place to English. Exceptions were more recent arrivals to the UK and this reflects the greater superdiverse mobility at the present time. In a parallel context to the Muslim one in the UK, Schachter (2010) has shown how learning to read Hebrew in Jewish supplementary schools (cheders) in the United States has faced similar challenges in adapting to the changing social and linguistic context the young learners fi nd themselves in. Here too, interestingly, teaching materials are examined. It is no doubt a truism that in the different diaspora settings of both these faith communities, the Jewish community has had a longer time in which to negotiate their linguistic trajectories, and the teaching materials are a reflection of this. In a cross-faith study of Muslim, Sikh and Jewish supplementary schools, Rosowsky (2013a) shares the colourful cover of a textbook for learning Hebrew which is not dissimilar in format to a school textbook of any subject aimed at English-speaking children of the same age (Figure 5.1). We will see below how innovative teaching materials (including the advent of online and electronic resources) are now being used in the mosque school settings. This itself sets up certain tensions between traditional and innovative approaches to the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy at the present moment. Moore (2006, 2013, 2016), in a series of articles based on research in Cameroon, usefully acknowledges the ubiquity of Qur’anic schooling around the world, agreeing with Wagner (1993) and Rosowsky (2015) that it is probably the most widespread form of supplementary education globally. Her work seeks to highlight the value of ‘guided repetition’ (her welcome less pejorative term for ‘rote learning’) in socialising young Muslim Cameroonians into their respective linguistic repertoires, one of which is Qur’anic Arabic. Other writers have explored Qur’anic literacy acquisition in different parts of the Muslim world. Gade (2004) and Rasmussen (2010) focus on Indonesia from the anthropology of religion and musical perspectives,

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Figure 5.1 Cover of Biblical Hebrew primer for children (reproduced by permission of Behrman House, Inc., www.behrmanhouse.com)

respectively. Gade (2004) provides a detailed account of Qur’anic literacy acquisition and practice in a region of Indonesia and draws on anthropological and sociological theories of subjectivity and affect in order to understand the psychological and social drivers for Qur’anic memorisation and reading. Rasmussen (2010) recognises the major aural ramifications of acquiring and practising Qur’anic literacy, also in Indonesia (see also Denny, 1989; Graham, 1987), and positions Qur’anic reading practices within a much broader survey of Islamic devotional music. The links between Qur’anic recitation and music are further explored via a focus on performance in Rosowsky (2013b, 2016), which draws on theories of performance such as Bauman (1975), Turner (1969) and Schechner (1988) to account for the cultural importance and richness of the art of Qur’anic recitation. Much of this research explores a form of ‘reading’ which is beyond the goal of seeking propositional meaning. In possibly the only other large-scale research project to date focusing on language and faith in UK urban contexts of diaspora (Gregory et al., 2013; Lytra et al., 2016), a focus on performance (in some cases ‘ultralingual’) is equally emphasised as way of understanding the role of sacred

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text acquisition and practice in youth faith settings. Through an exploration of the way second-generation Polish children, Ghanaian Pentecostal adults, Tamil Hindu children and third-generation Bengali Muslim children in London engage in literacy practices in faith contexts, the researchers conclude that ‘repetition, recitation, echoing and memorization’ lead children and others to imbibe and learn ‘by heart’ their sacred texts, which themselves are considered as ‘anchor points’ in their religious and linguistic identities. Notes (1) An Islamic seminary. The term is most often associated with institutions in Pakistan and India. The spelling reflects this association. (2) An individual who has memorised the complete Qur’an. (3) In situations where female teachers were employed to teach girls there was often far more rapprochement culturally, socially and linguistically. (4) About as far, geographically and linguistically, as you could be in Pakistan from the north-eastern region of Mirpur. (5) However, practice in the UK, when compared by parents to provision ‘back home’, was often commented upon quite favourably (Rosowsky, 2008: 83). (6) These are terms used by the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman to denote how minority language learning (not acquisition) often takes place via the majority language (or in some cases via another minority language). (7) In the UK many high school aged children have to complete a short period of work experience towards the end of statutory schooling. (8) Much of this activity took place hastily before the UK 1971 Immigration Act which placed restrictions on immigration from Commonwealth countries from that point on. (9) Endogamy here is ambiguous. On the one hand, marriages sought outside of the diaspora community ‘back home’ would constitute exogamy. However, marriages often take place between members of the extended family in the UK and ‘back home’, making them endogamous at the same time. (10) There were smaller communities in the south of England (e.g. Luton and Slough), often working in the car and food industries, respectively. (11) One of the fi rst large-scale government reports into UK multiculturalism and education was The Swann Report from 1985 (DES, 1985). (12) Some point to both the events of 9/11 in New York and the urban riots in northern cities in the UK with large Muslim minorities in the summer of 2001 as responsible for the growing attention by many to the Muslim community and its practices (Abbas, 2007). (13) See Introduction, note 3.

6 ‘Al-Qur’an’: The Sacred Text and its Centrality (Mosque School A)

This chapter addresses the centrality of sacred text literacy in UK Qur’anic supplementary schools. Like previous studies (Rosowsky, 2008, 2013a), it attempts to address the misrepresentation of this form of literacy but also emphasises its importance in Qur’anic supplementary schools in what are now known as ‘superdiverse’ societies (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Blommaert, 2010; Vertovec, 2007). Therefore, unlike those previous studies, it draws upon data from a much more diverse range of schools in terms of language, ethnicity and heritage, reflecting more accurately the superdiverse contexts in which they are situated. It also draws on the still limited body of recent published research to support this centrality, and updates and reappraises earlier outcomes from previous studies. At the same time, the chapter, together with many other chapters in this book, seeks to address the reductive critique of neoliberal policy relating to supplementary schooling, particularly faith-based, appearing in recent years. Although the data in this chapter come from the full range of settings comprising this ethnography, they draw mostly on one setting. This is the pattern for Chapters 6–9 as well, with a particular but different setting each time providing most but not all of the exemplification for the ideas and themes discussed. In this way, it is hoped that a richer picture of each setting can be created, providing the reader with a more coherent and encompassing view of the language practices taking place. This chapter focuses on the centrality of the sacred text, in this case the Qur’an, and its acquisition, to the life of the mosque school. Recent reports (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a, 2011b), which have called for a broadening of the mosque school curriculum, often fail to fully realise this primary purpose of the mosque school and why it is pursued by Muslim communities with so much earnestness and endeavour. In essence, the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy is considered not just an educational practice leading to religious identity and knowledge (although it is both those things as well), but principally as constituting a sacred duty by parents and teachers alike. Indeed, the recitation of the sacred text is considered an act 91

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of devotion in itself and although not as important as ritual prayer (which is a daily requirement for all mature Muslims), it is ranked very highly among other acts of supererogatory worship. It is possible to perform the ritual prayer by memorising the required text, but most Muslims consider that the ability to actually read (decode) the Qur’an is paramount. In societies steeped in a post-Reformation understanding of scripture which foregrounds vernacularisation and referential meaning (O’Leary, 1996), this emphasis on decoding an ancient text in an archaic language that may be beyond the understanding of most of its decoders may be difficult to grasp. Other religious traditions may have more empathy. In Jewish cheders, non-Hebrew speaking children learn how to decode the Biblical Hebrew of the Torah and in Gurdwaras Sikh children do likewise with the Granth Sahib. Theravada Buddhist monks from an early age learn to chant the Pali script of their sacred texts. For many this is essentially an ultralingual practice. The centrality of the sacred text to the lives of these worshippers manifests itself pedagogically, linguistically and materially, and this chapter will have occasion to dwell on all three of these elements in its account of Qur’anic literacy. This chapter often includes description and explanation of the devotional practices that take place in one particular mosque school, Mosque School A, which on the surface should differ significantly from the three other mosque school settings described in this book. Of the four, it is the mosque school together with its associated mosque that perhaps announces its doctrinal allegiance most explicitly. Named after one of the Salafi school’s main theoretical inspirations, the 11th century theologian Ibn al-Qayyim,1 the mosque school is part of a relatively newly established mosque in the east of the city. Converted from a light industrial unit in the inner city’s industrial area, the mosque serves a community of mainly Somalis and Arabs in an area of significant socioeconomic deprivation. I spent a period of six weeks in this mosque school attending most days of the week (the school only ran three days per week – this is another subtler change from the earlier period of UK mosque schools). I was able to participate in the ritual prayer that took place when I was there and generally be around the prayer area while the school was taking place. This happened, as with most mosque schools, from 5pm until 7pm. I was also given permission to consult all the teaching materials that were being used as well as the general library which was located to the rear of the prayer hall. As part of my gentle ethnographical approach, I carried out no surveys or questionnaires or formal interviews. Data were either observational or the result of informal conversations with various participants: boys, teachers, managers and other adults present, including some parents. One ethnographic technique I discovered while in situ that proved to be perhaps the most innovative (for me) and eventually useful elsewhere was attending to the sounds of the mosque and its school. This technique

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will be referred to on a number of occasions as it provides access to what is perhaps the mosque school’s most defi ning and salient language mode – its counter-intuitive emphasis on the spoken word. In a gentle ethnographic approach, using a recording device for capturing anything audible would be inappropriate, so the researcher was reliant on his ears and their sensitivity to the ambient sound. The resultant description of sound in the mosque is unavoidably subjective and impressionistic. However, in subsequent sojourns in the other mosque school settings, this technique became a regular part of my experience and allowed me to gauge the extent to which orality dominated any particular setting. For example, it was a common occurrence for a group of students individually reciting, either loudly or sotto voce, to fall silent in unison for no apparent reason. The same group of students, again with no sign of collusion, would resume their reciting after such a pause. This was an aspect of the mosque school ambiance with which I became fascinated during most phases of the ethnography and something I grew used to attending to. One of the characteristics of sacred text practices is that they have a predominant collective ethos. Even when reciters are reciting individually, from different sections of the sacred text, there is a sense of a collective purpose in what they are doing. The individualised reading of the silent reader in a world of their own imagination is alien to the collective ethos of the sacred text reciter. In his account of the history of communication, Ong (1982) writes vividly of the monastic scriptorium in the epoch of the written manuscript where, again, despite the individualised nature of each scribe’s activity, there is a collective ethos. He suggests that a combination of print literacy and vernacularisation was partly instrumental for the subsequent development of silent individual reading. It would appear that sacred text reading and writing take place largely in Gemeinschaft settings, whereas individual reading practices are more readily associated with Gesellschaft conditions. In most mosque schools, where personnel allow, the students are grouped. As a minimum, there is usually a beginners’ group with the mastery of the alphabet and the follow-on qa’idah2 as its main teaching purpose and resource. An intermediate group focuses on consolidation and fluency, and a third group may be concentrating on hifz, memorisation (see Gent, 2011, 2016). These are very rough descriptions of grouping in mosque school settings and much depends on class sizes and the availability of teachers. Figure 6.1, based on an extract from my field notes for Mosque School A, shows two of these groups in their physical groupings and location in the prayer hall. 3 The rest of the space is taken up by the carpeted rectangular-shaped prayer hall to the right of the groups as on the diagram. It is about 100 feet by 80 feet in size. The UN group are the ‘memorisers’ and the BM group are the ‘consolidators’. A beginners’ group is located elsewhere.

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(11 boys sit on the floor in a rough semi-circle with the teacher (Ustad 1N2 (UN) I learn later), with his back to the wall, with the semi-circle in front of him) Front of hall

UN

Author

PRAYER HALL

BM

Rear of hall (Another group sits in a similar way to the first group’s le using the corner of the mosque space. Their teacher is Brother M(BM). I sit with my back to the wall in between each group.)

Figure 6.1 Teaching layout in Mosque School A based on fi eld notes from 8 September 2014

The centrality of the sacred text to the mosque school is apparent visibly and audibly. First of all, a book is in the hands of every student. As there are no beginners in either of these two groups, this is always a copy of the Qur’an itself. They are a variety of sizes and editions although it is often the case that a preferred edition may be most commonly used in each mosque. For example, in Mosque School A the script of the Qur’ans used (also called a mushaf by Arabic speakers) is known as the Uthmani script and is the most widely used script in the Middle East, particularly in Arabic-speaking countries but also in Turkey and Central Asia. Children in two of the other mosques learn how to decode using a script derived from Perso-Arab scripts used mainly in South Asian contexts.4 In short, the latter is more rounded in appearance and the former more angular, although these are rather broad generalisations. In addition, there are also a small number of differences in letter shapes between the two scripts (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). The implications of this will be discussed in Chapter 8. The beginners’ group uses a qa’idah, or primer, for learning the alphabet and basic decoding. These can also be found in plastic, allowing for

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Figure 6.2 Typical Indo-Pak Qur’anic script

robust use from young hands. 5 In the environment there will be mushafs on shelves and, in Mosque School A, occasionally in displays on the walls. Wall-mounted calligraphy, which is usually of verses from the Qur’an but can also be of Prophetic sayings, is more a feature of two of the other mosques6 in this study. The reluctance to display exhortations on walls is sometimes a feature of the Salafi-type mosque which will often have bare painted walls surrounding the prayer area. It is difficult not to make the link here between the iconography and other visual features found in Roman Catholic churches contrasting with the deliberately plain décor of Lutheran or Calvinist churches. To an extent, this relative absence of visual distraction in the mosque school, and the mosque as a whole, helps to stress the textual orientation of liturgical practice, mirroring one of the arguments of Christian reformers such as Zwingli and Calvin (O’Leary, 1996) at the time of the European Reformation. The parallel is not exact, however, for the strictures on the depiction of living forms in Islam have led to the rich development of Islamic calligraphy which adorns the walls of many mosques and Muslim religious buildings throughout the Islamic world. In Salafi thought, though, such adornment for walls is considered

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Figure 6.3 Typical Uthmani Qur’anic script

inappropriate and a form of innovation on the basis that revelation is intended for guidance rather than for decoration (Al-Munajid, 2000). What reinforces the centrality of the sacred text in the life of the mosque school, however, is its sound. Once a teaching session is up and running, a particular hum-like sound emerges from the collective recitations of the students. In Mosque School A, this can be as many as 40 boys reciting individually either sotto voce or more audibly. Most will be reciting different passages of the Qur’an, but there is nevertheless a unison in sound that makes sacred text recitation unmistakeable. Qur’anic recitation in this way has far more in common with sacred text recitation in other traditions than it has with individualised modes of reading. In Mosque School A, the teachers themselves do not always have a copy of the Qur’an in their hands. As huffaz 7 (or sometimes partial huffaz) they can follow and correct their students’ recitations without consulting the text. The usual procedure is for students to recite to the teacher in turn, who will listen and correct any mistakes or advise the student on matters of recitation. This is often known as the ‘lesson’. In Mosque School A, it was common to hear one of the teachers, UN, correcting students from afar. This was a remarkable feat. Amid the hum of many

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students simultaneously reciting different Qur’anic passages, from across the prayer hall and even to a student in another group, UN was able to hear and point out a mistake and his stentorian voice would provide the necessary correction. It was hard to avoid the impression that on these occasions UN was a shepherd concerned for every one of his flock, even those some distance away. This procedure, which happened regularly, has strong parallels with a choir director preparing a choir for an ultralingual performance (see Chapter 4, page 59). This general Qur’anic sotto voce hubbub, interrupted occasionally by the booming corrections of UN in Mosque School A, provided the aural backdrop for the learning that was taking place. As students either learn their alphabets and syllabaries through a method of ‘look-listen-repeatlearn’ or decode their way through the text of the Qur’an itself or set about memorising selected passages of complete chapters, the oral nature of sacred text literacy is evident. Although mosque schools appear to have different cultural conventions about the volume level of the recitation, with some allowing a much louder recitation than others, there is little evidence to my knowledge of absolutely silent recitation in the mosque school. Even among adults this practice persists. In the mosques associated with Mosque Schools A and B, before the Friday prayer, many worshippers will read the Qur’an before the start of the weekly congregational prayer.8 This will be done in the same sotto voce way the students practise in the mosque school. The spoken word is therefore paramount in this form of literacy, with the internalised and individualised manner of reading a sacred text left, in the main, to the interested scholar rather than the lay reader. This is undoubtedly true for non-Arabic speaking Muslims but is also to an extent true for those with a command of Arabic. In terms of pedagogy, the pattern followed in all four mosque schools is similar. Students sit in groups and work individually with their text and each will have their ‘lesson’ when they sit in front of the teacher and either recite what they have been memorising or continue reading from where they have got to in their sequential reading. There is a self-sustaining element to this practice as although the teacher can often only attend to one student at a time, the nature of the learning, which is mainly about ‘getting through’ certain passages (reading or memorising), has its own momentum which tends to keep students on task. Of course, as described above, the teacher can on occasion carry out a more general monitoring even from afar. Another model is for a group to concentrate on the same passage with their teacher and for each student to read an excerpt. This is a little like the ‘reading round the class’ approach that happens in mainstream schooling in some UK English classrooms. In my experience, as in mainstream education, this only seems to work effectively if all readers are confident and fluent enough for the exercise not to grind to a halt in the face of difficult and unfamiliar words and phrases.

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One important difference observed between the four mosque schools is the role of the text as artefact. In my earlier study and in my experience generally with non-Arabic speaking Muslim communities, the sacred text is highly revered as a material object. In homes it will be positioned in an elevated place when not being read. In the mosque school, the students will have their copy of the Qur’an enshrouded in a cloth cover in order to keep it clean. In the mosque, old, tattered and almost perished Qur’ans will be carefully stored to prevent any accidental inappropriate disposal (such as being placed in a bin). Although these conventions apply generally across all Muslim contexts, it was evident that in the two mosques where there was greater familiarity with the language of the Qur’an (Mosque Schools A and B) there was less emphasis on the text as sacred artefact. In these mosques, for example, students would not have cloth-covered mushafs and would not be too bothered about how they treated the text, and a look at the condition of the books on the bookshelf would demonstrate clearly that these texts were to be read and used in a regular and workinglike manner. Furthermore, it is generally considered inappropriate to hold a Qur’an by the left hand and this was never observed happening in Mosque Schools C and D. However, in Mosque Schools A and B, even though if asked the teachers would also recognise the convention, there was less emphasis on this aspect of textual practice on the part of the teachers. Boys were free to hold their mushafs in the left hand, upside down, balance them on their book stands and even run across the prayer hall holding them. Balancing that, however, the importance placed on correct recitation and memorisation was much greater in these two mosque schools than in the other two. This also manifested itself clearly in those congregational prayers that were recited audibly,9 where the imam leading the prayer would regularly recite quite lengthy passages from the Qur’an. This was something that rarely happened in the mosques associated with Mosque Schools C and D where the imam tended to limit the recitation to shorter, well known verses and passages. Moreover, in Mosques A and B, members of the congregation would often be ready as ‘prompters’ to the imam who, when reciting a lengthy passage, might err in his recitation. Again, this practice was very rarely observed in Mosques C and D. The sound of the Qur’an was what dominated Mosque School A and its adjoining mosque. Adults who came early to the mosque to await a congregational prayer would spend their time reciting and listening (often on mobile technology) to the Qur’an – something that I rarely observed in visits to Mosques C and D where individuals would either sit quietly or sometimes use a rosary to ‘remember’ God.10 Another pedagogical practice, mainly in the hifz group, was to get the students to test one another on their memorisations. This even happened between teachers, whom I observed testing each other’s memorisation while waiting for a congregational prayer. In general, a much greater ease

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and familiarity with the sacred text was evident in Mosques A and B. Obviously, much of this familiarity stems from a greater familiarity with the language of the sacred text (despite its linguistic distance from spoken varieties of Arabic) which appears to lessen some of the reverence observable in the other mosques. Reverence, here, is given to the sound more than it is given to the material book. The language practices of the mosque school vary a little from one mosque school to another and this is largely due to (a) the ethnic-orientation of the mosque and its catchment area and (b) the linguistic and educational backgrounds of the teachers. However, one language practice that dominates and which is significantly different from the language practices of mosque schools 20 years ago (i.e. towards the end of the 20th century) is the universal use of English. In the mosque schools at that time, serving relatively stable Muslim communities, the heritage language was commonly used as a medium for teaching the sacred language, Classical Arabic. Teachers in particular were often, if not monolingual in that heritage language, at least limited in their English proficiency. This was due to the practice at the time of recruiting teachers of the Qur’an from ‘back home’. Imams and teachers (they were often the same person) from Pakistan, often from the same region as the majority of the community members, came to serve in the mosque with little or no knowledge of English or of UK culture and society. Their first language was often Pahari (or Pothwari) and they had all acquired the second and prestigious language of Pakistan, Urdu. Sometimes, an imam might be appointed where Urdu was the main language criterion rather than any knowledge of the community spoken language. Here, communication problems might be exacerbated, with the students unable even to communicate with the teacher in the local language of Pahari or Pothwari (they all had some knowledge of these languages even if it was minimal). The community was experiencing a degree of language shift to English at this time, especially among the youngest generation. There was, therefore, the potential for communication barriers between teachers and students, something which many parents and students commented upon in the 2008 study. The observation of their sons sitting at the back of the prayer hall on the day of the Friday sermon and congregational prayer not understanding anything of the sermon was regularly made by parents. In other parts of the city, with smaller but still stable Muslim communities, a similar process often took place. For example, the largest Yemeni-heritage mosque in the city recruited a Syrian imam in the early 1980s who taught the young students through Syrian Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) – quite different from Yemeni Arabic and with little or no knowledge of English at that time. In Mosque School A, where the majority of students were of Somali or Arab origin, it is still possible to hear Somali (two varieties are possible, Maxa and Maay) and colloquial Arabic of various types being spoken,

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usually between the adults in the mosque or sometimes from teachers when they were confident the student would understand. However, for the most part, teaching took place with English as the medium. In Mosque School A, this did not mean that the teachers were necessarily comfortable with English. Often they would be using English as a lingua franca (for example, a Somali teacher to a student of Arab origin or vice versa) and using a translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014; MacSwan, 2017) strategy deploying language resources as diverse as an Arab spoken variety, Classical Arabic, colloquial English and Standard English. It was also more common for Somali speakers to know some colloquial Arabic than the reverse, so the translanguaging could also include the Somali variety used in the community. The director of the mosque school and his assistants were fluent English speakers with the former being a UK graduate and medical professional. Their interactions with students and teachers were almost always in English, the announcements made using the PA were always in English and the assembly that ended each day’s teaching was also in English. This linguistic complexity, despite the dominance of the national language, English, is increasingly a characteristic of urban spaces in cities in the UK and elsewhere. In the context of the mosque school, another language practice – the acquisition and performance of a sacred language – while adding to this complexity, also represents an element of continuity in a fluid linguistic situation. It is not too hard to imagine similar learning and language contexts in different climes and different eras. As a sacred text, the Qur’an has been taught to children wherever and whenever Muslims have ended up. The encounter between a fi xed sacred language and countless other languages has been a constant factor in the history of Islamic education. In the UK we have witnessed, in the space of two decades, the language used to mediate the learning of the Qur’an shift from the languages originally brought with the Muslim communities in the 1950s and 1960s to an almost universal use of English. The superdiverse context means there is no ‘neat’ shift from the community language to the majority language. Firstly, unlike in 2000, there is no one dominating community language in the life of the mosque school. In the past, there were always minority languages among the dominant Pahari-speaking community (Pashto, for example), but in today’s mosque schools there is no clear dominant variety. In Mosque School A, some students may be of Somali origin and may speak Maxa fluently or haltingly. Other students are of Yemeni background but were born in the UK and have only a vestigial spoken Arabic available to them, while others may be new arrivals and have Syrian or Iraqi parents. There are students of Pakistani heritage speaking only English and many other students only comfortable in English regardless of their ethnic and linguistic origins. For all of them, English is the dominant language and the one in which they have been educated. The mosque

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school director’s son may have been a hafiz, but he also had a string of high-grade GCSEs to his name. To an outsider, this mosque and its school might be considered in a similar way to those of 20 years ago. Even though its management, some of its teachers and many of the students are of Somali background, this is very different from the stable ethnolinguistic profile of mosque schools in the past. The complexity of the language practices and the shift to English represents a major social development which contrasts with dated and illinformed opinions about the linguistic isolation of these communities and their institutions. For example, the 2011 conclusion that foreign-born imams have a deleterious effect on communication in the mosque school (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a) suggests the survey on which their conclusions were based was limited or has at least changed dramatically in the short time since their data were collected Another accusation from a succession of politicians is that a failure to learn English among Muslim communities in the UK is a potential cause of so-called radicalisation. This will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 7. What Fishman calls ‘learning Yish through Xish’, which is his generic formula for describing how minority languages (Xish) may be learnt or maintained through a majority language (Yish), applies to an extent in these teaching contexts, but the linguistic complexity and fluidity of the mosque school leads to translanguaging practices rather than a simple mediation of one language by another. In many interactions, Classical Arabic is, in a sense, the minority language but its mediation can be through any combination of language resources. For example, in Mosque School A, UN, a Standard Somali and Maxa speaker, will instruct and monitor the learning of the Qur’an (decoding or memorisation) in English for all students. On occasion he will turn to Maxa if he considers this a suitable communication strategy for his student. His student may respond, if he responds at all, in English or in Maxa. One of the most linguistically able students and a hafiz estimated his knowledge of Somali to be ‘25%’ and only conversational. It is also very unlikely that the student will have a command of Standard Somali. Those turning to one language or another, strictly speaking, are turning to different language resources rather than presenting instances of more systematic code-switching. Mostly, only a word or phrase will be necessary and the dominant language for the learning is English. However, listening to such interactions is a complex affair. (1) Laa tufsidoon! No. Again, Laa tufsidoon. Again. (2) I say that, but you don’t listen. Al hamdu lillah rabi `alameen. Very good. Ma sha’ Allah. Perfect. (3) Fajaaha … fajaaaha. Read. You looking around you. You no read.

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(4) You was reading ‘ha’ not ‘he’. It’s different from one person to other. Halass. (5) Open your book and start reading now. In huwa … illa … minhum. You need more oxygen to breathe. (Extracts from field notes from 22 September 2015, Mosque School A and 19 March 2018, Mosque School C)

Much of the instruction in the extract above is in the form of imperatives and requests. The Classical Arabic (italicised) of the Qur’anic words and phrases is linked together by mainly English instruction with the occasional colloquial Arabic (in bold). The non-Standard English of one of the teachers (Extracts 3 and 4) is an extralinguistic consideration and, although not evident in these extracts, the variety of non-Standard English spoken by the students (a variety of northern English) adds to the linguistic complexity. Pedagogically, much of the teaching involves precise and regular modelling of correct pronunciation and recitation conventions. Thus, amid the gentle hum described above, the teachers will be heard regularly uttering single sounds, words, phrases and even whole verses as models for their students to listen to and repeat. Explanations of how to correctly make such utterances are often imprecise and subjective. (1) I notice how UN is emphasising the distinct ‘q’ sound, the voiceless uvular plosive so distinctive of the Arabic sound system. Again his ‘q’ booms out across the mosque. (2) In huwa … illa … minhum. You need more oxygen to breathe. (Extracts from field notes from 8 September 2015, Mosque School A and 19 March 2018, Mosque School C)

Certain physical movements and postures often accompany the acquisition and performance of liturgical literacy. Degrees of posture-related formality differ across the four mosque schools. In Mosque Schools C and D, there is a noticeably more formal approach to ‘being’ with the Qur’an. Above I described how the materiality of the sacred text could be differently emphasised depending on the orientation of the mosque school (broadly, highly reverential to the material text versus highly reverential to the recited text), although it needs repeating that a degree of reverence for the text in general is consistent across all four mosque schools. This reverence is sometimes accompanied by bodily posture in respect to the sacred text. Thus, in Mosque School C, students are explicitly reminded about how to sit in the mosque school and this can result in a curious contrast with mosque schools where such etiquette is not emphasised as much. In Mosque School C, boys are told to sit either cross-legged or in a kneeling posture in front of their floor desks which serve to hold the Qur’an. When necessary, the teacher will give permission for the boys to

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stand in order to rest their legs. In Mosque School A, which does not emphasise such a formal code for sitting and where boys adopt any number of postures while sitting, including stretching their legs out, being told to stand by the teacher is usually a reprimand in response to some inappropriate behaviour! Similarly, there is difference in the bodily movement of the students when reciting or memorising. In Mosque Schools C and D, which predominantly serve communities of Pakistani heritage, it is quite normal to observe students rocking their upper bodies back and forth while reciting. This seems to be a reaction to the rhythm of the recitation, and is a physical response that sometimes unconsciously transfers to other literacy contexts. Muslim students used to reading in such a way in their mosque schools will often adopt a similar rocking movement when reading in English in their mainstream school classrooms and libraries (Rosowsky, 2001). In Mosque Schools A and B, however, there is far less evidence of such bodily movement, with most students remaining reasonably still when reciting. Yet one more bodily response to learning in the mosque school can be the various strategies used by those memorising. It is not uncommon for students to have an often idiosyncratic means of helping concentration through use of the body. (1) The boy who is reading by heart has interesting body language and I begin to notice this as a strategy when memorising. He recites by heart while sitting in front of UN. He deliberately avoids eye contact with anything and anyone. His eyes seem to focus on nothing, perhaps a mid-point between him and the floor and wall. A lot of the time he has his right hand over his forehead almost concealing his eyes. I surmise that this is another strategy for maintaining concentration and reducing distraction. (2) The body language of those memorising is fascinating. Some close their eyes. Others either raise or lower their heads. Some sort of distracting activity seems to help with memorisation – fi dgeting, fi ddling with something or another (hands or other parts of the body). Some stare into space or upwards. Having the hands over the ears also seems to help concentration for some boys (particularly the advanced ones). (Extracts from field notes from 12 September 2015, Mosque School A)

Bauman (1975) links performance closely to rehearsal which has its own set of markers keying in the communicative act, and ‘trying to remember’ is a highly visible and physical characteristic of the potential performer. One of the most common ways in which the students and teachers keep track of their progress in the mosque school is by noting where they have reached in either their recitation of the sacred text or their

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memorisation. This lends the whole exercise a quantitative quality. Students will talk in numbers with both their teachers and with each other. (1) (2) (3) (4)

You’re going to be 301 tomorrow. Ustadh, can I read four pages today? Ustadh, are we meant to do seven? You did ‘W-al-’adiyati’ one to four. I think I said to do ‘W-al’adiyati’ one to six.

(Extracts from field notes from October 2015, Mosque School B)

In general, much greater formal monitoring happens in the mosque school today compared to that of previous eras. In all four mosque schools, there was a system in place to monitor student progress and to communicate with parents. In three of the mosque schools, this took the form of teachers making regular notes of where their students had reached and points for practice or improvement. This was, in the case of Mosque School A, transferred to a programme on the director’s computer which he used to carry out spot checks on students and to communicate with parents. In Mosque School B, all record keeping was online with the teacher keeping a laptop with him throughout the teaching session. Communication with parents was carried out via a shared Google document. Mosque School D had parents’ evenings and issued reports. Overall, there was a much greater sense of the educational purpose of each mosque school with careful aims and curriculum. The main reason for this, it appeared, was the quality of the teaching staff and, in some cases, the management of the mosque school. In all mosque schools, the teachers, with a few exceptions, were UK educated and graduates. Those who had been educated in the UK, usually in local schools, had also experienced the model of mosque school education available when they were young. Many of them were involved in mainstream education as either teachers, technicians or postgraduates. As a result of this experience, the teachers were much more able to relate to their students. In the 2008 study, one of the outcomes was the parental dissatisfaction with teachers recruited from overseas with little or no knowledge of English language and society. Today’s relatively younger teachers were nearer in age to their students and could relate to their lives with empathy and insight. Chapter 9 focuses in more detail on how a convergence in educational and linguistic experience between teachers and students can shape the nature and quality of the education provided in a mosque school. In Chapter 8 we see how in other devotional performance practices teachers and students participate together and form a community of practice outside the mosque school. Recent experience of mainstream schooling has equipped these teachers to introduce elements from outside the mosque school to their teaching which can enhance their students’ experience of acquiring liturgical

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literacy. In an earlier study (2006b), I reported on an isolated event where two older girls were asked to teach the younger ones in a mosque school in a neighbouring city. They proceeded to adapt many of the practices they were familiar with in their experience of mainstream schooling such as grouping, games and adopting a more personal tone with students which they associated with their own schooling. In the same era, however, another teacher, UK educated and proficient in English, was dismissed from a mosque school due to modest innovations he was bringing in. The time was, with hindsight, not quite ready for such an approach. In 2019, however, there is space for a degree of pedagogical innovation. However, it needs emphasising that all mosque schools in this study recognised the centrality of the Qur’an and any innovation would be aimed at enhancing this. We have already mentioned the new methods of monitoring student progress. Other strategies include further contextualising Qur’anic literacy. All four mosque schools attempt to provide some aspect of religious studies in their timetables. This, though, is still an aim that is patchily met. Mosque School D is probably the most active in this regard. Every one of its teaching sessions is partly devoted to Islamic studies and this takes the form of the teacher working with the students on aspects of the Prophet Muhammed’s life (the seerah) or an introduction to matters of worship (the fiqh) or explanations of the Qur’an (the tafseer). Other mosque schools devote one of their weekly sessions to this aspect of learning. In Mosque School A, learning about the faith comes via a whole school assembly at the end of each session carried out by the head teacher/ director. Needless to say, all these sessions are carried out exclusively in English (see Chapter 7). Teacher 1 at Mosque School C is in his early 30s and an IT technician in a local secondary school. Although of Pakistani heritage, his profi ciency in the community language is slight and his fi rst language is English. He always addresses the students in English and contextualises the Qur’anic learning through Q/A time at the beginning and end of the teaching session. When did you go back to school after Eid? Tuesday? Wednesday? Monday? Who gave a present? Who to? My grandma. My mum. Who went to Eid prayer? Who recited their prayers between now and Eid? Who remembered and recited their duas that they had memorised? When is the next parents’ evening? In the week off, how many of you recited the Qur’an? Once is ok but on holidays you could have produced more. So what should we do in the evenings to practise? (Extract from field notes from 13 October 2015, Mosque School C)

In this way, he places great emphasis for the children on the value of learning and reciting the Qur’an. This is all carried out in English, his first language and that of all the boys in his class. The consequences of

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intergenerational language shift are obvious in this example. There is also an intergenerational pedagogical shift, with more emphasis on rationale and context for the acquisition of the liturgical literacy. Teacher 1 introduces elements of mainstream pedagogical approaches and terminology by referring to his strategy of employing a ‘buddy’ system where beginners are paired with more experienced or confident learners. Teacher 1 curtails the ‘buddy’ segment of the session. This should lead to a quieter mood but some continue chatting. Again I have to be careful not to catch the eye of anyone. I notice one boy mentoring another and he notices me. I don’t want to make him feel self-conscious so refrain from watching. Age range of the boys must be from 6 to 10. Teacher 1 has the boys follow a sequence – buddying – individual Qur’an recitation – memorisation of duas. Some boys have a book called Namaaz Duas (‘supplications to use in prayer’). Sometimes boys chat but it is about their books and their recitations or sharing with each other what they are reading, what they have learnt, where they are up to. They also text each other. Pupils take the initiative and ask the teacher whether they can do this or not. I notice one boy articulating a sound to a younger boy. Tuning in to Teacher 1, I can hear his voice reminding a boy not to rush. The boy is ‘doing a hifz’ – being tested on his memorisation. The boy makes too many errors and is told to re-learn the passage until next time. By 6 o’clock, many boys are distracted and tired. Teacher 1 is with a beginner. His isolated sounds contrast with the rest of the class ‘Siin!’, ‘`ain’. The boy in front of me is learning ‘Al-Takathur’ (Chapter 102). In the adjoining class which I can also see one boy is writing and another is spelling. Older boys guide the younger ones in the routines ‘You have to go up to the Hajji!’, ‘You’re looking round and not practising’. (Extract from field notes from 1 September 2015, Mosque School C)

A fi nal contextual element to the language practices taking place in these contemporary mosque schools concerns dress code. In my field work 20 years ago, in Pakistani-heritage mosques, the children who attended wore, in the main, either Western garb or the shalwar kameez combination particular to South Asian cultures. Now, in all four of the mosque schools, things have changed noticeably. First of all, there is a greater sense that there is a ‘uniform’ for wearing at the mosque school and guidelines for this are usually provided to parents. This is also sometimes accompanied by mosque bags which are also now widely available (Figure 6.4). On the one hand, this reflects a convergence of practices between mainstream school and the mosque school, again highlighting the emphasis on liturgical literacy practices as being educational ones. On the other hand, the style of the uniform represents a cultural shift from the heritage backgrounds of many of the children to a more pan-Islamic type of apparel. The two Pakistani-heritage mosques (C and D) and Mosque School A11 require their students to wear an Arab-style djellaba or thobe and skullcap. This aligns the children with a more ‘authentic’ model that

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Figure 6.4 Typical mosque school bag

also foregrounds the Arabic language rather than local dress and heritage languages. In Mosque School D, the teachers model wearing Middle Eastern jubbas and Teacher 1 in Mosque School C is known for wearing a North African djellaba and a range of headgear from the tarboosh of Egypt to the Ottoman kula. These young teachers model language, behaviour and dress for their students who are being inducted into a model of the faith quite different from that of their parents and grandparents. Mosque School D, in particular, exemplifies this pattern the most, having been established by its young staff both as an alternative to the culturally inflected version of Islam available at their local mosques and as a platform for practising the faith inspired by their own (Sufi-oriented) teachers. The emphasis on English, the breadth of the study on offer and the modelling of behaviour (adab), without diminishing the centrality of liturgical literacy, is typical of many mosque schools of the current generation. Notes (1) Ibn al-Qayyim was a disciple of Ibn Taymiyyah who is sometimes considered the ‘fi fth’ imam of Islamic jurisprudence. They lived nearly 500 years after the traditional four imams. Their teachings were significantly revived by the Salafi movement which began in the later 19th century and are very influential today (Wagemakers, 2016). (2) The qa’idah is a short primer for learning how to decode the Classical Arabic of the Qur’an. It contains, in order, the Classical Arabic alphabet, syllables, half-words, words and fi nally short verses. Once completed, students proceed to the sacred text itself. (3) It is not unusual for a mosque school to make use of the communal prayer areas for its activities. In this sense, the mosque school is not necessarily instantiated in its own physical structure and, spatially, remains a fluid entity – although some mosque schools do have separate accommodation (for example, Mosque School D in this book). (4) The other main script used regularly in the contemporary Islamic world (but not featuring in this study) is the maghrebi script used in North Africa. It was also the script used in Muslim Spain before the Reconquista. (5) In much the same way as an earlier technology was used to protect the paper texts of children’s primers using transparent sheets obtained by boiling horn (see Tuer, 1897).

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(6) In this and in the three chapters that follow, comments on the physical environment may refer to the mosque school, but in those mosque schools that share their teaching space with the prayer hall the references may be to the mosque environment more generally. (7) Someone who has memorised the complete Qur’an – a book of over 600 pages. (8) Underlining the greater emphasis on the sacred text in these two mosques is the fact that this reading practice does not usually happen in the mosques associated with Mosque Schools C and D. (9) Of the five canonical daily prayers, Qur’anic recitation in two is silent and aloud in the other three. (10) This is sometimes known as ‘dhikr’, literally the remembrance of God, and is often made up of various litanies designed to remind the reciter of God – another important performance practice but one surrounded by some controversy and not practised by all Muslims. (11) Mosque B, perhaps because it serves a quite different catchment area – near to the university and west of the city – is the only mosque school where students can dress variously.

7 The Qur’anic Supplementary School in a Superdiverse Setting (Mosque School B)

This chapter situates the Qur’anic supplementary school – the mosque school – within the broader sector of supplementary education which has witnessed greater regulation (DfE, 2018; Evans & Gillan-Thomas, 2015; Nwulu, 2015) and academic attention (Creese et al., 2008) in recent years. The changing demographics of Muslim communities is presented as a key factor in the changing linguistic profile of the mosque school. This relates to the origins of the children attending, the educational and linguistic backgrounds of their teachers and the pedagogical styles and methods adopted. The feature of a regularly shifting multilingualism is in strong contrast to the more stable linguistic profile of UK mosque schools typical of the end of the 20th century. In a previous chapter we reviewed the recent centrist ‘think-tank’ research conducted by Cherti and Bradley (2011a, 2011b) and determined that their conclusions presented an incomplete picture of the linguistic profile in these schools at the present time. In fact, the linguistic aspects of these schools were almost entirely ignored. For most of this century there have been regular claims from politicians and others that mosque schools need monitoring. Although this is undoubtedly part of the general reining in of forms of education not matching the circumscribed defi nitions offered by the mainstream model of schooling (home schooling is another area that has come under scrutiny recently in the UK1), the drive to monitor mosque schools is pre-eminently part of the greater scrutiny under which the Muslim community in the UK has been placed in the early part of the 21st century. 2 The so-called Prevent 3 agenda currently prevailing in the UK often refers to mosques and their educational functions in unsupportive ways (MCB, 2016). Against such a charged backdrop, we need to remind ourselves that a principal characteristic of the social phenomenon known as superdiversity is its rapidity. The rapidly changing linguistic profile of UK mosque schools 109

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is one that policymakers and researchers have been slow to recognise. That politicians and others often see fit to conflate language use and social behaviour (Blunkett, 2006; Cameron, 2016; May, 2015) suggests that it is impossible to ignore what is happening linguistically in mosque schools. This chapter presents such a changing linguistic profile and explores what this means for the core activity of acquiring Qur’anic literacy and for the ever-increasing role of English in Qur’anic literacy pedagogy. In Chapter 1 we mentioned how major social and demographic changes as a result of intense patterns of migration in the early part of the 21st century have led to the concept of superdiversity being used to describe contexts which, in the past, may best be characterised as ‘old’ diversity and which featured relatively stable, compared to the present day, communities of speech and otherwise. The mosque school was a common institutional setting for ‘old’ diversity and the language profile of these schools has been described above (see pp. 79–84). Today’s mosque schools regularly find themselves at the heart of superdiverse wards and districts in UK cities and towns and reflect this in their pedagogical and language practices. These practices are not, though, completely at odds with those that came before and, to a large extent, today’s practices are ways of maintaining and shaping previous practices in the advent of greater complexity. However, what has significantly changed is the range of languages and national or ethnic origins of many of the young people who now attend the mosque school. Twenty years ago it could be safely assumed that the children attending a particular mosque school and its teachers were from one particular ethnic minority or another. This was the phenomenon of the ‘ethnic’ mosque. Today the situation has changed significantly for many mosque schools. On the other hand, superdiversity does not seem to result in the establishment of mosque schools designed to address this greater linguistic and ethnic variety (although see Chapter 9 for an attempt to create something new in this regard). New mosques still tend to be established on ethnic grounds. Some of this is down to the delayed effect of the growing affluence of different Muslim communities. The older established communities such as those from Mirpur have been able to generate the funding for new buildings. The once fairly standard practice of moving into old dilapidated churches and low-quality large houses has now given way to the building of purpose-built architecturally designed mosques, often aping custom back home in shape and appearance. However, all mosque schools, new and old, find themselves quickly having to adapt to the new superdiverse context. The only mosque school in the city which in my experience has had a longer period of dealing with linguistic diversity is the mosque school serving the area around the city’s university, where parents, usually postgraduate students, come from a wide range of different national and language backgrounds. Their position is a special one as, quite often, the duration in the city of many is short lived and children attend the mosque

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school for only a few years before returning home. In more recent times, however, even this congregation has had to adapt to the changing linguistic landscape created by university students who often cannot return home due to wars breaking out (in Iraq, Syria or Libya) while they were in the UK, and this has given rise to a much wider range of languages spoken by children and their parents in the mosque schools. Many of these parents eventually seek refugee status, and a growing community in the city are refugees with Muslim backgrounds. Blommaert’s (2010: 43) ‘bits and pieces’ designation of much multilingual practice in the context of superdiversity applies strongly when analysing the language practices in the mosque school. The deployment and manipulation of language resources rather than conventional proficiency in discrete languages or codes appear to be a more accurate description of much of the linguistic activity surrounding the regular acquisition of liturgical literacy. This ‘messy’ (Blommaert et al., 2012) patchwork of language behaviour is made up of a variety of linguistic elements, variously acquired and of varying proficiency, including student and teacher fi rst languages, second and subsequent acquired and learned languages, local and standard varieties, formal and informal registers, regional and social accents, oracy and literacy, different scripts, rules and conventions for pronunciation and recitation and, at its centre, a sacred language (in this case Classical, or Qur’anic, Arabic).4 Whereas the deployment of these language resources in the mosque school bears witness to the fluidity and mobility of the superdiverse moment, the presence of a ‘fixed’ language (one that is immutable and literally fixed, firstly as an artefact within the covers of each mushaf, 5 and secondly fixed in the clearly established and defined parameters of the recited text6) offers a vivid contrast. Otsuje and Pennycook (2010) have coined the term ‘metrolingualism’ to capture the combination of the fluid language practices of the present moment with the more stable and age-old practices such as those represented by liturgical literacy. And although ‘metro-’ is not necessarily a prefi x for all mosque school language practice, the linguistic diversity described in this book takes place predominantly in large urban contexts. What Otsuje and Pennycook show, however, is how, amid the often very visible and audible presence of fluid patterns of diverse language use, there are often other, older patterns that persist and indeed resist attrition. In the new superdiverse settings of these mosque schools, with their variety of languages and language resources, a persistent presence is the age-old practice of sacred language acquisition as well as those accompanying language practices in the place of worship itself that make use of the sacred language (for example, prayer, recital, books, calligraphic wall signs). As explained in an earlier chapter, although one particular mosque school provides most of the data for each of the four central chapters of this book (Chapters 6–9 which deal with the devotional practices of Muslim youth in a range of settings), any chapter can and does also refer

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to examples and data collected from any of the other mosque schools. This is done so that it is possible to identify what is unique in each setting and also what unites them as case studies of devotional performances in superdiverse settings. Each of the mosque schools appearing in this ethnography is unique and a site for particular language practices. However, it is perhaps useful to point out that, linguistically, Mosques C and D have the most in common, while Mosques A and B are different both from each other and from Mosques C and D. Mosque School A There is strong evidence here of local accents. The English spoken is largely common to the east side of the city which historically has been the more working-class area of the city and accents and dialect here reflect that richness now overlaid with the distinctive features of different ethnic English accents and dialects (ethnolects emerging from Somali, Yemeni and Punjabi speaking speech communities). The English, of whatever variety, is always Islam-oriented with a heavy use of Arabic terms which through transfer often lose some of their Arabic phonology when adapting to English, or especially when arriving in English via another language such as Punjabi or Urdu. ‘wuzu’, as in ‘have you got wuzu’,7 is an example of ‘Islamic’ English which derives from the PersianUrdu variation of the Arabic ‘wudhu’ via Punjabi into English. ‘namaaz’8 is an item of vocabulary arising in phrases such as ‘reading namaaz’ from the same derivation and now vying with ‘making salah’9 as a term in Islamic English. Whereas the former is a calque from those languages into English, the latter is a neologism in English as ‘salah’ is generally used as a verb by native Arabic speakers. ‘Saleet?’ (‘have you prayed?’) not ‘a3amalt as-salah?’ (‘have you done your prayer?’). These different sources for Islamic English terms are leading I believe to the emergence of distinct varieties of religious English. (Extract from field notes from 8 September 2015, Mosque School A)

Most of the English spoken by the students in the mosque school is easily identifiable as a variety of South Yorkshire English with the characteristic vowels of Yorkshire English (Trudgill, 1990) and other dialectal features.10 In studies of multilingualism, the particular variety of a majority language is sometimes ignored even though much multilingual practice takes place within locales where regional varieties prevail. This is particularly the case with majority languages but also impacts on our understanding of minority languages. These boys and girls encounter different registers and varieties in the mosque school, in their neighbourhoods and in their mainstream schools where Standard English is the much vaunted ‘holy grail’ of language teaching for students, teachers, parents and governments alike. Attitudes to local varieties can still be very negative and something to be left outside the school gates rather than brought into the classroom. The rather dated notion of Bernstein’s ‘restricted code’ is still encountered in school staffrooms and has been resurrected in different guises since Labov’s (1969)

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rebuttal in the 1960s. Brice-Heath’s (1983) identification of school-ready patterns of literacy reminds us of the social disadvantages of non-standard language practices. Cummins’ (2008) BICS and CALP distinction is more class neutral but still hints at a hierarchy of language skills between the oral and the written. Also in evidence in the mosque school are elements of the students’ ethnolects. Audible are distinctive features of the three main ethnolects in the city: the ethnolect associated with the Somali community (many of whom speak a southern Somali variety known as Maay); the city’s Arab-Asian ethnolect shared by youngsters from the old steel areas of the city; and in the latter there are traces of the ‘street-cred’ pseudo-Caribbean ethnolect common to many British cities and spoken by boys and girls regardless of their ethnic background (this variety was satirised by the Ali G TV character made famous by the British actor Sacha Baron Cohen). As products of their cultural environments in a wider sense, these students linguistically have more in common with local non-Muslim boys and girls than they have with Muslim children in Scottish or London mosque schools. The very young children who attend the mosque school (aged 5–6) are not so productive in their meaning-making but are certainly absorbing the linguistic environment that surrounds them. On occasion, despite the relatively disciplined and controlled atmosphere of the school, students can be heard revealing more of those linguistic repertoires that tie them to their local mainstream schools and neighbourhoods. And this is no surprise. The local variety is what ties them to their locale in terms of identity and solidarity. Determining the central language practice of contemporary mosque schools is not, therefore, straightforward. Obviously, Classical Arabic has a looming presence, echoed in the recitations of the students and, in particular, in the models of accurate recitation provided by the teachers. Its symbolic presence is huge. Regardless of the complexity of the language practices taking place around it, all who attend would concur with the centrality of the sacred text. Even when sacred text recitation is minimised due to other activities such as ‘Islamic studies’, there is no question that the students are there to acquire liturgical literacy, fi rst and foremost. Indeed, when this centrality is threatened there is usually a fast response. In at least two mosque schools in my earlier study, teachers were dismissed for wishing to introduce too much in the way of Islamic studies and thus decrease the attention paid to the acquisition of the sacred language. In the new mosque schools, despite the slightly increased presence of Islamic studies (something called for by many parents in my earlier study), the acquisition of liturgical literacy is still dominant. When talking to teachers and students, there is no doubt in their minds as to what they are there for. When asked for the main aims of the mosque school, he [Teacher 3 in Mosque A] replied ‘harakat, ahkam and tajweed’ which roughly translates as ‘letters of the alphabet, pronunciation rules/conventions and the art of recitation’. He told me that what the boys found the hardest were the ‘ahkam’.

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[Why do you come to the mosque school?] For the thawab (‘reward’). To identify as a Muslim. It’s important to come to learn and pass on the message to others who can’t come. I have memorised the complete Qur’an. I started at the age of six and completed it when I was sixteen. What I find difficult is in not understanding it. (Extracts from field notes from Friday 22 September 2015, Mosque School A)

As mentioned in Chapter 6, there are few if any wall displays in Mosque School A (and even fewer in Mosque School B), which limits the environmental presence of Classical Arabic. However, this central presence is evident in print in books too, where the majority of books are in Classical Arabic with very few in English in all four mosque schools. Back to the environment. There are three wooden bookcases. Two have mostly Arabic mushafs and other Arabic texts. I notice Kitab At-Tawheed by Muhammed Ibn Abdul Wahab which is a classic text of the Salafi school of Islam. The books are mostly leather/or leather-like bound volumes with calligraphic titles and authors’ names on spines and covers. Colours of covers are mainly red, green or black with gold lettering. The nearest English equivalents would be the sort of covers you get with a Folio edition of a classic text. The look of the books suggests authority, tradition and importance. One of the bookcases has a half row of books in English (on the bottom shelf). (Extract from field notes from Monday 8 September 2015, Mosque School A)

The physical presence of these books as important artefacts in the mosque school, many printed in a very stylised way suggesting excellence and heritage even when the materials, if closely inspected, do not match the superficial impression of quality, represents that fi xed and stable language heritage central to the mosque school which many commentators often fail to recognise (Cherti & Bradley, 2011b), mistakenly assuming that the mosque school is a place of indoctrination and unquestioning belief rather than a rich literacy environment. The literacy environment has been identified in other educational settings as having a key role in promoting a positive climate for reading. In mainstream primary schools, displays of authors and book covers as well as collections of books are always prominently displayed. Variously called ‘early literacy learning environments’ (Justice & Vukelich, 2007) or ‘literacy-rich environments’ (Prior & Gerard, 2004), walls are often covered in other ways, with key words, spelling lists and exhortations in colourful glossy lettering being regular features of primary school classrooms. These features are replicated in many mosque schools, with a much more common use of the English language than in a previous era (Figure 7.1). Apart from these material artefacts, equally significant is the aural environment of the mosque school. Prayers, when performed audibly,

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Figure 7.1 Children’s work displayed on wall of Mosque School C Source: Author photo.

always remind listeners of the primacy of Classical Arabic – with, in this mosque, more virtuoso performance in recitations (as explained in the previous chapter, prayer recitations tend to be much longer in the mosques associated with Mosque Schools A and B). As many of the congregation and their children are from Arabicspeaking backgrounds, adults will converse in several varieties of spoken Arabic before and after prayers, at times drawing on their mutual familiarity with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) to make themselves understood. A Moroccan speaking his natural Arabic variety and an Iraqi his, with little linguistic accommodation, would find it hard to understand one another. MSA acts a buffer through which they can accommodate each other’s variety. Children, by contrast, remain English speaking even with their parents and one often overhears between them the not uncommon asymmetric (non-reciprocal) bilingual conversations. The head teacher makes all his announcements in Standard English and converses with the boys and the teachers in English (although sometimes he uses Maay Somali when speaking to a Somali boy or teacher). He generally speaks Standard English with a slight Yorkshire accent. The Arab teachers converse with each other in a combination of Arabic and English in the mosque school although I notice they speak Arabic in the prayer hall. There is, therefore, a societal linguistic repertoire of the mosque school as well as the respective repertoires of the individuals within it. With English as the main mode of communication in the mosque school, other elements of language use can be understood as the multivariate linguistic resources at play within this setting. These mosque schools now present a linguistic landscape whose features demand a different analysis from that of previous eras. If we take as

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an example a very recent development, the increase in numbers of Somali and Arab mosque schools (particularly outside London), we observe a variety of sociolinguistic patterns in novel and original configurations. First of all, there is the question of ‘English’. These mosque schools, like many others, are located in urban areas of significant socioeconomic deprivation and thus the boys and girls live and attend schools where particular urban dialects prevail. However, changing migration patterns also contribute to this complex picture. The main Somali community of the mosque school has its linguistic origins in the north of Somalia in what was once Somaliland, which was English influenced. Recent arrivals from the same country of Somalia have a language variety associated with the southern and central part of Somalia which historically had colonial ties to Italy. These two dialects (Maay and Maaxa, respectively) are often mutually unintelligible (Abdullahi, 2018). The linguistic picture then is one of ‘entanglement’ rather than one of ‘flow’. Some children will have some knowledge of one or other of these varieties, their English will be the local dialect plus the Standard English encountered in mainstream schools and elsewhere, and their knowledge of Arabic will be a specialised one involving the cracking of the code of the Arabic alphabet and adding knowledge of the diacritics which are a feature of the Arabic writing system in certain, particularly religious, contexts. They will also become quite familiar with the phonological system of the Arabic language and learn the phonetic features that distinguish one phoneme from another. For example, they will come to know implicitly that in Arabic there are binary dental plosive pairs (/t/‫ ت‬and /d/‫ )د‬which are distinguished by pharyngealisation (‫ ط‬and ‫ )ض‬and that there is no phonemic distinction between /p/ and /b/ (Watson, 2002). They will become familiar with word collocations, particularly as the Qur’anic text has many poetic elements that result in constant epithets, repetition and regular rhyme (Nelson, 1985). This is an extremely specialised domain of language usage but one that is, on the one hand, neither marginalised among other linguistic resources within the children’s repertoires nor, on the other, developed further. Only a very few graduates of mosque schools go on to become users of Arabic for communicative purposes and any such knowledge would have to be attained outside the mosque school setting. The process of entextualisation (see Chapter 4) is therefore quite complex. The role of English now as a lingua franca and medium of instruction results in the text of the Qur’an being scaffolded through guidance and prompts in English. There is no space here to dwell on the implications of translation within liturgical literacy practices but one related example is perhaps illustrative. The use of Roman transliteration (see Figure 7.2) can mean that at an early stage in acquisition in the mosque school entextualisation is materially different from previously observed practice in similar settings. Direct acquisition of the Arabic script is now regularly mediated through transliteration and guidance in the English language.

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Figure 7.2 Page from a Qa’idah with Roman transliteration and English explanation

In my earlier work, such innovation had a mixed response from teachers, some of whom felt it was at best unhelpful in ‘cracking the code’ and at worst verging on the sacrilegious. A degree of acceptance of such practice is now quite evident in teaching materials, even for teaching the initial alphabet. Mosque School B is perhaps the most linguistically diverse mosque school in the city. Located within walking distance of the main university and three of the main hospitals, it has had a historical association with international students for nearly 50 years. It currently offers a daily evening class for children as well as a weekend class. As a result of its association with international students (mainly from the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East but including some Turks, West Africans, Kurds and Iranians), its ‘speech community’ is more complex to defi ne. The area in which it is situated has not historically been very diverse, with many residents being either transient students or middle-class professionals. An area to the south of the mosque has a significant population of Somali families but few have attended the mosque school. Typically, students at the mosque school have been children of current and former postgraduate students, children of members of staff at either the university or hospital, or children from families who have decided to live in the area.

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Recently, however, there has been evidence of more settled patterns of residence. More postgraduate students, particularly those from countries experiencing war and civil unrest, have decided to stay in the city and raise their families. Unlike the other three mosque schools, there is no dominant ethnicity or language in Mosque School B. Turkish, Kurdish, Libyan, Iraqi, Syrian, Nigerian, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani are among the represented national origins of children currently attending the mosque school. With no other dominant language, English is the inevitable lingua franca. In the mosque itself, spoken Arabic is heard a great deal as it is still considered by many to be an Arabic-oriented mosque due to its association over the years with Arabic-speaking students. Good ‘hum’ established at 5.30. Some students are silent though. One woman comes to the door and speaks Arabic with Teacher 4 and they discuss a list. Two varieties are used, Saudi Arabian and Egyptian, with some use of English towards the end. In the pedagogical interactions between Teacher 4 and his students everything is in English apart from the language of recitation. Teachers address the students at all times in English. All instructional and transactional talk takes place in English. Even when Teacher 4 speaks in Arabic to an Arabic-speaking student he often transitions into English. Comments like ‘Who doesn’t have their green reading card?’ from Teacher 5 could come straight out of the mainstream school classroom. (Extract from field notes from Wednesday 21 March 2018, Mosque School B)

The language practices at Mosque School B, therefore, can easily be categorised as translingual (Canagarajah, 2013; Jorgensen & Muller, 2014). The two main languages, Classical Arabic (in its liturgical form) and English dominate the aural space. All instructional and transactional talk happens in English. The two teachers are postgraduate students at two local universities and have good proficiency in English. One is fi rstlanguage Arabic speaking and brings that knowledge to his teaching of the liturgical variety. The other is a fi rst-language Yoruba speaker and knows the sacred language but not spoken Arabic. Despite this difference, both attempt to foreground meaning when teaching. This is usually only on a lexical level, with regularly occurring words being emphasised. T: S: T: S: T:

What is ‘yad’? Hand? Yes, ‘hand’. What is ‘Al-`Ard’? Land? Earth. Yes, Earth.

(Extract from field notes from 21 March 2018, Mosque School B)

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The greater emphasis on meaning nowadays is a characteristic of all four mosque schools but manifests itself in different ways, often dependent on each setting’s language practices. Where there is more familiarity with the Arabic language as in Mosque Schools A and B, the teachers seek meaning in the sacred text itself by quizzing the students on lexical items. One of the teachers in Mosque School B has designed online tests and quizzes that consolidate the students’ recognition and retention of key lexical items in Arabic and in English. The head teacher in Mosque School A uses the end of school assembly each day to focus on the meaning of certain verses the students should be familiar with. In the end, the ‘Islamic Studies’ lesson evolves into the assembly which takes place in the large room to the rear of the prayer room proper. Some partition screens are in place so that the girls and boys can sit together and listen to the head teacher who sits on a sofa in a position where he can address both sides of the madrassah population. He talks to them about the short chapter at the end of the Qur’an called ‘Tabat yadah’. He addresses the boys and girls as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ and speaks in Standard English with Arabic terminology when necessary. … He also asks questions on another short chapter (he uses the Arabic term ‘surah’ though), Ikhlas (‘sincerity’). Some of the English words he uses, ‘attributes’, ‘clarify’ are from a high register which some of the younger boys might miss although answers to his questions suggest some boys are quite happy with words such as ‘attributes’. (Extract from field notes from 8 September 2015, Mosque School A)11

In the other two mosque schools, where Arabic is not one of the congregation’s spoken languages, meaning-making tends to come through contextualisation. Thus it is no surprise that in Mosque School C one fi nds (a) the most use made of texts in English explaining certain aspects of Islamic knowledge and (b) regular time devoted to discussion and questions about Islamic history, Islamic personalities and the meaning of rituals. Likewise, in Mosque School D, each session begins and ends with a discussion about aspects of Islamic knowledge. These two main approaches to making liturgical literacy practice more meaningful for the students is a clear development from the practices of 20 years ago and suggests a response to much of the parental criticism of that time. The different linguistic circumstances of the four mosque schools mean these approaches take a different form in each context but they all share in the same common purpose. However, this again stresses the notion that meaning-making in liturgical literacy settings is something other than or extra to the conventional referential meaning of the sacred text itself. This touches on a much broader point which is that the act of reading, in whatever context, does not operate in a meaning vacuum. If referential meaning is absent, then something else always moves in to provide the meaning for the reader. In Mosque Schools A and B this may be articulated as a

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reading ‘reward’ or ‘because this is part of my identity as a Muslim’ and be assisted with lexical consolidation. In Mosque Schools C and D, meaning comes more through an understanding of the religion more broadly and recognising the Qur’an’s centrality within it. It is important to note, however, that these are not hard and fast distinctions between the four mosque schools but are representative rather of different emphases. Children at all four mosque schools will understand the acquisition of liturgical literacy as ‘part of my identity’ and recognise the centrality of the Qur’an in their developing understanding of their faith. But what of that central language practice around which all this other activity rests? In Mosque School B, boys and girls attend three times a week for around two hours. This is already a difference from the more regular attendance expected 20 years ago (this was usually five days a week) and perhaps signals a recognition within the community and the mosque school administration that mainstream school work needs attention as well. It may also, however, be a consequence of a shortage of qualified Qur’an teachers. Only the imams in Mosque Schools A and C are employed full time. The other teachers are part time and some are volunteers only. This casualisation of the teaching staff in all four mosque schools leads to a constant turnover of teachers, as there are other demands on their time. This is also a feature of other supplementary schools which often can only survive because of the goodwill of volunteers (Minty et al., 2008). Nevertheless, each mosque school has a clear set of aims and purposes which its staff sign up to. Islamic Studies:– All children are given the opportunity to study Basic Islamic Studies to teach them the important principles of Islam according to what our beloved prophet Muhammad (may the peace and salutations of Allaah be upon him) taught his ummah. Quran:– The Quran is taught in various levels to meet the required needs of different age groups both Hifz and reading from the Kitab. To educate the children the correct method of reading and reciting the Quran this includes tafseer of memorised chapters. Arabic:– In this class the children study Madinah Arabic book to equip them with the basic understanding and foundations of the Arabic language. This will help the children truly understand the Quran and Sunnah without needing the help of translation. (Example of aims – taken from website of Mosque School A)

A typical evening in Mosque School B would begin at 5pm with the arrival of the students. The younger children would enter through the main entrance but fi lter to one room, while the 20 boys (aged between 10 and 14 years) I spent time with would occupy the space of the main prayer

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hall. They were divided between two teachers, one from the Gulf and the other from West Africa, both postgraduate doctoral students at local universities. One class was consolidating their current memorisation targets – all of which came from various points in the fi nal juz’ (one-thirtieth) of the Qur’an. This amounts to 23 pages and 37 chapters (surahs), gradually decreasing in length from the longest at around 40 verses to the shortest at three verses. It is customary in most mosque schools for memorisation (hifz; Gent, 2011) to begin with this last juz’ and to start with the shortest surahs and work backwards through the juz’ to the longer ones. This is individual activity and each boy would work alone on his targeted section. In turn, as in Mosque School A, each boy during the course of the sessions would have a ‘lesson’ and recite by heart to the teacher who would offer correction and encouragement. Unlike in Mosque School A, in this mosque school the teacher followed the text closely in their own copy of the Qur’an (this was also the case in Mosque Schools C and D and is perhaps testament to the memorisation skills of UN in Mosque School A). As in Mosque School A, all interactions, whether between teacher and students or between students, take place in English. On the odd occasion where the teacher shares a different fi rst language with one of the boys (this happens sometimes in Arabic), there is usually a brief instance of code-switching but it is infrequent. English, as either the lingua franca (for some) or the first language (for others), dominates proceedings. I described in the previous chapter how the emphasis upon Classical Arabic (contrasting with the emphasis of, for want of a better word, ‘knowledge’ in the other two mosque schools) paradoxically led to a more casual etiquette when handling the sacred text as artefact. In Mosque School B, too, there was no overt sensitivity in evidence regarding the sacred status of the book. Boys were not instructed to sit in any particular way when reading; neither was there any attention paid to how the book was being handled. Obviously, nobody was throwing books around and I saw no copies of the Qur’an on the floor, but there was a more relaxed approach to the text as artefact. I will write more about the text as artefact in the next chapter where the approach is different. Here, however, it was the recitation that was revered most of all. It was also in Mosque School B that digital technology was most in evidence. Although some of the congregation in Mosque School A were using their smartphones to assist memorisation, there was no active use of technology involved in the pedagogical practices employed by the teachers. The head teacher was using his computer to record attendance and monitor progress and this was shared with the teachers but this never transferred into active use of technology in the teaching of the Qur’an.12 In Mosque School B, the main teacher from the Gulf made use of language game/test software to support his students in their acquisition of liturgical literacy. This was mainly used at home by his students and their parents but there were plans to install a data projector in the main prayer hall so

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that he could use it to work with a whole class. The teacher shared with me online exercises that tested word-level understanding. This was telling because, in many ultralingual settings, the main recourse to referential meaning, if it takes place at all, is through single lexical items, mainly nouns.13 The online exercises merely emphasise the limitations inherent in understanding the sacred text by those who have no access to its referential meaning in a propositional way. For this to happen, strings of words with semantic meaning would have to be used in the exercise and this would have been difficult if not impossible for the boys beyond a ‘phrase book’ approach to language learning. Nevertheless, such technological development would have been unheard of 20 years ago, and here and there in the mosque schools sector the adoption of interactive online and electronic resources is becoming more common. Any perusal of these materials also underlines the shift to English that has taken place in mosque school teaching materials. All explanatory and instructional text for such materials is in English. The only one of the four mosque schools where a teaching resource retained a language other than English in its teaching resources was Mosque School A, where the main primer used was an Arabic language publication with all text in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Published in Egypt in 2013 and authored by Mostafa al-Gindy, the book seems to be a throwback to the type of materials used 20 years ago with no concession to a non-MSA reader. The sequence of letters, syllables, words and strings is constant (it is known as the ‘Qa’idah Baghdadiyah’ – the most commonly published learning sequence for acquiring Qur’anic literacy), but all instructional and explanatory text is in MSA. It is likely that the teachers in Mosque School A would be able to access this text but the children would not. Notes (1) In the United States a relatively contrasting feeling around home schooling prevails, with significant support coming from politicians and the media for home schooling – this is often associated with the religious right (Apple, 2011). (2) Perhaps falling into this wider net of scrutiny of religious supplementary schools has been the recent attention paid to some Jewish schools in the UK located in Haredi areas of its larger cities (the yeshivas), particularly in London and Manchester (Abrams, 2015). Here too, though, there is an interesting contribution to linguistic superdiversity with some of the last bastions of Yiddish in the UK still being spoken in these schools – unlike Reform and Liberal Jews in the UK who shifted to English many years ago. (3) Prevent Strategy, HM Government, 2011. Announced in February 2007 by Ruth Kelly, the then Secretary for Communities and Local Government, Prevent’s conscious aim was to develop a ‘British version of Islam’ (DCLG, 2007: 11) and £5 million was earmarked to be spent training foreign-born imams and inducing a ‘step-change in the role of madrasahs in teaching about citizenship’ (DCLG, 2007: 11). (4) Not to mention the explosion in digital literacies that not only pervade young people’s lives but that are also now being extensively deployed in faith contexts (see Campbell, 2013, for a stocktake of the current situation in this area).

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(5) The Arabic word for a printed (earlier, written) copy of the Qur’an – literally, ‘collection of pages’. (6) as-Said (1975) The Recited Quran. (7) Literally, ‘Are you in a state of ritual ablution?’, and thus able to read the Qur’an and pray, among other things. (8) Prayer. Persian subsequently into Urdu and Punjabi. (9) Prayer. Arabic. (10) These include the use of characteristic second person pronouns such as ‘tha’ /ða:/ and ‘thee’ /ði:/ and the diphthong /ei/ for the Standard English /ai/ as in ‘reyt good’ for ‘right good’ which is itself a more widespread dialectal phrase with ‘right’ being used as an adverb. (11) One opportunity often missed or ignored is the potential to make links between practice in the mosque school and the children’s mainstream schools. The policy literature (Cherti & Bradley, 2011b) often suggests the potential for mosque schools to support mainstream learning by providing space and time for activities such as GCSE revision. However, there is little suggestion that mosque schools might complement mainstream schools by building skills such as memorisation, reading stamina and vocabulary (‘attributes’). An exception is the advocacy of Berglund and Gent in their work on mosque schools in the UK and in Sweden (Berglund & Gent, 2018: Gent, 2016) (12) There is, however, available a substantial and growing collection of electronic resources (CDs, websites, downloads) aimed at individuals working alone or for parents working with their children. quran4Kids.co.uk is one such source, which is also now being adopted in many mosque schools. (13) Baker (1993), in his work on Qur’anic literacy practices in Indonesia, points out the importance of nouns, in his case proper nouns, in providing a sense of ‘apprehending’ rather than ‘comprehending’ meaning: ‘I can attest from listening to recitations that proper names flash out as recognizable entities in a stream of pleasingly lyrical but uncomprehended utterances’ (Baker, 1993: 110). Such is the experience, I would suggest, of many in ultralingual performances.

8 ‘Naat and Nasheed’: The Performance of Devotional Songs and Poetry (Mosque School C)

This chapter focuses on the second important genre of ultralingual devotional performance engaged in by young British Muslims in this book. The combination of language (or variety) and poetic and musical genre is explored in detail with examples. The language practices around performance are also considered, with attention paid to the interplay and deployment of language resources as the young people perform at varying stages of proficiency. The variety of language-genre combinations are presented as evidence of their superdiverse linguistic repertoires. The concept of ultralingual performance is further developed. Mosque School C, like the other three mosque schools in this book, considers its primary purpose to be the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy and the teaching of a basic grounding in Islamic belief and practice. Unlike Mosque Schools A and B, however, many of the young people attending, both as teachers and as students, regularly experience the performance of devotional poetry and song as an important element in the development of their religious practice and identities. For example, the choir in Vignette 3 in Chapter 2 all attend this mosque school. This is not to say that students in the other three mosque schools do not participate in devotional song and poetry. It merely means that this is an explicit element in Mosque School C. At the same time, it is important to point out that most participation in devotional song and poetry takes place outside the confi nes of the mosque school and these practices constitute the fi fth setting for fieldwork as described in Chapter 3. If we turn the clock back 20 years, devotional performance of poetry was not unusual in the mosque with which Mosque School C is associated. However, at that time performance was influenced to a degree by similar practices ‘back home’ and mainly consisted of performances carried out almost exclusively in Urdu and sometimes in H-Punjabi1 along with 124

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Qur’anic recitation in Classical Arabic. Guest performers, usually from overseas, might also include the occasional Farsi performance.2 The events where these performances occurred were also aimed predominantly at the older members of the congregation, representative of the first two generations. Moreover, such events happened relatively infrequently and coincided with a small number of annual events in the Islamic calendar such as the Mawlid and the Miraaj. 3 They certainly did not occur with the frequency of the monthly mawlids described in Vignette 5 in Chapter 2. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest there was not a significant degree of interest and enthusiasm for these performances shown by their target audience at that time. Indeed, an appreciation of the Urdu naat4 has always been a central feature of the community’s cultural and religious practices. Even 30 years ago, there were local radio programmes in the city featuring such performances. This particular religio-cultural tradition has also been transmitted to the next generation where there are young performers of the Urdu naat, some of whom perform at the monthly mawlids of Vignette 5 and at informal gatherings such as in Vignette 2. One important difference as a language practice, however, is the now large number of younger people showing an active interest in these devotional poems and songs by taking time and effort to identify, learn and perform them. This has important linguistic significance (Figure 8.1). As elsewhere, with the shift of pedagogical language from community languages to English, the language of instruction in Mosque School C, in common with other mosque schools, is now English. However, in Mosque School C, the use of English now extends to more than just the way Qur’anic literacy acquisition is mediated. The young teachers (in their early 30s) and their students (aged 6–14) have begun to turn to other languages for their devotional performances of poetry and song. In the

Figure 8.1 The Muslim boys choir of Mosque School C Source: Author photo.

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following conversation, we hear how some of the boys understand the repertoire they performed at the university event described in Vignette 3: Which of the three poems do you like the most? Which languages do you like singing the best?5 Arabic. Or the English. Why is that then? Easier to learn. Normally we listen to the Arabic and Urdu nasheed but never the English so it was exciting to learn. Do you know of any other English ones? No. I only know Arabic ones. Probably Harris J or something. Harris J is a naat reader. And Aa’shiq-al-Rasul also, they have English nasheed. Harris J is from London. When do you listen to him then? Just generally. Do you have him on your phone? Yes. If we’re bored and have nothing to do, we listen. [Harris then gets his phone out and shows me the YouTube links to Harris J.] How many nasheeds do you have on your phone? Don’t know. [no longer downloading onto devices but using 4G to access the internet directly] I listen to this one a lot. [showing me a YouTube video of Harris J] Have you got nasheed on your phone? [to another boy] Yeah. Which ones? I listen to Arabic nasheeds. Yes, English, Arabic, Urdu ones but I try to find English ones. So he’s quite a young person? [referring to Harris J] No, he’s 20. He looks young. He sings an Urdu one called Eid Mubarak. So he’s from a Pakistani background? No. He’s Malaysian. [I later fi nd out he’s a Londoner of Indian and Irish parentage] He’s Malaysian but he sings in Urdu. And in English, mostly in English. So you said you like English, you like Arabic and Urdu is third? Why is Urdu third? Because when we were reciting it was, like, practising it, it was hard because most of us didn’t know the words … Only one person really knew it. But you wouldn’t know the Arabic words either, would you? We already knew them. Because every Friday we used to recite it. Do you know of any other Arabic nasheeds then? Yeah. Ya Imamu Rusuli. Qamaru. Inna fil jannati. 6 Do you know the words to these? Yes, or maybe just the chorus.

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In their lengthy discussion, there is a complex picture of artists, poems or songs, lyrics and languages. The boys are asked about their preferences regarding performance languages and express their fondness for the Classical Arabic and then English songs. On the one hand, they fi nd the Classical Arabic songs easier to learn. Later, they say that this is because they recite them every Friday in the mosque school. On the other hand, for these boys, the prestige language of their heritage community and of their grandparents, Urdu, is less popular than Classical Arabic and English. The opportunity to perform English songs appears to have had an immediacy that they found exciting – ‘but never the English so it was exciting to learn’ – but the Urdu was ‘hard’ and ‘most of us didn’t know the words’. The Classical Arabic words, though, were more familiar. In this particular mosque school, the boys were introduced to Classical Arabic poetry and songs through their teachers and their parents. Some of these latter were individuals who had made the Arabic ‘turn’ (see Chapter 2, p. 29), and thus some of the boys had at least as much familiarity with Classical Arabic poetry as with Urdu. This turn is not just a linguistic one and is usually closely associated with a doctrinal repositioning. Many of the teachers in this mosque school, and to an extent in Mosque School D, have aligned themselves with the Sufi tradition in Islam which encourages devotional performance using song and poetry and which has been the wellspring for the vast canon of poetry that exists in the Islamic heritage. The gatherings described in the vignettes of Chapter 2 are typical of the practices carried out by adherents of Sufi paths. ‘Knowing the words’ here, however, constitutes knowing how to decode or memorise the sounds of the words rather than anything related to referential meaning. The boys are comparing their proficiency in memorising, in one language or another, and how to articulate in an artful manner the words of the poems and songs they recite. In the main, this is ultralingual performance. There is, however, here and there, the occasional expression of interest in English language devotional songs (‘but I try to fi nd English ones’). Before proceeding further in this chapter, it is useful to dwell a little on the defi nition of some competing terms related to devotional performance in the sense outlined here. Historically, the matter of ‘music’ (and by extension, ‘song’) in Islam has been, and remains, a controversial issue, with a wide spectrum of opinion on its admissibility in devotional contexts ranging from outright interdiction through a cautious and circumscribed inclusion to a full embrace of music in almost all of its traditional and contemporary formats. Morris (2019), in his review of what he calls the UK Muslim ‘soundscape’, describes Muslim music in the UK as ‘crisscrossed with diverse forms of music and performance’ and ‘inflected with global, diasporic and transnational sounds’. In respect of the term ‘music’, Morris, drawing on Faruqi and Faruqi’s (1986) typology, usefully elaborates the Arabic term handasah al sawt (lit. the ‘art of sound’). This is a

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much broader concept of artful sound than normally understood, with the more conventional, in a Western sense, defi nition of music only featuring as one possible category within a range in a broad typology (Faruqi & Faruqi, 1986: 457–459). This approach has similar resonance to the musiclanguage discussion in Chapter 4 (see pp. 53–54), where Faudree (2012) argues that music and language are socially constructed and how it might be preferable to view both (and other symbolic systems) as part of a ‘total semiotic field’ into which both music and language can collapse. In Islam, the supreme form of the art of sound comes in recitation or cantillation of the Qur’an, and in Faruqi and Faruqi’s (1986) typology of artful sound it unsurprisingly comes out on top. The next two categories are ‘religious chants and poetry’, into which most forms of devotional song and poetry fall. What I am calling ‘poetry’ in this book are forms of verse variously known as naat (Urdu and Persian), ghazel (originally Arabic but mainly Persian, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi) and qasidah (Arabic). Among participants, these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, with naat being a commonly heard catch-all term. For ‘song’, the Arabic word nasheed is mainly used and can include within its defi nition a much wider range of performance genres ranging from quite traditional Arabic folk-like songs to modern Western-inflected pop songs. Like naat, the term nasheed can also be heard as a catch-all term for all forms of devotional poetry and song. Despite the overt similarities between the sound of lyrics and poems being performed and what, in different circumstances, many would consider as ‘music’ or ‘song’, the terms ‘song’ and ‘music’ are rarely used in conversations with both teachers and students. As the boys often say, ‘poetry’ and ‘singing’ are things that are done in their mainstream schools and what they are interested in is ‘reading’ naats and nasheeds. The use of the word ‘reading’ in this context is an extension of the principal language practice of the mosque school, and by extension their religious practices more generally. Whenever these young Muslims speak of either reciting the Qur’an, or making the call to prayer (the adhan) or are referring to their naats and nasheeds, they almost always use the terms ‘read’, ‘recite’ or ‘perform’. The verb ‘sing’ is very rarely heard. ‘Read’ and ‘recite’ very clearly tie the performances to a written source, even if the text has been exclusively memorised from an audio source. This relationship runs through much Islamic practice. On the one hand, the sacred source at the heart of the faith, the Qur’an, is experienced as a written text, with letters, words, lines and pages, and it refers to itself reflexively on many occasions in the body of the text as the ‘The Book’ (al-kitab). However, it also refers to itself as the ‘The Recited’ (al-qur’an). This ambivalence between a written text and an oral recitation has resulted in much faith practice being characterised as a text-based orality where devotional performance is experienced orally, through either the recitation aloud from a decoding of the text or the memorisation of a text

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(which may or may not be the result of an initial decoding). The ‘book’ is central but the ‘sound’ is dominant. In terms of Faruqi and Faruqi’s typology, the categories below ‘cantillation, chanting and poetry’ approach the more conventional concept of music as understood in the West with a folkloric category bridging these two main areas. The higher categories inevitably have close association with a sacred text. Cantillation has the Qur’an itself, ‘Religious Chants’ include the call to prayer (the adhan) and the various litanies made up of Qur’anic and Prophetic texts, and poetry (shi’ir) is almost always centred on written verse. The boys at Mosque School C, therefore, tend to prefer to say ‘read’ or ‘recite’ when referring to their performances and, in doing so, are thus (a) cementing the link that exists between devotional performance and sacred text, (b) demonstrating the complex relationship between literacy and orality in Islamic devotional practices and (c) maintaining the Islamic distinction between artful sound and ‘music’. Alongside their devotional performances either in Classical Arabic or in their heritage languages such as Urdu, there has been a turn to English in respect of devotional performance, and the boys from Mosque School C spoke at length about artists they had found online who recited in English. One of the artists mentioned was Harris J, a young Londoner with a growing fan base and particularly strong online profi le (see Figure 8.2 and the Online Resources section at end of the References at the back of this book). Harris J, although associated by the boys with devotional performance, comes closer in musical terms to some of the genres in UK Muslim music described by Morris (2019). This is a relatively new genre

Figure 8.2 Harris J’s YouTube channel Source: Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnxYiaHRPFY

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of popular devotional music (and ‘music’ is probably the more appropriate term here) which adopts Western styles and forms. Morris explains in detail how Muslim music has developed a number of different forms and positions in what he calls the ‘Muslim soundscape’. These range from explicitly devotional performance which preserves the language heritage of the community by faithful imitation (the subject of most of this book), through songs that adopt some Western elements, all the way to ostensibly recognisable popular music genres either with an Islamic theme or with only a generally spiritual or moral theme – a genre sometimes deemed ‘spiritique’ (Sami Yusuf, cited in Morris, 2019: 223). Interestingly, the boys call Harris J a ‘naat reader’, even though his songs are as far away from traditional naat as is possible and their grandparents would certainly not recognise this term in association with Harris J, although, as the boys claim, he does also read in Urdu.7 For these boys, many of the terms are interchangeable – naat, nasheed, qasidah – and are often lumped together under the term ‘nasheed’. The use of English for Islamic devotional performance takes on a range of forms at the moment and it would be safe to claim that English is gradually establishing itself as a linguistic vehicle for such practice. One of the UK’s most prominent English converts to Islam, Abdul Hakim Murad (aka Timothy Winter), founder and Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, has adapted old English and Irish folk songs using lyrics with Islamic themes and also compiled original Islamic songs composed in a similar manner for use with young people (Murad, 2005). These include sea shanties and songs composed by Abdullah Quilliam8 from the 19th century and other pieces with tunes going back to the 17th century. Although many of these compositions are lyrical songs with either Islamic or more general spiritual themes, some incorporate litanies that move them into the higher categories on the Faruqi scale of artful sound for religious purposes (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 A page from a British Muslim song edited by Abdul Hakim Murad (2005)

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The inclusion here of the Arabic words ‘la ilaha il Allah’ (‘there is only one God’), the first part of the Muslim shahadah (or credo), adds a degree of sanctity to the more prosaic English lyrics. Fishman’s fi fth principle in his Decalogue for a Sociology of Language and Religion (2006) states how an important aspect in the relationship between language and religion is how hitherto secular registers of a language can become co-sanctified when used regularly in certain faith-oriented domains and for religious functions. The best example of co-sanctification in the English language is probably the King James Bible (Holy Bible KJV, 2011 [1611]), whose language has taken on a sacred flavour that has spread to other contexts such as prayers, homilies, prayers and hymns in the Christian context. This co-sanctified register of the English language is so pervasive that translations of important religious texts from other faiths have regularly made use of it in order to communicate their sacred nature. Obviously, it needs stressing that much of this tradition stems from the hegemony of the English language which dominated most of the Eastern world in the past and of which the linguistic legacy remains today. The early 17th century standard use of second person singular pronouns and verbal forms (for example, ‘Thou art’) is found in numerous translations of the Qur’an, the Torah, the Guru Granth Sahib and the Upanishads, to mention only a few of the most obvious sacred texts outside the Christian tradition. This is a Scripture which We have revealed unto thee that thereby thou mayest bring forth mankind from darkness unto light. (The Abraham surah of the Qur’an, verse 1; translated by Marmaduke Pickthall, 1993 [1930]) And the Lord God called unto the man, and said unto him: ‘Where art thou?’ 10 And he said: ‘I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ 11 And He said: ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?’ (Genesis, Chapter 3, verses 9–11; Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917) His Will (forsooth) Inborn in us, ingrained, Thou follow. (Thus is Truth attained). (The Mul Mantra; translated by Bhai Gopal Singh, 1960) Thus thou mayest live; there is no other way. By doing this, karma (the fruits of thy actions) will not defi le thee. (From the Isa-Upanishad, translated by Swami Paramananda, 1919)

At the other end of the spectrum, and in the category of devotional music that has been called by some (e.g. Sami Yusuf, cited in Morris, 2019: 223) ‘spiritique’ (thus removing an explicitly confessional dimension), almost the full panoply of contemporary Western musical forms and language have been used to compose songs that are used in devotional contexts. Some of these are mentioned by the boys in this chapter. Harris J, for example, has all the trappings of a boy-band star with professionally produced videos and highly managed publicity. A local performer with a

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Figure 8.4 Wajid Akhtar’s YouTube channel Source: Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPaE-5CPRZe15E9GEwI_tQ.

UK-wide following, Wajid Akhtar 9 enjoyed a brief spell as a leading nasheed star with his brooding sound and ‘seeker’ image (Figure 8.4). In one of Akhtar’s songs, a local artist joins with him to produce a hip-hop/ballad collaboration. The use of such contemporary idioms in devotional sounds takes place in a range of faith contexts. Soldat-Jaffe (2019) has explored the complex issues of migration, homelands and loss through the collaboration of Yiddish and Francophone African multilingual hip-hop (in Yiddish, English and French). The stylistic distance between King James Bible English and the varieties used in these latter contexts is enormous and, for some, these latter verge on the sacrilegious. When asked about singing or reciting for the Prophet in English the following opinion is not unusual, particularly for older generations: Our parents do not really understand that there is such a thing as naat/ nasheed in English. All their lives they’ve heard naat in Urdu. They’ve never thought someone could be praising the Prophet in English also. (Haroon, 25, naat performer)

The fact remains that, on the evidence gathered by Morris (2019) and others (Herding, 2013; Lewis, 2015), Islamic devotional performance carried out in the English language is now well established and is likely to grow in scope and range. The complex performance repertoires of these young people span not only different languages but also different registers and styles within those languages. This devotional practice ‘supermarket’ means that different tastes develop and preferences emerge. Therefore, it is important not to stereotype and consider the groups of boys homogenous in their tastes and preferences. An essential element of linguistic superdiversity is its heterogeneity and an awareness of historical and biographical trajectories is essential for understanding this diversity.

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Blommaert and Backus (2011) remind us of how linguistic repertoires can be best understood through such an approach: The origins of repertoires are biographical, and repertoires can in effect be seen as ‘indexical biographies’. This, then, allows us to reorient the triad of repertoires away from communities towards subjectivities, and suggest that repertoire analysis can be a privileged road into understanding Late-Modern, superdiverse subjectivities. (Blommaert & Backus, 2011: 2)

One of the themes of this book is the way in which once relatively stable speech communities with fairly predictable patterns of language use – a minority spoken language, a minority prestigious language and a majority language – can no longer be understood as fi xed communities in terms of language but, through a complex cluster of social and cultural processes, need to be understood in a fluid and mobile way with regularly changing linguistic repertoires even among individuals within, on the surface, the same social and cultural grouping. Chapter 5 describes the process of language shift affecting the community and this is no doubt an important factor in this changing understanding. However, it only tells part of the story and is, as research tells us, not a particularly uncommon process, particularly in diaspora settings. Fishman (1991) some time ago associated language shift with the move of simple communities towards complex modern societies (the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft distinction) and a similar drive is apparent in the speed and encompassing nature of globalisation. The social superdiversity defi ned by Vertovec (2007) is reflected linguistically in the variety of languages and language resources deployed not necessarily by a community as a whole but by its members in a range of subjectivities determined by different biographical trajectories. Once we add to the mix the specialised languages and language resources deployed in devotional performance, the diversity becomes ever more complex and the possibility of different biographical trajectories more likely. Thus, one of the boys states a preference for Urdu and explains how this is because of his family circumstances: I learn with my mum. Because she knows more Urdu than my dad. My mum was born in Pakistan and so knows Urdu. She helps me practise. (Mohamed, 10)

In an earlier study dating back to the end of the last century (Rosowsky, 2006b), a parallel trend identified among some families was the not unusual pattern of arranged marriages between Mirpuri men of mainly rural backgrounds in Pakistan who had settled in the UK initially and more urbanised women whom they married later. The social status brought about by residency in the UK was considered a suitable match for educated and urbanised women in Pakistan and therefore trumped any residual class disparities that might prevail if both partners had been living in Pakistan. At that time there was evidence that Urdu featured

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more prominently in the family when this was the case. Although the trend for marrying partners from the ethno-cultural heartlands has diminished in recent decades and more young people are fi nding spouses within the UK, there are still enough of these exogamous/endogamous10 marriages taking place, leading to different biographical trajectories resulting in differing linguistic repertoires. Mohamed has greater knowledge of Urdu because of his mother. This means that out of the six boys in the conversation, only Mohamed prefers Urdu devotional performance. So how do you learn Urdu then? [to Mohamed] I have a feeling it’s maybe easier for you. I learn them at home. Whenever I’m at home and I am reading an Urdu naat and I am practising it, I feel like when I am doing it in English there’s something wrong. That I quickly change my language and I speak Urdu. It sounds more better for me.

The other boys help him out by saying: I think also, like, sometimes people … imagine you are born in this country, if your mum is Christian or white … then that’s their first language. And you get it from them. And you speak English confidently. Sometimes you just get English words mixed up. And maybe that’s what happening with Mohamed. (Naveed, 11)

However, part of the linguistic complexity within the younger generation that leads to some confusion is the names used for various languages. The spoken language at home for Mohamed is likely to be English, particularly with siblings, and a variety of Punjabi (Pahari or Pothwari – the spoken varieties associated with the Mirpuri region of Pakistan and most of the Pakistani diaspora in the UK). His mother’s Urdu is almost certainly her second language, learnt possibly at home in Pakistan but consolidated (particularly via literacy) at school and in all other formal domains. Therefore, when Mohamed claims knowledge of Urdu, it is a knowledge of either spoken Urdu or, just as likely, spoken Punjabi (Pahari/ Pothwari). Can you read Urdu, Mohamed? No, but I can understand it when my mum speaks. You might understand it but imagine singing when there were no English letters, could you read that? No, I’d say I can’t read Urdu yet. Are you learning it? We did it in the holidays.

As in many cases of language shift when the written language is not part of original language acquisition, there is more risk that the language will shift more readily to the majority language. Mohamed does not know how to read Urdu using its conventional Perso-Arabic script so relies on a

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Roman transliteration (‘imagine singing when there were no English letters, could you read that?’). In respect of the three poems/songs performed at the university, the Urdu one was the trickiest to learn. [T]he Urdu one was quite hard to learn because we had to keep revising it. But I think Tala` al Badru `Alayna 11 [in Arabic] and the English one were easy because the Urdu was a bit hard because most of us didn’t know all the words. It wasn’t new but we didn’t know it. We never knew all the words properly. We kept on making mistakes on some of the words. (Naveed, 11)

The comprehension of Urdu poetry extends to more general discourse relating to religious instruction and mirrors what parents were saying 20 years ago: Akhtar:

On a Friday they can’t understand what the imam is saying. [He’s speaking in] Urdu. Very like Shakespeare Urdu. Really deep Urdu that I have to listen to it carefully and it takes me a long time to understand some of the words. AR: So who is he speaking to? Akhtar: Mainly the older generation. (Adapted from Rosowsky, 2008: 201)

When a similar situation is asked of the boys, there is a similar response: In Juma’a [the Friday prayer] do you understand the Urdu sermon of Hafiz Salim? I understand some of it. I understand some words. There’s some hard words. Sometimes he reads Urdu but differently with hard words and really quick. He’s [the imam] from Pakistan so he reads it fast. There’s different types of language. Sometimes he mixes it up. With some Punjabi and also he’s a bit older and we have new words and he still uses older words. And then he says the new words so we can understand. (Imran, 12)

Much of the devotional recitation of poetry, even in Urdu, is, therefore, an ultralingual performance. Mosque School C was described earlier in the book as somewhere that might on fi rst appearance suggest little has changed in the intervening 20 years from my original study. It can still be characterised as an ‘ethnocultural’ mosque with the vast majority of the congregation sharing a similar cultural and linguistic heritage. The mosque is located a short distance from the centre of the city in a district once dominated by the steel industry. There is little evidence of other Muslim communities or individuals attending the mosque. The most prominent new arrivals to the area are non-Muslim Roma (Payne, 2018, 2019). However, Mosque School C still shares in the same changing linguistic world of those other mosque schools nearer the city centre which, perhaps, reflect more overtly changing patterns of migration and human mobility. It does this, as alluded to earlier, through the young teachers who now teach in the

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Figure 8.5 Teacher S from Mosque School C Source: Author photo.

mosque school (Figure 8.5). Unlike their predecessors from 20 years ago (one or two of whom are still around so this aspect of the mosque school has not disappeared – old and new), all three teachers were born and educated (to degree level) in the UK. Their own personal journeys in the faith, which align with those seeking more contemplative paths (Rosowsky, 2018b), have resulted in a sophisticated repertoire of performance-oriented practices including but not restricted to Qur’anic literacy. And although the boys attending the mosque school are there primarily to acquire Qur’anic literacy, they cannot but be influenced by their teachers’ own devotional practices, whether explicitly or implicitly shared. From the clothes their teachers wear to the language of wider communication they employ (English, and a local variety to boot), the boys seek not only to learn but also to imitate these role models with whom they have so much more in common compared to their predecessors. In the next chapter, we see further evidence of this generational rapprochement. The immature linguistic knowledge of the boys can often lead to some confusion between languages, particularly between Punjabi and its variants and between Urdu and Punjabi. Have you ever heard or sung a Punjabi naat? Punjabi is like Sikhs. Punjabi is like, ‘d’y want t’cum t’shops’. [an imaginative attempt to represent the colloquial nature of Punjabi in the

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community] There are no nasheeds in Punjabi. Yes there is. [Mohamed] But there is qawwali. (Imran, 12) I have a video of your father singing a Punjabi naat in this mosque! There are Punjabi naats. There is qawwali as well. I know lots of qawwali songs. (Mohamed, 10)

As we see here, one of the boys associates ‘Punjabi’ with either ‘Sikhs’ or the spoken colloquial variety (which is more correctly called ‘Pahari’ or ‘Pothwari’).12 Although since 2000 there has been an increase in awareness among linguists and language activists about these varieties, there is still a lack of understanding among many younger members of the community in their regard. Given that they are subject, more than any other language in the community, to a shift to English this is perhaps not surprising. However, the boy’s attempt to characterise the spoken variety as folksy and akin to varieties of Yorkshire English demonstrates, on a level, a sophistication about language variation not usually available to his monolingual peers. There follows then a disagreement between Imran and Mohamed who states there are devotional songs and poetry in Punjabi mentioning qawwali (as in Vignette 4). This may have something to do with Mohamed’s more varied linguistic repertoire. He mentions Punjabi naats as well as qawwali. The linguistic distance between the language of a naat or qawwali poem sung in H-Punjabi and the language of spoken Punjabi varieties such as Pothwari and Pahari is considerable and may explain the first boy’s ignorance of Punjabi nasheeds (used in the general sense as mentioned above). Mohamed’s father sings H-Punjabi naat occasionally at public events so his son will be much more aware of this language than some of his peers. The reference to qawwali by the boys represents a much greater awareness of this form of devotional performance among the younger generation than was the case 20 years ago. The presence of a local qawwali ensemble made up of local individuals, including young ones, is perhaps responsible for this and the boys would have had opportunities to watch and listen to qawwali live. Qawwali performance offers, however, fewer opportunities for performing for the boys as the level of instrumentation and style prevents much individual participation apart from listening (and perhaps clapping). The performance of naat and nasheed, however, is more readily available. As we have seen in different contexts, ultralingual performance regularly sidesteps referential meaning to achieve its effects. This is not usually a conscious decision, such as someone reading and not paying attention to what is being read but who could comprehend if they needed to, but is an established cultural process that takes in traditions and practices from a wide range of religious, cultural and artistic contexts almost universally. A boys’ choir singing in Latin in Kings College Chapel in Cambridge will be participating in an ultralingual performance as will the audience. Although much ultralingual performance involves sacred languages, even secular contexts can give rise to ultralingual performance. Many polyglot

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opera singers will sing at least one of their languages in an ultralingual way (see Chapter 4 and Rosowsky, 2001: 60). When asked about the issue of understanding, the boys struggle a little to express their ideas. How much of it do you understand, the Arabic Tala` al Badru `Alayna13? I don’t know what it means but I do know why and where and when it was sung. What about the Urdu? I’m not used to Urdu which is why I had mistakes. Because I’m Punjabi. There are Punjabi naats aren’t there? Have you ever heard one of those? No, they’re tricky. Which language do you sing in that means the most to you? I’d say Arabic because of the Prophet. And most people recite Arabic as well.

Meaning is not absent in their performances as the boys are able to relate to what they sing in terms of the song’s context and provenance, ‘I do know why and where and when it was sung’. These are meaningrelated factors beyond (ultra) the referential meaning of the words or the propositional meaning of the poetic text or lyrics. This exchange shows, however, that no matter what language is performed, for these boys only ultralingual performance is possible. Critics of the mosque school approach to reading often express bewilderment that attention to meaning is not a concern while at the same time they are happy to acknowledge that many in the contemporary audience of a Shakespeare play may not be following the referential and propositional meaning as closely as an Elizabethan audience might. We have seen earlier how Fishman (2006) uses the term ‘co-sanctified’ to denote languages (or language registers) that have incorporated an element of sanctity through prolonged use in religious domains. Urdu and H-Punjabi in these devotional performances have this co-sanctified status and the lack of referential attention often adds to this sanctity. Something not understood can often take on a mystical or secretive character, especially when it is performed in a religious ritual. Anecdotally, many English-speaking converts to Islam have expressed their preference for performing and listening to Classical Arabic over English despite their ignorance of the language. They often feel there is an authenticity present in the former that is missing in the latter. The turn to Arabic in terms of a preferred language for performance mentioned earlier is therefore rationalised in the last comment of the exchange above, ‘because of the Prophet’, as a justification for Arabic being the best language to perform in regardless of comprehension. We’ve been talking about how good you are at learning and reciting. But what about the poems themselves? We said earlier on that we don’t understand much but do you think they’re important? Yeah. We know the naat but we don’t know what it means. Because they are for the Prophet.

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Why is that better in Arabic than it is in English? Because in Heaven they speak Arabic.14 Because the fi rst ever language was Arabic. And you can read naats from years ago. And the Arabic language is the language of Islam. So Tala` al Badru `Alayna was sung 1400 years ago and you are singing it today in 2016. It’s your heritage.

An additional reason provided by the boys for their preference for performing in Classical Arabic is the confessional argument that the language of Heaven is Arabic. If we rank the naat languages in order we would have English at the top with full understanding, then Urdu naat and then Arabic? No. I think Arabic would be before Urdu.

Although this chapter has focused principally on the practices of young boys in Mosque School C, other data collected from the same demographic in the preceding five years show that such practices are fairly common across a range of settings (Rosowsky, 2011, 2015, 2018b). However, although we have focused on a particular mosque school in this chapter, the ‘space’ where much of the discovering, learning and sharing of devotional poetry and song take place is online. An important source of the emotional and aural meaning emitted by ultralingual devotional performance comes from the reasonably regular exposure to ultralingual recitations not only in places of worship but also, particularly nowadays, on various platforms of electronic media. The ready availability of recitations to download or link to adds to the exposure. In an earlier era, such sources of exposure came through tape recordings and, later, CDs. These have now been superseded by the ubiquity of electronic platforms such as YouTube and portable devices such as smartphones. The availability of devotional performance online and easily accessed through contacts and networks provides material and role models for the young people’s own performances. As in Vignette 2, the ubiquitous smartphone with all its functionality significantly supports performance in respect of being an occasional aide-mémoire when memorising and when performing. It also facilitates the speedy and efficient sharing of favourite performances which happens now as much through shared online links as it once did through uploading and downloading audio and video files. The availability of devotional performances on the internet not only gives the performers themselves a greater audience reach but also allows access to a variety of devotional performance genres and languages. Some of the strictures regarding appropriate devotional performance in places of worship (mainly those to do with ‘music’) are absent from the internet and thus more innovative forms and genres are in evidence. The boys’ identification with Harris J in this chapter, despite their incomplete knowledge about him, is shaped by their access to his performances online. These, in a sense, are appropriated by the boys as being something ‘for them’ in contrast to the devotional art in heritage languages which

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may or may not be as appealing. It is perhaps too soon to anticipate what shape devotional performance in the English language may take. It is inevitable, however, that it will develop, as it did in all the languages associated with Islam throughout the past 1400 years. The added ingredient of easily available mobile technology has particularly driven the resurgent interest in devotional poetry and song and has equally facilitated the turns to Arabic and to English described in this chapter. Notes (1) A form of literary western Punjabi, referred to here as H-Punjabi, and transcribed in a script known as shahmukhi is sometimes heard being recited for devotional poetry. Ironically, if this language was stressed as the community’s prestigious language rather than Urdu, it is likely that there would be greater retention given its greater affi nity with the spoken varieties. Urdu is, linguistically, a more distant relative. (2) The famous Pakistani Naat Khawan, Owais Raza Qadri, who is a regular guest performer in UK mosques, includes Farsi naat in his repertoire. (3) This is the event celebrated on a small scale in Vignette 2 in Chapter 2. (4) The term ‘naat’ (Persian, and subsequently Urdu, lit. ‘ode’) is commonly used for more formal Urdu and H-Punjabi recitations and, as a poetic form, is reserved particularly for odes to the Prophet Muhammad although other topics do occur. (5) Researcher questions in bold. Boys’ responses in italics. Square brackets used for author clarifications. (6) Three well-known Classical Arabic qasidahs easily found on YouTube. (7) A trawl through Harris J’s online repertoire suggests that the Urdu elements of his songs are sung by co-artists, e.g. Eid Mubarak performed bilingually with Shujat Ali Khan (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = qnxYiaHRPFY). (8) Quilliam was a prominent convert to Islam from the Victorian era. He was given the title of Sheikh al-Islam by the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II (Abdullah Quilliam, n.d.). (9) ‘I Need your Help’, ‘Rise Again’ and ‘Heal Me’ are three of his best-known songs (see Online Resources section at the end of the References). (10) Endogamy here is ambiguous. On the one hand, marriages sought outside of the diaspora community ‘back home’ would constitute exogamy. However, marriages often take place between members of the extended family in the UK and ‘back home’ making them endogamous at the same time. (11) See Chapter 1, note 8. (12) I have already written about this variety in a number of ways in this book. Elsewhere (Rosowsky, 2018b, 2018c) I have also written about the status of Pothwari/Pahari and noted the reversing language shift (RLS) efforts of individuals such as Tariq Mahmood to have the language recognised as an independent language. See, for example, Rehman (2005) and Hussein (2015) for academic studies of these languages in the UK and see the Apna Thuthar Facebook page for an example of a contribution to RLS activist social media platforms. Sadly, the language is also undergoing language shift in its ethno-cultural heartlands (see Anjum & Siddiqi, 2012). (13) See Footnote 11 above. (14) Within Islamic theology there is disagreement about this feature of Paradise but it is popularly held that this is the case.

9 Leaving ‘the Mawlana and the Child’ Behind (Mosque School D)

A significant transformation in devotional language practices in mosque schools but also, as we saw in Chapter 8, in accompanying devotional performances, is the use of English. In some madrassahs, now, they have a choice if they want to learn in English, about four or five madrassahs. In 2006 there wasn’t. There was us, there was probably Masjid [‘mosque’] Uthman but a lot of the teachers there couldn’t speak English either. The headteacher, yeah, but a few of the other ones couldn’t. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

Reminiscent of historical examples of the co-sanctification (Fishman, 2006) of languages such as Persian and Ottoman Turkish due to their association with Islam, there is now the likely prospect that English is not only becoming a regular lingua franca in the Islamic world but is also gaining acceptance for devotional purposes. Resistance to this phenomenon is also considered in this chapter. The chapter describes in detail how English has become the sole language of instruction of an innovative mosque school and provides significant observational, linguistic and textual evidence. Mosque School D is one of the few mosque schools in this study to explicitly call itself a ‘madrassah’, not only in its publicity materials but also in the general discursive practice between teachers, children and parents. It was set up in 2007 by a small group of young British Muslims of Pakistani heritage. As with many of the new generation of mosque school teachers, all are fi rst-language English speakers, underwent instruction themselves in the ‘older’ type of mosque schools towards the end of the 21st century and were also professionally qualified and educated in the UK mainstream system, some up to degree level. When I asked them about the aims of their mosque school, they were able to articulate clear and realistic aims that fit their own personal philosophies and experiences. Aim? Erm. To teach … the traditional … Islamic knowledge … but … not in a traditional way. OK? What happened with us, was that – little bit of 141

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a history – we had a teacher at one of the local mosques, he used to teach in English and … student numbers were sort of coming down a bit and the mosque decided that they could no longer afford him. And then my nephews like Arif, and a few older ones, they were his students. And they enjoyed going for the fact that he was teaching in English. It might not have been the best English in the world, but it was English. And he could understand you as well. He might not have been the best person to express himself in English but he could understand you. He was also our teacher. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

One of the regular errors of much political rhetoric is that it nearly always mistakes perceptions for realities (and perceptions themselves, moreover, which are often based on little more than hearsay and ignorance). The calls for the greater use of the English language in the very communities at the heart of this study by many prominent politicians, no doubt with their own agendas, reflect poorly the linguistic realities evident on the ground (Blunkett, 2006; Cameron, 2016). As I write these words (July 2019), a contender for the leadership of the UK Conservative Party is reiterating the same mantra (Halliday & Brooks, 2019). Although Mosque School D is slightly unusual in its setup and history when compared to some of the more established mosque schools in the city, its foregrounding of English as the central pedagogical language is now a common feature of most mosque schools in the city. There may be genuine pockets of heritage language interactions in some or even all of the mosque schools but, in general, the pedagogical language has shifted from a range of previously heritage languages such as Urdu/Punjabi, Bengali/Syhleti, Somali or Arabic to English. This is not only a reflection of language shift but also reflects a desire on the part of mosque school organisers and teachers to make their teaching meaningful: ‘they enjoyed going for the fact he was teaching in English’. The pioneer, described by Suhail above, was perhaps unfortunate to be in place a little too soon to benefit from this change in linguistic culture. Rather like the teacher described in Rosowsky (2008) who was removed from his position for choosing to teach in English and considered by the local mufti1 and imam to be ‘unqualified’ despite qualifications from a UK-based seminary, this English-speaking teacher was deemed responsible for falling rolls and so was dismissed – it seems from later evidence that teaching in English was unlikely to be the cause, given the parental demand for more English in the mosque school. The emphasis Suhail places on ‘he could understand you’ is crucial. This shift was not only a linguistic one. From other comments shared by Suhail and others, it is clear that for teaching in the mosque school to improve, there needed to be a personal connection between the student and the teacher. Ali below characterises the previous model of teacher-student relationships in mosque schools as the ‘mawlana2 and the child’, a phrase that tries to capture the cultural, social and linguistic dissonance and distance that once existed between the young second- or third-generation Muslim child

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in the mosque school and the middle-aged, brought in from ‘back home’, teacher. What we want here [in Mosque School D] is completely different to what the mosques have been – you walked in, it’s just strict. It’s not just the strictness, it’s the perception that they have. And the teacher has this aura and he never breaks it and so what you had is ‘the mawlana and the child’. And you don’t have anything in between. And we changed that. As it’s not the way it should be. We don’t want to be seen as the ‘mawlana’, we want them to realise we are just like them. They’re going out there. Because it was this perception again. You see the mawlana, you see him with the big beard, the long hair, you see them only in the mosque. And that was it. He’s not allowed to play football, not allowed to walk, not allowed to eat. (he’s allowed to eat!) He’s allowed to eat but you can’t see him when he’s having his fi fth plate. So, we didn’t want that. It’s very, very practical. So we wanted them to have a connection with the teacher. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

What came through very clearly during the time I spent at Mosque School D was the warmth and respect the teachers showed their students and how this was reciprocated. This was evident in the emphasis placed on what the staff called, in Arabic, ‘akhlaq’, 3 manners. Always the three things we focus on in our teaching are the Qur’an, learning and teaching so we wanted a good level of Qur’an; the second was fiqh, knowing what is halal and haram,4 very, very clear; and the third one was akhlaq. This is important part of our syllabus. From that time to now. So like Hajji Saab5 said, our main focus was the akhlaq, 6 the manners, the behaviour, the love. It was essentially based on love. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

This reference to akhlaq and then to ‘love’ reflects very distinctly the teachers’ own path in the faith. Although very little was discussed relating to the doctrinal aspect of the mosque school (and indeed this was also the case with my field work in the other mosque schools – doctrine had to be read from ‘between the lines’), I knew from my other connections with the teachers that they all had personal commitment to one of the most wellknown Sufi turuq7 in the UK. Sufism as a path is characterised as much by an emphasis on the perfection of character as it is a method of reaching spiritual enlightenment. Indeed, it is stressed in Sufi teaching that enlightenment can only be secured once character has been perfected (Chittick, 1989). The teachers were at pains to stress with me in our conversations how important this was for the ethos and what they called the ‘USP’ of their mosque school. And although the use of the English language was a key ingredient in the mosque school, it shared its privileged status with akhlaq. Despite the lingering memory of some more unsavoury practices in some mosque schools of the previous generation, such as corporal punishment, which they could laugh off now but which must have been a significant factor in creating the ‘mawlana and child’ model, English and

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manners (or character) were the two unique features Mosque School D was proud of. They’d [parents] heard that we’ve got a no hitting policy [laughter] and also that we explained things in English. I think the no hitting policy was the major attraction! In fact, till today. No, seriously. I think that before that, the people that was part of it we all had a good reputation before we actually came into the madrassah. We would be seen in the mosque, we were already learning and the people knew us. You know, beforehand. They knew us and the teacher himself he spent a good year, well over a year, a good 18 months, so people knew what he was about … and they thought that was a chain … (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

The last word here, ‘chain’, is probably not used by chance. In the traditional Islam that these young people aspire to, the authority of any teacher is often based on being part of a chain of transmission that links one teacher to another. These chains, whether they be in matters of teaching jurisprudence (fi qh) or in matters of the purification of the heart (Sufism), usually involve large numbers of named individuals responsible for transmitting knowledge dating back through the centuries to the Prophet himself. The link between the English language and character is not a given, however, and these young mosque school facilitators were keen to stress the need for both. But … we employed the teachers who are the best of the characters in the area that we could fi nd. We tried not to employ just anybody. Simply because we had many people who had been to the mosque and shared our own experiences. We realised it wasn’t the teacher with the biggest beard that has that effect, but the best character. So we were looking for the people with the best character we could fi nd. And not just because English-speaking. What we have found is that just because someone is English-speaking does not mean they are the best teachers. Imparting knowledge is a skill, it’s not for everyone. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

Much of the policy literature on UK mosque schools has centred on the recruitment of adequately qualified and trained staff. Cherti and Bradley’s (2011a, 2011b) reports even as recently as 2011 were still assuming that mosque school teachers were in the main recruited from ‘back home’ and thus there was a need for ‘accrediting madrassas teachers from overseas’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 66) or that mosque schools needed to ‘improv[e] teaching methods by developing mentoring or shadowing opportunities in mainstream schools for madrassas teachers with some teachers lacking the skills and experience to provide effective lessons’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 66). Although these reports possibly captured the state of UK mosque schools at a moment of change and reflected more the fi ndings evident in Rosowsky (2008), there was nevertheless a sense of ‘damned by faint praise’ in the report’s summary which, despite the use of

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‘some’ as a qualifier, allowed its negative judgements to dominate its overall impression. In some cases, poor communication between the teacher and students was seen to restrict the learning potential in madrassas. Teachers who are unable to speak English to a high standard were seen as a particular problem in some cases. Despite this, there are some madrassas using innovative methods to help their children learn and develop. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 65)

From what has been presented so far in this chapter, it is clear that Mosque School D would certainly match the description of ‘using innovative methods’, although I am certain they would feel aff ronted if they felt what they had done was in any way a response to a top-down policy directive. As they eloquently explain, their initiative was carried out very much as a bottom-up approach which drew on their own experience of mosque school education and their subsequent journeys in the faith and their own career paths. The presence of teachers from the professions (obviously not the same thing as ‘professionally trained teachers’) at Mosque School D, and in all the other mosque schools in this book, has certainly made a difference to the type of staff recruited. Therefore, to the English language and akhlaq (‘character’) we can add some sort of professional training or career as being not quite a prerequisite but at least a correlation. Across all four mosque schools there are an ophthalmologist, two IT technicians, two mainstream school teachers, two doctoral students and two social workers all working as administrators or facilitators. And so what you’re getting, the biggest change is you’re getting more professionals in these fields, so people who are teachers, people who work in fields that are deemed as professionals are coming into, bringing that experience, into the madrassahs. So you’ve got people who are practising Muslims and have gone in their spare time as a volunteer and that’s how we started really. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

There is a double-edged sword aspect to the growing use of young professionals taking on the responsibility of teaching children in this new generation of mosque schools. In Rosowsky (2008) a strong fi nding was the relatively poor pay and living conditions experienced by foreign-born and non-English speaking teachers and imams. Other policy reports (DCLG, 2007) reported on this as one of the reasons for the poor-quality teaching going on in mosque schools. Recently, however, young professionals, driven more by a sense of their own religious responsibility than by any desire for a secondary income, have been at times happy to volunteer for such work. The social, linguistic and cultural capital gained in their own professional lives has provided them with the knowledge and skills to take on such duties, which they do with enthusiasm. It does, however, leave the staffing structures in such places as relatively fragile.

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Staffing is a huge problem. Huge problem. Just when you think you’ve got it right, summat happens. Yeah, it’s always been the case. Alhamdulillah [‘praise Allah’]. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

As with many self-help ventures (and the Pakistani heritage community has a rich tradition in self-help practices known as biraderi; Ballard, 2001), mosque schools such as Mosque School D rely enormously on the expertise and enthusiasm of its young founders. This has its advantages: We have no allegiance to a committee. That gives us tremen- … immense power. [You are the committee?] Yeah, we are the committee. We are the beast … (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

However, there was a strong realisation by these young teachers that their venture sinks or swims depending on that fi rm base established a number of years ago, and is kept going by a consistent commitment to the mosque school aims and ethos, both of which have been heavily influenced by their adherence to certain spiritual paths (‘a benchmark’) that insist on a level of duty to the community. We’re fortunate that we’ve got organisations that we know. Aspiring to be like them. We’ve got a benchmark that we try and aim for. But what we always go down to, what we realise in this line of work is you’re always left with a few people. When you talk about the help and the support, it’s there, like, theoretically, not practically. People are there saying this is what to aim for but in the end you’re going to have to clean up yourselves. You’ll have to do it yourself. And what we’ve got is that the original people who set this up eight years ago are still there. The main guys are still there. The rest of the people are up and down, up and down. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher) Our teachers sometimes have been volunteers, then paid, then volunteers again, then paid and so on. We don’t do it like that. And … is there a need? 100%. But some of the fantastic work some people are doing, unbelievable work. I don’t know about other people but I’m networked with them. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

And finally, there is an openly expressed intention that the work of the mosque school will carry on through the students that it teaches and who will inherit from their teachers their ways, aims and ethos. This was communicated very strongly by these young men and I believe drew upon their view of traditional Islam with its careful arrangement of teacher and student transmission proceeding through chains over time. Called variously isnad or silsilah,8 depending on which branch of learning is in question, the tradition of a student learning ‘at the feet’ of a teacher in a spirit of deep respect and love permeates the words of my participants and was being actualised in the flesh by younger teachers who were present in the mosque school. But the best thing that I fi nd that now is that we’ve got ustaz 9 Arif, ustaz Munir, here they’ve been through the system, they’re the products of the

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system, or we’ve got children that I believe when they will turn in the next couple of years, they will continue doing some shape or form of volunteering. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher) Mosque School D and Islamophobia

Although I am writing here about Mosque School D and its response to Islamophobia (Allen, 2010; Runnymede Trust, 1997), I could be writing about any of the four mosque schools, for in each I heard similar sentiments expressed by their teachers. The data in Rosowsky (2008) were collected in and around 2001 when the events in New York on 11 September ushered in a period of worldwide anxiety linked to Islam and Muslims, and subsequent Western military aggression took place against a significant number of Muslim-majority countries (and is still taking place). The young men in the mosque school, both as teachers and as students, have not known a time when their faith was not a regular feature of media headlines and political scrutiny. Part of this ‘anxiety’ has often been the perception that mosque schools themselves are possible ‘hotbeds’ for radicalism and extremism. Such a context has given rise to the two Cherti and Bradley reports along with other, often apologetic, publications such as the Association of Muslim Social Scientists’ (AMSS) report in 2004 and Dyke’s (2009) government-supported publication. The young teachers of Mosque School D originally founded their school in the wake of both 11 September and the July 2005 London bombings (carried out by individuals sharing a similar ethno-cultural background to those of our participants). It was because … back then … (it’s started again now with this ISIS thing) … there was stigma attached to Muslims and bad press and this, that and the other. And then what happened in London. In 2005. And you had, like, children who were, like, ducking and diving, publicly, and not wanting anyone to fi nd out they are Muslim. And we didn’t want them to feel like that. To say to them ‘Look, this is what we are, there’s this bad bunch amongst us, but the majority are fi ne. There’s no need for us to feel ashamed for the acts of the few. And we’re not responsible for the acts of the few’. And especially the older children, whenever I’ve taken the classes, for some reason, it does every now and again, it still pops up but not as much as it used to. Four or five years ago. But like I said, that thing that’s going on now, that ISIS, it’ll all probably just come back again. They need to feel that they’re not aliens. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

In this poignant account of why Mosque School D is the way it is, we witness an aspect of the school’s ethos that contributes to the students’ sense of pride and respect in attending it. For these young British Muslim students, aged from six up to 14, making sense of the way their faith has been portrayed and misrepresented in the public domain must be a

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never-ending challenge. An endless flow of newspaper headlines and TV news items (Versi, 2018), US presidents publicly saying that Muslims are not welcome in their country (Liptak, 2018), politicians pronouncing negatively on the use of language in their communities (Blunkett, 2006; Cameron, 2016; May, 2016) and UK government policies such as Prevent (2007–2019) must, at the very least, engender an atmosphere for these young people that makes them question their identities and risks diminishing their self-esteem. The measured but non-apologetic stand of Mosque School D must help the students in the school to make sense of the aberrations carried out by a very small but vocal minority in the worldwide Muslim community. At the time of writing these words, an atrocity in New Zealand leading to the deaths of scores of worshippers at a mosque and of hundreds in churches in Sri Lanka highlight how such guidance is needed on a fairly regular basis. The comment, ‘they need to feel that they’re not aliens’, goes to the heart of the task currently facing those working in UK mosque schools. On the one hand, the alienation caused by Islamophobia may have a significant impact on a range of social indicators such as educational attainment and social wellbeing. On the other hand, it can result in the very outcome such an attitude falsely predicts – a self-fulfi lling prophecy with at the very least unwanted, and at the worst dangerous consequences. Recent reports such as those by Cherti and Bradley (2011a, 2011b), in their predisposition to focus on failings only slightly tempered by the identification of pockets of good or ‘innovative’ practice, fail to acknowledge work on the ground in such settings as Mosque School D. As we have seen in the previous three chapters, all four mosque schools place at the centre of their activity (their curriculum) the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy. This is seen by some as a limitation: Most madrassas focus on teaching material related to Islam and the Quran which, at times, was limited to teaching based on recitation and rote learning. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 65)

And furthermore, according to such a view, such a limitation can be redeemed only by broadening the faith-based curriculum to include activities that support mainstream school learning, ‘where madrassas provide a broader curriculum, either through increasing children’s understanding of religion or covering mainstream subject areas’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 65). Notwithstanding the paternalistic attitude revealed in such a desire, no mosque school, to my knowledge, would want to diminish the place in the mosque school of the acquisition of sacred text literacy. This is just as true for Sunday cheders catering for UK Jewish children and Saturday gurdwaras preparing UK Sikh children for reading the Guru Granth Sahib as it is for UK Muslim children in their mosque schools (Rosowsky, 2013a). A general misunderstanding held by many is that ‘rote learning’ with an overemphasis on memorisation is somehow outdated and unsuited to the

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modern world. Unlike the work of Berglund and Ghent (2018), who have begun to identify significant advantages for raising awareness in mainstream education about mosque school learning and teaching, the sentiment of much discussion using the term ‘rote learning’ is a pejorative one. On the one hand, rote learning is often compared unfavourably with ‘meaningful learning’ (Oxford Learning, n.d.). Such discourse suggests that rote learning, as it does not attend in the first instance to semantic meaning (whether these are words in a phrase or numbers in a multiplication table), is an inferior pedagogical strategy compared to an overtly meaningful one where comprehension, even at lexical level only, is preferred. More sinisterly, in the discourse of the ‘war on terror’ (Hodges & Nilep, 2007; Makoni, 2012), ‘rote learning has come to take on connotations of “brain washing”’ (Singer, 2001). Although the link between ‘rote learning’ is not taken to such an extreme in Cherti and Bradley’s (2011a) report, nevertheless such pedagogy is seen as an obstacle to more ‘meaningful’ activity. ‘rote’ learning is preventing them from providing children with a richer appreciation of their religion. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 68, emphasis added) Yet these are methods that may be criticised strongly in mosque schools and madrassas, which tend to instruct Muslim children in how to read (but not understand) the Quran by means of rote learning and do not always encourage questioning or debate. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 13, emphasis added) madrassas have little educational value because teaching methods focus on rote learning. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 11, emphasis added)

Regardless of the fact that learning how to decode and recite an ancient text in an unfamiliar language is probably best carried out in rote fashion – young children can hardly be expected to apply themselves as medieval scholars in the pursuit of philological truths – there is little understanding within such comments about the main purpose of the mosque school, which is frequently only viewed as a useful adjunct to the mainstream school system. This meaning is often captured in the choice of the word ‘supplementary’ to categorise these schools. Madrassas are supplementary schools run for Muslim children that operate outside the mainstream education system. (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 3)

The phrase, ‘that operate outside the mainstream education system’, sets up expectations on the part of casual readers that the school is perhaps clandestine and apart from the rest of mainstream society. Other cultural pursuits such as dance and gym clubs which can be as regular as mosque schools are never given such a sinister characterisation. Moreover, ‘supplementary’ suggests a subordinate role for the mosque school. In other research conducted on language practices in supplementary schooling

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more generally, ‘complementary’ has been used by some researchers as a way of suggesting something more independent and positive (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Creese & Blackledge, 2008, 2011). Obviously, the framing of the mosque school in certain ways benefits certain views and such framing fits prevailing discourses that characterise Islam and Muslims as a threat. Allen (2010), in his work on Islamophobia, which itself draws upon Frank Furedi’s (2002) broader ‘culture of fear’ analysis of the 21st century West, shows how government, media and political parties contribute to this discourse even when claiming to be challenging it. Muslims are in the contemporary setting routinely conceived as a homogenous ‘Other’ which presents a very real, ongoing, and at times apocalyptic threat to ‘our’ values, democracies, identities, and way of life. (Allen, 2017: 2)

The ‘dinner table test’ speech of former Conservative minister, Sayeeda Warsi, is usually credited for announcing the mainstreaming of Islamophobia as a phenomenon no longer solely the preserve of the political far right. It seems to me that Islamophobia has now crossed the threshold – For far too many people, Islamophobia is seen as a legitimate – even commendable – thing. Islamophobia should be seen as totally abhorrent – just like homophobia or Judeophobia – we need political leadership. Government has got to show that it gets it. (Warsi, 2011)

It is, therefore, impossible to write about the sociolinguistics and language pedagogy of mosque schools in a vacuum that does not take into account the sociopolitical circumstances in which they function. These circumstances obviously have consequences for those running and working in UK mosque schools but also for the young people who attend them. For the latter, their ‘othering’ by the discourses just mentioned forms part of their identities which are often internalised into feelings of alienation and separation. The Curriculum and Marking Progress

The young facilitators at Mosque School D have a clear vision and understanding of their mosque school. And despite their relatively unconventional origins, theirs is a fairly traditional route through the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy and is a pedagogical pattern found in all four of the mosque schools in this study and also, incidentally, in the study of 20 years ago. Firstly, there is a period when children starting at the age of six are introduced to the alphabet (through a primer sometimes known as the first or basic qa’idah). We don’t accept any children below the age of 6. That’s a madrassah policy. The other madrassahs in the local area take children younger than

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that. (Yeah, under 5.) And we’re probably the only one that doesn’t take children under 6. And we want to push it to 7. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

The second primer follows a teaching sequence known as the Baghdadi Qa’idah. This sequence is found in a number of different variants with the variation determined by the nature and amount of textual and visual support provided. Mosque School A, for example, described in Chapter 6, makes no concession to its young English-speaking students, by using a version of the Baghdadi published and printed in Cairo and aimed at Egyptian young people (al-Gindy, 2013). The Baghdadi Qa’idah at Mosque School D, published by Azhar Academy publishers in London (Afzal, n.d.), which is unusually laid out for reading left to right book-wise but right to left page-wise, contains a significant amount of English. Most of this is aimed at the teacher and is characterised by its rather stilted language choices, where ‘sounds’ and ‘letters’ are frequently used interchangeably and where the syntax belies a non-native speaker author. Teachers are required to specify the places of origins of letters. As children will be able to recognise the letters by their very sounds if they will familiar enough with the places of origin of letters. Therefore, they should be well aware of the outlets for the sound of letters. (‘Exercise’ from Baghdadi Qa’idah, published by Azhar Academy; Afzal, n.d.)

The pages in this qa’idah use colour to indicate certain diacritic markings (this feature extends to some of the printed Qur’ans available). The sequence of letter-sound correspondences is followed by practising the formation of syllables using the three main vowel sounds in the Arabic language: fathah /a/, kasrah /i/ and dammah /u/. These are short vowels and their long counterparts follow next: /a:/, /i:/ and /u:/. As these are syllables, they also introduce the manner in which letters are joined to each other (or not joined in some cases). As Arabic uses a cursive script, recognising the joining of letters is an essential element in learning to read. At this basic level, in Mosque School D, the curriculum also includes some basic matters of jurisprudence such as how to perform the ritual ablution and cleansing oneself after visiting the toilet. As so much of a Muslim’s daily behaviour is accompanied by prayer and supplication, the appropriate supplications (part of the adab) for entering and leaving a toilet are also learnt (by heart) at this stage. As mentioned in previous chapters, the text as sacred artefact is more of a factor in some mosque schools than in others. The two mosque schools with a language environment closer to the language of the sacred text (and with teachers who reflect this) appear to pay less attention to the reverence of the sacred text as an artefact. Here in Mosque School D, however, this factor is ever present. Boys are reminded to sit in a certain way when reading and to place the text at all times on its dedicated stand (Figure 9.1) and

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Figure 9.1 Plastic stands designed for reading the Qur’an and other religious texts while sitting on the floor Source: Author photo.

if not in use in an elevated position on a shelf. Because of this insistence on sitting formally for long durations, standing is seen as a privilege, whereas in other mosque schools it can be used as a sanction (see p. 102). By contrast, the sound of the individual and collective recitation is less distinct – even when louder. The level of challenge for perfect pronunciation and recitation is, to my ears, perhaps less here than in Mosque School A. This matches comments made earlier about how in mosque schools where Arabic is not a language of wider communication, there are different emphases. One thing I notice is that it is more difficult to discern separate verses here. Not sure if this is the acoustic or something to do with the reciting styles (and accents/sound) of the boys’ recitations. (Extract from field notes from 8 September 2015)

Nevertheless, the slightly hypnotic ‘hums’ described in Mosque Schools A and B are still present in Mosque School D, and the collective sound of the mosque school, I imagine, aligns itself with the universal sound of liturgical literacy acquisition and recitation across the globe and across different faiths. Those who read fluently, I suspect, can ‘lose themselves’ in their recitation. Most boys with varying degrees of attention can do this. It is possibly a more relaxed mode than memorisation which has more stress involved – self-imposed and teacher imposed. (Extract from field notes from 8 September 2015)

The qa’idah primer aims to bring the child to a degree of fluency where the pronunciation of individual sound-letter correspondences is not an issue. As Suhail says, ‘Because the next teacher, when they get to the next teacher, he doesn’t want to be correcting their pronunciation. He wants to continue teaching them the rules [of recitation] and getting them fluent at reciting the Qur’an’. In addition to progressing through the qa’idah and some basics of jurisprudence, some Islamic history, especially the biography of the Prophet, is covered at this fi rst stage.

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And seerah [biography of the Prophet] level, they’ve got to at least know a bit about the Messenger (salla Allahu alayhi w-salim10). A few of his friends. His children. And grandchildren. From the seerah of Mecca and Medina. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

When they progress to the third class, the articulation of the sound-letter correspondences of the Qur’an should be fluent so the teacher can concentrate more on the rules of tajweed, the ahkam (see page 114). These are the conventions of artful recitation and include such matters as elision, vowel elongation and rules for pausing. Although progress through the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy continues, both individually and collectively, at this next stage there is also more scope for dwelling on matters of jurisprudence matching the maturity level of the students. We’ve done it by age, by secondary school at the moment. Just simply because some of the subjects, you need a little more maturity, and so what we fi nd is that anyone who is in secondary school, already knows what’s going on, so we can talk about puberty, and stuff like this, what they really need to talk about. So up to 11, while they’re in that class, they would have fi nished the Qur’an personally,11 as best they got, and group they’re getting on with it. The seerah. They would have done it. So the duas12 are extended. And the surahs13 are extended. In the sense of how much they going to memorise. So there’s a certain level. And when they get to the top class, then we, I fi nd that, as we said at the beginning, the akhlaq series is completed. The fi qh and the five pillars14 are defi nitely done and they know the Qur’an well enough that we can say, you can go now. You know the three things. You can leave the madrassah. [aqidah?] And aqidah,15 which is included in the fi qh. The duas, you know daily duas, sleeping, waking, eating. So what we are saying, they know enough practicalities to leave at 14 which we expect them to leave at … Yeah, Y10s.16 It’s normally when the parents are pulling them out for GCSE. And at that age, we’re saying, ‘ok, he knows the five pillars, she knows the five pillars, he or she can recite the Qur’an, and they know a few duas, they are sufficient for them, and the akhlaq and manners we have discussed’. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

The third stage as described here (‘the top class’) completes the three major elements of the mosque school curriculum – the acquisition of fluent Qur’anic recitation, the basics of jurisprudence (including some rudimentary theology) and the akhlaq (‘manners’ or ‘character’). Apart from using Arabic for technical terms such as fi qh, aqidah and akhlaq, the only Arabic employed in the mosque school is the Classical Arabic learnt and recited of the Qur’an (and supplementary materials such as duas, shahadas17 and short adhkar).18 As in Mosque School A, there is an awareness that competing demands for the students’ time from their mainstream schools (‘the parents are pulling them out for GCSEs’) mean their students would normally exit the mosque school at the age of 14.

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In Rosowsky (2008), the communication gap between teacher and student was described in both linguistic and socio-psychological terms. This communication gap was also identified by these young facilitators early on in their deliberations regarding setting up the mosque school, and at various points in our conversations they were insistent on how this was not going to be an issue at their mosque school. We’re doing a lot more with them outside also. Like, on a Sunday we have a football club. Where we get 45–50 young people from this madrassah and others but 60–70% from this madrassah. During the half term there are sports camps. We run the sports camps. Ustad Arif is there teaching, there’s Munir and myself. We just run the camps. Kids are dropped off, and they’re with us for three or four hours. They’re seeing us in different settings. They’re no longer, like, ‘O madrassah study, ok let’s put on a jubba’.19 This half term is going to be the ultimate one. Munir will be joining us. He doesn’t know yet. He’ll be going paintballing with us. And Laser Quest. It’s in the pipeline. I just like to shoot them! And that’s the difference. Now the young people, there’s a different level of connection. And the parents. That’s what we always wanted for the madrassah. Ideally, what we want. … Our teacher was slightly different. He got the best out of us. And that’s the way he is. (Ali, Mosque school D teacher)

By the phrase ‘seeing us in different settings’, the Mosque School D facilitators bridge the gap that existed between the ‘mawlana and the child’ for so many years. Moreover, all four teachers in the mosque school have experienced not only the UK mosque school as it was 20 years ago but also the UK mainstream school system. That combination and their age provides them with valuable common ground between themselves and their students. One thing you’re missing is that we’ve been through the schooling system. That’s unique. We relate with the kids. They can’t get away with being what we’ve been through. We see what they see. We’ve done what they are doing. So they no longer, we don’t need a magnifying glass. We have it on them already. ‘Don’t tell me about Facebook. I know more than you do.’ ‘How dare you. Twitter? How come you don’t follow that?’ ‘Stazi, you’re on Twitter?!’ I know more games than they do. That kind of stuff is different. Which was not there in the past. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

This objective of communicating with the children and getting them to understand the diverse wider society in which they live without having to hide or deny their identities is another central aspect of Mosque School D. Their way of dealing with lifestyles of others and discussing these frankly is a million miles away from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, who perhaps saw things much more as an ‘us and them’ or ‘right and wrong’ dynamic. The nuances and affordances of postmodern societies in which a mosque school in the UK has all the freedoms it requires to teach children the sacred text and about Islam, mean it takes its place,

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however uncomfortably (from some perspectives), alongside other minority lifestyle choices which must be ascribed the same freedom in a liberal democracy. So it’s really, really, you know, what happens when you go, ‘I went with a gay guy’, ‘Hajji, what the hell?’, and the next guy, a woman sat there is a lesbian, because I had a culture shock, I had a religious ‘what the hell? I’ve been told they’re haram, haram, haram’. And I’m sat with somebody and I thought, you know, ‘What is happening here?’. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

This acknowledgement of the facilitator’s own confusion in the face of social diversity is a useful indicator of what Mosque School D is trying to do, particularly in the area of akhlaq, or character formation. They pray with us on the football field. We go residential. That was my youth work and stuff. But what we’ve got in the pipeline here is with developing a youth project from the mosque itself, from the madrassah. So we don’t just have, what we fi nd we teach them the duas and then send them home. And the parents, like you said what’s the interaction, parents send them to the madrassah but they are verbal not practical. (Ali, Mosque School D teacher)

In one frank comment, one of the facilitators recalled an event in his past when a local imam had been accused of child abuse and how this incident had had an effect on him to the extent that it fed into his aims for the mosque school. You know, adding to that, when I was younger, in the early eighties, one of our ustads was involved in something very horrible. And when I was growing up, it used to play on my mind. Sometimes you’d be sat down thinking on your own, and you’d use to think to yourself, ‘Is this what they are really like?’ And that is something I used to tell Ali. We need people teaching who we’re not going to fi nd out in five or six years’ time, you know that teacher of yours, he did such and such. We want people who when they see them in 20 years’ time, it will be insh’Allah, 20 someone with no scandal. And that, thinking about it now, has brought it back. It was horrible to think of a religious figure, someone who is responsible for you, was to tell you about fearing Allah, or give you the stick if you did something wrong, was involved in something like that. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

Another factor contributing to the vision and ethos of Mosque School D is the teachers’ admiration for role models outside their ethno-cultural and linguistic community. Their understanding of ‘a traditional Islam’ is different from that of their parents and grandparents, where ‘traditional’ necessarily included a close and intimate association with their ethnocultural backgrounds. Their traditional Islam moves outside such cultural constraints and can draw on teachers from a range of Muslim backgrounds and historical periods. Part of this is their admiration for highly

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prominent English-speaking Muslim converts from the West, particularly from the United States. Plus, you know, what we might get called by people who convert to Islam  – ‘you’re ethnic Muslims’. Muslims by ethnicity. And we think that’s tradition. That that’s the authentic Islam but as we knew and as we found out, and listened to people like Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, 21 who was a convert, Shaykh Nuh Keller, 21 who’s a convert, people like Imam Zaid Shakir, 21 convert, Sohaib Webb, 21 convert, you see something else in them people, like yourself, Shaykh Nazim, 22 a lot of the murids23 of Shaykh Nazim. When Shaykh Hisham came a few weeks ago to our Masjid, I was there. And at the back, there was an old English gentleman with a beautiful white beard, with beautiful turbans, looked like they are, what we, our Moulvi, 24 pretend to be, these are the living examples. And if we don’t get it in our lifetime, we want our children to get it. We want the next generation, insh’Allah. This is the deen25 of Allah. The way of the Prophet. Networking Challenges

Although the four mosque schools in this book are in the same city and three of them are within one square mile of each other, they operate pretty much independently. When asked about mutual support or networking, the response is usually one of either reluctance or missed opportunities. On one occasion, Mosque School D hosted an introductory talk for a well-known publisher and their syllabus for mosque school education. The IEOSA syllabus, they came over from South Africa two years ago and we hosted them here. We invited them, the madrassahs, in the area. We told Bashir. 26 Imtiaz. 26 We told another mosque. And they took it up. They came [the IEOSA representatives] and the women were there and the men were here. They did the training. Only one came though, one madrassah. (Suhail, Mosque school D teacher)

The disappointment of this event was mirrored, to some comic effect, by the attempts of the city council to get the diverse community of mosque schools in the city together to discuss the serious issue of child protection. I was part of the city child protection board (with Qari Shahid?) Yeah. And stuff. I know Qari Shahid. It was a failure. They brought all the mosques together and the Deobandis27 were sat there and the Barelvis28 were sat there, and the Salafi s29 were sat there. And it was hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. [we don’t fit in with them]. I know the Mawlanas in the Barelvi mosques and they think I’m Barelvi and the Deobandis thought I was Deobandi and I was sat there thinking, the Salafis are going to. … And I teach at the Salafi mosque because I do the physical exercise stuff and they go ‘Ah Shaykh …’ So I’m there and I’m thinking, ‘What?’

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This is embarrassing. Because we’ve got Qari Shahid who’s really from a Deobandi background, and he’s sat there and they’re trying to tell everyone they need to do child protection and this that and the other. And it’s not going to work, they’re not going to give you £100,000. We can’t pay £50 per person to go and do a CRB check. (Ali, Mosque school D teacher)

However, alongside these stories of frustration, Suhail was insistent on highlighting the successes of Mosque School D. Two doors away from where I live we’ve got a young chap, a young boy called Muhammed. He’s probably 14 now. Came here as a six-year-old. And when you see him, it makes me – I hope it’s not my ego – but it makes me feel good inside. That, Alhamdulillah [praise Allah], this kid, I know his family, despite more problems with his brothers and sisters, with his parents, no-one’s ever heard him swear. He’s fi nished everything in here but he still wants to come back. He’s a child who prays all the time. He’s memorised. The imam was telling me which surahs he’s memorised. Big surahs as well. And that is something I believe he saw someone transmitting something to him in our language [English], in a way he understood. And he’s taken it. His brother’s the same. Younger. He’s not as bright as him but he’s the same. There’s other children as well. He’s the one though who stands out. Because he’s one of the children who’s been with us from the beginning. Some of the children, the ones who have come in at an older age, and they’ve been spoilt a bit, a bit hard sometimes to get through to them because you have to build that trust with them. If you can get that trust with them when they’re younger, no matter what happens, they’ll know what the real thing is. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

Having made the point that the use of the English language was what made a difference in this new generation of mosque schools, the facilitators drew on other dimensions of their work to demonstrate their success. And do you think a lot of this is to do with language? Language? I would say 60%. The other 40% is your behaviour towards them. If you’re in a bad mood, don’t take it out on them. If you’re in a good mood, don’t let them do anything they want. You’ve got to have consistency yourself as a human being. The Prophet (salla Allahu alayhi w-salim) used to be the fi rst one to give salaams30 even to children. When I heard this, and at fi rst it was strange, and I realised I don’t do this. I was waiting for the child. So I had to break myself and put my hands forward. Now they love it. When they’re coming and going, sometimes you’re absent-minded and they come up to you and they want to give salaams. I didn’t do that to my teachers. Do you understand? With our Ustad we just wanted to just sneak past and if we saw them on the road somewhere we’d hope he didn’t see me. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher)

Undeniably, however, the ability to communicate in the manner desired was predicated on the mutual use of the English language. The

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subtle cultural references made by Suhail above would have meant little if there had been no mutual language. The colloquial and intimate language register he and the others were able to employ contributed to the successful interaction between the teachers and the students and removed the ‘mawlana and child’ issue. You talked about how we measure success. I look at Ustad Munir. I look at Ustad Arif. We have another Ustad, ustadi Asif. Not at the moment. He’s at school and stuff. And none of our students who are left here. And you said ‘What’s the difference with our students?’ It’s the passion of the teachers, the love that they have to teach, just to make that difference, it transfers automatically to all these kids. Some of these children absolutely love coming to the madrassah. (Suhail, Mosque School D teacher) Notes (1) A title given to a scholar qualified to issue legal decisions according to Islamic law. (2) Lit. ‘our master’ but with the general meaning of a teacher in the mosque school. (3) Lit. ‘character’ but also translated as ‘manners’. The Arabic word adab (also ‘manners’) was also used a lot in this mosque school. (4) Halal and haram are two categories of jurisprudence roughly translated as ‘the permitted’ and ‘the forbidden’. (5) Colloquial form for the Urdu title sahib (‘Mr’). (6) Arabic, derived from the root form kh-l-q, meaning ‘manners’ or ‘character’. (7) ‘turuq’, plural of Arabic ‘tariqah’, literally ‘path’ or ‘way’ but often translated, as a legacy from Orientalism, as ‘Sufi order’ – e.g. Trimingham, 1971). (8) Both of these words can be translated by the English word ‘chain’ – isnad is used primarily for the transmission of religious tradition such as the Hadith and silsilah for the chain of succession of authorised teachers. (9) ‘ustad’ (Arabic, lit. ‘master’) is a regular title given to the teacher in a mosque school. In Pakistani mosque schools this is often sounded as ‘ustazi’ or even ‘stazi’. (10) ‘Peace and blessings be upon him.’ This is the standard honorific uttered by pious Muslims on saying or hearing the name of the Prophet. (11) ‘Finishing the Qur’an’ is a rite of passage often referred to, mainly in Pakistaniheritage mosques, where the fact of having decoded the text from beginning to end is considered a significant achievement in a young Muslim’s life. It sometimes also coincides with their leaving the mosque school. Other children, though, may accumulate complete readings so that one hears on occasion, ‘I’ve read it three times’, or more. (12) ‘Supplications.’ The dua is probably the form of Islamic worship that comes closest to the Christian understanding of prayer. The dua is usually personal or made on behalf of a group, the vernacular language is generally used and it is often linked to formulaic Arabic supplications. The dua is perhaps the most intimate form of communication with the Divine in Islam. This relates back to Keane’s (1997) question about how to communicate with the Divine. (13) ‘Chapter of the Qur’an.’ These range from the longest chapter of nearly 300 verses (Al Baqarah) to the shortest which has only three (Al Kawthar). (14) The ‘Five Pillars’ in Islam are uttering the testament of belief (the shahadah), prayer, alms-giving, fasting and the pilgrimage to Mecca. (15) ‘Creed’ – in the mosque school this is at a very basic level. (16) In the UK, Year 10 (Y10) covers the ages 14–15. (17) Again, in mosque schools of mainly South Asian origin the memorising and reciting of some of the ‘shahadas’, the six kalimahs, is a regular part of the memorisation

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cycle. Ostensibly part of aqidah (creed), they are similar to a Catholic child reciting the credo. (18) ‘adhkar’, the plural of ‘dhikr’ is an invocation that can take on many different forms – ‘Allah’, ‘La ilaha il Allah’, ‘Hu’, ‘Haq’, ‘Hayy’, any of the beautiful names of God and so on. They are most often associated with Sufi practice where they have developed into elaborate and sometimes lengthy litanies to be recited daily or weekly, individually or collectively. (19) The full-length robe worn by the teachers and boys in the mosque school. (20) ‘If Allah wills it so.’ (21) From the United States. (22) A Sufi shaykh with many students in the UK and the West. (23) ‘Students’, usually of a Sufi teacher. (24) Religious title used in South Asian contexts – similar to mawlana (Note 2). (25) ‘Religion.’ (26) Teachers in another local mosque school. (27) One of the main South Asian schools of thought to which many Pakistani heritage mosques in the UK affi liate (Birt & Lewis, 2011). (28) The other main South Asian school of thought making up the majority of Pakistaniheritage mosques in the UK (Birt & Lewis, 2011). (29) The reformist movement in Islam which has links to what has come to be known as Wahabism. (30) ‘To greet.’

10 ‘Binding and Shifting’: Language Continuity and Linguistic Change in Ultralingual Devotional Practices

Within recent conceptualisations of globalisation (Appaduari, 1996; Robertson, 1992), it is possible to understand religious practices as either sub-systemic forms of communication in themselves or as part of a general cultural ‘store’ from which other sub-systems draw. According to the sociologist Beyer (1994) they do both, constituting ‘a social sphere that manifests both the sociocultural particular and the global universal’. The role of language in both possibilities is obvious. Firstly, the language practices of both religious individuals and organisations retreat in the face of subsystemic pressures from elsewhere (for example, language shift as a result of economic or political migration). This can contribute to cultural homogenisation, or ‘the universalisation of the particular’. Secondly, subsystems such as human mobility and information technology have facilitated worldwide social networking and the revival of religious practices, including language practices with which they are associated, and give rise to instances of cultural heterogenisation, or ‘the particularisation of the universal’. Moreover, alongside these two ‘shifting’ and ‘binding’ concomitants of globalisation which, among other things, remind us of the metrolingualism of Otsuje and Pennycook (2010), we also witness the possibility of the convergence of sub-systems (such as entertainment, technology and mass electronic communication) in creating newer forms of religio-linguistic practices. This book has shared empirical data gathered from the sociolinguistic and religio-linguistic practices of young British Muslims which exemplify all three of these sociolinguistic phenomena. This chapter returns to some of the theoretical frameworks introduced in Chapter 4 and touched on elsewhere, and argues that the majority of studies ensuing from these important heuristics sometimes ignore the 160

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unique and very relevant language practices occurring in religious settings. In particular, settings such as diasporas and other transnational settings, where textual and devotional performances draw on, modify or counter practices from the ‘ethno-cultural heartlands’, are regular spaces for the recontextualisations and novel entextualisations of ultralingual devotional performance. This is especially relevant given the spearheading of this activity by younger, UK-born generations. The chapter also summarises the fi ndings of this book which has dealt with the two main devotional performance practices engaged in by many young UK Muslims. On the one hand, the book has focused on ultralingual liturgical (Qur’anic) literacy and its acquisition and it has also featured, on the other hand, the (mainly) ultralingual performance of devotional poetry and song. The linguistic connections between these two genres have been made clear and exemplified and the factors that make each broad genre distinct have been identified. This has been carried out by employing a time-sensitive perspective which has encompassed what I have characterised as relatively more stable and ‘traditional’ linguistic devotional performances of two decades ago and the more recent, often innovative, changes and transformations that characterise young British Muslim engagement in devotional performance of today. In such a way, it is hoped that some of the sociolinguistic theory that has prevailed in the past ten years, which has as its object the plotting of language practice in superdiverse spaces, has had something useful to contribute to the understanding of complex settings of language and religion. In previous chapters we have had occasion to mention the sociology of language and religion (SLR) project first publically outlined by Fishman in 2002 (Fishman, 2006) and subsequently fleshed out by others (Omoniyi, 2010; Pandharipande et al., 2019; Rosowsky, 2018a). A foundation for SLR was presented via a Decalogue of principles that any sociology of language and religion should attempt to address. Many of these principles are relevant to the language practices described in this book. In this conclusion, I will draw attention to those particular principles with which the subject matter of this book appears to align. For the sense of completeness, I am presenting the full set of principles below: Fishman’s Decalogue of Theoretical Principles for a Sociology of Language and Religion (I) (II) (III) (IV)

The language (or ‘variety’) of religion always functions within a larger multilingual/multivarietal repertoire. The variation posited in Principle 1, above, exists both intra-societally and inter-societally and may vary over time as well. Religious languages/varieties are more stable than others and impact their secular counterparts more than the latter do the form. A by-product of all of the forgoing characteristics of longstanding vernacular translations (‘saintly’ translatorship, greater linguistic

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contrastivity and the sheer weight of traditional usage itself) is their acquisition of a degree of sanctity of their own. (V) The rise and spread of newly sanctified and co-sanctified varieties (or also of less sanctified ones) within the sociolinguistic repertoire of a speech community renders that repertoire more complex and more functionally differentiated than heretofore. (VI) All sources of sociocultural change are also sources of change in the sociolinguistic repertoire vis-à-vis religion, including religious change per se. (VII) There are several reasons why multiple religious varieties may coexist within the same religious community. (VIII) The power and ubiquity of sanctified and co-sanctified languages exert a major conservative influence on the speed and direction of corpus planning and frequently serve as a counterweight to modernization emphases in the language-planning arena. (IX) However, the languages and varieties of religious functions are not as eternally unchanging as their custodians often imply. (X) Religious emphases ebb and flow and, as a result, so do their religious varieties too, as well as the impacts of these varieties on nonreligious usage and the impact of non-religious usage upon them. (Fishman, 2006: 14–24)

It is immediately obvious that Principle I is central to the ethnography of this book. Importantly, Fishman makes the significant inclusive claim for ‘variety’ alongside ‘language’. In much religious practice, a different register or language variety distinguishes devotional language from the spoken and written vernaculars of those taking part. In this book, a range of languages (or varieties) and their registers are deployed by the young people in their devotional practices: Classical Arabic (poetic variety), Classical Arabic (Qur’anic variety), Urdu, H-Punjabi and English. They also deploy a range of vernacular languages and varieties for the purposes of both wider communication and identity formation. This complexity not only reflects the cultural and linguistic sources that the young performers draw upon, but also relates in differing degrees to the multilingual and multivarietal worlds they live in. These repertoires are made up of both discrete languages and what Blommaert (2010) refers to as ‘bits and pieces’ of language, learned or acquired for specific purposes and discrete functions in identifiable domains. These language resources are crucial factors in these young people’s religio-linguistic identities. Although we have only touched briefly on doctrinal issues in this book, we have seen how ideological-theological considerations can shape language practices, as when the Salafi-oriented mosque school places greater emphasis on Qur’anic Arabic expertise than do the more Sufi-oriented mosque schools which, conversely, allow for devotional performance of poetry and song in a range of languages as well as their greater emphasis on akhlaq or manners (in Mosque School D in particular). However, as I have stressed through previous chapters, this is only a matter of emphasis.

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In all mosque schools, the centrality of Qur’anic Arabic literacy acquisition is both unquestioned and unquestionable. The Muslim world as a whole provides ample exemplification for Principle II, where variation is ever present in religious contexts. Even in Arabic-speaking majority countries, the particularised varieties of Classical Arabic (Qur’anic, poetic and scholarly) sit alongside Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and spoken varieties to provide a complex multivarietal profile. In the non-Arabic speaking parts of the Muslim world (by far the majority), national languages and other varieties function alongside a range of sacred languages (sacred and co-sanctified) to mirror such complexity. In respect of Principle III, other research (Ferguson, 1982; Fishman, 1989; Safran, 2008; Spolsky, 2003) has consistently shown that in circumstances of minority language attrition, where sacred languages are present alongside minority-spoken varieties, the former have greater staying power than the latter, to the extent that where spoken vernaculars have shifted completely to the majority language, the sacred language remains. Much of this is down to the centrality of religious practices in many people’s lives (individually as well as collectively) and their important role in their religious identities. Safran, for example, reminds us of how minimal familiarity with Hebrew ‘has been considered a sine qua non for believers … by almost all to whom Jewish identity remains important’ (Safran, 2008: 186). For the young people in this book, living in conditions of diaspora or at least the heritage of diaspora, the languages of religion take on an importance for identity that not only connects them with their heritage communities but also with the Muslim Ummah1 globally. In Chapter 8 I shared fi ndings that showed how some young British Muslims choose either to sidestep or to supplement their heritage languages with a turn to the Classical Arabic of poetry and other Arabiclanguage litanies, a turn that takes them beyond the standard Classical Arabic recitations for prayer that all Muslims generally need to know. This turn is part of a greater emphasis on a more pan-Islamic identity which, historically, was present in the early history of Islam but which since appears to have had alternating periods of dormancy and resurgence. It is argued that we are currently in a period of resurgence roughly ushered in by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and framed by the subsequent political and military involvement of the West in the Muslim world of the past 40 years (Hashmi, 2009). Principles IV and V can be mentioned together. The inevitability of the languages of sacred texts being associated with different spoken and written vernaculars (and soon superseded by them for communication purposes in those circumstances where they originally coincided) is a historical fact. This has happened in order to ensure the transfer of referential meaning to the faithful and is certainly due to the mobility of religions throughout time. This association in Islam, historically, has

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been between the sacred language and local vernaculars wherever the faith has spread outside its Arabic-speaking heartlands. Social and political conditions at the present moment, loosely bundled into the term ‘globalisation’, mean the sacred text is encountering newer vernaculars with which it needs to associate. Although a case can be argued for considering varieties of Persian, Urdu and Ottoman Turkish as having accrued to themselves a degree of co-sanctification due to their association with Islam in the past, it is perhaps too soon to see a similar outcome for the languages of colonialisation, particularly English. Yet, at least potentially, in a number of places in this book where devotional practice in the English language is referenced, it is possible to imagine the future emergence of an Islamic-inflected register of the English language. Emically, at least, there is a generational tension between those who see English as the language of secularity and colonisation and, therefore, inappropriate for devotional performance, and a younger generation who are beginning to enjoy and perform in the English language (see pp. 129 and 132). Many of the Islamic nasheeds in English suffer leakage from quite popular genres of contemporary music (rap, hip-hop, rock, ballad) and, as such, have not developed the sophisticated linguistic style of, for example, traditional English-language Christian hymns of the 19th century (Blake and Parry’s Jerusalem, for example, or Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven by Lyte) and, similarly, are far from the poetic prose of the King James Bible (Holy Bible KJV, 2011 [1611]). Furthermore, there is doubt whether merely performing devotional poetry and song in English is enough to warrant ‘co-sanctification’. The examples given by Fishman for co-sanctifi ed languages such as Lutheran German, Yiddish and Ladino themselves are already archaic and contrast with, on the one hand, the sacred languages of Hebrew and, on the other, vernaculars such as Pennsylfawnisch and/or English. In many translations of Islamic texts into English, especially but not exclusively of the Qur’an, liberal use has been made of the archaicisms of the King James Bible (see Ali, 1934; Pickthall, 1993 [1930]). The translators into English have obviously deemed such language to be already associated with devotional performance and transposed it, sometimes wholesale, over to the translated Arabic text. This usage, however, fi nds its own tension in the tendency in more modern translations to remove the archaic language forms in order to make meaning more transparent and accessible for modern readers and audiences (for example, Abdel-Haleem, 2004). To what extent the ‘co-sanctification’ process needs archaic forms for the sanctity to become real for users is an interesting question. The evidence of recently composed and published nasheeds in English suggests there is no return to these forms in contemporary nasheed writing. In English-language Christian tradition, which has had more time to develop a co-sanctified variety of English for devotional purposes, with the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer being obvious examples, archaism persists. The

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language of the compositions of the contemporary Orthodox composer, John Taverner, retains such archaisms. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Thou that art highly favoured. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! The Lord is with thee. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! Blessèd art thou among women. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? (‘The Annunciation’ from The Protecting Veil, Taverner, 1988)

The social, cultural and political context of the past 20 years, both in terms of the world more generally and, in particular, in respect of the Muslim community in the UK, has shaped significant changes in the language practices of the UK mosque school. Fishman’s Principle VI applies strongly here. The current multilingual and ethnically fluid nature of what were once ethno-culturally and linguistically stable institutions reflects what Vertovec and others (Creese & Blackledge, 2018; Vertovec, 2007) have called the superdiverse age. As demonstrated in this book, the multivarietal and multilingual contexts of many heritage communities are complexified by the presence and performance of liturgical and devotional practice in a range of sacred and co-sanctified languages. The emergence of English as an Islamic devotional language only adds to this complexity. The admittedly limited context of four mosque schools in a city in the north of England may not claim any universal representativeness for sacred text acquisition or associated ultralingual devotional performance, yet it is not difficult to understand some of the reasons why two or more religious varieties frequently occur together (Principle VII). The boys in this book regularly take part in devotional practices in sacred languages such as Classical Arabic and, through the performance of verse, co sanctified varieties of Urdu and H-Punjabi. The ‘conservative influence’ (Principle VIII) of the sacred language within the lives and practices of these young Muslims – enhanced by the recent turn to Classical Arabic made by so many – confi rms earlier fi ndings (Ferguson, 1982; Safran, 2008) that when minority spoken vernaculars may be shifting to the majority language, the sacred language remains stable and protected. What the future holds for the languages of devotional practice within this and other communities is difficult to predict (Principles IX and X), although it is likely that, eventually, a co-sanctified variety of English will emerge suitable for devotional performance alongside or perhaps instead of the heritage co-sanctified varieties – a variety that will be able to satisfy the criticism of some that English is

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inappropriate for such purposes and functions. The process for this cosanctification is not a formal one and any eventual authentication of English would appear to include a strong intergenerational element, with the younger members of the community feeling more at ease with their use of English for devotional purposes, at least in respect of poetry and song. Our parents are not really understanding that there is such a thing as naat/nasheed in English. All their lives they’ve heard naat in Urdu. They’ve never thought someone could be praising the Prophet in English also. (Haroon, 25, performer of devotional poetry)

*** The lives of many young British Muslims, therefore, are shaped to varying degrees by the devotional performances described in the preceding chapters. In terms of language, much of this practice occurs multilingually across a range of languages and registers. Where there is linguistic distance between their active language proficiency and the language or register of performance, much of this takes place, as I have argued, ultralingually. At the same time, however, we have also seen an ever-increasing degree of devotional performance taking place in the English language. Where this is the case, there is the much stronger possibility of accessing and/or communicating referential or propositional meaning as a performer or as a listener. There is, therefore, in any one individual a dual stance towards the language and its meaning in devotional performance. Although there appears to be a significant difference between acquiring proficiency in the decoding and reciting of Classical Arabic in the Qur’an and the various devotional performances of poetry and song, there are a number of clear parallels. Firstly, when performers are reciting poems and songs in languages and registers in which they have no active proficiency, the skill they are demonstrating is one of decoding and artful articulation. This is the case with the acquisition of Qur’anic literacy, for as we saw in Chapters 6–9, decoding is only a first stage in acquisition and this is generally followed by acquiring the conventions for tajweed, or artful enunciation, and the ahkam, rules of artful recitation. The aesthetics of recitation have only been touched on briefly in this book as very few of the young people in this study go on to become professional reciters, or qaris, which is the level of performance where the aesthetic qualities of different styles and timbres become significant. Nelson (2001), in probably the best English-language account of the art of Qur’anic recitation available, 2 presents the full panoply of aesthetic considerations in her analysis of Qur’anic reciters from Egypt – probably the most influential school of reciters of the 20th century. 3 At the level of the young people appearing in this book, these considerations are limited to the pursuit of accuracy in pronunciation, the conventions for adhering to rules on vowel lengthening, consonant elision, pausing and, for advanced learners, nasalisation. In their performance of song and poetry, there is

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less attention paid to (and less knowledge of) such details and accurate performance is often determined by careful imitation and peer learning. However, the ultralingual aspect of this artful decoding remains similar. In both cases, there is little or no access to propositional or referential meaning4 and performance draws upon those features of the verbal arts identified by Bauman some time ago – ‘special codes’, ‘conventional openings and closings’, ‘stylistic devices’ (although these, strictly speaking, are a property of the text rather than the performer), ‘prosodic patterns of tempo, stress and pitch’ and ‘special paralinguistic patterns of voice quality and vocalisation’ (Bauman, 1975). The twin Bauman conditions for performance in the verbal arts apply in both of these contexts. ‘The assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence’ (Bauman, 1975: 293) defi nes the performance nature of the recitations, and an audience undergoes an ‘enhancement’ or heightening of experience where appreciation of the act of expression itself is possible above and beyond any referential content. Audiences listen to these ultralingual performances for the recognition and appreciation of their sound and the artful abilities of the performers. Their enhancement of experience comes through their recognition and appreciation. This is primarily an evaluation of sound rather than meaning and, as such, is similar to how music might be experienced, albeit with the extra emotional experience provided by its religious context. Therefore, whether an audience is listening to a recitation of the sacred text or a devotional poem, the experience is similar. At the same time, the orientation to the performance, by both performer and audience, is one of reverence and an understanding that such performance is communicating a spiritual message regardless of the specific meaning of the words recited. This gives the practice added emotional and aural meaning (or ‘signification’, Nattiez, 1990) which has multiple sources. There is the knowledge and awareness that these texts – particularly so with the Qur’an itself – are the sacred centre of their identities as Muslim believers. The presence of the Qur’an in their lives both aurally and as a sacred artefact announces its centrality in homes, places of worship, vehicles and even on items of jewellery. Regardless of individual levels of religious knowledge, a keen historical perspective provides a link between their own practices and those of the past. The sacred text spans the distance in time between the listener and the original revelation of 1400 years ago. Even if not always explicit, this sense lies not far below the surface of the experience. On page 2, I stated that an ulterior aim behind the writing of this book was to challenge the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of ultralingual devotional practices. In the Muslim world, only 420 million individuals have Arabic as their fi rst language. This leaves the vast majority (approximately 1.4 billion) as non-Arabic speakers. Leaving to one side trained religious scholars who may have a high degree of Arabic mastery, it is clear that most Muslims in the world experience aspects of devotional

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practice in languages they do not always understand in a referential sense. They experience ultralingual performance on perhaps a daily basis. For all, Classical Arabic is the sacred language experienced mostly in this way. But, as we have seen in this book, other languages, co-sanctified or merely locally available, can be experienced in this way too. These multilingual repertoires, made up of discrete languages including English, and more fluid and mobile language resources, are central to the lives of young British Muslims. Their devotional performances form an important part of their religious identities. Ultralingual acquisition and recitation of the Qur’an is the raison d’être of the mosque school, in the UK and throughout the Muslim world. It cannot be dismissed as a place for ‘rote learning’ that prevents children having a ‘richer appreciation of their religion’ (Cherti & Bradley, 2011a: 68). Increasingly complementing the ultralingual recitation of the sacred text in the mosque school are devotional performances in other languages and genres which, for many, serve to shape and reinforce their religious and linguistic identities. This book, I hope, has provided some evidence for suggesting that such devotional language practices should be re-evaluated for their importance, their value and their meaning in the lives of the many young people involved. Notes (1) The Arabic word denoting the ‘worldwide Muslim nation’. (2) Labib as-Said’s (1975) The Recited Qur’an: A History of the First Recorded Version is an excellent account of how the Egyptian school of recitation piloted the fi rst ever recording of the complete Qur’an, together with a fascinating description of the controversies evoked by such a venture. (3) Although their position as the most influential school has waned slightly with the development of other schools of recitation, particularly the Gulf school of reciters, their influence and popularity still remains strong in the Muslim world. (4) Osborne (2016) calls this ‘non-discursive meaning’.

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Online Resources Showcasing or Supporting Young Muslim Devotional Performers Harris J – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_-McEvEGvI Quran4Kids – see http://www.quran4kids.co.uk/ Shahe Mardan – see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMQtlO2k9rWItk3TzKolwNg The Keighley Munshids – see http://www.abuzahra.org/keighley-munshids/ Wajid Akhtar – see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPaE-5CPRZe 15E9 GEwI_tQ

Index

Arabic (spoken) xii, 18, 74, 100, 115, 118 Aramaic 75

Ferguson, Charles 1, 9, 31, 87, 163, 165 Fishman, Joshua xii, 1–2, 10, 40, 48, 64, 71, 77, 78, 84, 87, 90, 101, 131, 133, 138, 161–165

Bangladesh/Bengali xii, 5, 10, 12, 23, 74, 80, 90, 128, 142 Bauman Richard 25, 38, 49–51, 54, 55, 59–69, 89, 103, 167 Bennett, Brian 10, 64, 77 Bible 47, 131, 132, 164 bilingual xi, 25 Buddhism 75, 78, 92

gender 7–9 Ghana 54, 90 Gladiator 52 Granth Sahib 26, 92, 131, 148 Gujerati 74, 88 Gurdwara 15, 92, 148 Hebrew/Biblical Hebrew xii, 38, 51, 64, 72, 75, 83, 88–89, 92, 163, 164 heritage language xii, 1, 15, 18, 20, 24, 31, 36, 99, 129, 139, 142, 163 Hinduism 29, 36, 39, 44, 75, 78, 90

Cameroon 88 Christianity xiii, 22, 36, 39, 56, 70, 75, 78, 95, 131, 134, 158, 164 Classical Arabic 5, 10, 12, 15–18, 25–31, 36–38, 41–46, 65, 73–73, 82–84 99–101, 113–115, 125–127, 138–140, 162–168 co-sanctification 49, 75, 77, 78, 131, 138, 141, 162–166

identity 2, 6–7, 15, 21, 24–25, 40–44, 91, 113, 120, 162–163 Indonesia 8, 72, 88–89, 123 Islamophobia xii, 19, 87, 147–150

Decalogue (Fishman) 2, 131, 161–166 Derrida 51 devotional (religious) language 3–4, 40, 48, 86, 162 devotional poetry and song 1, 3, 6–8, 18, 27, 29–30, 37, 40–42, 45–47, 59, 70–77, 124, 128, 161, 164, 166 diaspora xi, 7, 10, 16–18, 31, 40–42, 133

Jewish xi, 20, 26, 29, 38, 72, 88, 92, 122 Karl Jenkins 52 language and music 53–61 language maintenance xii, 49, 84 language practice 2–4, 13–14, 26, 38, 40, 48, 82–88, 99, 100–113, 118–120, 160–168 language shift 5, 13–14, 17, 31, 40–41, 49, 71–72, 76, 80–82, 86–88, 133, 140, 160 language variety xi, 9, 45, 162 Latin 26, 55, 56, 60, 75, 137 linguistic repertoire xii, 1, 7, 11, 17, 24, 42, 45, 74, 88, 113, 115, 124, 133–134, 137, 162

Ecclesiatical Greek 64, 78 Egypt/Egyptian 29, 62–63, 70, 107, 118, 122, 151, 166, 168 endogamy/exogamy 82, 90, 134, 140 entextualisation 49, 67–70, 116, 161 ethnography 3, 4, 8, 11, 33–36, 44–46

180

Index

linguistic/language resources 1, 5, 11, 41–45, 48, 74, 85, 101–102, 111, 115–116, 124, 133, 162, 168 liturgical (literacy) xii, 1, 3, 7, 9, 38–40, 82, 86, 106–107, 113, 119–121 madrassa(h) xii, 10, 87, 141, 144–145, 153–156 mawlid 22, 26–31, 125 memorisation 1, 12–14, 39, 60, 65, 89, 93, 98, 101–106, 121, 123, 149, 152 metrolingualism 48, 85, 111, 160 Mirpuri 10, 13, 26, 36, 79–83, 90, 110, 133–134 mobile/digital technology 15–17, 98, 121, 140 monolingualism 2, 22 mosque school 1, 5, 10, 13–14, 35–45, 79–86, 91–107, 109–122, 124–139, 141–158 multilingual/multilingualism 2, 7, 18, 31, 36, 41–44, 109, 112 music 8, 20–23, 42–45, 52–59, 71–72, 75–77, 89, 127–131, 164, 167 naat 15–17, 21–22, 28, 30–31, 40–47, 71–73, 125–140, 166 nasheed 15, 30, 42–44, 71, 126–139, 164, 166 New Labour 6 Omoniyi, Tope xii, 1, 161 oral 14–15, 39–40, 61, 66, 69–70, 93, 96–97, 113, 128 orature 78 Pahari/Pothwari 10, 12–17, 31, 36, 72–74, 80–84, 99–100, 137, 140 Pakistan/Pakistani xii, 10, 12–13, 26, 36, 40, 46, 74, 79–82, 90, 99, 133, 133–134 Pali 64, 75, 92 pedagogy 5, 39, 97, 104–105, 110, 144–145, 149–153 performance (Bauman) 38, 49–51, 55, 59–69, 89, 103, 167 Persian 5, 14, 23–24, 29–31, 47, 53, 71, 77, 128, 140, 141, 164 poetics 49, 69 Polish xi, 12, 90

181

prayer 12, 14, 21, 34–38, 61–67, 84, 92–98, 103–107, 123, 128–129, 135, 151, 158, 163 Punjabi 5, 15, 17–18, 23–28, 31, 41, 46–47, 71–76, 80–83, 112, 123–124, 134–140, 162, 165 qa’idah 66, 93–94, 107, 117, 122, 150–152 qasidah 15, 20, 23–25, 29, 41–43, 46, 128, 130, 137, 140 qawwali 15, 22–24 radicalisation 2, 87, 101, 109–110 reading 5, 12, 14–16, 39, 48, 50, 61, 69, 75, 89, 93, 97, 103, 112, 119–123, 128, 138 religious classical 1, 10, 54, 64, 75, 77, 82, 87 reversing language shift (RLS) 49, 140 Rumi 6, 20, 24, 26, 53 sacred language 1, 10, 31, 38, 66–67, 75–77, 86, 99–100, 111 Salafi 6, 44, 47, 77, 92, 95, 107, 114, 156, 162 Sanskrit 26, 64, 75, 78 Sikh/Sikhism 26, 44, 54, 88, 92, 136–137, 148 Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) ix, 1, 131, 161 Somalia/Somali 10, 92, 99–101, 112–113, 115–117, 142 South Asia/Asian xii, 3–6, 10, 12, 30, 36, 74, 80–83, 159 Standard English 14, 36, 100, 112, 115–116, 119, 123 Sufi 6, 18, 23, 27–29, 32, 44, 46, 107, 127, 143, 159, 162 superdiversity 5, 11, 85–86, 91, 109–111, 122, 132–133 supplementary school xiii, 2, 85, 88, 91, 109, 120–122, 149–151 Sylheti 10, 23, 74, 88 Tamil 90 tariqah 6, 29, 32, 46, 143, 158 teachers 79–81, 104–107, 141–158 Torah 26, 92, 131 transcription 41, 65, 69, 72, 116–117

182

Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

translanguaging 48, 85–86, 100–101, 118 translation 15, 16, 27, 29, 30, 56, 70, 116, 131, 161 transliteration 25, 27, 29, 65, 73, 116–117, 135

Urdu 5, 10, 12–19, 23–36, 41–42, 46–41, 71–74, 79–88, 99, 112, 124–140, 164–166

ultralingual 25–26, 37–42, 51–90 Upanishads 131

Yemeni 10, 18, 85, 99–100, 112 Yiddish 29, 83, 122, 132, 164

vignette 9, 11–31