Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh: The Poetics of Popular Preaching 1838606009, 9781838606008

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

Islamic South Asia Series Series Editor Ruby Lal, Emory University

Advisory Board Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University Stephen F. Dale, Ohio State University Rukhsana David, Kinnaird College for Women Michael Fisher, Oberlin College Marcus Fraser, Fitzwilliam Museum Ebba Koch, University of Vienna David Lewis, London School of Economics Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London Ron Sela, Indiana University Bloomington Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam Titles

Sexual and Gender Diversity in the Muslim World: History, Law and Vernacular Knowledge, Vanja Hamzic The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India, Pushkar Sohoni Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State: The End of Religious Pluralism, Umber Bin Ibad The Hindu Sufis of South Asia: Partition, Shrine Culture and the Sindhis in India, Michel Boivin Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh: The Poetics of Popular Preaching, Max Stille

Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh The Poetics of Popular Preaching Max Stille

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Max Stille 2020 Max Stille has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Max Stille All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN HB: 978-1-8386-0600-8 ebook: 978-1-8386-0602-2 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0601-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures List of abbreviations Acknowledgements

vii viii ix

Introduction 1

1

Towards a multilevel analysis of sermons as a narrative and performative genre Sermon gatherings in their political context The political between language and emotion Popular culture, public Islam and global preaching Sources and transliteration Structure of the book

14

Waz mahfils: Genre, actors and space

27

Islamic sermons in Bangladesh: From Arabic Friday ritual to popular Bengali forms Popular preachers between roles and regions Timing and preparing the mahfil The production of mahfil space Arriving at the mahfil and framing the sermon Religious emotions and political participation Consensus and concretization Mediatization, female audiences and repeating the new

2

Aesthetics of religious language: Code switching and connoisseurship of the poetic Framing religious and social speech acts in introductions of sermons Expanding and naturalizing ritual competency Religious nationalism and the politics of religious language Translation, argumentation and connoisseurship Quotation of Urdu aphorisms and poems

3 6 19 23 25

28 34 41 46 52 55 64 67

75 80 88 92 96 103

Contents

vi

3

Heroes of courage and compassion: Public piety between mobilization and melodrama Mobilizing heroic courage Cool heroes, emotional wives Bodily disintegration for the flag of Islam From divine mercy to human compassion Passionate Prophet Tears of the aggrieved mother Linking emotionalizing narratives to the collective climax of final prayers

4

Melodic narration: Performative exegesis, joint self-affection and musical valuation Melodies in Islamic sermons, the Quran and poems Learning the melodic texture of prose chanting Chanting and the sensory guidance of dramatic narration Chanting and the performative interpretation of canonical texts Songs and disentangling critique of melodies in sermons Culture as nature: Prose chanting and self-affection Music–rhetorical encoding of emotions and political attitudes

5

113 115 118 121 128 135 142 147

153 154 157 160 165 168 174 179

Humour: From ridiculing the Other to parody of waz mahfils 191 Othering and unity in populist humour From role play to parody

193 200

Outlook: From comprehensive to comparative genre analysis

211

Notes Bibliography Index

223 258 280

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

‘Madrasas Mushroom with State Favour’ Two examples of poster announcements Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’, 51:37–52:55 Salvic expectations and melody Statement and melody condensed Antithesis between merciless mundane justice and the merciful justice of God Staff notation of parody

7

45 183 185 186 186 209

Abbreviations AL

Awami League

BJI

Bangladesh Jamaat-e Islami

BNP

Bangladesh Nationalist Party

HI

Hefazat-e Islam

IS

Islamic State

RAB

Rapid Action Battalion

s.a.w.

ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam (Eulogy on the Prophet Muhammad)

TJ

Tablighi Jamaat

Acknowledgements This book is an updated and shortened version of my dissertation ‘Poetics of Popular Preaching: Waz Mahfils in Contemporary Bangladesh’, which I defended at Heidelberg University in 2017. During intensive years of learning and researching, I have received generous support from a number of people and institutions. I would like to express my deep gratitude to all those who encouraged, inspired and questioned me, in so many different ways. I owe the greatest debt to many people in Bangladesh whose insights fundamentally shaped my view of this topic: the audiences of waz mahfils where I was present; the preachers whom I accompanied and interviewed; and all the people I met during my fieldwork in Bangladesh, who defied stereotypes of inaccessible religious spheres by graciously sharing their perceptions and world views with me. I salute Tafsirbhai, the only person who has probably listened to the recordings I deal with in this book more often and more thoroughly than me. I am also particularly grateful for the assistance given by various madrasas, from Deoband in India to Jatrabari in Dhaka and Muradpur in Chittagong. My supervisors Professor Dr Hans Harder and Professor Dr Susanne Enderwitz patiently allowed me to develop my own perspective. During my PhD, I coordinated the project ‘Listening Communities’ on the transcultural dynamics of Islamic sermons together with my colleague and friend Jan Scholz. His knowledge, collegiality, friendship and support have been a constant anchor and motivation. I am grateful that at my new research home at the Center for the History of Emotion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, I had the time to turn my bulky dissertation into a book. I thank the centre’s director Professor Dr Ute Frevert and in particular my mentor and colleague Professor Dr Margrit Pernau. I feel overwhelmed by gratitude for the generosity of many colleagues and friends who challenged, enabled and supported me during research and writing. Every single name here represents a long story and an invaluable contribution, and I beg forgiveness for those I should have mentioned but did not: Sharaf Ahmed, Tapan Bagchi, Zara Barlas, Jamie Barret, Jamila Begum, Sadia Bhajwa, Awwal Biswas, Salauddin Biswas, Amélie Blom, Nusrat Chowdhury, Anwar Chowdhury, Habib Chowdhury, Thibaut d’Hubert, Deepra Dandekar, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Abu Dayen, Sabine Dorpmüller, Fletcher Dubois, Richard Gauvin, Anubrato Ghatak, Rajarshi Ghose, Thomas Gugler, Johanna Hahn, Tofajjol Hak, Lotte Hoek, Arian Hopf, Shamsul Hoque, Shahadat Hosen, Tofajjol Hosen, Nazrul Islam, ‘Digital’ Khaled, Hans-Martin Kunz, Darya Lenz, Muntassir Mamun, Ali Mian, Lisa Mitchell, Ainoon Naher, Abul Kasem Nuri, Carla Petievich, Abdul Quyyum, Mizanur Rahman, Saifur Rahman, Imke Rajamani,

x

Acknowledgements 

Nikolaus Rentrop, Karola Rockmann, Rebecca Sauer, Mascha Schulz, Arup Sen, Arup Sengupta, Dina Siddiqi, Tony Stewart, Petra Thiel, Torsten Tschacher, Moin Uddin, Salah Uddin, Raphaël Voix, Ines Weinrich, Saymon Zakaria and Arifuz Zaman. I am grateful to my parents, Sabine Kroker-Stille and Frank Stille, and thank my daughter, Alia Tara Stille, for being patient and impatient in just the right way.

Introduction

The preacher bounces down the brightly lit and colourfully decorated path. He passes stalls perfumed with the aroma of snacks and sweetmeats. He is escorted by an entourage of followers chanting slogans. The audience joins in enthusiastically: ‘God is great! Oh Prophet! Long live the martyrs of Kerbela! Enemies of the saints, atheists, beware!’ Hanging on the bamboo posts supporting the roof, bright neon lights illuminate the tent, the stage for the preacher and the men squatting by the stage. About 8,000 mostly young men have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of their favourite preacher for the past few hours. They liked the preachers up to this point, but they eagerly waited for Tophājjal Hosen, who was advertised on the posters and whom they knew from audio recordings and maybe even videos. They had left the district town to sit on the field in the vicinity of a shrine in eastern Bangladesh to hear this man give a sermon. The current preacher, who had paused in his sermon when the chanting started, continues to speak even after Hosen and his followers mount the stage and sit down next to him. The men in the audience, however, become increasingly restless and the current speaker can no longer hold the audience’s attention despite bringing up their favourite topics: he narrates accounts of life and death, suffering and strength from the times of the Prophet and the Day of Judgement, and does so in a melodic rhythm. The audience quiets down as Hosen starts his sermon with a calm and serene recitation of Arabic ritual formulas. Now it is time to dive deep into the Prophet’s world unfolding before them. The dialogues of the Prophet with his dear ones remind the listeners of their own personal relationships. At the same time, they marvel at the miraculous strengths that these revered figures show in the difficult situations they endure. They feel the rising tension as well as the resolving mercy in the actions and words of the Prophet, his family members and friends. Hosen has a beautiful voice, and he adds charming melodies to what he says. The audience moves together and is moved together. Hosen’s words assure them that the Prophet reciprocates their own feelings of closeness to him. Hosen chants: My Prophet cries a stream of tears. The companions say: ‘Master, why did you shed tears?’ My Prophet calls out: ‘O companions, listen up, (I tell you), which people are my friends! One thousand four hundred years, one thousand four hundred and fifty years from now, my crazily loving community will sit down to listen about me, the Prophet, hour after hour, night after night. When they hear the words of my, the Prophet’s, sadness, they will moan, “Oh, ah.” Some will shed a rushing stream (jhar jhar kare) of tears.’ …

2

Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh My Prophet says: ‘Oh companions, don’t be surprised! You will be witnesses: I, the Prophet, am telling you that my community from that time will be friends of me, the Prophet!’1

A second sermon gathering is held in a more protected space, the interior courtyard of a religious school (madrasa) with an adjacent mosque. It is the fifty-fifth such gathering organized here. The listeners, bearded students of this madrasa, are dressed in white tunics and loose-fitting cotton trousers and wear prayer caps. Before his sermon, Imrān Mājˡhārī (Mazhari), a teacher at a madrasa in another part of the city, allows the students to show their own skills. They recite the Quran in Arabic or a number of Hadith in Arabic and Bengali, or present a self-authored devotional song that urges, ‘Don’t forget the Mawla’s telephone number.’ For this audience, Mazhari’s discourse is quite specialized. He constantly quotes Quranic passages in Arabic interwoven with many untranslated words, maxims or quotations from scholars of the Deoband tradition in Urdu, the medium of instruction at the school, and addresses the young men as doston (friends). Mazhari places emphasis on generating the passions of interior knowledge (ʿilm-e bāṭiner josh) through exterior knowledge (ʿilm-e ẓāhir), thereby stressing the ideal of closeness to the Prophet via the mediation of the sunna and the adoption of its teaching in everyday practice and individual striving. When he switches between languages, Mazhari also changes his style of speaking. The audience appreciates these frequent shifts as much as his jokes about fools who deem themselves scholars or about competing Islamic movements. They huddle together to keep warm against the chilly night air but are attentive and voice their assent. Nevertheless, their responses are plain and sober, in line with the spatial decoration, and the study session will end on time, around midnight. The behavioural codes of the madrasa are maintained under the supervision of its teachers. A third kind of sermon takes place at the annual mass gatherings on the five-acre parade ground in Chittagong. These gatherings are conducted by preacher and MP Delowar Hossain Sayeedi and party organizations of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e Islami (BJI). The usual means of directing audience responses using visual contact with the preacher’s entourage is supplemented by elaborate crowd control. Collection boxes for donations are provided nearby. Workers support Sayeedi by inciting sloganeering and urging those who leap up in excitement to sit down again. The attendants are filmed from above. Joining such a gathering may be taken to signal supporting the BJI’s cause. Sayeedi addresses his gatherings as if they are a strong Islamic movement working to establish an Islamic state, and projects an image of the gathering as masculine engagement of those who do not ‘want to die as cowards, serving the unbelievers and polytheists’. He emphasizes that his gatherings are banned by the government, while ‘song, theatre, pujā, bibi gān, gājir gīt’ are freely held. He addresses the government and ‘reports’ on his political activities in parliament or what has been written about him in the newspapers. His sermons are interspersed with explicit references to identity politics, stringent attacks on political enemies and refutations of accusations against him: ‘We don’t do politics in the name of religion. But we’re doing religious politics’ (dharmer nāme āmˡrā rājniti kari nā. dharmīẏa rājˡnīti kari). This book examines Islamic sermons held in Bengali, the mother tongue of about 10 per cent of the Muslim population worldwide. Surveying a mass religious

 Introduction 3 and participatory public practice of the labouring classes,2 I go beyond categories of security discourse to understand how popular preaching shapes roles and rules of what can be said, imagined and felt. Speaking to research on popular culture and subaltern formations, Islamic revival and the crisis of secularism,3 I show how musical performance, heightened emotions and poetic expression are part and parcel of popular religious practice, and that religious communication is part of popular culture. Suggesting new ways to interpret musical and performative poetics of Islamic speech, I call for rethinking the role of the senses and religious aesthetics in public piety.4 With insights from narratology and performance studies, I speak to new conceptualizations of the public. I highlight the role of communicative conventions, speech genres and the power of vernacular rhetoric.5 Deviating from conceptions of the public sphere that concentrate on deliberation, dialogue and secular political expression, I unravel public preaching as civic participation that shapes subjectivities and ways of imagining and embodying community with possibilities distinct from media such as newspapers or spaces such as the coffee house.6 I argue that the utopian, activist and conservative roles Islamic discourse offers to Muslim audiences are shaped by communication practices in regional contexts. The poetics of popular preaching coordinate the consensus of public crowds and the melodrama of the self and the community. Unravelling these poetics contributes to understanding widespread riddles of the social and emotional roles of Muslims in Bangladesh and Muslim societies at large. Global Islam is not pitted against local Islams, but gains its meaning through concrete acts of mediation. This book proposes thinking about forms of Islamic mediation that are shaped by religious hermeneutics as much as by audiences and communication culture.

Towards a multilevel analysis of sermons as a narrative and performative genre Analysing sermon gatherings (waz mahfils) in present-day Bangladesh, I describe different levels of a speech event that weaves together theological deliberations with narrative and rhetorical artifice to evoke community feeling, bodily activity and collective as well as individual imagination. In so doing, I give serious consideration to a cultural and religious practice that has so often been underestimated by ‘secularists’, ‘modernists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ alike as either propaganda or unknowledgeable speech of the rural classes. On the contrary, I take seriously what the sermon gatherings in Bangladesh tell us about and across categories such as entertainment, religious teaching and political mobilization. I argue that they create a space with its own dynamics, common characteristics and rules of discourse. These characteristics and rules constitute the genre’s ‘poetics’, a term that also highlights the affinities of the sermons’ discourse to traditions and performances of oral literature. I closely follow the ways in which the spoken (and chanted) word engages the listeners’ linguistic repertoires, their ideas regarding human passion and action, and their joint bodily response to the sermons’ musical dimensions. Through this multi-layered

4

Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

analysis, I aim to do justice to the richness and complexity of performances that are part of a long-established, perpetually repeated and finely tuned cultural practice of preachers engaging with their audiences. To disentangle their poetics requires nuanced considerations. The words of the preachers are linked to histories of form and reflections on expression, and they create narrative situations, navigating through possible worlds with great skill. Throughout the book I adduce resources developed by literary theory, but at the same time expand them to include the intricacies of performance that involve an artful interaction between audience and performer.7 Affective and bodily dimensions of Islamic preaching have been the most exciting advances in the field over the last decade.8 This book in many ways builds on current approaches to cultures of piety as developed by anthropologists. It pushes them further with a closer analysis of the speech events themselves. While I include the materiality of communication, particularly the bodily dimensions of sound and music, I highlight its connection to, and interaction with, theological, linguistic and narrative features. The practice of sermon gatherings is significant as a process of public communication that is sensory and pious, imaginative and bodily, emotional and theological. For instance, I trace the question of how the specific form of mediation relates to some of the most important religious expectations of devotion to the Prophet, namely his mercy and intercession on the Day of Judgement. I also trace different ways of evoking emotions and the various emotions that are brought forth. As cool male heroism and female compassion show, these can be gendered, but at the same time go beyond a single possibility for the construction of masculinity. When tracing the performance and response processes of the sermons, temporality is central. At the outset of this book, I described the eager anticipation of audiences for preachers.9 Preachers are proud when they engage the audience so that they stay glued to their seats for the whole gathering. Gatherings take around six hours, and a single sermon may take between one and three hours. While audience members might join gatherings later or sometimes leave in the middle, they most often stay for several hours. Routine listening and even boredom might be part of their experience, as are concentrated immersion and a joint reaction to the extent that they constitute co-performance. But the sermons’ distinctive parts and the narratives they contain constantly help the listeners to orient themselves on their micro journey through each sermon and gathering, and make possible reorientations, augmentations and shifts. Each sermon in turn connects to a series of sermons that listeners have heard on prior occasions. To do justice to both of these temporal processes, I follow the progression of the distinctive parts of the sermons and review the features that cut across all sermons. This enables me to identify the commonplace elements as well as reveal different approaches of preachers at specific points in the sermons. The participation in sermon gatherings entails multiple learning processes. These relate to, but are not limited to, the explicit teaching in the sermons about norms of right and wrong or clear value judgements, for example, about ethics, gender norms or religious doctrine. The preachers’ didactic models are more complex. They often communicate teachings by encapsulating them in long narratives or comments on valued texts. These narratives range from Islamic stories about prophets and saints to everyday incidents, while interpreted texts cover the Quran and Hadith as well as Urdu

 Introduction 5 and Bengali poems. Which models do the sermons allow listeners to try out and relate to? What are the modes of perception and human interaction, of feeling with and for others, of utterance and action? Reception and learning processes depend on the specific ways in which the sermon gatherings engage and address their listeners. Long narratives can offer the audience different patterns of identification with their heroes and merge religious and human experience; linguistic choices relate to questions of identity and religious expertise; different forms of address include the listeners as part of different collectives. None of these processes represents the totality of any of the listeners’ subjectivity, and none is linked to actions in a direct way, but this does not render them less meaningful. The sermon gatherings offer religiously sanctioned forms of discourse with a high degree of social acceptance among the lower middle classes. This mixture allows for a particular kind of sociality (in this sense similar to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of āḍḍā in urban Kolkata) and connoisseurship that is linked to the expression of collective sentiments ranging from resentment and laughter at opponents to compassion towards secular and religious heroes.10 Throughout this book, I reflect on potentialities and understandings of complex performances, of directed, but also of undirected, reception processes; I do not assume automated and unilineal effects. In the homosocial spaces of sermon gatherings, different forms of masculinity are performed, ranging from tearful softness to heroic self-sacrifice. Preachers and their audiences are not merely engaged in spreading a unified set of ideas; they are actors who shape and are shaped by, in reciprocal and dynamic ways, cultural and political negotiation, religious truths and individual sensitivities. Emphasizing the multiple layers of what the sermons offer to their audiences is important in order to avoid reductionist and potentially Othering perspectives. I say this also because, given the focus of the majority of publications on ‘mainstream’ Islam in Bangladesh, there is a danger of reducing waz mahfils to instances of the propagation of a unified project of Islamic activism with a teleology of militancy and unilinear social change.11 Such a view misses the multivocality of the sermons and the contentions between different actors, and it bars us from taking into account the motivations of preachers and listeners. In contradistinction to such a hermeneutics of suspicion that still remains far removed from communication practices, I observed specific aesthetic forms and finely tuned interactions that make joining public religious congregations worthwhile. Closely listening to and evaluating the sermons for me presents a chance to think about the public role of Islam in more processual ways. Criticism of Islam or Islamic positions makes way for questions about how public communication and mediation, aesthetics and sociabilities work, and allows for criticism of, for example, exclusion mechanisms of public addresses, pseudo-participation or emotionalization of political communication. Bangladesh is a particularly promising but also challenging place to lay out such an approach. It is particularly promising because of the region’s long, multifaceted and continuous Islamic and non-Islamic traditions that pervade and have formed the language and culture of the region. It is at the same time particularly difficult because

6

Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

of the domination of developmental or fact-oriented research with very limited ‘global’ scholarship not only on Bengali Islam but also on cultural history and popular culture.12 Whether as an effect or as a cause of this dearth, Bangladesh is surprisingly little known beyond those with some personal connection to it despite the fact that Bengali is among the languages most widely spoken by Muslims, and that there is a large global presence of Bengalis because of their long-standing and ever-increasing migration. In the next section I provide for the non-specialists some of the most essential political and cultural contexts of the sermon gatherings from 2012 to 2016 when I undertook my research. This is an important foundation to understand how waz mahfils, and the analysis in this book, are situated in the Bangladeshi public. I will focus on events since approximately the new millennium, only recalling the wider history of Bangladesh as a backdrop to understanding the perceptions and constructions during that time. This is important as it allows us to understand some aspects of the ‘melodrama of nationalism’ through which the politics of Bangladesh gains shape and clarity and in which waz mahfils are often pitted against the master discourse of ‘1971’.13

Sermon gatherings in their political context The gatherings analysed in this book in many ways relate to the way they are perceived from the outside. The sound of waz mahfils reaches many in urban neighbourhoods and can be heard from far away in quieter villages, in this way seeking recognition from a wider public. Joining a gathering always entails self-positioning. The three gatherings I described at the outset of this book varied in their aspirations of becoming crowds of national importance and reaching out to the political public. Among the developments directly influencing the preaching landscape since the new millennium was the rule from 2001 to 2006 by a coalition headed by one of the country’s two large parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), joined by two Islamic parties, one of which was the BJI. During this time, a political culture characterized by violent street agitation around strikes (harˡtāl) by ‘student’ organizations linked to the political parties was already firmly established. Bomb attacks on public processions, such as the 2004 attack on the opposition leader, shocked society. One year later Islamic extremist groups staged attacks throughout the country. Such violence was grist for the mill for those who supported the founding of the elite paramilitary force Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) tasked to make up for weak law enforcement by carrying out extrajudicial killings, but were seen by critics as evidence of a lack of trust in the judiciary. The overall political constellation fitted common fault lines. At that time, the Awami League (AL), the ‘secularist’ party of the independence struggle led by the daughter of the father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was the main opposition party. The BNP, headed by the wife of the second founding figure of Bangladeshi independence, Ziaur Rahman, was in power. It was easy to perceive a common threat posed by an Islamic bloc that consisted of religious schools, extremist terrorist groups and political parties joining hands. Progressive urban middle classes still fear the Islamist bloc, which has direct consequences on how they perceive sermon meetings as belonging to it.

 Introduction 7

Figure 1  ‘Madrasas Mushroom with State Favour’, in Daily Star 5/423 (2005): 1.

A caricature published in a main English-language newspaper in 2004 captures the fear of urban secular middle classes of a politically motivated education policy and a political Islamic project in general (Figure 1). It comments on the fast growth of madrasas compared to the general education sector since the election of the new government. The caricature is titled ‘Madrasas Mushroom with State Favour’.14 We see a red-bearded man in green clothing and a cap sleeping on a daybed. Six boys of varying ages (including a baby in diapers), all wearing Islamic caps, support and massage him. His legs rest on two large sacks bearing the tags ‘charity funds’ and ‘government grants’. Next to him we see a plate with chicken bones as leftovers from his meal; a book is left lying around on one of the prayer mats. A student walks towards the sleeping man, asking ‘Er … Hujur … Are we not going to attend our Fazil exam today?’ On the blackboard behind the man, the ‘Routine’ of the ‘Bhooa [fake] Madrasa’ is listed: ‘8:00–9:00 – ancient history; 9:00–10:00 – political “waz”; 10:00–11:00 – grill Toslima; 11:00–12:00 – grill murgi [chicken]; 12:00–1:00 nap’. The schedule sums up in a very condensed manner (which every reader of the newspaper is expected to grasp without further information) the most important criticism and prejudices against this strand of education in Bangladesh: it only teaches knowledge removed from practical realities (‘ancient history’), that it lacks quality (‘nap’, ‘grill murgi’) and that it caters to violent bigotry (by referring to the violence that forced the feminist author Taslima Nasrin into exile after she published the book Shame describing the violent riots against Hindus in Bangladesh). Importantly for our topic, the caricature assumes that its readers are familiar with the meaning of waz. Furthermore, the caricature puts waz right in the middle of the complex of Islamic, madrasa-based bigotry, and deems it ‘political’.

8

Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

This perception builds on long-standing disappointments about Bangladesh’s political and cultural development since its independence and the changing role of Islam in national politics. Dreams and aspirations are important, but so is their interrelation with opposing aspirations. It is instructive to glance at a larger picture of Islam as an oppositional aspiration in the region’s history. The Islamic movements of Eastern Bengal were often enmeshed in economic resistance.15 Economic issues continued to be part of the aspirations for Pakistan, which was also pitted against the unifying tendencies of the Indian National Congress and later the colonial state.16 Sandria Freitag has highlighted the withdrawal of the colonial state from public arenas in North India. The emerging collectivities were often based on religious identity and later provided the basis for politicized religious identity (often termed ‘communalism’ in South Asia).17 The various nationalist movements derived much of their appeal by carrying strong elements of social justice that were expressed as an aspiration to rule by one’s own group as against another, be it the British or other groups such as, in Bengal, the dominant cultural or land-tenant groups. Decisive aspects of the mobilizing rhetoric at sermon meetings today resonate with this ‘interconnected history of region, religion, and political visions of a just society’.18 When Bangladesh gained independence from British India as East Pakistan, Urdu was surprisingly advocated by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, one of the country’s founders, as an Islamic language and the (only) legitimate state language. For many Bengalis, Islam was associated with oppressive Pakistani state ideology.19 Secular cultural activities became valued as cultural opposition. The support of Pakistan by many Islamic groups during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971 further contributed to the decreased legitimacy of Islamic politics in Bangladesh, which continues to be an important factor today, as we will see later. However, the military regimes that ruled Bangladesh soon after its independence until 1990 acted much like other dictatorships, such as those in Iraq and Pakistan, trying to increase their legitimacy by including and expanding Islamic symbols in the state and in the constitution at the expense of secular provisions; by turning Islamic celebrations into national holidays; by fostering Islamic institutions and education; and by changing the appellation of citizens from Bengali to Bangladeshi in order to distinguish them from the Indian part of Bengal. Islamic parties were allowed to participate in elections, and while the Jamaat-e Islami was banned after Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, it was able to return to the political stage under Ziaur Rahman as the BJI. At the opening of this book I briefly described one of the mass rallies held by Sayeedi in Chittagong. These have been organized annually since 1979. Back then they were part of a global rise in Islamist politics. The BJI furthermore became an important party in the opposition during the Ershad regime in the 1980s. The shifting and multiple perceptions of the relationship between Islam and politics and their link to dreams and aspirations are exemplified in a sermon held in 1987. In this sermon, Sayeedi simultaneously thunders against communists and the secular dream for Bangladesh and against the regime’s superficial Islamization policy. Sayeedi and others linked to Islamic politics could continue to carry on his role as an opposing voice also after Bangladesh’s democratization since 1990 had failed to fulfil many of its aspirations. Despite substantial successes in economic development and healthcare, large parts

 Introduction 9 of the population profited little and power structures often remained unaltered. The voters expressed their dissatisfaction by voting the government out of power in each of the elections from 1991 to 2008. An Islamic idiom could once again raise hopes as an oppositional discourse amid the harsh realities of Bangladesh in an era of economic privatization. From the point of view of many secular and liberal Bangladeshis, this ‘rehabilitation’ of Islamic politics endangers many of the ideals they cherish. The binary opposition of ‘Islamic’ versus ‘secular’ visions became even more dominant in the years between 2009 and 2015, a time that Ali Riaz aptly characterized as an ‘era of polarization and democracy’s retreat’.20 At the same time, it is important to note that also during the era that forms the immediate backdrop of this book, the teleology was not uniform. Rather, it involved moments of high hopes, creative mobilization, thoughtful reflection and justifiable anger. All the while, competing perceptions of national history and the public role of Islam were pushed to new fronts, and new groups and forms of mobilization emerged. The landslide victory of the AL in 2008 included an important promise, one that had been made and thwarted so often, and directly related back to the birth of the nation. During the Bangladesh War of Independence, the Pakistani army had committed large-scale war crimes. The perpetrators could never be brought to justice for reasons of international diplomacy. In some atrocities, such as the murder of intellectuals at the end of the war, the Pakistani army was supported by pro-Pakistani groups such as the Jamaat-e Islami and voluntary cadres. These ‘collaborators’, too, were not tried after the war. This failure had attracted constant criticism, which became more vocal during the democratization movement and the transition to democracy. The diary of an eyewitness, Jahanara Imam, covering the time from 1 March to 17 December 1971, was a huge success when it was published in 1986. Setting up a ‘people’s court’ brought the demand for justice to the public in the early 1990s, but the government remained hostile. The demands for the punishment of accused war criminals had often focused on high functionaries of the BJI. A cartoon of Ghulam Azam, erstwhile leader of the BJI’s East Pakistan division, was printed on posters propagating the ‘people’s court’. In short, when the AL promised to try the war criminals in 2008, it built on longstanding efforts and demands for justice that had been a constant concern of not only high politics but also popular mobilization. Stakes were high in the way the war crimes were dealt with (if at all). They related to the demand for justice in 1971 as much as to the contention over the national identity of Bangladesh versus Pakistan and India and questions of state policy and the place of Islam in Bangladeshi politics. These complex histories and positions were often turned into a question of life and death of the accused. The answer was to be resolved by competing truths inside and outside the courtroom. The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), which was to judge and implement justice in cases related to the war crimes of 1971, not only forms an important part of the context, but relates to the sermon gatherings in a concrete manner. The abovementioned prominent preacher and MP of the BJI between 1996 and 2008, Delowar Hossain Sayeedi, was the first case the ICT dealt with since 2011. The announcements of the verdicts against him and Abdul Quader Molla in February 2013 triggered spectacular shifts in Bangladeshi public space and mobilization. When the first verdict,

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

life-long imprisonment for Quader Molla, was announced, it was perceived as a success for the defendant. The victory sign he showed when walking out of court provoked spontaneous protests demanding the highest punishment: the death penalty. The protestors assembled in front of the national museum and next to Dhaka University on a busy intersection called Shahbag, resulting in the Shahbag Movement. They were mainly younger people and women and were outside established party structures. Furthermore, they were not involved in violent action, which conventionally marks (party political) public protest. The movement drew on cultural resources and symbols such as folk performances, theatre and song, as much as on mobilizing media and slogans that deployed the language of the anti-Pakistan movement. The controversies surrounding the ICT showed rifts in perceptions about truth and justice. While most Bangladeshis agreed that the war criminals should be punished, this did not mean that they supported the way the trial was held.21 Sayeedi’s case was extreme in this regard, as he was, due to his preaching, by far the most widely known and popular politician of the BJI – and, for similar reasons, particularly abhorred by the opposing side. Also, before his trial at the ICT, his sermons had been subject to criminal investigations, and investigators used excerpts as evidence that he supported, for example, the violent attacks on the Bangladeshi author Humayun Azad, whom Sayeedi had opposed as an MP.22 His impact as a preacher, on the other hand, always allowed him to create an image different from that of the accused perpetrator and politician. The ICT judges, for example, consciously emphasized that they merely wanted to find out about the events that transpired forty years earlier and did not want to judge him in other roles. This is only to show how the judiciary brought in positions and mobilizations in different media spanning over a decade. In a sermon gathering from 2001, for example, Sayeedi had directly addressed the accusations as part of a smear campaign against him. He ascertained that ‘no mud from the year of 1971 touches Sayeedi’s body’, and that those who called him razakar (lit. volunteer, but here ‘traitor’) in reference to the role of the detested voluntary forces aiding the Pakistani army in 1971 were ‘Indian razakars’ and ‘fatherless bastards’.23 More decisive than such direct claims was his overall image. Soon after the verdict – the death sentence – against Sayeedi was announced at the end of February 2013,24 the BJI organized countrywide attacks against state institutions, government supporters and religious minorities. A few days later, a photo was circulated depicting Sayeedi’s face on the moon to evoke sympathies for him as a popular preacher and scholar. This mobilization technique had been used in a very similar way by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978 and again underlined the interrelations of perceptions of truth and public persona in Bangladeshi politics. The justice system was not above contestations, but was an arena open to influences from various publics displaying strength and a large following. Despite all their differences, this underlying appraisal was tacitly shared by the Shahbag Movement and its opponents. The Shahbag Movement soon celebrated the death penalty verdict against Molla and the cancellation of the BJI’s registration for elections, while they were not as happy about the reduction of the sentence against Sayeedi to imprisonment in late 2014. To a certain degree, antagonistic political rhetoric was employed by both sides. Despite its reflexive and clearly anti-violent attitudes, the

 Introduction 11 pictorial and performative language of the Shahbag Movement was violent, binary and Othering. The omnipresence of the gallows and the slogan ‘we want [them] hanging’ expressed an urge for justice, linking to the youth movements of the past, and was as much as a threat to the opponents. While aiming at a punishment of all war criminals, the Shahbag Movement, increasingly taken over by the AL, focused on BJI leaders. War crimes and political Islam were once again perceived as synonymous; the past and the future were entangled. In hindsight, it seems that this binary mode of reliving the past contributed to making the Shahbag Movement susceptible to being co-opted by or even integrated into a world view close to that of the ‘fundamentalists’ they opposed with a descriptive vocabulary to match. The eternal struggle against bigoted fundamentalists could all too easily be flipped into the opposite narrative: the eternal struggle of defending Islam against atheist opponents. The success of decrying the movement became evident when the BNP called the Shahbag Movement ‘atheist’ after a long period of silence in the spring of 2013. It was also seen in the public attention and acceptance that the movement and its emerging rivals received. The most direct and important antagonist of the Shahbag Movement has been the Hefazat-e Islam (HI), an organization that gained prominence on a national level in the spring of 2013. It stems from a particularity of Bangladesh’s educational institutions: parallel to the mainstream secular institutions, about 15,000 madrasas under state supervision and a similar or higher number – reliable statistical information missing, also due to the huge diversity of school types – of religious schools that operate independently from the state.25 The latter, termed qawmī/komi madrasas, mostly follow the model of the Islamic seminary in Deoband, which was founded in British India in 1867 and developed into one of the most influential strands of Islamic education in South Asia and beyond. The oldest komi madrasa in Bangladesh is in Chittagong, but over time the schools have been organized in different government boards and within other networks of affiliation. Free from any accusations of involvement in war crimes, the HI effectively shifted the discourse towards its demands for the state to strengthen and ‘protect’ Islamic symbols. Next to advocacy for their own cause by making Islamic education compulsory and stopping violent attacks on teachers and students as well as religious instruction (waznasihat) and acts, these demands included punishing the ‘self-declared atheists and apostates leading the so-called Shahbag Movement and the bloggers, who disseminate horrible slander against the honour of the dear Prophet (s.a.w.), and all their friends, who are full of animosity towards Islam and propagators of untruth’.26 And indeed, instead of the initially plural agenda of the Shahbag Movement, the discussion shifted ad personam, to the credentials and faith of those involved. The decried group of ‘bloggers’ was intangible and distant, prone to being stereotyped, and did not manage to mobilize crowds or stir public agitation. The HI, conversely, arranged mass marches and rallies. Its march to and rally in Dhaka on 5 May 2013 was heavy-handedly suppressed by the government. It has been commemorated as an act of martyrdom by HI supporters ever since. The AL recently implemented policies that were key demands of the HI and frowned upon as BJI agenda back in 2004, such as the ‘Islamization’ of schoolbooks or the recognition of madrasa degrees.

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

Not only did the two antagonistic popular movements gain national importance in 2013; the formal political sector underwent drastic changes, too. There were fierce conflicts about the election system for the elections to be held at the beginning of 2014. The AL eventually altered the system that had been in place since the democratization of the 1990s, namely the preparation of elections by a neutral ‘caretaker’ government. It accepted the opposition boycotting the elections of 2014, which were held amid violence, particularly against religious minorities, and took them as a basis for continuing their government. At the same time, a new kind of violence began that has been haunting Bangladesh ever since: vigilante attacks on bloggers or liberal activists, in their homes and in public spaces. In nearly all cases, the perpetrators were not apprehended. Governmental responses included blaming the victims in a language strongly reminiscent of HI semantics or even incarcerating them on the basis of ambiguous clauses in newly passed laws. As several of those attacked had appeared on hit lists circulated by ‘Islamic’ militants on the internet, a general atmosphere of fear gripped many who may have appeared liberal, progressive or secularist. Journalists and human rights organizations faced increasing pressure after the opposition parties boycotted elections in 2014 and there were attacks by extremist groups against minorities. The murder of foreigners in an upscale café pointed to new styles of extremism with a sophistication that pointed to international terrorist trends.27 Later, the public humiliation of a Hindu teacher in a Facebook post emblematized how this combination of government and nongovernment violence led to ever-dwindling opportunities to publicly voice opinions. It also indicates that new social media platforms have often continued the trend of newspapers, in which political alliances became more antagonistic in the period between 2012 and 2014.28 This background makes it clear that the public speech events I deal with in this book took place at a time of embattled and shrinking public space. They were part of polarizing dynamics and at the same time maintained a crucial distance to everyday politics. Explicitly political actors, such as preachers directly associated with the BJI, were banned during the period covered by this book. Nevertheless, recordings of Sayeedi’s sermons continued to circulate and be played in semi-public spaces, and the public discursive forms engendered by sermon congregations by other groups and preachers continued to be replicated by the thousands every day in many regions of Bangladesh. How, then, if at all, can preachers voice opposition or alternatives? Again, it is necessary to look beyond simple advice or utterances of opinion. In Chapters 3 and 5, I will draw attention to narratives of heroism and populist jokes as prominent venues for opening up alternatives and uttering criticism. Analytically, polarizations between secularists and Islamists, between free speech and blasphemy, can only take waz mahfils as emblematizing ‘communalist’ politics, as the opponent of those rallying around national or party symbols and commemoration days. Depending on whom I talked to, I heard many accusations of the sermons as leading the masses to ignorance and communalism or of them being championed as the only remaining spaces for uttering the truth in times of great calamity or government suppression. In an atmosphere of fear among anyone outside the ruling party’s establishment, the sermon gatherings could portray themselves as counterdiscourses.

 Introduction 13 This points to the fact that audiences of sermons and non-audiences reflect political positions, but it also means that we need to think about how to evaluate them in terms that do not merely reproduce controversy. From a secularist perspective, waz mahfils are too easily perceived as being part of an inscrutable religious mind that is manipulated for outright political mobilization. Here, the political dimension of waz mahfils is equated with preachers urging the audiences of sermons to vote for particular parties, promising them paradise if they followed and threatening them with dire consequences such as divorce if they did not.29 Religious teachings and political messages, then, are two separately existing entities that can be added to one another only by incredible interpretations by preachers. It seems an important task for the researcher to go beyond such propositions, even if, embedded in a history of anxiety about Islam in Bangladesh,30 they make sense from a nationalist perspective. Among the thinkers who go beyond such polarization between the religious and the secular, Dina Siddiqi stresses the interrelation between global and local productions of Islam, and the all-too-easy distribution of terms like ‘blasphemy’ and ‘terrorist’ to religious actors, thereby sidelining other forms of violence. She sets the task of ‘how to address the specificity of Islam in Bangladesh without reproducing the trope of the nation as a space of moderation or of excess’.31 Most interesting for the context of this book is an interview of intellectual Ahmed Sofa in 1992, in which he discussed Sayeedi’s preaching. He stressed important aspects that I treat throughout this book, such as dramatic suspense, and stated that ‘if instead of preaching, Sayeedi sang songs, he would be a very popular singer (gāẏak)’.32 Along with stressing the importance of aesthetic dimensions of the sermons, he made conscious remarks about processes of Othering in the thinking of secularists, about the mutual production of religious and secular discourse, and the failure to create educational dialogues about the sermons: I have seen that there is nothing unnatural (asvābhābik) in liking the sermons. Hence what we should have done was to write a booklet on the topic and raise the people’s awareness. We missed that and set off a fight to mar Sayeedi’s speech gatherings – as a result allowing him to turn himself into a star.33

I hope my analysis can make a small contribution to raising awareness about waz mahfils, even if not fully in Sofa’s sense. I make transparent mechanisms that are otherwise often rendered opaque. In the course of this book, I pin down and describe how preachers generate norms from religious interpretations, how they achieve subtle musical underpinnings of value judgements, or crack Othering jokes. By describing how communication in the sermon gatherings works and is linked to judgements and attitudes, I make their persuasions visible, graspable and criticizable. My approach does not aim at exposing delusions or faulting arguments in the sermons, or at comparing these to ‘good’ practices that are more restrained, more liberal or more democratic. Still, I am convinced that increasing the purview of public and religious communication processes and taking seriously their complexity is not antagonistic, but rather complementary to the goals of those of my Bangladeshi friends who fear religious discourse is too conservative or even fundamentalist. To arrive at a new angle,

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

it is useful to think about categories to connect public speech acts and subjectivity, the political and the personal.

The political between language and emotion The above overview of recent developments in Bangladesh stresses that Islam is far from being a private affair, but lies at the heart of public and political processes and is integral to contested narratives.34 I have placed emphasis on the overlaps between high politics and popular mobilization, between the judiciary and public opinion, and between discursive spaces and political opinions. Aspirations, oppositions, legitimacy and consensus all extend beyond politics in the narrower sense. Speech events can be prominent focal points of these overlaps and the ‘melodrama of nationalism’. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s speech at Ramna Race Course in 1971 has been a ‘grand moment of declaration where the boundaries between popular demands for independence and constitutionalism were blurred’ and produced ‘one of the most iconic moments – and sound bites – of East Pakistan’s struggle for nationhood’.35 To grasp such dynamics, it makes sense to speak of politics rather than Politics, of le politique instead of la politique. I take ‘the political’ as a ‘communicative space’,36 which may shift meaning and extension and overlap with the social space and perceptions of collectivities. Communication processes influence politics as a separate domain and are part and parcel of the political. The political, in turn, cannot be separated from its representation and speech acts and becomes part of communication practices.37 This perspective stresses that what can be done ‘is to a large extent dependent on what can be said’.38 Which forms of articulation do the sermons provide for which topics? To whom do they lend their voice and which other voices do they silence? I draw attention to linguistic expressions of consensus, often commonplaces holding ‘selfevident’ truths. Far from being a container of ideology, language offers potentialities for action and acts itself. It does so by shifting the rules of what and how something can be said – in other words, by shifting poetics and rhetoric. In thinking about the sermon gatherings I emphasize three points: the role of, first, genre; second, imagination; and, third, the body. First, in relation to genre, I stress that, contrary to Foucault’s theory of discourse, the rules of what and how something can be said are not reducible to a general episteme but are specific to particular spaces and genres of communication where they form ‘codes of their own’.39 Similar to sociolinguistic insights into the importance of the pragmatics of speech styles and their particular connotations of social belonging, I show the alignment of discourse rules and emotional expression along particular genres.40 This is not to deny overlaps and re-contexualizations but to stress that what and how something can be said changes immensely along genres and media. Despite internal variation, English newspapers in Bangladesh represent different audiences and values than their Bengali counterparts, and both are different from sermons of the transnational lay preachers’ movement Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) or songs of Sufi orders or the increasing number of talk shows on commercial television channels.41 Are media and genres themselves not bound up with particular subject positions and political values? I propose that it is important to perceive competing positions within one genre or media type, such as

 Introduction 15 newspapers, but it is equally important to ask about the belief in and attachment to different genres. Many theories of the public sphere assume utterances as engaged in some form of ‘dialogue’ with other actors.42 Instead, genre-specific communication might be producing specific forms of consensus and truth that aim to persuade not everyone, but those involved in this particular communication. This, in turn, highlights Michael Warner’s point that publics are always mediated by cultural forms, but decreases the distinction he makes between ‘us’ and ‘strangers’ as long as all participate in the same genre of public discourse.43 From this point of view, histories of publics and literature in the broadest sense need to be very aware of the pragmatics of the texts they deal with and hence with the linguistic and genre configurations.44 It implies that the multiplicity of genres and their publics in Bangladesh are one important factor in the performance of possibly irreconcilable positions on truth, justice and due action. I identify genres as open systems of texts, defined by multiple and varied criteria, which can be formal, structural or thematic. More precisely, they each form ‘a communication system’ that guides production and reception and provides the ‘rules of the game’ just as conventions do for a particular speech situation in everyday communication.45 The different genres are not clearly separated entities (which they cannot be anyway, according to the insights from the theories of interand trans-textuality),46 but often overlap. In our case, two sets of similarities and differences are at stake: on the one hand, all the different kinds of sermons are to be recognized as sermons, performing the basic mediating functions between religious and contemporary inventories and truths and between universal ideas and particular lifeworlds; but on the other hand, they have to be perceived as different sets of communication systems or situations with complementary functions.47 The waz mahfils stick out in the Bangladeshi preaching landscape. They are much more flexible than Friday sermons in mosques that might be more formal and hence less interactive and sensorily rich. They are also distinct from the TJ sermons held in smaller groups or mass gatherings with several million attendants. Waz mahfils are closer to longdeveloped Bengali performance cultures.48 Mixtures between genres are important, and the meaning of each genre, structurally speaking, evolves through distinction from and play with neighbouring genres. The three sermon gatherings we glimpsed in the beginning of this chapter, for example, were different from one another. Nevertheless, they form a distinct group vis-à-vis other speech contexts, for example, at party conventions or the Shahbag junction and from other Islamic sermons in Bangladesh. This relates to particular times and spaces, to linguistic registers, vocal intonation, forms of address and narrative. In all three cases, those assembled followed similar conventions of listening and co-performance. At the same time, their expectations were specific. They knew the specialties of the preachers and were aware that they were part of different publics, ranging from a specific educational strand via a political party to pious youth culture. While location and audience are important factors that influence a preacher’s performance based on his assessment before and during the assembly, there are limits to their influence. While I was aware of the importance of micro-social interactions that help preachers maintain audience interaction, partaking in these religious gatherings also taught me a lot about the importance of repetition. To speak of codes

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

and rules also calls attention to the fact that no author can freely and deliberately ‘make use of ’ the genre according to his or her own wish, but always has to manoeuvre through the genre, even if contesting or changing it.49 In this sense, analysis needs to go beyond intentions, self-statements and programmes and examine the rules and effects of speech. Since success in a genre means success in adopting and reproducing its main characteristics while bringing change and innovation to just the right degree, successes of preachers with, for instance, particular political intentions can only be fully explained against the background of a full understanding of the genre to which they subscribe. Second, I assume that what can be done relies not only on what can be said, but also on what can be imagined and felt in response to narratives. Imagination and feeling are not alternatives to saying something, but are closely interlinked with what and how things are said.50 The sermons do not primarily communicate and evoke response with specialist vocabulary. Rather, they are characterized by long narratives that are often aimed at triggering emotional responses by engaging the listeners’ imagination. Take, for example, the narrative of Hosen at the first of the big gatherings we glimpsed earlier. His representation of the dialogue between Muhammad and his companions, who wonder about the waz mahfil’s participants identifying with his pain, is particularly apt in evoking the presence of the Prophet in the gathering due to the narrator’s particular positioning. Such a short snippet can only be analysed with reference to longer narratives. I therefore propose an analytic method that goes beyond a focus on ‘heavy’ substantives.51 Borrowing from narratology to consider, for example, the arrangement of different modes of narrative, I usually take the whole sermon as the framing entity of narrative, with building blocks often spanning several minutes. In the course of my analysis of the narratives in the main part of the sermons, I describe junctures and larger complexes and tropes, and I do so with a focus on their capacities to trigger responses. Instead of focusing on the central content of the message, I trace a series of the recipients’ interlinked and augmented positions brought forth by the narrative.52 In short, I make use of tools and concepts developed by literary studies to help access the emotional impact of the sermons and thereby analyse an important aspect of the particular communication of this genre. This toolbox might come as a surprise. The more politicized or ‘mainstream’ an Islamic phenomenon is, the less a perspective informed by insights from narratology, or literary studies more generally, is taken up. In Bengal, for example, the ‘heterodox’ religious community of the Bauls has attracted and continues to attract an enormous amount of Bengali and Western scholarship that often, at least partially, relies on textual analysis of literary tropes.53 Part of this attraction lies in the fact that their songs go beyond religious identities as Islamic or Hindu, and they have been edited and analysed as an important part of Bengali literature. Among the various contemporary Islamic idioms in Bangladesh, Sufi songs have been studied along with their literary motives.54 When approaching a phenomenon that is more obviously linked to politics and an Islam that is perceived as more ‘orthodox’, a ‘literary’ perspective is much less common and questions about mobilization and organization come to the fore. It seems less obvious here why to bother transcribing and analysing what amounts to 2,000 pages of sermon texts.

 Introduction 17 There is no question that in-depth sociological and politological contributions about the context of this study – about madrasas in Bangladesh, about local power dynamics or about the growth of village organizations dedicated to ‘Islamic’ activities – are an important field for research.55 However, the actions deemed legitimate – or simply natural – are often premised on more subtle and less explicit personal attitudes and attachments or perceptions about normal behaviour and social interaction. These are acquired and shaped by interactions, models and narratives. The sermons provide important ways for the recipients as co-performers to take up particular subject positions and prefigure possibilities of talking, feeling and acting. The emotions evoked in the sermons may have clear moral and ethical foundations and aims, and may be mobilizing for concrete political goals, but may also be therapeutic. I argue that while it is possible to differentiate between these aspects to a certain degree, they are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Rather, they form a larger ‘resonance chamber’ that can combine positively with other messages and calls for action. Here, the structure of relating and feeling is what counts. The listeners at sermon gatherings jointly make their way to being affected by particular structures of narrative and therefore learn to be responsive to similar ones. Obviously, such an approach works against colonial stereotypes like ‘religious fervour’ of the Muslim masses without at the same time pushing away the importance emotions play for religious and communicative practice. Third, I argue that the narrative structures and the communicative processes in the popular public arena cannot be fully understood without taking into account the materiality of the communication and its ways of shaping the body. This is a particular challenge as neither historical semantics, nor narratology, nor discourse analysis provides readily available methods of analysis. I expand by borrowing from the diverse field of emotions studies that has shown the interlinkages between multimediality and sensory practices.56 My goal is to be specific about the bodily, imaginative and emotional dimensions and avoid general assumptions of crowd psychology or affect theory,57 while acknowledging the importance of collective emotions. As in crowds, mimesis ‘drives the subtle dialectic between emergence (immanence) and institutionalization (mediation)’.58 But the preaching processes I study reveal more layers of mimesis, including, crucially, dramatic forms of narrative that offer roles for mimetic reception. Furthermore, throughout this book, I describe productive mechanisms of coordinated reception uniting bodily and imaginative faculties to achieve consensus and collective experience. For the collective experiences of sermon congregations, their sonic dimension is by far the most important. Synchronization of emotional experience is achieved through rhythmic patterns of communication between preacher and audience.59 How do these rhythms work? Is it possible to methodologically relate the musical and rhythmical aspects of the sermons to their textual dimensions? Do these diverge and produce dissonances or merge to have a combined impact? My analysis of the preachers’ melodic voices instead assumes that heightened emotions in the sermon assemblies are corporeal, but not involuntary and natural, as they rely on established cultural patterns. I ask how we can access these patterns and analyse them concretely without machines to access the body but instead as cultural forms that are cherished and nourished by preachers and audiences. I hereby build on and refine existing approaches to emotions in contemporary Islamic preaching among

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

others famously stressed by Charles Hirschkind, whose main intervention lies with sound and affect theory.60 I diverge slightly in respect to the roles I ascribe to the body, culture and mediation. I find it difficult to integrate affect theory into cultural analysis that asks about history, expectations, learning and intentions. One challenge then is how to go beyond describing explicit statements about the perception and artifice of the sermon performances, but also to incorporate a contextually grounded analysis of the performance ‘itself ’. So far, there are elaborate works on the discourses around Islam to the effect that music is no longer taken as innocent or anti-Islamist,61 and Hirschkind accomplished groundbreaking work to highlight the sonic dimensions of Islamic sermons. Nevertheless, the interest and methodological advances in actually analysing the concrete workings of the vocal dimensions of public preaching performances remain limited. Patrick Eisenlohr proposed a fascinating and fruitful way to relate affects and sound studies to processes of attributing meaning. He combines phenomenological approaches to the body with ethnographic data and approaches Islamic praise songs with spectrogram analysis to unravel correspondences between ‘objective’ acoustic traits of the vocal performance on the one hand and the perception of listeners and performers of heightened intensity and suggestions of movement on the other. He thereby takes a similar direction as theories of aesthetic response that aim to link subjective interpretations and experiences of art with qualities of the artwork itself. While he employs the analytical term ‘affects’ rather than ‘emotions’, his approach is fruitful for the study of culturally situated and consciousness-related emotions in religious performances.62 I take a similar approach in combining narratological and musical analysis. From the very beginning of my research, I was fascinated by the melodic vocal performance of preachers which I call ‘prose chanting’. Over the course of my research, I discovered ever new ways in which this chanting is crucial for the sermons. It presents a unique case to challenge the literature on historical as much as contemporary forms of Islamic preaching, which has not described the role of the melodic voice. One reason is that chanting of prose passages by preachers is a phenomenon of South Asian Islam,63 which has been neglected by scholarship. Despite its centrality, many preachers did not elaborately describe this chanting. Its connections to music in general and to Bengali cultural forms or performance traditions shared with other sects and religions render such emphasis undesirable in the polarized public situation and conservative Islamic publics of contemporary Bangladesh. This defensive discursive position resonates with the defensive attitude of proponents of traditional preaching in contemporary Indonesia, which is criticized for not being socially transformative. Julian Millie points out that in Indonesia national modernist discourse is so dominant and generally accepted that traditional preachers would lose if they engaged with their critics directly. Instead, they chose to make their linguistic and emotional styles acceptable through practice and interaction with audiences.64 The prose chanting of long passages in Bengali waz mahfils, too, is largely left to practice and rarely commented upon explicitly. This silence stands in remarkable contrast to the attraction that this vocal technique has for audiences and the fact that

 Introduction 19 it in many ways stands out as the marker for the whole genre of waz mahfils and is followed in some way or the other by nearly all actors partaking in this genre. This gives impetus to the unravelling of the poetics of the chanting, which is linked to its bodily effects as much as to its relations to its texts. How is the tension between marking individuality and extending one’s fame with melodies navigated by preachers? What are the skills that are necessary to appreciate and produce the patterns and effects that make differences and are intelligible intuitively at the same time? I propose to tackle these aspects by combining the analysis of textual and melodic features. Considering the poetics of popular preaching therefore contributes to our understanding of the political in Bangladesh despite being distinct from politics in a narrower sense. Similar approaches to the political have been fruitful in historical research on nationalism in British India, which has turned away from elitist and party functionary-oriented analysis towards popular imaginations and community practices.65 In post-colonial times, too, bringing together people who consider themselves part of larger communities and relate to the common good continues to be of pivotal importance. In India, the capacity for cultural activities to attract large numbers of people, even if they do not contribute to concrete political actions, had brought impact.66 In the country’s everyday spaces of nationalist sentiments, sensorium and embodiment are central as educational practices that link interiority and the national self.67 In Bangladesh, the energies and paradoxes of crowds were decisive in recent non-party political movements.68 In concentrating on speech, this book follows historical scholarship that describes how languages were transformed in various regions of South Asia. They ceased to be a mere medium of expression but became objects of emotional attachment and were turned into markers of group identity.69 This relationship was, among other factors, affected by and had repercussions on literary public spheres that involved nets of public representation and private interest, but also ‘customary’ cultural institutions.70 Religion was a decisive factor of this change,71 and it is regrettable also in this respect that, in this region that contains the world’s largest Muslim population, we know very little about Islamic preaching practices. There is some research on Shiite preaching,72 while Sunni sermons in South Asian languages have so far been used as occasional source material rather than as a specific genre.73 As I describe in the following section and in the outlook of this book, preaching is a great prism to access wider questions of intermediality and identity.

Popular culture, public Islam and global preaching By combining entertainment and public religion, sermon gatherings in contemporary Bangladesh complicate classifications that diffuse the appeal and reach of both by pushing them into separate spheres either judged to be socially irrelevant or reduced to overt political ‘action’. The contentious role of Islam in Bangladesh’s discussions on the nation’s past and present and for social movements only gains significance against the background of a continuous practice of everyday Islam. This everyday Islam is characterized by not only personal piety or missionary striving and ritual practice

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

but public performances appealing to the senses and having entertainment value. To signify the close interrelationship between religion and entertainment, we might speak of religiotainment, but without the connotations of frivolity, business orientation or prejudices of aesthetic and linguistic forms that resemble ‘modern’ entertainment known from television. Rather, we might remind ourselves that the etymology of entertainment itself points to the holding and keeping of a common and shared belief and opinion. At the same time, beliefs are held and cherished in pleasurable processes. How do preachers and their audiences deal with sensational and theatrical forms? How are ‘religion’ and ‘entertainment’ combined in the sermon process? Many approaches to the public sphere would argue that entertainment or art is the training ground for the exchange of opinions and judgements, which finds its ultimate purpose when applied to political problems.74 But we do not need to follow this valuation and can instead ask what religious and political spectacle and mediation has to offer in ways of pleasure, imagination and common bodily and emotional experience. Sensational forms relate to religion and political melodrama alike.75 How do preachers’ discourses arouse heightened passions? How do pleasure and suffering, imagination and bodily experience interlink? While I certainly do not want to claim that oral communication is intrinsically more authentic or emotional than written, it is important to keep in mind – and analyse – its particular possibilities. This is all the more urgent in the case of a country in which reading is very often not a skill and certainly not a habit among the social classes that make up the majority of listeners at waz mahfils. Although each of the three sermons we glimpsed at the beginning has a specific audience, they were also transmitted to the entire neighbourhood by loudspeakers set up all around the tents. The loudspeakers may reduce them to a distorted sound, but they are present nonetheless. The sound is reproduced in a much crisper way on mobile phones – which are much more widespread in today’s Bangladesh than reading skills. Walking through cities at night, one can discern whispers of multiple sermons: night guards listening to audio recordings while on duty, or rickshaw or taxi drivers listening while they drive. My research points to complex relationships of specific media environments and to the importance of non-mediatized communication. There is no uniform effect of media practices on religious traditions.76 In the Middle East, television preachers ranging from the ‘national preacher’ Shaʿrāwī to televangelists like ʿAmr Khālid have long since established an official media presence.77 James Hoesterey has provided a comprehensive analysis of the Indonesian public self-help guru Aa Gym to go beyond an argument of television preachers being mere epiphenomena of media change and to explain the rise of particular preachers and the conversion of religious into political authority.78 But his case, too, relies on a very different audience and configuration of media and publics than that of Islamic publics in Bangladesh. While Bangladesh has been part of the upsurge of ‘little’ media, the waz mahfils are not broadcast on radio or TV, which means they are related to very different media habits and audience segments. Waz mahfils are a fascinating case for thinking about how public performance and gathering interlinks with mediatized dissemination. Mediatized waz mahfils are always recorded, never produced, sermons. The specific efficacy of waz mahfils in Bangladesh

 Introduction 21 relies on interactive patterns that resist easy transfer out of context, as do subtle jokes or role play. At the same time, the long narrations of preachers lend themselves perfectly to listening, and I will show how preachers are driven to innovation. While in madrasa contexts videos are proscribed, other preachers use them deliberately to transport their image to those who cannot visit their congregations, particularly women. While Sayeedi’s sermon gatherings were banned, his recordings continued to be played in public spaces such as tea stalls, buses or hotels. The religious public here reaches far beyond the physical audience and preacher. The preachers’ ideological messages at the same time become organized around shifting genre conventions shaped not by one actor alone but are the outcome of a ‘struggle’ among different actors with different aims. This dynamics of mediatization stresses the importance of genre conventions beyond global media formats. And it again feeds into public gatherings of Muslim men and collective experience: in the recordings, the preacher’s voice comes along with his audience and its answers to didactic questions, its singing along, repeating God’s name in collective zikr, and its constant collective consent or rejection, wonder and surprise. The emotions that listeners express at the gatherings are not only personal and interior, but also decidedly public. All three congregations that we visited in the beginning shared careful lighting, which together with the vocal feedback of the audience answering questions and joining the preacher in formulas make the other participants very tangible. Emotions are expressed as feedback loops, an essential part of the communication between preacher and audience, and between the audience members who respond as one to the preacher’s discourse. The audience’s intimacy with the figures of the preacher’s discourse, their partaking in the narrated emotions, is public.79 Unlike other media formats, this public intimacy includes the bodily closeness of those gathered in the tent. The sermon gatherings vie with other forms of public entertainment, cultural or religious activities, for participants.80 An example of this is the quotation of Sayeedi above, who juxtaposed the participation in his sermon gatherings to that in ‘folk’ performances and theatre. This is part of a distribution of political positions along cultural formats. Folk theatre has indeed been used by NGOs to work towards social transformation antagonistic to the aims of the BJI. It may, for example, perform the nationalist master narrative of the War of Independence.81 Waz mahfils pose a particular challenge in this cultural politics. They cannot be pushed away easily as a supposedly foreign form of Islam, as they are articulate in idioms that are deeply steeped in Bengali Islam.82 But at the same time, they do not adhere to nationalist or liberal political visions and do not at all lend themselves to becoming a ‘folk’ genre in the sense of the search for national authenticity. In the discussion of prose chanting, the inclusion of songs and parodies in sermons will provide points of entry to destabilize commonplace assumptions around Islamic musical performances. This jostling for public space often overlaps with divisions between ‘Islamists’ and ‘nationalists’ as much as with inner-Islamic rivalries. During the time of my research, the most obvious political tension was between the ‘Islamic bloc’ on the one hand and a Bengali-nationalist ideology connected to the ruling AL on the other (a political configuration that has changed significantly over the past two years with what sometimes seems like a marriage of convenience between the AL and the HI). Against this

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background, the participation in and cherishing of, or the rejection of, particular rituals and religious genres was associated with political positions. The participation in rituals at shrines, the devotional songs that lie at the heart of many Sufi traditions in Bangladesh or the performance of mīlād at public venues or lifecycle events are as much a marker of differences among the pan-South Asian Sunni schools as in Bangladesh they signal relationships to the state and religious parties. The rivalry between Islamic sects is not as formative in Bangladesh at it is in Pakistan, or at least in case of temporary spaces there is nothing concrete to ‘capture’ as Naveeda Khan has described it for Pakistani mosques.83 At the same time, waz mahfils might be supported or opposed by the organizational strength and muscle power of political organizations and, as I mentioned, often seemed to be giving voice to those not represented in national politics. Taken together, they are embedded in and influence the ‘distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution’.84 Islamic sermons in Bangladesh stand in relation to and are distinct from those held elsewhere. Bringing new forms of preaching into the scope of analysis expands our conceptualizations of Islamic sermons. As most of the research so far has been concerned with the Arabic Middle East, it has, despite serious treatment of code switching between official and dialectal/regional languages,85 not dealt with the linguistic configurations that characterize the majority of the Islamic world. Millie’s study on preaching styles in Indonesia draws attention to a different sociolinguistic situation, in which national (Bahasa Indonesia) and regional language (Sundanese) are employed by preachers alongside Arabic.86 In Bangladesh, there is a different set of Islamic languages with Urdu as an important mediator. I pay attention to the interaction and integration of Quranic Arabic in the complex linguistic situation in Bangladesh and ask about the dynamics of the recited Quran transformed and translated as a dramatic form of speech. As analytical concepts, finally, these genres cannot be deduced from the historical concepts that in Islam tend to be derived from prophetic practice or ‘classical’ times. As is often the case in aesthetic theory, there may be wide divisions between theory and practice, either for normative reasons or because aesthetic practice takes forms that theory has not yet grasped.87 Furthermore, with regard to non-Arabic Islam, many of problems that were described in the discussion sparked by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe are prevalent: Arabic models are used as the concealed tertium of comparison of an Islam that is frozen in time (and language). My simplified transliteration, waz, for example, hides linguistic and conceptual differences that the Bengali word oẏāj carries. Does the etymology leading back to the Arabic root w–ʿ–ẓ imply that what is expected from this form of preaching is advice and instilling fear? Does waz preaching relate to other parts of public oration in Bangladesh just as it did in early Islamic times or in contemporary Egypt in which horror and fear are described as the pivotal emotions elicited by non-ritual sermons? How does the orientation for consensus described in preaching of medieval Syria play out in the democratic transformation of a decolonizing society? To consider Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh in this sense expands models of Islamic communication and of communication practices available in Muslim societies.

 Introduction 23

Sources and transliteration My recording of sermons is in a sense a continuation of the conservation of otherwise ephemeral speech events by contingent technological developments. Cheap audiovisual recording for the first time in history fixed the sermons in their actual performance and made them repeatable and, at least potentially, open to de- and re-contextualization, new practices and forms of reflection. While I have regularly visited Bangladesh since 2004 and been in contact with Islamic actors since 2010, I conducted the field work for this book between 2012 and 2015. During this time, I built up an archive of recordings of waz mahfils that combine my own recordings with those of media producers in Bangladesh. Overall, I analysed the transcriptions of about fifty sermons, most of which were more than one hour long. More than 300,000 words of Bengali transcriptions of sermon performance provide an unprecedented foundation for research on Islamic sermons, not only in Bangladesh but globally. For select passages, I furthermore noted melodies and added markers of performance and linguistic and narratological characteristics. The conscious mix between my own recordings and those I bought on VideoCD, VHS, cassette, or downloaded from YouTube hopefully helped me to avoid distortions in the data either by my presence at the mahfil or by the selection and production process of commercial recordings. I followed preachers to gather recordings from different regions and rural as well as urban areas; still, my recordings have a strong focus on Dhaka and Eastern Bangladesh, particularly Sylhet and Chittagong. More data and a different research methodology would be needed to judge if that is due to my research networks or if there are indeed quantitative differences in the occurrence of waz mahfils in different regions. While it is unconventional to write about transliteration in the introduction, I deliberately do so. Transliteration is about conscious choices that are closely related to my research perspective and results. While transcription of sound into words according to general rules is necessary to achieve comparability and comprehensibility, canonized orthographic conventions at the same time simplify and distort. In the case of Bengali, the main language considered here, transliteration is modelled on that of Sanskrit and diverges from Bengali pronunciation. This is even graver in Bangladesh, where pronunciation does not ‘fit’ the Kolkata standard. What is more, ‘Islamic’ Bengali idioms often have a high degree of lexical items from influential Islamic languages. In an excellent reflection on the pitfalls of Bengali transliteration, Tony Stewart points to the unstable orthography of Bengali, particularly in non-standardized genres and in texts that include Persian and Arabic words, which are not rendered into Bengali in a standardized way.88 At the same time, they also cannot simply be represented by transliterating them back to some assumed origin, as that would homogenize the world of Islam and ignore the importance of regionalisms. Ideally, transliteration amounts to being able to historicize the relations between spoken and written language, its relation to other languages, and their shifting status in each and every case. All of this is even more complicated in the case of the research presented here, as transcriptions and transliterations are combined. The spoken sermon is transcribed to the Bengali script and then transliterated to the Roman script. A major problem,

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

for example, is that Bengali script very insufficiently represents dialects (my English translations, alas, do so even less). Furthermore, if languages are involved that might be written in another script, then how do I decide which script the preacher and the audience referred to in the first place? In the case of Quranic recitation, for example, it is plausible to assume that any graphic association of preacher and audience would be that of a vocalized Arabic text, while in the case of Arabic words pronounced in a Bengali way, the Bengali script seems a reasonable assumption. Again, this is often quite eclectic: most Arabic words are pronounced according to Urdu and not Arabic standards, for example, the ʿayn goes as unpronounced as do the emphatic consonants. I did not fully standardize the various ways of transliterating sound to show the variety of different realizations: the Persian gunāh, for example, can be rendered gonāh or gunāh or gonā. Nevertheless, as for general Islamic terms in the main text, I often employ Arabic transliteration to ease recognition across regions without implying universal meaning of Arabic over regional variants beyond the possibility that actors might share such aspirations. To enhance readability, I have taken some liberties in adopting dynamic equivalents common to the English-language readership, particularly in respect to names of individuals and places (such as Jacob and Dhaka instead of Yaʿqūb/ Iẏākub and Ḍhākā). Lastly, I also include conscious orthographic choices relating to Bengali renderings of Arabic, such as adding a ba-phalā after consonants as in dvin or kvorān. This helps indicate the particular discursive belongings related to language politics of those groups who would use such variants in their printed publications. During my fieldwork at waz mahfils, my appearance, different from everyone else’s, marked me as an outsider. Even though I knew some of the preachers and listeners because I had travelled with them, I still stood out from the crowd. In many cases, I was made to sit on the stage next to the preacher, and some preachers felt obliged to introduce or comment on me: ‘A German friend of ours has come to record our mahfil, to do so very nicely. He is already here, with his recording machine. He understands Bangla. He does research on waz – if that’s good or bad, only Allah knows. Are you afraid?’89 But actually, no one seemed afraid, and everyone just waited eagerly for the occasion to greet me, even in cases in which I was announced as a Christian at the mass meeting of the madrasa movement of the HI. The only time that the organizers were alarmed by my presence was in London. As usual, I squatted among the audience and started recording, when suddenly an excited security guard asked me to follow him to a side room. However, his suspicion was swiftly appeased as soon as he realized that I could actually speak and understand Bengali – as this proved that I was really recording the sermon with interest and was not someone’s agent with a hidden agenda.90 More difficult to subdue were the suspicions and expectations from my secular friends, who were concerned that I was failing to recognize the political dangers of the waz mahfils. This book represents an effort to take their warning seriously but at the same time to remain aware of the fact that many of those who criticize waz mahfils had only ever listened to them during their childhood, if at all. I remain convinced that the only way to meaningfully engage with the generic form of waz mahfils is by first accepting the perspective of preachers and their audiences. At the same time, making transparent their discourse and unravelling its ‘poetics’ is already a perspective far distinct from the way an ‘insider’ would perceive it. As elaborated above, there are many pitfalls in

 Introduction 25 selecting and representing the discourses I worked with, but I at least tried to make these as transparent as possible and am grateful to continue learning from others who challenge and add to my perspective.

Structure of the book The book is divided into five chapters, each of which approaches the Bengali waz mahfils from a different angle, but which overlap in so many regards that you get the most out of them by reading them together. Chapter 1 starts with a short introduction into different trajectories and functions of Islamic sermons, ranging from the Arabic Friday ritual to Bengali waz preaching. It aims to familiarize the reader with the contemporary practice of waz mahfils in Bangladesh, depicting practicalities of organization and approaching the mahfil space and its communicational setup. I ask about the means of raising audience expectations and interactions between the preacher and the audience, which provide the basis for different forms of mobilization. I furthermore trace developments triggered by global migration and the relations between shifts in media technologies and new female audiences. The next chapters enter the textual and performative layers of the sermons, and these chapters each analyse one of these layers. Chapter 2 starts off by considering the implications of the idiom of the waz mahfils being marked by including not only Bengali, but also Arabic and Urdu. I try to trace the functions and identities that these languages point to. I make sense of their mutual entanglements and the resulting dynamics of recognition and connoisseurship. What role, then, do the Quran and Quranic translations play in this multilingual environment? What functions do poems carry? In respect to the structure of the sermons, Chapter 2 focuses on the sermons’ introduction and main part. Chapter 3 continues with the main part and ends with an analysis of the sermons’ last part, the final prayer. It focuses on the ways in which the sermons involve the listeners in narratives that offer them chances to identify themselves with different kinds of heroes. What are the gendered roles offered here? What forms of masculinity are present to mobilize the youth? I furthermore trace the link between narrative and the expectation of salvation. What, I ask, are the theological consequences of identification with the characters in the sermons? I argue that the narratives are structured in ways that serve to heighten emotional identification, turn traditional narratives of heroism into means of mobilization, and use human compassion as a springboard for religious salvation. Chapter 4 returns to both multilingual code switching and emotionalizing narratives, but adds an analysis of the dimension of vocal performance. I inquire particularly into the preachers chanting passages of the Bengali text, a unique characteristic of sermons held at waz mahfils. To do so, I methodologically integrate rhetorical analysis with the effects of rhythm and melody. I bring together the threads of Quranic translation and emotional identification in a bundle of cultural techniques, with musical self-affection at their centre.

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

After the continuous immersion in the world of the sermon gatherings, Chapter 5 zooms out again. It discusses humour, yet another element of the sermons’ play with language, performance roles and with genre conventions themselves. I argue that humour is essential for populist mobilization against joint enemies while at the same time harbouring the seed for reflective distance. This brings us again to perceive the genre from a greater distance and prepares the ground for the diachronic and intermedial considerations of the outlook, which rethinks trajectories and configurations of popular culture and oral literature by including Islamic sermons.

1

Waz mahfils Genre, actors and space

Waz mahfils (Beng. oẏāj māhˡphil) are a familiar picture in the cities, villages, markets, neighbourhoods and quarters of the Muslim-majority country Bangladesh. They are organized by mosques, madrasas, or on the invitation of religiously passionate Muslim brothers. Such a view can usually not be seen in any other Muslim country in the world. In all these well-arranged waz mahfils, prudent scholars, Sufi leaders, and wise elders keep offering normal Muslims comments on different religious topics to direct and advise them. From far away, on foot, on a motorcycle or different means of transport, the religion-loving Muslims keep taking part in all these waz mahfils and stay awake the whole night to listen with deep interest to the discussions on Quran and Hadith. The mothers and sisters covered by veils also habitually listen to the waz from their own homes or from those of relatives.1

This quote from a Bangladeshi newspaper commentator stresses the ubiquity of waz mahfils in the Bengali religious landscape. It reiterates again and again, without the need to explain it, the composite term waz mahfils, a well-known entity in Bangladesh, but not as familiar outside the country. This was even true for me when I started conducting research on Islamic sermons in Bangladesh in 2012, and this despite the fact that I had listened to Friday sermons in mosques and stayed at the mass gathering (ijtemā) of the Tābligī Jāmāt (TJ), one of the largest movements of Islamic lay preachers globally in Bangladesh. In this chapter, I introduce the preaching gatherings by conveying some insights from my multi-sited and mobile fieldwork. I will start by situating the waz mahfils within the preaching landscape of contemporary Bangladesh. After this short introduction to other forms of preaching, I focus on the main actors of waz mahfils: preachers, organizers and audiences. I sketch the spatial set-up, both in terms of communicative practices and the religious and community-related conceptions that these practices rely upon and that they in turn shape. In short, this chapter is concerned with the multiple frames that surround the sermons: those anteceding the sermons, such as advertisements and songs, or those succeeding them, such as the collection of money or the (after)life of recorded sermons.

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

Islamic sermons in Bangladesh: From Arabic Friday ritual to popular Bengali forms As outlined in the introduction, the distinction between different genres of Islamic sermons lies at the heart of my approach. I argue that the narrative, performative and emotional possibilities of waz mahfils are distinct from those in other forms of preaching. Approaching preaching via its genres also matches the way homiletic knowledge is organized in Bangladesh and comes closer to how research participants perceive it. While there is hardly any literature on ‘Islamic sermons’ in Bangladesh, there is an abundance of collections of sermons held or composed by luminaries of nearly all Islamic schools of thought found in bookshops in the vicinity of mosques and shrines.2 These collections are nearly always marked as belonging to a specific genre of sermons. My interview partners, too, referred to generic differences. Rahman, one of the preachers I worked closely with, differentiated between the following places and their associated speech genres: the bayān held at the ijtemā of the TJ, the waz sermons of waz mahfils, the Arabic Friday sermons (khuṭba), the reformist sermons in madrasas (the isˡlāhī programme), teachings in class, and political speeches and council meetings.3 Of these forms of preaching, the Friday sermon is of particular significance. It the only sermon prescribed by Islamic law and therefore sets ritual standards, providing coherence and continuity to the other different sermon genres. It is also safe to assume that all male listeners of waz mahfils regularly hear Friday sermons. At the same time, because of its ritual restrictions, it is also the sermon genre that is most clearly distinct from the sermons held at waz mahfils. For this reason, a short discussion of the Friday sermon helps us to sharpen the focus for the subsequent analysis of waz mahfils. In turn, I also show how the Friday sermon, too, can be better understood by considering its dynamic relationship to other forms of preaching. In Bangladesh, khuṭba denotes the ritually significant part of the Friday sermon, which is held in two parts before the Friday congregational prayer. The khuṭba is, as elsewhere in contemporary Sunni South Asia, most commonly held in Arabic.4 This linguistic choice has been championed, for example, by the Deobandī school since the nineteenth century. In his famous fatwas, Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī (d. 1905) spoke out against any translation. He adds the argument that the khuṭba should be delivered before the prayer so that no one leaves early.5 A different opinion was voiced early on by the Ahl-e Ḥadīth, which was ‘the first Islamic movement in India to insist that the Friday sermon (khuṭba) be given not in Arabic, but in Urdu, so that it could be understood by the masses’.6 Continuing this controversy, the Bangladeshi preacher Olipuri accused the TV preacher Zakir Naik, whom many in the Deobandī community in Bangladesh deem part of Ahl-e Ḥadīth, of advocating a non-Arabic khuṭba.7 Collections of Arabic khuṭbas are foils for practice. They are not to be read by the interested reader, but to be performed by the Friday preacher prior to Friday prayer in the precise way they are printed. While some preachers do not use such collections and compile their Friday sermons anew each week, the more common model is to hold a khuṭba from one of the available compendia, with only some short preparation

 Waz Mahfils 29 beforehand. The khuṭba compendia are ordered according to the weeks of the ritual year. This repetition is not a flaw, but rather serves to underline the khuṭba’s ritual function. In an environment where only the specialists know Arabic, the khuṭba mainly provides catchphrases that listeners recognize and offer the characteristic sound of the holy language. Due to the general repeatability of the khuṭba, a limited number of khuṭba collections can cover a large number of the khuṭbas held in Bangladesh, and new collections are not necessarily needed. My collection of Bangladeshi khuṭba books attests to the strong presence of the luminaries of the two large South Asian Sunni ‘ideological orientations’8 (maslaks), the Deobanīs and the Barelwīs. The Barelwī tradition is represented most prominently by the Collection of Scholarly/ʿIlmī’s Khuṭbas (Majmūʿa ʿilmī khuṭab), first published in 1877. Its Bengali translation Majˡmuẏāh elˡmī khotˡbā by Maulabī Ābdu Raśid Sāheb was published in the typical cheap paperback format of the Gaosiẏā Lāibrerī at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Bengali version only retains the Arabic khuṭbas, leaving out the Urdu poems that are added after each khuṭba. However, it adds practical advice for the Friday preacher, the khaṭīb, for example, by advising him to sit down in between the two parts. The Bengali translation, transcription and pronunciation of the Arabic text are given interlineally. The Deobandī school is represented by the khuṭba collection by Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī9 called Sermons of the Rules, for the Year’s Fridays (Khuṭbāt al-aḥkām li-jumuʿāt al-ʿām), originally published in 1929.10 I reviewed two Bengali editions and translations, one from India and one from Bangladesh, both of which were translated into Bengali from a Pakistani edition published in Karachi. An important difference between the two Bengali translations is their arrangement: while the Bangladeshi translation follows the order of the Urdu original, the West Bengali one has an altogether different order.11 Both editions feature not only Arabic text but also a Bengali translation of Thānawī’s originally Urdu explications on the importance and rules of the khuṭba. Thānawī’s collection is a particularly interesting case, as the Friday sermons are clearly outnumbered by his Urdu sermons. The latter are read in Bangladeshi komi madrasas, where Thānawī’s ideals of reform of individual and religion, often linked to ideas of balance, continue to be popular. While these Urdu sermons are several hours long and feature extended theological discussions alongside an equal amount of moral advice, educational stories and poems,12 the Arabic khuṭbas of this collection of Friday sermons are very short and devoid of narratives. After the obligatory praise of God and the Prophet and the profession of faith, a very compressed sermon follows. It begins with one or two sentences on the sermon’s message and quotations of Hadith, and includes one or two Quranic verses at the end. Each khuṭba covers about two and a half pages of Arabic text. The khuṭba collects the most important canonical Arabic quotations. They are interpreted and given meaning in the Urdu sermon. While the two khuṭba collections discussed thus far indicate the importance of ‘traditions’ from the influential South Asian Sunni schools of the late nineteenth century, there are a number of collections that seem to have been composed in Bengal after the independence of the South Asian nation states from colonialism. The oldest of these was published in 1949 and from the Chārchīnā darbār in what is now Southern Bangladesh. It is simply called Khuṭbas Translated into Bengali (Baṅgānubād khutˡbāh)

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and contains instructions to the preacher to call upon the people to visit the shrine.13 The second collection from the same place was published shortly after Bangladesh gained independence; the latest edition is from 1993. Their prefaces prescribe the procedure of the Friday sermon. Next to stressing its timing prior to Friday prayer, the authors provide the minimum number of congregants and detail requirements for the voice of the preacher and the sermon’s brevity:14 For a khutˡbāh, it is obligatory to only say āl hāmˡdūlillāh, subahānāllāh or lā-ilāhā illāllāh, but it is repugnant to finish the khutˡbāh with only that. If one says āl hāmˡdūlillāh after sneezing or subahānāllāh when surprised, the khutˡbāh is not realized. If the khutˡbāh and the beginning of prayer are separated by too long a timespan, then the khutˡbāh has to be read again. It is sūnnat to read two khutˡbāhs. It is repugnant (mākrūh) if both together are longer than the surās of the ‘tuẏāle muphācchāl’, particularly in the winter season.15

The prescriptions for the khaṭīb are to be ritually clean (pabitra) and to read the khuṭba standing on the minbar, facing the listeners. The preacher should leave the minbar from the prayer niche (mihrāb) and the listeners should face the imam. I started by saying that the khuṭba is commonly performed in Arabic. While this is true, it is to a degree tautological: khuṭba in this sentence refers specifically to the Arabic part of the Friday sermon, not the Friday sermon as a whole. At the end of the instructions of the Khutbas Translated into Bengali from 1949, the question of the language of the khuṭba is addressed and the common set-up of the Friday sermon is indicated: It is an unlawful innovation (bidāt) to read out the khutˡbāh in any other language but Arabic or to enter a translation (tarjumā) in the khutˡbāh. That’s why before the regular khutˡbāh, but arranged in a way that it does not hinder anyone’s sunnat prayers, or after the prayer it is good to deliver the khutˡbāh’s meaning to the listeners.16

The term khuṭba here, as in South Asia at large, does not denote the entire Friday sermon. It is not an equivalent to the khuṭba in Arabic-speaking countries, where it encompasses the entirety of the sermon held before the Friday prayer. With rare exceptions, such as the Friday sermon held in the madrasa in Deoband for religious specialists trained in Arabic,17 the Friday sermon in Bangladesh – and indeed in most of Sunni South Asia and I would assume in the Muslim world at large – is much more than the repetition of the Arabic khuṭba from the collections discussed here. Rather, it is a composition of different parts including a sermon held in a locally understood language before or after the Arabic khuṭba. Considering the Friday sermon as a whole, the Arabic part is the most significant for the ritual. However, as with the relation between the Urdu and Arabic sermons by Thānawī mentioned above, it is not the most important part in respect to content and communication. In Bangladesh, this is reflected in the fact that considerably more time is allotted to the Bengali sermon than to the subsequent Arabic sermon. While

 Waz Mahfils 31 preachers like to stress the duration of the Arabic part in interviews, in the sermons I observed, each part of the khuṭba was between thirty seconds and a minute long. Indeed, initiatives like that undertaken by the Islamic Foundation of the Ministry of Religious Affairs to issue a common Arabic khuṭba to be read out throughout the country in reaction to the terrorist attack that shook Dhaka on 1 July 2016 seem to have been a one-time exception. The effort was a strong statement against terrorism and militarism (jaṅgībād o santrās / al-irhāb wa al-fasād). We can understand from the above that the underlying assumptions about the communicative function of the Friday sermon were not correct. Neither can the sermon be reduced to the Arabic khuṭba, nor is this the best place for addressing listeners on the issue of terrorism. As the language of the Bengali and the Arabic parts are distinct, so too are the roles of the preacher in each part. While he wears his ritual attire throughout – often a white turban and a white punjabi (what in northern India and Pakistan would be called shalwar kameez) and a long cloak with golden braid – his bodily position and posture change. The preacher stands on the minbar with his preaching staff in his hands during the Arabic khuṭba. In contrast, he delivers the Bengali sermon sitting, either on a chair in the mihrāb or on the lower steps of the minbar, which, if it exists at all, in Bangladesh consists of a small pedestal with a couple of steps. While the Arabic khuṭba stands for continuity of the commandments of a transcendental God and a transhistorical and transcultural community with many legalistic and practical restraints on its communicational possibilities, the Bengali sermon, most often classified by respondents as waz or bayān, is closer to the audience. It may ask for audience response, and it may at times include speech registers such as dialect, melodic poetry and prose recitation in various languages, mimetic speech in short narratives, expressions of the emotions of the dramatis personae, gestures and jokes. This contrasts to the khuṭba that might be recited in different styles of Arabic recitation but is a consistent solo performance. In the Bengali part, the preacher also is free to discuss current topics of concern to him and his audience.18 Nevertheless, as the Bengali sermon before the khuṭba is also part of the Friday sermon and takes place in the mosque before the Friday prayer, the preacher’s interaction with the audience is restrained compared with waz sermons in other settings. The preacher also aims to thematically align both parts of the sermons, to include topics that are ‘noteworthy and famous’ (mashhūr, prasiddha),19 and to try to follow the khuṭba’s topics of commands and seasonal circle guiding the listeners throughout the liturgical year. Both the Bengali ‘pre-khuṭba-waz’ and the Arabic khuṭba are bound together ritually by the fact that the Bengali sermon starts off with Arabic ritual formulas that are not necessarily repeated in the khuṭba later on. In turn, after the Arabic khuṭba, there is usually a Bengali supplicatory prayer that starts off with the Arabic formula ‘we committed sins’ (ẓalamnā anfusanā), but then switches to a supplication in Bengali. After the Friday ritual in the narrower sense has ended, meaning that the sunna prayers have been performed, it is customary at many mosques to hold a durūd/milād māhˡphil (blessing circle) among a smaller circle of participants who remain in the mosque. The fact that this ritual is a standard part of the Friday rituals is attested to by the fact that it

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is added at the end of the 1974 edition of the Khutbas Translated into Bengali, just after the regularly repeated second part of the khuṭba. In South Asian migrant communities worldwide, this set-up of the Friday sermon is adapted differently depending on context. In South Africa, with its large and longstanding South Asian diaspora communities, the arrangement matches the one described above. Recently, there has been a shift in the ‘pre-khuṭba-talk’ from Urdu to English.20 The Bengali migrant workers I interviewed in the United Arab Emirates have a Bangladeshi Friday preacher in the mosque of the worker’s camp, but he does not hold a Bengali sermon, only an Arabic khuṭba. Instead, there is dars afterwards during which volunteers translate the khuṭba to the migrant workers.21 In London, where there is a much higher degree of religious freedom, I noticed different approaches to the Friday sermon. One is the procedure described above only with the slight difference that due to the predominance of Sylheti-origin Bangladeshis, the preacher often adopts Sylheti in his address before the Arabic sermon.22 Another set-up is chosen in one of the largest mosques of Europe, the East London Mosque. Here, the Friday sermon is held in three formally and content-wise equivalent parts in Arabic, Bengali and English, with the Arabic part being only slightly shorter than the English and Bengali parts.23 The Arabic part’s communicative function is extended considerably in comparison to the model sketched above. Conversely, the parts held in Bengali and English are influenced by and restricted by becoming more akin to the formal khuṭba. The preacher hence has to outsource his ‘non-official’ role to a question and answer session after the sermon when community members form a semicircle around him and pose their questions. This important difference in the composition and sequence of the Friday sermon from the model prevalent in Bangladesh fits the orientation of the khaṭīb and imam towards ‘Middle Eastern’ models of preaching and education in Saudi Arabia. In short, the Arabic khuṭba is but one part of an elaborate composite ritual surrounding the Friday sermon. The predominant model of the Friday sermon in Bangladesh can be described as a composition of different genres. From the perspective of the Friday sermon, these might be considered subgenres. From the perspective of this book, it makes the Friday sermon a part of a varied preaching landscape in which different genres lead a ‘life of their own’. Also in the case of non-ritual Islamic sermons, the mostly Arabic-derived terminology for different genres can only provide limited orientation. Dars, for example, might refer to the ‘classroom’ speech mentioned by Rahman, or to the informal talk of the Friday preacher in the ‘Arabic model’ of the East London Mosque’s Friday ritual. Maimuna Huq takes dars to denote ‘the group study of Islamic texts and discussion of personal reports’,24 which is ‘the most fundamental element of any BICSa (Bāṃlādeś Islāmī Chātrī Saṃshā (Bangladesh Islamic Female Students Association of the BJI)) training program’.25 These programmes include training in exegesis for the women who present their views before the other members, sometimes in relatively large gatherings.26 This set-up is remarkably similar to the female, although selfdeclared ‘apolitical’, ‘religious discussion circles, known as Talim, Tafsir, Islam class, Dars and Quran class’.27 In short, the genre denominations dars and tafsīr are employed

 Waz Mahfils 33 differently by different actors, who at the same time try to shape the practice of these genres in particular ways.28 Bayān (Beng. baẏān, literally elucidation, explanation) is strongly associated with the Deobandī tradition and the TJ. They are nearly as widely available in print as the vade mecum of the TJ, the Faẓāʾil-i aʿmāl. At the time of my research, the most popular bayān were those of the prominent Pakistani preacher Tariq Jameel. His sermons are translated by different teachers of Bangladeshi komi madrasas.29 Bayān are at the centre of the largest gathering of the TJ in Bangladesh, the Biśva Ijˡtemā, or Universal Gathering, which takes place in January on the northern fringes of Dhaka city.30 Like the student clubs in Deoband, this Universal Gathering is organized in a geographical fashion, with tents for each region of Bangladesh, and, since there are tents allocated for foreign nations, for the whole world. Walking on the right side in ‘the Prophet’s way’ and different from everyday practice, eating from shared metal plates, self-organization of food and sleeping arrangements, the celebration of peacefulness, and the sheer capacity to organize a mass event that, according to organizers, draws three million participants – these turn the ideal into practice, at least temporarily. The gathering is the starting point for lay preachers’ preaching tours. One of the main activities during this mass gathering is to listen to bayān. They are held on a central stage and broadcast over the entire space with the exception of the foreigners’ tents, which have their own arrangements. The disembodied voices of the preachers address the often silent and calm crowd of seated listeners as a whole. Most of the preachers give their sermons in Urdu and leave some space after every two to three sentences for the Bengali translator. Whatever little drama there was in the Urdu is lost in the Bengali translation because it is usually marked as a repetition of someone else’s words when the translator uses inquit formulas such as ‘he says’. The most important goal of the translation seems to be to avoid pauses and make sure that there is a continuous rhythmic flow of advice, which in turn performatively underlines the perfect translatability of the message. The idea of translation is held up even where no translation is possible: in the foreigners’ tent of the Biśva Ijˡtemā, I witnessed ‘translations’ into Arabic that were actually new sermons by Arabic preachers who had very different styles than the sermon that was being broadcasted at that very moment in the other tents. This overview shows that preaching in Bangladesh has many forms that stand in a dynamic relationship to one another, but work along distinct genre rules. These genre rules need to be reconstructed rather than normatively deduced from terminology. This is also true for the kind of sermon gatherings that this book focuses on. Other than waz mahfil (oẏāj māhˡphil), these are commonly called oẏāj o mīlād māhˡphil, korān māhˡphil or tāphˡsīrul korān māhˡphil.31 Oẏāj is the Bengali transcription of the Arabic waʿẓ,32 a form of preaching that has been associated with admonition, piety and later, Sufism, as well as with storytelling,33 and typically is held freely and didactically in markets and open spaces.34 I will start the reconstruction of the Bengali genre by introducing the preachers and the specifics of the gathering as a mahfil, which is crucial to understanding the performative, narrative and emotional possibilities of waz mahfils.

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

Popular preachers between roles and regions Jonathan Berkey stresses the importance of Islamic popular preachers for ‘transmitting basic religious knowledge and instruction to the common people’ and concludes that ‘the controversy that their activities engendered was in the final analysis about how the common people were to understand Islam’.35 Linda Jones’s research highlights historical changes in the role of preachers and notes that they often sought to distinguish themselves from disreputable colleagues and consciously worked to improve their public images.36 I take the popular preacher as one who appeals to the wider population rather than a specialist who adapts his preaching style accordingly.37 At the same time, the popular preacher aims to be popular and hence has to be a good reader of trends and tastes among his recipients. In Bangladesh, the waz preacher is most commonly called wāʿiẓ without pronouncing the specifically Arabic phonemes. The Bengali composite form waʿẓkārī and the plural form waʿiẓīn are also common. This is quite similar to the titles elsewhere. In contemporary Nigeria, the waz sermon is called wazu and the preacher wazuko.38 In both cases, the term for the waz sermon can also be used in the wider sense of admonition. In Bengal, this tendency is emblematized in the common compound oẏāj-nachihat (waʿẓ-naṣīḥat), meaning admonition and counsel, but also reproof and reprimand. This semantic connection also links waz sermons to the ‘reformist’ literature of the late nineteenth century, the naṣīḥat nāma, which aimed to correct the masses’ incorrect beliefs.39 Being a waz preacher is often more a temporary and context-bound role than an occupation or identity. Abu Suphi̇ ẏān āl Kāderī puts oẏājkārī in one group with thief (cor), person who says his prayers (nāmāzī), leader, person who does his pilgrimage (ḥājjī), or person who drives a car (driver).40 And while the newspaper commentator cited at the beginning of this chapter mentions the compound waz mahfil over and over again, he does not speak of the preacher as wāʿiẓ (or any derivative), but rather refers to scholars (ālem), representatives of Sufi lineages (pīr-māśāẏekh), and wise men more generally (bujurˡgarā). The religious field in Bangladesh is to a great degree organized independently from the state, even while there are influential state-run religious institutions, such as the Islamic Foundation and the government-supervised religious schools, the so-called Āliẏā mādrāsās. The website of the Madrasa Education Board that supervises them provides lists of roughly 10,000 such institutions. Their various degrees are recognized as equivalents to degrees of the bachelor’s and master’s system.41 However, the majority of the religious educational institutions in Bangladesh (uncertain figures of around 14,000) are Islamic colleges modelled on the Islamic seminary in Deoband, which are called komi madrasas in Bangladesh (derived from qawmī, as the Deobandī madrasa from its inception relied on money from the community and not the state). There are also some newer private institutions, such as the International Islamic University, Chittagong (statistics are not available). Very recently, in autumn 2018, the AL government recognized the highest degree of the komi madrasas as an equivalent to the master’s degree in Islamic and Arabic studies, hence pro forma opening up

 Waz Mahfils 35 employment opportunities in state institutions. How this will impact the field of preaching, however, is yet an open question. Due to this diversity of Islamic institutions operating to a large degree outside state regulation, there exists no unified office for the ‘free preachers’. Apart from the stars, who can make a living off of their preaching activities, most preachers are employed in another function, most commonly as ‘imam and preacher’ at a mosque or as teacher at a madrasa.42 This places the preachers in quite traditional and conservative institutions and contradicts the assumption that ‘new’ Islamic thinkers and preachers are rarely graduates of religious universities or madrasas. While this may be true in the case of radical global movements, and for cases such as the medical doctor Zakir Naik who became South Asia’s most influential Islamic televangelist, generally in Bangladesh, graduates of religious schools do not shun appointments at mosques or madrasas.43 Rather, preachers and other actors in the religious field take madrasa education for granted and as a basis for their activities. It is important to recognize the immense influence of these teaching institutions and traditions for the role models followed by preachers. The popular preacher is showered with praise and titles when he is invited onto the stage of a sermon gathering. ‘Today’s main attraction (pradhān ākarṣaṇ), the internationally famous religious scholar, interpreter of the Quran, proclaimer of the Ahl-e Sunnat, pir-e tarīqat, Maulana al-ḥājj Maulana Abu ‘l-Kasem Nuri, will come to you with a message of light (nūrānī bāṇī).’44 Typical titles given to preachers include Hājj, Ālim, Maulāna, international Islamic thinker, famous and distinguished preacher, writer, researcher, or, more elaborately, the famous Hadith expert of the subcontinent. Announcements also mention functions, such as imām o khatīb, pīr sahib, madrasa teacher, or madrasa principle (muhtamim).45 In case of particularly important personalities, this praise is extended: ‘the symbol of the revolutionary public of Bangladesh’s religious scholars (ʿālim ʿulamāʾ), the honoured chairman of Bangladesh’s Komi Madrasa Education Board, the Shaykhu ‘l-mashāʾikh Haẓrat Allāma Śāh Āhmad Śaphī.’46 The image and role of preachers is furthered by self-descriptions that they include in the narratives of their sermons. These are, of course, always rhetorical in the sense that they are related by the preacher and should not be taken as objective descriptions, but they are part of the simulation of a communicative ideal. They generally correspond with the ideals of the speaker that preachers described to me and with various forms of advice given to preachers. This ideal is that of the preacher as an orator perfectus who authentically (bāstabāẏita abasthāẏ) lives up to what he preaches and has a good character (caritra).47 He speaks from in-depth knowledge with love (prem) for the Prophet.48 Like a gentleman, he displays love and softness, and he is not too harsh (karkaś), but he never ceases to preach against social wrongs.49 This image complements the one created outside of the mahfils by the preachers’ other roles, by their representation in recordings and by their philanthropic engagement. The self-performance of the preacher at waz mahfils is particularly important, as the audience often cannot make a judgement about the personality of the preacher, who comes from another area. The most important commonplaces related directly to the idealized image of the preacher are those of humility, hardship, sickness, travel and motivation. Display of

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

humility and weakness is, of course, a ubiquitous feature of oratorical and authorial ethos.50 In the religious literature of Bengal, it is long established that composers seek forgiveness for their limitations from God as much as from the patron.51 Similarly, in waz collections from the 1920s, the author–preacher seeks mercy from the audience as a ‘nothingness’ and ‘sinner’ (khākˡchār gonāhˡgār) and appeals to God: ‘Holy khodāwand! Burn the fire of knowledge in my heart and grant me the power to hold waz during this time. I am an extremely unknowledgeable and senseless and incapable person, unfit to present any praise.’52 Today, the child preacher Faruk Siddiq remarks: ‘I am a young person, and in my remarks, there can be mistakes. Please, look at them forgivingly and pray for me.’53 And Sayeedi, focusing on concrete outcomes, elaborates: ‘Allah the Pure (Allāh pāk) knows well how much I could do. If by this anything is accomplished, then the only one to claim the praise, the praise’s owner (mālik) is who? Allah! Who owns that praise? Allah! And if I failed to explain, then all the responsibility for this failure is mine. Allah the Exalted, forgive me!’54 Waz preachers follow a role model that is open to many. This is important to keep in mind: while waz preachers in Bangladesh reach the masses, it would be a mistake to see their form of communication as adhering to the model of ‘one to many’. Rather, the variation and adaptability of a form of communication that is modelled on the lines of ‘many to many’, in the sense that the preacher’s role is taken up by many actors in different places simultaneously, is crucial. The evolving sense of rootedness of waz mahfils in society led Maimuna Huq, in her research on ‘Islamist’ women’s groups, to characterize waz preaching in Bangladesh as ‘traditional religious sermon (waaz) practiced in South Asia’.55 As mentioned, the most common combination of roles is that of a preacher being imām o khatīb in a mosque while also occasionally preaching at waz mahfils. Both roles are emphasized to different degrees by different preachers. Rahman, an active member of the TJ and graduate from a komi madrasa, was pursuing a degree in Islamic studies at a private university in Dhaka when I got to know him in September 2012. In 2014, he took up the post of imām o khatīb at a small new mosque in Śeoṛāpāṛā. This choice of occupation made it necessary for him to rent a small apartment close to the mosque; to be on duty even during the birth of his youngest son; to regularly drink tea with the local politician, who spent the day in the unfinished main floor of a new building just across the street; and of course to prepare the Friday sermon and the tafsīr sermon, which he held on Thursday evenings. Tablighī tours were not the only thing that no longer fit this new phase of his life; attending waz mahfils, too, was no longer possible for him. He only made exceptions when the waz mahfil was held close to his hometown north of Dhaka city. The situation was different in the case of the young preacher Zaman, a graduate of the Hāṭhājārī madrasa close to Chittagong – the oldest Deobandī madrasa in Bangladesh – who had just been appointed as imām o khatīb in Sylhet. He did not hold a tafsīr on Thursday nights and supplemented his income by teaching at two madrasas in the mosque’s vicinity and by making use of his melodic voice at waz mahfils. Zaman’s example brings us to a second frequent role combination: a preacher and a teacher at a madrasa. Here it is necessary to differentiate between ‘in-house mahfils’, which are held inside a madrasa, and those teachers who preach outside as well. At

 Waz Mahfils 37 mahfils inside madrasas, there is little outside advertisement and the sermons are part of a cluster of activities promoting the network of madrasas. These are, particularly in case of komī madrasas, organized according to affiliations to ‘mother-madrasas’, which can have thousands of smaller affiliated madrasas. In this context, preaching also becomes a means of strengthening affiliation and promoting specific groups among the komī madrasas, such as the HI or the Majlise Dāoẏātul Hakk. The latter movement’s founder and leader (Āmīr) Āllāmā Māhˡmudūl Hāsān was the khatīb of the central mosque in Dhaka’s high-end Gulshan district during the time of my research. At the same time, he headed a system of more than 150 affiliated madrasas, whose preachers have been meeting annually since 1992 for the ‘central gathering’ (markājī ijtimā) at the ‘central office’ (kendrīẏa kāryālaẏ), the Jāmiẏā Islāmiẏā Dārul Ulūm Mādāniyā in South Yātrābāṛi. Hasan’s son-in-law and right-hand man, Niʿamat, became one of my main conversation partners on the educational background of komī madrasas. As a head teacher of Arabic literature and a fluent speaker of Urdu, he particularly enjoyed practising and showing his immense linguistic skills, thereby embodying the opposite of the prevalent stereotype that preachers in Bangladesh would generally not master Arabic. He was busy with administrative work and teaching at the madrasa; he commuted there from his Gulshan home together with his father-in-law on a daily basis. During the Majlise Dāoẏātul Hakk’s central gathering, he took up the role of a general moderator. As the madrasa’s network spanned over the whole country, he became increasingly busy attending mahfils at madrasas outside of Dhaka until he himself ultimately became the principle of a large madrasa in Mādārīpur. In this context, ‘traditional’ preaching has to be understood in the strong sense: Niamat is a self-conscious adherent to the Deobandī tradition, its strong repudiation of secular politics, the love of debate (not the least with me) and the scholarship of reformed Sufism. His sermons were part of a programme of reform, first of all of the madrasas themselves, but also of the preaching landscape in Bangladesh. The envisaged reform of preaching is spelled out in detail on a leaflet that was distributed at the central gathering in 2014.56 It aims to assign a waz preacher to each madrasa, whose job it is to teach the regular Muslims and who is financed either by individuals or by community contributions. For the preacher, it is not necessary to be a great scholar, but he definitely has to avoid attacking anyone, being controversial or making political statements. The independence of the office is to be ensured by the preacher never accepting any gifts and even being suspicious about invitations. Only the organization to which the preacher is attached is to decide where the sermons can take place, a decision taken with great care. The preacher is in no way to be engaged in ‘folk-blessing’; talismans, amulets and the like are forbidden. Furthermore, the leaflet names the books that are to be consulted by the preachers.57 The preacher is not to restrict himself to mahfils, but is to invite people from offices, shops and the like. The preacher’s ideal as described in the leaflet approaches that of the tablīghī lay preacher. The programme of reform hence takes up many characteristics of contemporary waz preaching in order to change them. It shows that actors consciously connect the form of preaching with the politics of religious organizations and their respective theological stances.

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh

While in these examples a regular job is the platform that enables the preacher to engage in ‘free preaching’, a preacher’s career might also follow the opposite path. For example, the well-known preacher Tophājjal Hosen Bhairabī is also imām o khatīb at a mosque, but he had himself founded the mosque in Bhairab after having become a successful waz preacher. Similarly, Ābul Kāsem Nūrī was already an accomplished preacher when he founded an organization working against the practice of dowry with a centre two floors above his flat in Chittagong city.58 And while Hosen takes up the responsibility of a Friday preacher, the sermon and the mosque’s location both cater to his preaching activities at waz mahfils. His Friday sermons include snippets of his wellknown waz sermons, and his mosque provides organizers of waz mahfils elsewhere the opportunity to approach him and his personnel to book him.59 The number of regular attendees for prayer is relatively small in comparison. Nuri and Hosen both told me that before becoming preachers they had been reciters of the Quran and songs of praise. Generally speaking, the role of the waz preacher in Bangladesh in many respects borders that of the reciter of the Quran (qārī) and of poems and songs praising the Prophet (naʿt). Common to all three roles is the wish for beautiful vocal performance. Hosen, for example, remembers that as a child he listened to the khatm-e saphīnā, amplified Quranic recitations. ‘I liked it so much that from that point onwards I thought: Oh my God, if I could only become such a reciter (ḥāfiẓ, lit. someone who knows the Quran by heart). … And I found the mic, hanging from the tree, was very beautiful.’60 At that time, even though he did not know the Quran, Hosen, ‘out of desire’ and for his ‘own satisfaction’ (ātmatr̥ pti), cut a banana plant’s stem and carved a microphone out of it.61 On the bottom (of the stem) I made a mouth (for the microphone). Then I repeatedly recited the few sūras that I knew by heart. I got the mental satisfaction that I could also do that thing like they do it. Then I told my parents that they have to enrol me in the school for Quranic memorization (Hephājātkhānā). ‘If you don’t enrol me in the Hephājātkhānā, then you will be in difficulty at God’s house.’ So my parents agreed.62

Along with the first occasions on which he himself recited the Quran at the saphīnā, Hosen also recalls extended exposure to qārīs on TV and radio, which complemented his lessons at the Hephājātkhānā. At that time, he also started going to waz mahfils and wrote his first naʿt, which centred on Muhammad’s passions; he later performed it at a waz mahfil long before he became a preacher after more religious study. While preachers take different paths on the journey to becoming a preacher, their activities as preachers are characterized by travelling to preaching events, the locations of which are to a large degree not determined by the preachers. Travelling to and fro makes up much of their work time. Successful preachers attend up to three preaching events per day, often until late at night, and depending on the distance and location, they might be on the road from the afternoon until late at night. This is, as I personally witnessed when I joined preachers on their tours, quite exhausting even without preaching. Nevertheless, preachers see it as a great blessing that their body and particularly their voice have to undergo this strain.

 Waz Mahfils 39 Travel is also another important commonplace in preachers’ self-descriptions in mahfils. ‘I offer thanks at the court of the great Master of Mankind, whose courtesy made an ignorant, worthless person like me (travel safely): yesterday I was in Mongla, Khulna, and today I am in the Bagmara village in South Komilla. In between was Dhaka.’63 To keep up with the many places he visits, the preacher often turns to the organizers and entourage to remind him of his past performances or upcoming events, and it is no shame that these little conversations are broadcast to the audience.64 Next to travel activities, preachers describe, during their sermons, other bodily hardships that they have to endure. Olipuri, preaching in the United States, remarks that he suddenly caught a cold while travelling to Bangladesh, adding: ‘I hope you can understand my voice, and I cannot speak very loudly. Please listen attentively to what I am saying.’65 The preachers say that they can endure bodily weakness and travels; as they are for the sake of religion God grants special favours for their pious work. ‘I am travelling throughout the country. That’s nothing. Has the deception of Satan ever hindered the religious work? No one could do so. Allah works for the religion (dīn).’66 Preachers portray travelling as a form of reward-bringing jihad. Their descriptions at the same time mirror the everyday experience of modern travel infrastructure, which is becoming more and more frustrating in urban areas of Bangladesh, particularly Dhaka, and remains very dangerous for the majority of domestic travellers. On a very chilly night, Mazhari explains that it would not be a problem for him to shorten the day’s sermon, as the day before he had stayed at the mahfil beyond midnight. Also the audience would gain religious merit (ṣawāb) for being there the whole night. Linking the hardships of travel and sickness, he explains: For five months I have been sick. It’s a particular sickness, inside the body, which doesn’t show to the outside. But there is some sickness nevertheless. Allah the Pure may fend off this illness. Āmīn! … Allah the Pure Himself strengthens the servant when he starts talking about the Quran, isn’t that right?67

Qaderi talks about his preaching activity as a way of distracting himself from his suffering and about his travels being in the company of God and the Prophet, and makes the audience chant along a rhythmic and rhyming take-home message: I am actually a sick person, going to the hospital every day. Typhoid fever, diabetes. But when I am going to the mic, then I myself forget that I am sick. Although the body is very weak, I do waz, and die doing it. Because it’s a big issue, the Prophet’s gathering (campus), the words of Islam. If no one comes with me, the Prophet will come. Say loudly: ‘The Prophet will go with me. I come alone, who will come with me (saṅge yābe ki)? Along will come, by two names, Allah and the Prophet (Allāh o nabī).’68

Preachers never travel alone, taking along trustworthy comrades from their own family or the region they are travelling to. The more successful a preacher becomes, the more he travels and, hence, the more he professionalizes his company. Hosen employed two drivers and four to five other people who help him on the road. In Nuri’s

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microbus, there were overall nine people accompanying him, including relatives such as his younger son and a ‘nephew’ who had been to the Middle East and was waiting for his next work permit with Qatar Airways. Furthermore, guides from the villages organizing the events often come along to show the way, have a last-minute chat with the preacher and ensure that the preacher will reach the mahfil in time. The importance of the preacher’s ‘entourage’ goes beyond mere organizational concerns, however. Often, people are included who take up complementary roles closely related to the performance of the sermon: as the Friday preacher is complemented and aided by the muezzin, so the waz preacher often brings along reciters of the Quran or of naʿt to ensure the right atmosphere for the sermon. Other marriages of convenience are possible, too: Nuri is accompanied by a man who sells his recorded sermons and Islamic songs, posters, and other related material – Nuri even points at him during his sermon. The preacher’s travelling troupe enables preachers-to-be to travel along and learn from the models of the preachers just as much as the preacher relies on his troupe to aid him during his performance by providing prompts and information that might slip the preacher’s mind. And last but not least, as select members of the entourage are seated on stage together with the preacher, it is a means of showing allegiance and building up an image of themselves. When organizers announce the preacher at waz mahfils, they often indicate how far the preacher had to travel. Hosen reports that he has been invited to Tripura in India, Malaysia, the Maldives, and, most recently, Jordan. The so-called VIP roads are a nuisance for normal travellers, who cannot use them, and Hosen, in a sermon, recounts how he is recognized by the policemen who block off the road and finally let him proceed on the VIP road itself. While this boasting is part of his pop-star image, Hosen immediately states that the Umma of the last Prophet and hence all his listeners, are VIPs.69 The global reach of Bengali preachers is part of the growth of the diaspora, which reproduces cultural practices from home. However, it adds to the meaning and function of the preaching events. The historian Amit Dey has underscored the fact that in the nineteenth century ‘preachers like Meherullah served as a link between the educated Muslims in the centre (metropolis) and the Muslim masses in the periphery (hinterland)’.70 Against this background, the diaspora draws on long-established cultural resources: the travelling preacher not only mediates between the religious texts and their interpretation and relation to the listeners’ horizon, but is also a mediator between regions and classes. In Dey’s interpretation, this connection was part of a purification process of Islam. As the word ‘purify’ implies, there has often been a tension in Bengal between supposedly ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of Islam, which in turn are identified with theological positions, such as (local) pīr versus (pure global) ‘orthodoxy’.71 This is not the perspective I take in this book because it implies a hierarchy between local and global, which are categories that hinge on a particular standpoint, and because such a perspective implicitly adapts loaded nationalist perceptions of what is foreign and what is not. Furthermore, different theological schools do not easily match with regard to being more or less global. For example, during my research in the UAE, I met Bengali workers who connected to their homeland by Sufi festivities and proxy shrines,

 Waz Mahfils 41 and not by a ‘global’ or ‘de-cultured’ Islam; among the preachers with a global impact mentioned above, there is no uniform theological tendency towards anti-Sufism. Rather than conceiving of the waz mahfils as transporters of a particular religious ideology, I think it is important to see the potential they harbour for creating a communal experience that connects (imagined) home and diaspora in many ways. The sermons include concrete references to the diaspora if they are held in Bangladesh and to Bangladesh if they are held abroad. Longings for the far away – and ultimately unreachable – are fundamental religious topics, and allegorical interpretations in waz mahfils often speak to both religious and migrant experiences. The sermons as practice not only perform well wishes to community members far away, particularly in the supplicatory prayer, but also express, imagine and offer participation in narratives that foster shared emotions of longing and joint experience, which is important for migration experiences. Thus, the waz mahfils are to be counted among the many cultural and media forms that take up, more and more explicitly in the last decade, the topic of migration. When Khan preaches in London with an audience of mostly Sylheti migrants, he praises Sylhet as an important centre of Islam that is well-known across the world.72 Speaking in Sylheti dialect, he uses the only form of Bengali known by many of his audience members. In the diaspora, where standard Bengali is often little known, the sermons easily take up a prominent position as representatives of the language and language community. The domestic and community functions of dialect thus overlap with the imagination of a dialectal configuration at home in Bangladesh. The diaspora is part of the economic system of the preaching events, just like the inland migrants who sponsor waz mahfils in their home villages. Purification and reform constitute a relatively stable discourse that reproduces certain positions as much as it seeks to change things. Extending Dey’s analysis that waz preachers are not only theological mediators but also mediators between centre and periphery, it seems that today they have become mediators between diaspora and home. Their practices and the experiences in their participation help the two communities mutually reproduce each other.

Timing and preparing the mahfil The time and rhythm of holding waz mahfils is influenced by the meteorological and agrarian calendar, the school year of the madrasas and the liturgical calendar. Travelling and setting up events in public spaces is much more convenient in the winter season (roughly December to March) than during the monsoon season. While there are differences between agricultural regions and changes due to the increase in irrigated cropping and new employment opportunities, the season between the Āmān and the Bara rice harvest puts the smallest workload on agricultural workers. In this sense, waz mahfils are also harvest festivals. The liturgical year, while providing stock themes for preachers, seems to be less important for determining the organization of waz mahfils, which generally see an increase around the Prophet’s birthday and a decrease during Ramadan. The time during monsoon season is somewhat less hectic and preachers take time for their creative work, such as writing new praise songs and thinking about

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new sermons. They can be reached at their bases more easily than during the peak season. Thus, for the organizers of mahfils, it is the time to book the preachers for the next season. The curriculum of the religious schools integrates weekly internal preaching events. These feature many structural aspects of the waz mahfils, such as framing songs and announcements. Furthermore, the madrasas organize a yearly congregation (jalsa sālāna) that includes a graduation ceremony (the binding of the turban, dastār bandī) on a more or less fixed date, a practice that most likely goes back to the yearly convocation of the college of Deoband.73 However, the principal (muhtamin) of the madrasa in Deoband, Abū ‘l-Qāsim Nuʿmānī, despite going to Bangladesh regularly, stated that he was not aware of waz mahfils outside of the madrasas or during the evening when I talked to him in autumn 2013. As most waz mahfils are announced only locally and depend on a multitude of decentralized actors, it is impossible to measure exactly how many are held in Bangladesh. My impression was that during the peak season it is nearly impossible to avoid them. When driving through the country by night bus from Dhaka to Gaibandha in January 2013, I counted no less than six mahfils next to the highway. When a student compiled a (non-comprehensive) list of mahfils in and around Sylhet town in March 2014 (the end of the season), he listed at least two for every evening, despite the fact that the AL government had already in that year effectively decreased mahfils openly organized by the BJI. Waz mahfils in rural areas are most commonly organized by local committees (pariṣad) or societies (samāj), particularly youth societies (yuba samāj) or committees for the improvement of Islamic society (islāmī samāj kalyāṇ pariṣad). Depending on the size of a village, it can have several of these societies, up to ten, each of which has (several) hundred members. These societies are also engaged in activities such as construction and embellishment of mosques, support of the poor for medical treatment or marriage ceremonies, or ponds for cultivating fish. However, collecting money and organizing mahfils are their main activities. The chairman (sabhāpati) bears a major part of the costs and hosts and feeds the preachers, who only go to the mahfil once it is their turn. Other important roles include those of the major guest (pradhān athithi) and the special guest (biśeṣ athithi), who are invited to the location to join the mahfil and whose names are included in the advertisements and announcements. Due to the social prestige of the organizers and guests and the monetary importance of the collection at the end of the mahfil, one key quality of a preacher is his ability to attract listeners to the mahfil. This, in turn, means that – contrary to the abovementioned leaflet’s goals of establishing the preacher as an office independent of audience attraction and only committed to the religious institution he is attached to – the preacher’s ‘market value’ is directly dependent on the taste of the audience. The organizers are crucial in shaping this taste, but they also have to correctly appraise it: choosing a particular preacher who is expected to fill up the tent implies knowing that he is popular among the audience. This process requires a lot of prior negotiation, as both preacher and organizers have to be sure that they share the same expectations for the event. During the waz mahfil itself, only minor corrections are possible, with communication being limited

 Waz Mahfils 43 to slips of paper passed on to the preacher by the organizers for particular requests or pressing questions they want the preacher to address. Usually, the topics to be discussed have to be at least roughly defined in advance. In madrasas, these topics deal with the schools themselves, from the possibilities of sustaining the livelihood of madrasa-educated persons to trying to ease the students’ worries. At the same time, preachers there often discuss the expansion of the religious sector through missions among fellow Muslims or the establishment of more religious schools. In the ‘free’ preaching field, expectations are not as clear. Organizers often have their own ideas about the fitting topic and the preachers have to prepare it, particularly when the audience is expected to be more demanding. It might be that the committee urges the preacher to address topics of local concern, such as cases of theft or excesses of youth (drinking, smoking or dancing); or he is called to address social problems such as an increase in theft; or he provides theological clarification concerning, for example, ritual practice. Sometimes the organizers also know of particular topics the preacher often deals with, such as dowry, and agree that he should speak on them. Furthermore, good preachers have the ability to intuit which topics might be fitting at which moment. To keep the audience attentive, Najrul Islam mentions that he consciously announces topics that stir their curiosity. For a young audience, for example, he could choose to speak about qualities important to make a good marriage match. In cases in which the mahfil is set in remote places, the use of dialect and spontaneous discussion of whatever topic is named to the preacher upon arrival works well. Here, the use of English words, for example, may result in the audience rejecting the sermon, something the preacher has to sense and adjust to.74 There are also expectations and negotiations about the gift (hādiẏe) the preacher receives from the organizers. Formally, this gift is given only after the sermon without prior communication, but here, with respect to the topic and schedule, the organizers talk to the preacher or their assistants beforehand. There is a wide margin between unknown and star preachers. Given the low salary of many madrasa teachers, muezzins and imams, even small sums can be very attractive. Hosen reports that he received his first payment when he recited a naʿt and was given baksheesh of 5 taka. ‘Five taka! At that time, five taka was a lot for me!’75 As a preacher, even 10 to 20 taka per mahfil was not too bad given his monthly salary of 700 taka. At the time of our conversation, the young preacher Zaman earned between 1,000 and 6,000 taka per mahfil compared to a monthly salary of 7,000 at the mosque and 6,000 at the madrasas where he teaches. The salary of accomplished preachers remains clouded but I am told that they easily reach 50,000 taka (and more in the diaspora). When I talked to them, preachers often indirectly reflected their income when they talked about reinvesting their earnings into religiously meritorious activities. Nuri reinvests into his movement and the twelve madrasas he founded. Hosen also runs a student hostel and a madrasa for which he claims to spend 1.5 lakh (150,000 taka) a month. Running a small business and being engaged in philanthropic activities in his area, his set-up is typical of an affluent person in semi-rural Bangladesh. Madrasas often draw on existing networks and internal publics. While the waz mahfils they organize remain open to everyone and are advertised to those living in the area, they typically feature a homogeneous audience consisting predominantly of

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students of religious schools. Mahfils are mostly frequented by audiences that already have something in common with the ideological background of the organizers and preachers. While no audience consists of people from just one sectarian background, the most common situation is the preacher ‘preaching to the choir’ – a homogeneous group that is already convinced of his standpoint. The old preacher Najrul Islam complains about the increasing diversification, competition and animosity between different ‘platforms’ since the foundation of Bangladesh.76 And indeed, many preachers proclaim their adherence to one of the Sunni schools and distance themselves from others, or from new authorities such as the TV preacher Zakir Naik.77 Typically, they depict alleged attacks of the opponents or refute their arguments in front of their own flock, strengthening the in-group convictions among the audience.78 The competition of waz mahfils as a place of discussion between different opinions in which one side may be victorious is merely simulated. It is a longestablished practice that preachers rhetorically challenge their opponents to engage in debates and then accuse them of avoiding discussions with real scholars.79 Imams sometimes advertise the upcoming gathering after the Friday sermon. Announcements might also be made by tying loudspeakers to a three-wheeled taxi and driving it through the streets. Most common are visual announcements, such as painted banners, wall paintings and posters.80 These posters are glued to walls, buses, lampposts or palm trees, preferably next to mosques or in areas with shops selling Islam-related things. The posters are printed by small printing and advertising businesses that do not necessarily focus on religious printing but also print posters for political parties and companies. As these companies reuse successful designs for later occasions, the design of the posters announcing sermon congregations often has much in common with other posters they design, for example, for election campaigns. The posters for waz mahfils, however, never display faces or photographs, thus marking themselves apart from political posters. They often include ‘Islamic’ forms, such as minarets, mosque architecture and stars, but also other shapes that are less context specific (see Figure 2). The main title is printed in a fancy font: it often highlights the event’s importance and situates it in the genre by using the above-mentioned genre denominations, such as oẏāj māhˡphil, taphˡsīrul koran māhˡphil, doẏā o mīlād māhˡphil, or, for example, ‘great Islamic gathering’, ‘huge Islamic assemblage’. Furthermore, they include the names of the ‘main guest’, the ‘special guest’, and the ‘chairman’, which allows even people who do not participate in the event to associate these names with the mahfil’s public piety. The same holds true for the society or committee or organization that organizes the event. The emphasis on the organizers and their invitees shows that the waz mahfil’s social meaning goes far beyond the sermon. Not all speakers’ names are listed, and may be subsumed under the category of ‘honoured scholars’ who ‘will deliver a sermon’ (oẏāj pharmāiben, baẏān peś karben). As in other forms of public speech, the main speaker is often announced separately under headings like the ‘main attraction’, ‘main speaker’ or ‘main discussant’. The posters also provide several indicators about the sectarian orientation of the congregation. If a gathering takes place at a religious school, it is possible to draw inferences about its orientation from its name, indicating whether it is an āliẏā or komī

 Waz Mahfils 45

Figure 2  Two examples of poster announcements.

madrasa, or takes place at the shrine of a saint. Similarly, the titles of the dignitaries mentioned on the posters are indicators. Moreover, slogans are often printed on the top or the sides of the poster. These are known from all kinds of public mobilization as well as from waz mahfils and typically consist of two parts: the instigation to shout out by the leader/speaker and the performance of the shout by the group/audience. On the posters, the slogan: ‘Shout the greatness of God – Allah is great’ (nārāẏe takbīr – Āllāhu ākbār) is used by multiple groups. In contrast, the slogan ‘the Religion Islam – shall live’ (dvīn Islām – jindābād) is an indicator of the Deobandī groups, while ‘Shout out the mission – Oh Messenger of God’ (nārāẏe risālāt – iẏā rasūlāllāh) is an indication of groups who perform qiyām and who thus belong to the Barelwī movement.81 These hints tell the informed audience about the religious affiliation of the speakers beforehand and allow them to make a deliberate choice about which mahfil to join. It is very difficult to generalize about audiences. Star preachers draw huge audiences: Hosen claims to have filled a square that even Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was not able to fill. Of course, the size of the audience is in turn linked to organizational capacities: the mahfils at madrasas and those organized by the party workers of the BJI are the largest, and while the formulas of preachers about the ‘hundreds and hundreds of thousands’ (lakṣa lakṣa mānuṣ) or ‘ocean’ of attendants (janasamudra) seem exaggerated, they are difficult to disprove. Mahfils organized at private houses in rural areas, for example, on the occasion of marriage, might consist of less than 100 guests. The social structure and age ranges of audience members differ from location to location and preacher to preacher. Older listeners seem to be slightly overrepresented and, at the beginning of the mahfil, so are children. Some preachers explicitly address

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the youth. However, the more decisive factor is the adaption to the preferences of the organizers and the setting of the mahfil: preachers always stress that it is crucial to adapt their sermon to the respective audience and their intellectual capacities. A minimum of religious interest certainly is a common factor uniting people who join the audience. On the other hand, as many of the mahfils are organized in a way similar to the typical set-up of village festivities (melā), the opportunity for nocturnal strolling around and chatting is at least one way for people to become interested in joining the mahfil.

The production of mahfil space We already glimpsed some settings of sermon gatherings in the beginning of this book. Particularly in rural areas, small stalls sell typical rural foods, tea and even handicrafts; flags and lights often decorate the pathway leading up to the entrance of the preaching tent. The tent (pandal or sāmiẏānā) is set up only for the event itself. It is usually placed in schoolyards, on fields after harvests and in open spaces of towns, be it public squares, sports grounds or simply street corners. A bamboo structure supports often colourful cotton panels stretched out around the congregation and a roof of the same fabric. The cloth separates, in an osmotic and temporary manner, the congregation from the outside – often all too osmotic, given the cold winter air, and all too temporary, when spring storms set in and eventually wash the whole structure away. The preacher takes his place on the ‘superior location’,82 a slightly raised platform at one end of the waz pandal, and usually sits in a comfortable chair (ranging from beautifully carved throne-like wooden chairs with cushions to office chairs).83 A little table is placed in front of him with the microphone and some decorative items such as flowers are placed and where tea can be served during the act of preaching. As the sermon does not have a script, the preacher typically does not bring anything with him. Only rarely does he take a slip of paper out of his pocket with some information on the event. The preacher does not require any particular utensils nor does he need to put on a particular outfit – it must only be Islamic and festive. The simplest version is to wear a white punjabi and a white prayer cap (ṭupi). Both the punjabi and the cap can often be quite ornate. The ṭupi, for instance, might be colourful or even glittery or be adorned by binding a cloth around it. To protect themselves against the cold, preachers tend to wear vests on top and shawls around their shoulders or even covering their heads. Another headwear option is a turban (pāgri), which can have different colours, from dark red to green to lighter colours. The use of headwear is not restricted, but may indicate group adherence or at least indicate some level of education. Many preachers also wear a cloak, often made out of beautiful cloth, black, light (white) or green, and with broad golden borders. Some preachers also wear gold watches. As the spatial turn has emphasized, practices and conceptions of space mutually influence each other. The space of the mahfil usually does not derive any sacred status from its location (mahfils held at mosques, madrasas or Sufi shrines are only slightly different in this regard). Besides the performance itself, it relies on the tent structures,

 Waz Mahfils 47 the naming of the gatherings, and the Bengali waz traditions to create the particular atmosphere that characterizes the space as that of a mahfil. The tent structures are set up in Bengal for events of different religions as much as for non-religious purposes such as hosting of marriage attendees in rural areas. The most prominent occasion for the erection of pandals is the durgā pujā in Kolkata, a huge festivity in which pandals house the idol of the Goddess before it is taken afloat on the Ganges. The durgā pandal is designed according to the idol, which is to be met in a conspicuous darśan, thereby making it a location where direct contact with the divine can be established. The semantics of mahfil similarly point to a festive and sensorily rich space, and add dimensions of emotional community and interaction. Etymologically, mahfil goes back to Arabic, where it quite neutrally denotes a place of assembly, meeting or congregation.84 However, many connotations and expectations that the term still carries today in Bangladesh follow the lead of cultural practices in Persianate South Asia. The Mughal mehfil ‘was an intimate gathering of elite male friends, who were connoisseurs of music, and musicians, in which the full mental, emotional, and bodily engagement of both listeners and performers was necessary to achieve the ideal effect of musical performance, emotional release’.85 The main point of such a mehfil was ‘to seduce the listener and excite ecstasy … often in songs of love and longing’.86 In the protected mehfil space, the performers and the audience worked together to achieve the affective ends of Indo-Persian high culture.87 Public mehfils in many respects paralleled the linguistically playful and humorous literary settings such as French salons or even carnival.88 Alongside the importance of music as a means of bringing people to a joint state of ecstasy evoked by emotions of longing and separation, the word mahfil carries connotations of eroticism and competition. The twentieth-century leftist poet Ḥabīb Jālib, for example, evoked the mahfil as the gathering of rivals for their beloved’s affections. ‘There s/he entertains herself by playing them off against one another while entertaining them, in turn, by plying them with wine and song.’89 Mahfil is also a common term in the religious sphere. In a famous Persian qawl (line of the devotional music qawwālī) attributed to Amīr Khusraw, the gathering is described as a nightly gathering that is also joined by the Prophet: ‘I do not know which place it was, the nightly place in which I was Muhammad was the candle there (shamʿ-i maḥfil) – the nightly place in which I was.’90 The mystic musical performance of qawwālī is usually termed maḥfil-i samāʿ (gathering for listening),91 and at one of the most famous locations for qawwālī, the shrine of Niẓām ad-Dīn Awliyāʾ in Delhi, they are called maḥfil-i khāṣṣ (special, as opposed to public, gatherings). In Shiite practice, maḥfil is an alternative way of denoting the mourning gathering (and sermon) more commonly called majlis,92 possibly a less martyrdom-centred one.93 Maḥfil is also employed the context of mīlād celebrations, which have a long-standing history in Islam in general94 and South Asia in particular,95 and were promoted by the Pakistani state in the 1980s.96 The term mīlād maḥfil has been used by the proponents and opponents of such gatherings since the nineteenth century.97 Magnus Marsden, analysing musical mahfils in Chitral, has pointed to the creative atmosphere relatively free from social constraints.98

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In contemporary Bangladesh, mahˡphil is used in contexts describing coming together informally, often with a joint emotional and religious concern. Alongside the combination of mahfil with waz, other common combinations are gatherings evoking blessing, such as ‘gatherings for the reaching of religious merit’,99 of ‘breaking the fast’, or more generally, ‘supplicatory prayer gatherings’. The term is part of denoting gatherings of grief, political parties, hoping that someone is freed from jail, or even shopping mall mahfils. Sometimes, the word mahfil is substituted or extended. As in the case of the extension of waz mahfil to waz o mīlād mahfil, the Carmonāi pīr, and some other groups add a zikr session and hence hold a waz mahfil o hālˡkāẏe jikir. These additions serve to accentuate a particular aspect of the gathering and sometimes underscore group belonging; for instance, adding mīlād is an indication for a Barelwī outlook, while speaking of ijtemā indicates a Deobandī gathering. Bengali waz collections from the 1920s provide important insights into the spatial imaginations of the Bengali waz tradition. Listening to waz-naṣīḥat and ‘religious advice’ (dharmopadeś) is described here as ‘a marvellous boon’ (ājab niẏāmat). Human sin and the ‘body’s disgrace-gloom’ is cast off with ‘the mercy’s light arising’, just as ‘in spring the ends of the plants’ leaves drop to the ground being drunk by God’s love, and a beauty (śobhā) develops on the new leaves blossoming in bundles’.100 There is a tangible presence of the divine and a showering of baraka and mercy upon the participants – a strong spatial semantics that persists until today. Next to the physical tent, there is a tent of light set up by God Himself: If a session of oẏāj-nachihat or a religious assembly is held, on behest of the Exalted God, all the pure souls and innumerable angels will in flocks take part in that huge religious gathering and the Exalted God’s endless mercy (karuṇā) will continuously shower down upon them. … From this religious assembly countless grace, blessing (baraka), progress (unnati) will be distributed to mankind. … During the sessions of a huge religious gathering, the merciful supreme God the Exalted, by means of the angels, pulls up a lighten canopy (cã̄ doẏā bā śāmiẏānā) above the location of that gathering. During waz-nachihat below that canopy, the angels come in flocks.101

Etiquette, in these doubly coded surroundings, is always linked to pleasing God. The power and the protocols of reception of listening to sermons are linked to the Quranic advice of Q7:204 to listen to the Quran to find mercy. ‘When in the religious gathering (dharma sabhā) or in prayer or in another place the holy Quran is read out or the explanation of religious advice is given, then you remain silent and listen to the speaker’s words with mind and body and deep engagement, so that your keeper, Allah the Exalted, continues showering his unsurpassed grace upon you.’102 Given this background of the mahfil as a space of divine presence and etiquette as part of its performance, we can understand the efforts preachers and organizers today make to discipline the audience. The organizers’ announcements urge the audience to come inside the mahfil tent and maintain ‘the beauty’ (saundaryaṭā) of the field on which it is arranged.103 Preachers scold the audience for not switching off their phones, for looking in directions other than the stage, or for chatting instead of listening.

 Waz Mahfils 49 Faruk Siddiqi, echoing the Bengali waz of a 100 year ago, connects the etiquette of the servants with God’s satisfaction and his blessing them with the right conduct: When someone leaves home and heads to the Quran mahfil and sits inside the Quran mahfil’s tent, then immediately all the angels who came along on his shoulders stand around the mahfil tent (sāmiẏānār bāhir). … When the angels are seeing, that hey, those servants of God are sitting at the Quran mahfil, they are sitting at the mahfil and don’t get up (uṭhāuṭhi), then the angels immediately go to Allah’s court and say: ‘Oh Allah, see, oh Worshipped One, your servants are sitting at the Quran mahfil and don’t get up and hustle around. Oh Allah, we cannot bear this hustling around (ghoṛāghuṛi) of your servants.’ My Allah says: ‘Oh angels, go, and throw the hustling around into the deep sea.’104

Hosen, in his sermon, explicates the mahfil’s salvific potential in a fictive didactic conversation he had with ‘ordinary Muslims’: Then the question comes: ‘Huzur, how should we know that Allah has forgiven (kṣamā) us for one invocation, that we were forgiven?’ … Those who have received mercy, they develop a desire in their hearts to listen to waz, they want to remain seated, there won’t be any trouble in their hearts. Listening to waz, a longing (ākāṅkṣā) and wish will grow in their hearts. All right, in your hearts, is there peace or trouble? [Audience] Peace! Those in whose hearts there is peace, be sure that your sins have been forgiven. [Audience] Praise be to God!105

The disciplining comments by preachers are not always as theologically saturated. Ābu Hāniphā Nechāri (Nesari), for example, exaggerates his authoritative role to such an extent that it becomes comical. In an analogy to the angel of death whom humans cannot escape, he adds: ‘And whoever wants to get up, catch him like Azrāʾīl and make him sit down silently.’106 Half-jokingly, he also updates the traditional analogy of the preacher as a healer of the souls,107 comparing the preacher’s role to that of the doctor who just performs an ‘operation of the soul’ (rūḥ-er operation) on the audience, who hence has to lie down unconsciously and abandon its love (muḥabbat) for home, business, women and mobile phones. The disciplining role of the preacher is also expanded in the mass gatherings held by Sayeedi and the Carmonāi pīr to include necessities of crowd management. Sayeedi announces: Friends! Because of the great crowd, people nearly die in the (mahfil’s) vicinity. If I tell you to move together, can you do this? I know you can do this. But no one stands up. No one stands up. You never have the permission to stand up. Please move to the front while remaining seated. … No one, no Muslim will stand up. While you remain seated, get closer and make a zikr with love.108

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Another time when preachers call for discipline is the supplicatory prayer (duʿāʾ) performed at the end of a sermon. There is a consensus that for the prayer, everyone should be present, and the more there are, the better. The promise on the part of the audience not to leave prior to the prayer logically implies that they will stay throughout the sermon. Building on this, a preacher might ask the audience if it feels too strained and whether he should better not perform the final prayer – at the same time expecting the audience to deny this ‘offer’. The announcement of the imminence of prayer is another strategy to turn the remainder of the sermon into a preparation for prayer and therefore prevent listeners from leaving. After the prayer, people hurry to go home. Jubāẏer Āhˡmad Ānsārī (Ansari) takes this rush up when he jokes that he will not hold the prayer before the next speaker because this would invite ‘undisciplined behaviour’. Based on spatial imaginations of closeness to a merciful divine, waz collections and waz practice amalgamate behavioural etiquettes from religious ritual and public assemblage. Religious imagination and performative aesthetics are intertwined to such a degree as to be inseparable. The preacher’s directions to the audience might, for example, overlap with his role as narrator. Sayeedi links audience behaviour at the mahfil to the roles and context of his narrative. When he tells a story of heroism in a battle of Islamic history, he says that only those who are concentrated on his story and remain seated can be taken to ‘the battlefield of jihad’ (jehāder maẏdān). While this is certainly true given that the narration does not have much effect without paying attention to it, the statement also creates a parallel between the role of attending a waz mahfil and the combative action in his narrative.109 While the space of waz mahfils is saturated with religious meanings, participation in it has a voluntary character, offering a wider range of possibilities for audience and preacher’s behaviour than the ritual setting of a mosque. This voluntary and optional character underlines and strengthens the sermons’ aesthetic dimensions.110 The mahfil is at the same time a protected and particular space: the community of listeners enters without ritual intention but with a clearly allotted role. To take up this role, members willingly suspend individual disbelief and become part of the performance.111 The audience members sit cross-legged on simple bamboo mats or straw that provides some comfort and protection from the cold. The regulation of temperature is also one reason why the audience always fills up empty space between the rows. This huddling together is reminiscent of the practice of filling up rows during ritual prayer. Being close together helps audience members coordinate their bodily perception, responses and gestures. Bright neon lights attached to the bamboo poles of the tent as well as extra light fixtures in larger tents that illuminate the entire pandal underscore the significance of perceiving fellow audience members. The listeners intensely observe the others and know that they together are observed, both by the others inside the tent and by people outside the gathering. The feedback between the audience members provides guidance and reduces individual variation, but at the same time makes the performance dependent on so many actors that it is never completely controllable by the preacher alone. Performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte calls this a feedback loop. In European theatre, which she studies, it was only in the late eighteenth century that ‘the visibility of the spectators to the actors and, particularly, to each other’ was reduced and visible and audible – that

 Waz Mahfils 51 is, potentially distracting – audience reactions were to be channelled into ‘interior’ responses that would be sensed intuitively by others but remained without outward expression.112 In contrast, waz mahfils use lighting and seating arrangements to enhance the feedback loop as much as they encourage – and expect – that audiences express themselves in a visible, audible fashion. This emphasizes the necessary extempore qualities of the preacher who has to construct his sermon while performing, meaning that he has to lead and respond to the audience. It also emphasizes the generally egalitarian outlook of waz mahfils by ‘empowering’ the audience, which constantly responds to the sermon. At the same time, their responses are guided on many layers and listeners take up their role in a fine-tuned manner. One decisive means of fine-tuning audience response is the ‘entourage’ of the preacher. On stage, directly next to the preacher, the ‘chairman’ and ‘special guest’ are seated in chairs. Next to them local dignitaries, religious functionaries and the entourage sit crossed-legged, turned half towards the preacher and half towards the audience. This spatial set-up places the entourage in a key role as a mediator and model for the audience. The group, seated around the preacher as a circle of pupils, allows the preacher to sometimes stage his sermon as an intimate didactic conversation. He deliberately turns to them when taking on the role of the approachable conversationalist, when cracking jokes or adding informal comments, often in dialect. The entourage aids the preacher with details, be it of his current location or with providing the sources for citations he uses. It is in no way defamatory for the preacher to ask about these things; quite the opposite, addressing one of the persons sitting next to him strengthens the simulation of a conversation. Even when not addressed explicitly, the entourage’s behaviour of intent listening and their answers to didactic questions or exclamations show audience members the role that they themselves ideally play in the sermon – without ever having to look away from the preacher. It is not only the gestures of the preacher that serve as important visual cues, but also the reactions of the entourage, which are simultaneously reproduced by the rest of those present in the tent. The entourage’s role as ideal audience makes the feedback mechanism in waz mahfils akin to that of ‘pedagogical theatre, where scene and gesture not only teach a thing, but also simulate the effect the thing is to evoke’.113 The entourage acts out the ideal form of reception the audience is supposed to mimic and displays the mood of the ideal listener and his engagement. As with other processes of mutual observation, the entourage is aware of its dual role as both listeners and guides. The communicational set-up of public piety in waz mahfils involves multiple audiences and multiple processes of reception. First, within the tent itself, there is the close circle of the entourage and the listeners. The outer circles of the audience are split into those listening from outside the tent, but live; and the audience listening to the recordings. This multitude of layers not only increases possibilities for guidance, but can also increase the awareness of the staging of waz mahfils. New media technologies build on complex communication practices and we cannot conceptualize sound amplification as a mere extension of the mahfil’s call.114 The entourage is an example for a non-mediatized element of mise en abyme. The

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sermons are explicitly addressed to those within the tent and to the women hidden by ‘the screen of parda’. This whole communication process is in turn communicated to the outside. The choice of loudspeakers has become part of sectarian divides, as they amplify sect-specific audio forms such as naʿt and durūd.115 As the entourage sits closest to the microphone and thus is again part of the audience – albeit a privileged, sonically overrepresented part – it helps to project to the outside how informed and coherent the mahfil’s audience is. In Sayeedi’s mass gatherings, loudspeakers echo chants from the ‘masses’, a well-known technique of mass staging.116 Organizers put great effort into assuring that the electricity supply is stable by setting up generators where there is no electricity. Loudspeakers are positioned far away from the location of the congregation. While the loudspeakers outside are often turned up too high and reach a volume that garbles the words, they advertise the mahfil far away and extend the acoustic space of the mahfil. This is particularly effective in rural areas where there is little ambient noise. For instance, in one village, I walked away from the mahfil for a quarter of an hour and could still hear that it was going on and even discern speech melodies. The broadcasting attunes those approaching the mahfil. Let us close this section by returning to the spatial imagination, this time not in a historical waz collection, but in the narrative of a preacher at a waz mahfil in contemporary Bangladesh. Depicting the conflict between the Meccans and Muhammad, Siddiqi narrates how Abu Jahl wants to expose Muhammad in a ‘meeting’ in which his friend ‘will be the main guest (pradhān atithi) and Muhammad will be the special guest (biśeṣ atithi)’, and Abu Jahl himself will be the chairman (sabhāpati), all of whom will compete in front of the audience to ‘prove who is right.’117 Furthermore, Abu Jahl makes sure that he and his friend will each sit on beautiful chairs, while Muhammad is seated on the earth to defame him. Needless to say, the competition is decided in favour of Muhammad, who in the end sits on the golden chair. The form of the competition, the terminology, and the spatial set-up clearly resemble that of the waz mahfils: the audience watches and judges a spectacle of competition; the roles of Muhammad and his opponents resemble those of the preachers.

Arriving at the mahfil and framing the sermon The mahfil often starts after the evening (ʿishāʾ) prayer. The more important a preacher is, the later he performs, and the tent fills up over the course of time. There are, of course, practical reasons for this: many people who might attend have to work, and in the early hours, children often populate the mahfil ground. A succession of preachers performs, each for around the time of a movie (one to three hours). The star preachers announced on posters come last, usually quite late at night, and the audience eagerly awaits them. Junior preachers – ‘warm-up acts’, if you will – set the tone and get the crowd into the mood. As performers of increasing skill present their work, the mood builds, and the audience enters into the conventionalized world of discourse. When preachers and their entourage mount the mahfil stage, it is common that slogans arise

 Waz Mahfils 53 welcoming the preacher, and when the preacher’s troupe chants along with them as they march together towards the tent, they display community strength as much as they celebrate this particular preacher. Hosen boasts that no one wants to speak after him, implying that no one would be able to surpass him.118 Siddiqi uses the reference to the preceding speakers as part of the commonplace of modesty, asking what he could possibly add.119 The last preacher conducts the final supplicatory prayer, the sermon’s climax and most important point of the whole mahfil both religiously and with respect to communitas.120 It is common for mahfils go on ‘until the morning prayer’ (fajr namāz), with preachers boasting of their ability to keep the audience fixated on the mahfil throughout the night. However, particularly in urban areas, city administrations insist that mahfils end around midnight and this seems to be the general practice. Moreover, despite claiming otherwise, preachers in practice are not always keen to preach too long, as they have to return home as well. Mijānur Rahˡmān (Mizanur) argued that ‘the morning prayer is worthier (beśi fayḍa) than listening to waz for seventy years’,121 and the newspaper commentator cited at the beginning of this chapter even recommends that waz mahfils be held during the daytime.122 The sequence of preachers has to be followed and the speaking time precisely allotted. Once the next preacher arrives on stage, his predecessor is expected to finish. This may be done explicitly. Ansari jokes about the next speaker perceiving him as someone who does not want to let go of the mic,123 and another preacher apologizes for not having finished immediately.124 At the outset of this book, I sketched the uncomfortable situation of a preacher being ousted by the audience after Hosen had mounted the stage. Good time management is among the primary tasks of the organizers during the mahfils. They pass slips of papers to the preachers to keep them from overrunning their time. When preachers within their sermon announce that only a short while is left, or say that they can only speak for another ‘half an hour’ or ‘some minutes’, this is also an indication to the organizers that they have understood their requests, which, of course, does not mean that they will then take the time they announced literally. Organizers also have to ensure that the preachers arrive on time. In one case, Niamat could not make it in time because he was at the hospital visiting his brother, and then he got caught in a Dhaka traffic jam. The organizers bridged the delay by requesting that students from the madrasa offer spontaneous recitals, but after a while, the audience began to become irritated about what was happening. And when Niamat finally arrived, he had to shorten his sermon.125 The intermediate performance of the students also brings to the fore that at waz mahfils, it is not only the preachers who perform; there are opportunities for performances before or between the sermons.126 These framing performances are particularly important, as they contribute significantly to the atmosphere of the mahfil space. They are an active part of the atmosphere, the emanating and affecting aspects of space, and for reaching out to everyone in earshot of the loudspeakers.127 They set the tone by binding together the aesthetic and affective dimension of the mahfil sound. Songs performed before and in between sermons are furthermore intertwined with group-specific outlooks, as is typical for framing devices. Let us look at some examples

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of how they do so. The sermon of the Carmonāi pīr, for example, is framed by an ‘Islamic song of the love for God’ (esker gajal): The love for the Lord (Mawlā), the love’s play is not understood but by the lover (ʿāshiq) I do not care whether it’s day or night, crazy (as I am) for the Lord With which worship do I reach you, tell me, Lord, where shall I go? I will remain infused with your light (tomār nūre) Give me a sense of direction Burning in the pain of separation from the Lord It is not possible to bear It is not possible to utter Waiting, life doesn’t move on Please do something Having drunk the potion of love I get lost in you Raise this downtrodden one I can’t bear this life.128

The song expresses typical mystic ideas and commonplaces, such as the limits of understanding of those who do not tread the Sufi path and the inexpressibility of the experience. More specifically, it incorporates many topoi of Sufi songs prevalent in contemporary Bangladesh,129 such as love’s play,130 madness, the bodily pain of the lover and particularly the pain of separation. It peaks in the address to the beloved. Its melody is that of a very popular Bengali naʿt by Ābdul Ālīm (1931–74): ‘I have high hopes that I’ll go to Medina.’131 The song helps set the tone for a gathering that includes Bengali Sufi and folk traditions and culminates in a long zikr session. The framing of a song presented during a waz mahfil of the HI is performed by a student trio and is modelled not on folk songs, but on songs of mostly leftist mobilization (jāgaraṇer gān). The chorus of the song parallels the chorus of a popular communist song called ‘Guerrilla, We Are Guerrilla’. However, in the version sung by the madrasa students, the school’s name al-Faruq displaces ‘guerilla’, and the song becomes ‘Al-Faruq, We Are al-Faruq’. The other lines which are sung alternately with the chorus are as follows: We are a swarm of birds in the universe of melodies (surer bhubane) Filling this world with melodies We came with the true message To enlighten, holding tight to the source Stopping injustice and misjudgement Destroying all the oppressed’s (majlūm) worries Our interest (kautuhal) is the way of the Quran We don’t accept any obstacle or difference in opinion If there come hundreds of hindrances and hundreds of menacing roars After we stamp over them with our feet, what will remain? Having fought on the battlefield of jihad we become immortal

 Waz Mahfils 55 On the path of Allah lies life’s worth When the blood’s price will increase in a storm Then the life of the Prophet’s companions will be with us.132

The framing songs create different atmospheres and raise different expectations of what is to come. While the al-Farūq song is utopian and ambiguous, it presupposes a clear message that is brought to a menacing world by combat and sacrifice. While the song is performed by students and not by an official representative, it is precisely this choice of topics and triumphant diction that gives a good impression of what the listeners are to envision and strive for emotionally. The a cappella performance is selfconsciously part of a declamation and is hence, unlike in the communist mobilizing context of the guerrilla original, not linked to action. However, the melody and diction of the song do mobilize emotions and the political opposition of those holding on to the true message, and hence colours the emotional contours of the HI as an activist movement that publicizes and politicizes the concerns of the komī madrasas. At the same time, the songs should not lead us to conceiving oppositions between quietist and inward ‘Sufism’ and activist ‘fundamentalism’: the mystical journey and the burning love of the song framing Karim’s mahfil are political too. Karim not only is combative when it comes to theological opponents,133 but also runs komī madrasas and heads the political party Islamic Movement (Islāmī āndolan) Bangladesh, whose election symbol, a hand fan, is shown on the posters advertising his sermons. The ‘Sufi’ framing for a ‘Sufi’ sermon can be used in a theologically ambivalent context with definite political ends.134 What remains are two different semantics and performance traditions operating to situate the mahfils in different kinds of organization, a pīr-based and local political party on the one hand and a nationwide movement of politicized madrasas on the other. Even within one group, such as the HI, mahfils are given different framings and hence mobilize different registers in different settings. The Faruq madrasa is not as embedded in its surrounding rural area. At a mahfil in a komi madrasa in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in Dhaka, where the main sermon was delivered by a preacher associated with the HI who also presented at the al-Farūq madrasa, the framing song performed by a student revolved around topics of piety and not mobilization. It was a self-composed naʿt urging the addressees not to forget God’s telephone number, which is ingrained in the ritual prayers (‘two for Phajar, four for Yohar / four again for Āsar // At Māgrib number three / four again at Eśā’); it stresses that the ritual tears make the line clear for conversation (‘If we don’t cry during sālāt / The line won’t be clear’).135

Religious emotions and political participation The stress on feedback mechanisms and affirmations of the presence of audience and preachers by the organization, spatial set-up and sequence of waz mahfils is mirrored prominently in the performance patterns of the sermons that feature various forms of

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call and response.136 In the following I want to give an overview of the basic interactional patterns between preacher and audience as – albeit asymmetric – co-performers. In this respect, waz mahfils resemble the sermons of US folk preachers as described by Bruce Rosenberg. Next to formulas (in the sense of Milman Parry and Albert Lord) of ‘story-telling’, which introduce and advance dialogue and narrative, Rosenberg discerns formulas that serve as stimuli for the congregation: ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’, ‘I don’t believe you know what I’m talking about’, ‘Listen if you please’, or ‘Ain’t God all right?’ Furthermore, he notices preachers mocking the audience with formulas such as ‘Gettin’ quiet (in here) (again), isn’t it?’137 Similar interjections are prominent characteristics of waz mahfils. They didactically confirm the knowledge and consensus of the listeners. Their appeal could be spelled out as ‘follow my words!’, ‘be attentive!’ and ‘confirm your consent!’ They are a typical feature of didactic conversation in Bengal (and beyond). These questions are about getting the audience’s attention, and unlike ‘rhetorical questions’ in the narrower sense, preachers do expect answers; indeed, these answers are a quintessential part of the performance of waz mahfils.138 In the following, I unravel some of the most obvious forms of explicit and directed audience feedback in waz mahfils, which establishes rhythmical and bodily expectations and uses participation to create a pseudoconsensus among audience members. Not planned beforehand, the capacity to guide this feedback in the heat of the sermon is a quintessential skill of any preacher. Most likely because of the proximity to the underrepresented rhetoric of conversation, this sort of ‘didactic question’ has received little attention in research on rhetoric.139 As this kind of didacticized speech seems to be a stable feature of Islamic didacticism across languages, it calls for a more systematic transcultural inquiry. The didactic questions in the waz mahfils are a constant feature of the teacher’s/ preacher’s speech. They often transform the speech into a chain of questions, the answers to which are immediately given by the preacher himself and the audience. The answer is always obvious, as it is often part of the narration itself and repeats the most important information. The Bengali syntax with the verb coming last helps to raise expectations and allows for finishing the sentence meaningfully. Typical examples for this process are the following snippets from sermons: ‘The third condition is that when one goes playing, it does not harm the family. That it does not? Harm the family!’140 ‘My friends! This Sura came down in venerable Mecca. Say, where did it come down?’141 It is noteworthy that a similar type of conversation was also simulated in Christian preaching around the time of Augustine, modelled after one of the moralphilosophical declamations in rhetorical schools directed to the lay people. Here, the inquirer approached apostolic authority, ‘as in an interrogation’.142 Despite differences – the main one being the fact the questions in the Christian sermon are addressed to apostolic authority and those of the waz mahfils to the audience – both forms feature didactic questions that transform statements into simulated dialogues. In the waz mahfils, these dialogues often confirm the co-presence of the audience as attentive learners, but also as followers who express adherence to a certain consensus. The corresponding very common type of question to the audience is a ‘fishing for consensus’. Here, the preacher interlaces his speech with the tag ‘right?’ (ṭhik?) or ‘isn’t that right?’ (ṭhik nā?), to which the audience responds affirmatively. Sometimes this is

 Waz Mahfils 57 also couched in the linguistically idiosyncratic formula ‘right or wrong’ (ṭhik nā beṭhik? / ṭhik ki nā?). This polar question has a known answer, which suggests that the questions and answers are clear and simulates unanimous agreement among the community. This technique is particularly dependent on the interaction between audience and preacher: it occurs less frequently at big events and in mediatized sermons. Furthermore, it is bound to didactic passages in which the preacher speaks as a preacher and not as a narrator of longer narratives. In general, preachers seek audience confirmation, particularly when they want to drive home controversial points directed against outside enemies. Just after I arrived at his mahfil in Sylhet, Siraji constantly demanded audience confirmation when polemicizing against the corruption of the affluent. I quote him at length, marking the audience response by underlining: Another son became a lawyer in America. Such sons return to Bangladesh. Get a high-income job. The salary at least one lakh (100,000). Fringe benefits (emne hemne) even amount to two lakhs. Don’t you understand fringe benefits? You understand fringe benefits – bribe. Say, isn’t that right? Right! The people of this area are very good people, they don’t take bribes (ghuṣ-ṭuṣ), do they? No. Say a little more loudly! No! How many laws have they not passed to stop corruption? How many laws were passed? An anti-corruption commission was formed. An anticorruption commission was formed. But corruption does not stop, it increases. The larger the laws, the more bribes they take. Say, isn’t that right? Right! Say it more loudly, isn’t that right? Right! And what happens in Bangladesh when such a move is made? Also a big thief creeps in. Right! The angels of mercy also know that thieves and robbers are rooted here, isn’t that right? Right! Say more loudly, isn’t that right? Right!143

The preacher’s direct questions and the way they demand feedback create rhythms of synchronized audience response. These further the explicit consensus by adding a coordinating performative dimension and a means to anticipate future events. Let us examine in more detail this rhythm of raising and fulfilling expectations. The next example shows how the binary structure of the pseudo-choice in ‘right or wrong?’ is often followed beyond the simple tag question. The passage relates the narrative to the audience, and Hosen starts out by situating it in the location where he is holding the sermon. The audience is to confirm the basic emotional truth of the mother figure: If there is, in this your Kanchanpur Badamtali, a mother, with a son who just turned twenty-five, but in these twenty-five years has not called his mother ‘mum’ even once. Ok, if any son behaves like this, will the mother be happy or sad? [Audience] Sad! All right, when, leaving today’s mahfil, you will start knocking at your mother’s room, at three o’clock at night, ‘mum, mum, oh mum, open the door, mum!’ – If, after twenty-five years, the mother hears such a call from the son, will the mother then be displeased (bejār) or happy? [Audience] Happy!144

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Note the rhythm of the audience responses: in this passage of forty-one seconds, the first response occurs after twenty-one seconds and the second after another twenty – an incredibly precise rhythm, given the fact that the text is not memorized word for word. I could also obtain another recording of a nearly identical passage, but from another occasion in a different location. While Hosen adapts the first question to the other locality, also in this sermon, the passage’s performance takes a total of 41 seconds and the near-identical questions each occur after 20.5 seconds.145 We can conclude that the rhythmic structure of the tag questions is built into the sermon, can be readily called up by the preachers and is an important part of mnemonics. Periodic events like the rhythm of audience responses ‘make it easier for inexperienced listeners to form accurate temporal expectations’, and being able to form these brings ‘positively valenced predictive rewards’.146 Listeners quickly learn to rely on the rhythm they establish as a joint bodily response of a unanimous community. Audience responses are elicited by ‘formulas’, such as ‘say’ (balen / kan) or ‘won’t you say?’ (balben na?). The louder the audience reactions are, the more appreciated the performance is and the more successful the mahfil. Preachers reproach the audience for not responding or not responding loudly enough, for ‘falling asleep’. They constantly call for loud responses, most often with the formula ‘say loudly’ (jare balen), ‘more loudly’ or ‘cry out’ (citkār kare balen). The opposite is hardly ever heard.147 Good performance, co-performance of the audience and emotional reaction are interlinked. The audience is expected to perform loudly, and after having uttered his dissatisfaction with the technical set-up, Nesari scolds the audience: ‘You are just like the (weak) mic.’148 Loud reactions, such as moaning, can be indicative of intense emotional effect by mirroring emotional expression. The loud reaction is also an expression of religious fervour and love. When the preacher asks the audience to respond ‘with love’ (muḥabbat-er sāthe), this means to respond loudly. Loud takbīr dispels sleepiness (ghumṭum) and keeps Satan at bay (dūrīkr̥ ta).149 The preacher and the audience are united in a dialogue of loudly expressed love.150 At the mahfil of the Carmonāi pīr, the audience cries out loudly when saints are mentioned: a reaction of love and allegiance which is, in turn, criticized by opponents who mock: ‘They become unconscious when they only see a red flag or hear his name.’151 The emphasis on clearly audible audience reactions is shared by many performance traditions in which the performer urges the audience to respond more loudly.152 While these reactions are not specifically religious, they are linked to religion by the fact that the quality of the performance in its religious efficacy is linked to making an emotional impression.153 Like in Shiite majlis, Bengali kabi gān and kabi laṛāi and Urdu mushāʿira, the audience’s response in waz mahfils not only expresses their reaction to the content of the sermons but also serves as an evaluation of the performance: the louder the reactions, the better. The preachers are contenders competing for audience applause. Specific feedback phrases by the audience, too, express aesthetic judgement as much as religious emotions. Marḥaba, for instance, expresses appreciation. By far the most common phrase employed by the preacher to elicit audience feedback is to ask the audience to exclaim ‘God be praised’ (subḥāna ‘Llāh). This praise might be initiated by the preacher stretching out his right arm towards the audience and moving it in a semicircle from left to right. This feedback is asked for at moments of thankfulness and

 Waz Mahfils 59 pleasant surprise vis-à-vis divine mercy and favour – again a joyful expression of an encounter with the divine, but also a wonder at the preacher’s performance. That this is the dominant expression by the audience underlines that the dominant emotion of waz mahfils is a joyous reception of divine mercy and not the fear of the tremendum aspect of the Divine.154 That these religio-aesthetic emotions are expressed in conventionalized formulas calls into question the idea that these emotional responses are individual and interior. The audience’s responses simulate, in a well-guided and trained manner, spontaneous reactions. The preacher and the fellow audience members lead the way as to how a particular part of the sermon’s narration is to be received. The repertoire of audience responses also shows that waz mahfils are geared to forging consensus rather than rejection. Among the formulas expressing that the audience wants to work towards future goals, such as jointly voicing āmīn or in shāʾa llāh, there is only one feedback phrase of joint rejection. ‘No, I seek refuge in Allah’ (nā aʿūdhu bi-llāh) is employed much less frequently, usually only once over the course of an entire sermon. The call-and-response patterns of waz mahfils at the same time parallel and prefigure the mobilizing practices, for example, at political demonstrations. We already encountered images of group-specific call-and-response patterns on the posters and their enactment when the preacher and his troupe march in. These patterns feature two clearly allotted roles: that of the instigator, whose part includes the Urdu instruction to shout (naʿrā), and that of the responding mass. At the beginning of the waz mahfil, calland-response patterns ensure that the preacher’s arrival on stage runs with the right fervour and serves as a kind of warm-up exercise for the audience. After the sermon has ended, the slogans remain as easily repeatable items for future mobilization. Their success is testified to by the way they have even come to inspire and shape political sloganeering in Bangladesh across ideological borders of leftist and ‘Islamist’ activism. Also within the sermons, the preacher can draw on the slogans. He can call on the audience to ‘say Allāhu akbar!’ (Allāhu akbar balen), upon which either an audience member takes up the role of instigating the other audience members or all immediately call out Allāhu akbar. Like other calls upon the audience, this one is also supported by specific gestures – in this case the preacher circles the upright index finger of his outstretched arm at about the level of his forehead. The preacher mostly employs this mobilization to make the audience express joy and wonder about victory. By responding ‘praise to God’, the audience expresses religious wonder. Allāhu akbar, on the other hand, is uttered in response to situations demonstrating the pride and strength of the Muslim community. Often, a series of questions build up to Allāhu akbar as a response, and it is worth treating these in some detail to demonstrate the different processes and aims to which the questions can be geared. A particularly common and efficient way of doing this is for the preacher to pose questions to which the audience responds by shouting out ‘Allah’. This shout links to well-practised ritualistic patterns of call and response as practised in zikr, which is often interspersed in the sermons and is an important feature of audience interaction. The bodily dimension of zikr helps the audience warm up during chilly winter nights. Mazhari fires up his audience by remarking, when

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advising them to do zikr: ‘Doing zikr, the cold goes away and one gets redemption from hell.’155 Zikr is furthermore very participative, because the slogans entail a role reversal. The preacher leads the audience to temporarily take over the performance, which also gives him the opportunity to take a sip of tea. The religious ritual can feed into a valorization of loudly responding ‘Allah’. Mazhari leads up to the loud roar he wants his audience to perform by emphasizing the closeness to God that is expressed in zikr. He states that there is only one ‘entity’ (sattā) in this world, which is very much one’s own, of one’s own (āpan). What’s the name of that entity? [Audience] Allah. In the mishkātu ‘l-maṣābīḥ, in the ḥadīth-e qudsī Allah the Pure says, ‘I am so much your own, so much your own, that when the servant comes to call me, then as soon as he calls me, I become the servant’s friend.’ [Audience] Praise be to Allah! Call this Allah! [Audience] Allah!

At this point, the audience starts to perform a zikr, before Mazhari continues recounting that when one of the founders of the Deobandī madrasa, Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī, called Allah’s name after the tahajjud prayer, ‘the mosque’s pillars trembled, the wall trembled, the roof trembled, as if the whole area of Gangoh had arisen’. He then appeals to his audience: ‘Oh servants, give a call in such a manner that from your call the whole area of Sylhet will tremble (kāïñpā uṭhe)!’156 Here the roar is an act of communicating the proud devotion of the Deobandī tradition in its Sylheti surrounding and fits the internal mobilization among those present at the madrasa mahfil. Another important variant of the audience responding ‘Allah’ to a series of questions is linked to God’s sovereignty and permanence: On the piece of land (jamin) on which you tonight listen to the invocation of this mahfil, on this very piece of land many people have lived and passed away, on to the graveyard. Those who have lived on this earth before us, they have entered the graveyard. We who are inhabiting this earth now are bound to enter the same graves eventually. Those who follow us will also have to pass away. The plot of land will stay. Because this land’s sole and genuine owner (hākikater mālik) is – you should say it together – is who? [Audience] Allah!157

Hosen here links the concrete piece of land to a long-standing commonplace of Christian and Islamic preaching, the question about the dead,158 and refers to the discrepancy between the individual’s lifetime and the world time that is indifferent to it. Similarly confirming God’s sovereignty and permanence, Sayeedi uses the ‘Sufi fervour’ of loud zikr to get people to loudly voice their political attitudes. In the religious

 Waz Mahfils 61 sphere, the Arabic malik can in a positive sense only refer to Allah, and when Sayeedi replaces ‘land’ in the generic formulation above with ‘country’ (deś) and asks: ‘Who is the malik of the country?’, the audience immediately responds ‘Allah’. Malik, however, is not only one of Allah’s ninety-nine names, but also, in the sense of its Arabic root, the common Bengali word for owner: the expression jaminer mālik could, in a profane sense, simply mean ‘owner of the land’. Sayeedi exploits this polyvalence in order to make it into the basis of an oppositional stance to the government or the democratic system. By juxtaposing the ‘Islamic’ position that God should be the sovereign with the ‘people’, Sayeedi depicts his (secular) opponents as being anti-Islamic: They say the greatest power is the people (janagaṇ). The malik of the country is the people. Allah the pure says: (Q2:284, Ar.) To God belongs all that is in the heavens and earth.159 Whose is the joint propriety (mālikāna) of heaven and earth? [Audience] Allah’s! Is it a shame to take up Allah’s name? [Audience] No! A sin? [Audience] No! So why can’t you say it loudly? Whose is the joint propriety of heaven and earth? [Audience loudly] Allah’s!160

The insistence that Allah is the malik of the entire earth and everything on it, and that this can be thought of as ownership as one owns property, goes back to the historical ties of property with Islamic identity during the formative period of East Bengal agrarian society. It is one of the reasons why the Pharāẏeji (Farāʾiẓī) movement, whose rejection of saints also implied a rejection of the land-tenant rights attached to it, was popular.161 Placing the actual ownership with Allah at least opens up the possibility of rethinking the allocation of this crucial resource. To a wider audience of Bengal, including the lower strata of society, this seems to have remained an attractive position over the course of the last century and a half. It was taken up by leftist Islamic thinkers such as Maulana Bhashani, but also by Maududi. In other words, appealing to Allah’s ownership has become a commonplace that carries connotations of different political calls and at the same time need not be concretized. Contrasting the ideal (Allah as malik) with the actual infuses the sermon with an urgency for worldly change. In another sermon, Sayeedi explicitly emphasizes the group-forming dimension of the joint roar. The shouting of the audience is directed towards political agitation for the Islamic cause. At the end of this passage, it is no longer the preacher that performs the first part of the slogan, but as in zikr the crowd leads itself – which means that there are well-trained party workers who bring in specific BJI slogans: Scholars, saints, great men (ʿālim, pīr, buzurg), officer, teacher, student, worker, labouring masses, all people bring, for one moment, all the power of your body to

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the throat. You will give the most excellent slogan of your life. The best slogan of your entire life. You will raise such a roar that the heart (kalijā) of the unbelievers will shake and tremble (thar thar kare kā̃pbe). The hypocrites will leave their hypocrisy and come to Islam. Won’t you be able to do it? Lift your two hands, and raise a roar like lions, a sky-wind-crushing sound will go off to the great throne of Allah (ʿarsh-e ʿaẓīm). Loudly (jore sore) and with your two hands lifted up, say with all your strength shout Allāhu akbar (naʿrā-ye takbīr). [Audience] Allāhu akbar. Louder! [Audience takes over] Naʿrā-ye takbīr: Allāhu akbar! – dvīn Islām: Long it lives! (jindabād, jindābād) – Bangladesh, Bangladesh – Long it lives! – Quran, Hadith, Quran, Hadith: Long it lives! – Islamic social system: It shall be established, it shall be established (kāẏem hauk) – An Islamic public: It shall be established, it shall be established. The Quran’s light (ālo): light it in every house (jvālo) – Muslims from all the world: unite, unite!162

At the height of his agitation, Sayeedi lets the agitation calm down in a joint zikr. Regaining his role as a leader of a Sufi ritual, he advises: ‘Sit down immediately. Sit down within one second. Loudly do a zikr, lā illāha illā llāh.’ While not all preachers at waz mahfils employ the mobilizing technique of combining zikr and slogans as elaborately as in this example, instilling shouts are commonly used by preachers, even without specific mobilizing intentions, but just as a show of masculine strength. Nesari, who is associated with neither the H nor the BJI and even takes a deliberate stance against the violent street politics of the latter, simply plays on this as a commonplace of audience interaction: ‘I didn’t take so much trouble to come here to hear little goats making “baa baa”. You Muslims have to roar like little lions, are you ready? Ready! Who gave you the voice in your throats? Allah! Say more loudly, who? Allah!’163 Preachers often direct the audience to lift up their hands to show that they subscribe to a certain position. This kind of bodily participation by the audience even more strongly emphasizes the nature of the congregation as a unanimous and active community. Even more than roaring slogans, this gesture relates the individual to the community, as it clearly marks non-participation. The bodily movement emphasizes commitment, intention and subscription more clearly than the speech acts, and forms a possible transition from participation to action. Listeners can simply raise their hands in order to commit to stay until the final prayer, to follow mahfil etiquette, or to listen to a particular topic. Mazhari interrupts his narration to make the audience proclaim the obvious, such as their intention to go to Paradise.164 Another preacher asks the audience to show their hands if they want to drink the heavenly water.165 Audiences subscribe to decidedly basic truths, such as ‘following the Quran’ or ‘rejecting what Allah has forbidden’.166 Of course, all audience members are happy to raise their hands at these moments. One popular topic about which it seems safe to exhort the audience is dowry. Sayeedi preaches against it, and so does the TJ, which even performs zero-dowry marriages at

 Waz Mahfils 63 their large annual gathering.167 Across different ideological positions, actors for social change routinely identify dowry as a major problem, albeit with different arguments and outlook. Nuri, too, runs a ‘movement’ against dowry. He and other preachers make the audience subscribe to this stance by raising their hands in case they are ready to support it.168 Nesari plays on the ambiguity of ‘eating’ (khāoẏā) as ‘taking in’ things, whether it be food, drugs bribes – or dowry: To eat (khāoẏā), perceptibly and imperceptibly, the meat of dogs and pigs is forbidden (hārām). To take (khāoẏā) dowry is hārām, so says Allah and Allah’s Messenger – but they marry by taking money from the girls. Will you do it? If you do so, then you don’t believe in the Quran, you are not Muslims, you also can’t have hope for Paradise, you will stay in danger (kṣatir madhye)!169

After the audience members raised their hands in affirmation of his message, Nesari even lets them speak after him at the end, drawing on the model of the prayer for redemption: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah, we won’t take dowry for marriage. Those who have done it, grant us forgiveness.’ The discourse on dowry, however, also shows the rift between the claims for social change made in waz mahfils and social reality. The practice of dowry continues to flourish, and it is doubtful that it is a true representation of the social dynamics when Nesari declares that ‘the practice of taking dowry has been stopped in our area; three boys have married without dowry … and everyone there criticizes (the practice of providing dowry)’.170 Preachers might also ask the audience to lift their hands in reference to matters of more controversial positions. Given that people, as described above, hardly join waz mahfils of theological opponents, matters of theological contention strengthen consensus within the gathering. In relation to political community, in the 1980s, Sayeedi called on his audience to reject the then arch-enemies, the communists: ‘Oh Muslims, will you help the communists in any way? Those who won’t help them, show your hands in the air!’171 Later in the sermon, Sayeedi moves from mere rejection to describing those lifting their hands as the real Islamic community, who are both distinct from the hypocrites (munāfiq) and committed to his political movement. Sayeedi increasingly narrows and specifies the community, starting off with matters of consensus impossible to reject and moving towards a more narrowly defined community: Only those believers (momenerā) who want Islam in the bosom of this country, those who want the law of Quran and Sunna, lift your hands, no one else. No hypocrite should lift your hand, you will be called to Allah. Those who want that religion (dvīn) be established on the Bengali earth and will not remain sitting idly but join (śarīk haben) from today on, all those believers lift your hands.172

In this sense, the waz mahfils support a particular style of politics based on visibly and audibly homogeneous communities that demonstrate strength of their group and religion in the events. While these affirmations of belonging and belief are immensely successful on a performative level, they are only loosely linked to specific agendas. Most

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often, they simulate participation without stabilizing membership and belief outside the performance. Public piety on this level is not foremost sectarian and antagonistic, but builds broad formations of majoritarian consensus.

Consensus and concretization Towards the end of the waz mahfil, persuasion becomes more concrete as the world of the mahfil meets with mobilization for concrete community goals. Preachers make practical requests, for example, to have a stronger microphone or better lights. At many mahfils, the time in between the sermon and the final prayer is the place to collect money on behalf of the mahfil, or a nearby madrasa, mosque or shrine. The roles of the preacher and the collector are often kept apart. Preachers might restrict themselves to some general remarks encouraging donation. Siraji even explicitly distanced himself from doing so by complaining to the organizers, but transmitted via mic to the audience: ‘Brothers, I am not at all used to making collections. But you ordered me to do so, so I adapt.’173 Preachers call on the audience to support the building of religious schools, mosques and graveyards, and stress the benefit of such engagement. When calling for donations for a graveyard, Mizanur explains that the good deeds of the pious people buried there would redeem the others, too.174 Nesari sets a good example and shows himself as part of this community. He mentions that the headmaster of a nearby madrasa would support the founding of a new one with a land donation, and he himself would contribute 5,000 taka right away, but ‘even if I gave 100,000 Taka, a madrasa or mosque doesn’t come to life through one person. Or does it?’ Reciting and translating the Quranic verse ‘Allah will build a house in paradise for whomever builds a mosque for Allah’, Nesari continues: ‘If you don’t have money with you, give it later. … Allah says: “Why say ye that which ye do not?”’ (Q61:2b, Ar.). And similar to NGOs offering to match donations, Nesari states: ‘Allah says: “Oh, Nesar, you gave six thousand, I will give sixty thousand.” Allah says: “For each hundred Taka I will give a thousand Taka.” Say: “Praise to God!”’ Nesari then turns to direct advice, asking the ‘friends’ to give or make a knot in their ‘handkerchief or something like that’ (rumal-tumal) so that they can give later. ‘Say āmīn! More loudly, say āmīn! Āmīn! Āmīn!’175 Siraji starts the collection by elaborating that mosques will not be destroyed even on the Day of Judgement. The local mosque is thus the gate to Paradise, and those who make the mosque alive (jindā) with their donations will enter Paradise.176 The organizers had already beforehand prepared lists of donors. The chairman takes the opportunity to mount the stage and set a good example by slipping money into Siraji’s hand, who immediately praises him by name and leads the audience to a takbīr. Afterward, he again says the donor’s name and calls him ‘a guest (mehmān) of God’s house’. He also mentions the amount donated. The audience responds with a praising marḥaba! and Siraji leads a short melodic prayer invoking Allah to ‘accept (kabul manẓūr) the donation (dān)’ and ‘send it to Golden Medina’. He stresses that Paradise can be reached ‘by means (uchilā) of this donation’.177 The chairman remains standing behind the preacher with his hand affectionately placed on his shoulder. The next

 Waz Mahfils 65 donor is an emigrant living in Australia. Again, Siraji blesses him and his donation. The money keeps coming to the stage, where it is passed on by the fellow audience members or brought by the donors themselves, who are loudly announced and blessed by the preacher and the responsive audience. Siraji keeps inciting the audience to give more donations: A holy man (Āllāhˡr alī) said, ‘how much does Paradise cost?’ Another holy man said: ‘As much as you have in your pockets.’ In the name of Allah, put your hands in your pockets, put them in. For the house of Allah. I won’t stay. The mosque will stay.178

The larger individually announced donations are at this point followed by smaller donations collected by boys forming baskets out of the lower part of their wide and long punjabis and by other volunteers with their hats. Siraji also mentions that audience members can donate to the mosque committee after the mahfil has ended. He specifically addresses women and praises their important role for Islam. But Siraji also puts some pressure on them. Alluding to the common saving groups of women organized by NGOs in rural Bangladesh, he says: ‘The women have a secret bank, isn’t that right? They have a separate secret bank that has a plan. Do send something. Give something to Allah’s house, the mosque.’ The transition from collecting the donation to the final prayer is easily made by invocations such as ‘Oh Allah, the Exalted, by the means of this donation, don’t call him up as a sinner on the plain of resurrection (keẏāmater māṭhe).’179 Overall, the accumulated amount of collection called out by Siraji at this mahfil amounted to 12,650 taka. Donations are not limited to monetary contributions, however. Like some others, Nesari announced that he would donate land, and after a mahfil Nuri held at a newly opened but not yet finished boys’ school, someone pledged to contribute twenty sacks of cement. In the context of donations, proving one’s piety to other community members is linked to concrete action. This action is close to the audience and at the same time is not controversial: other than abolishing dowry, building mosques does not put anyone’s claims into question. Practising ‘pious philanthropy’180 transforms worldly money into a pious deed and links the individuals to a common community project attained by community sacrifice. The community includes absent members, such as emigrants from the village, whether to the city or abroad, whom the preacher announces as donors. At the same time, as the preacher announces the amount and the name of the donor and collective praise is uttered according to their generosity, social hierarchies are reinforced. The same holds true for other information that he provides on the donors, such as their membership in the organizing foundation.181 In contrast, in the mass gatherings by Sayeedi, donation boxes are set up and Sayeedi points to spending money at Islamic bookshops around the location.182 No guest is to be sent home without having eaten, and the waz mahfils often close with a joint meal. This is a common feature of many Islamic traditions as much as of political or social meetings in contemporary Bangladesh.183 Sufi gatherings often feature communal meals, and the joint meal ‘in the way of the Prophet’ with five persons sharing one large metal plate is an important feature of emulating the Prophet

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at the TJ’s ijtemā. It is common to give out blessed food (tabarruk) at the end of mahfils at madrasas. At smaller mahfils in rural areas, the dynamics of invitation and hosting guests from outside the locality are added. At the mahfils where Siraji spoke, śinni, a sweet food offering, was prepared for all, but while audience members coming from elsewhere were allowed to eat inside the mahfil tent, the food was sent to the homes of those hailing from the same village. During the announcements leading up to dinner, organizers can straighten out unplanned deviations from their expectation. What I want to call the ‘dialectic’ of the mahfil develops, which adds to the sermons’ ‘frames’, such as posters, spatial set-up, songs and announcements of preachers. As the preacher is temporarily replaced by an organizer to announce the collection, an opportunity is created to adjust his discourse to the audience or the organizers’ opinion. After a sermon in which Siraji polemicized against Hindus and Sufis, one of the organizers shortly addresses the audience for ‘clarification’, advocating a reformed Sufism, as is typical in Sylhet: One word in the meantime. We can greatly misunderstand the Huzur’s discussion about the shrines (mazār). We can make many completely wrong comments. About the māzārs, about the graves of the saints (walī-awliyāʾ), we Muslims hold the belief that they are holy (pabitra) places. (However,) one can only make a pilgrimage (ziyārat) there. There is nothing to ask for from there. The Huzur has discussed that which is obviously fake. A shrine is a holy thing. A place of baraka … . It is a fundamental belief (ʿaqīda) that we will visit (ziyārat karˡba) these graves. We get a little bit of the Huzur’s spiritual bounty (rūḥānī faiẓ). There is nothing else to ask from there. Presently shrines are made into jokes (mājārke tāmāśā karā haẏ). There are even happenings like building a mazār out of shit. Even the name [unclear] is related to shit. That happens. All these Huzurs are fake (bhejāl). About these, he was talking. Please don’t understand the Huzur wrongly. Our beliefs about the shrines are all right.184

That the dialectic element is introduced at this late point furthers the understanding of the mahfil as an undertaking designed to develop consensus: the audience always affirms what the preacher says. Although audience members might have objections to the preacher’s message, their performative role is to agree. The organizers also cannot interrupt the preacher during the sermon. In turn, the preacher cannot immediately respond to the organizers’ small criticisms, as he has to stick to his role and perform the money collection and prayer without any outward sign of disturbance. However, I vividly recall his stiffness and bad mood during his dinner served at the house of one of the organizers afterwards. The mahfil can simulate discussion and opposition, but any kind of controversy that might divide the congregation is avoided. This behavioural code also tells us about the limited validity of the speech acts performed at the mahfil: what the preacher says there is of importance (otherwise the organizers would not have to step in), but it becomes an object of collective (and individual) evaluation after the mahfil, when it is transported from the space of consensus to complex reality. On the other hand, while the organizer’s comment served as a corrective to Siraji’s polemics against shrine worship, there was no one to address his polemic jokes against Hindus.

 Waz Mahfils 67 The often-uttered position to be non-political hence is, as in other social movements in Bangladesh,185 ambiguous. Preachers emphasize that they are figures of consensus and that they remain aloof from any political faction in typical moves of establishing themselves as above political doubts. This allows them to address political wrongs. Nesari condemns corruption by reference to the Quranic verse (Q4:85a): ‘Whoso interveneth in a good cause will have the reward thereof, and whoso interveneth in an evil cause will bear the consequence thereof.’ He takes this as meaning to vote for ‘those who intervene, for good people’, this is those who ‘having become leaders, pray tahajjud prayers, give grants to the poor, destitute and orphans (etim miskin garib), and do good work’, as ‘those who made the leaders will get fifty-fifty (of the reward) of this’. Conversely, those who make ‘blanket thieves and tin thieves and sand thieves and potato thieves’ into leaders, are thieves themselves. It is after this statement that Nesari falls back to the commonplace that he does not ‘mind any party’ but ‘just the Quran’s words’ and his ‘leader is only one, that leader is Muhammad the Messenger of God!’186 Even Sayeedi takes up this impartial role, albeit clearly playing on the fact that his impartiality is only short-lived, and that agreeing to a joint ideal might have specific political implications: ‘There is no party opinion like BNP, Jamaat, or Awami League – today we are all just Muslims! If we can keep this vow, then there is no enmity (śatrutā) between us, brother, no enmity. Come! Once we become one in the question of our ideal (ādarśa), then there will be peace on earth and peace in the hereafter.’187 Here, apolitical and impartial religious authority is transformed into political capital. The preacher is not in dialectic tension with the organizers.

Mediatization, female audiences and repeating the new It is hard to imagine how waz mahfils would look today had they not become increasingly available as mediatized forms since the 1980s parallel to similar phenomena in the Arab world.188 This was a period of heightened exchange, when an increasingly global Islamic soundscape was coming into being that was triggered by and relied on the distribution of ‘small media’, particularly cassettes.189 Initially, the recordings were pioneered by the media-phile BJI, who recorded Sayeedi’s yearly gatherings. The increasing pluralization of media since Bangladesh’s turn to democracy in 1990 was mirrored by the increasing activities of media recording and distribution.190 CDs became the dominant medium in the late 1990s. Nowadays, sermons are loaded on mobile data cards for a small fee or exchanged among friends, leading to new forms of religious sociality.191 Another significant media shift was to video recordings distributed via VideoCD (and now YouTube as well). There are several actors who play a role in the production of recordings. The organizers of waz mahfils may engage local recording teams to produce a CD that they can play in order to demonstrate to the community their organizational success or attract new listeners. More ideologically oriented groups have an interest in producing recordings to promote their cause. Professional media enterprises want to produce sermons of prominent preachers for marketing. These enterprises most often have a

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programme that is not restricted to ‘Islamic’ content.192 In contrast to the informally shared recordings by audience members and to the situation Hirschkind described for sermons on cassette in Cairo, in which the recordings are not a common object of merchandise, recordings of waz mahfils are not commercialized differently from other items of popular culture, making them more similar to the distribution of sermon cassettes in Mali observed by Dorothea Schulz.193 A professional post-production team often cuts out parts of the sermons that are deemed too boring or too controversial. Furthermore, each sermon gets a title, which might refer to the event by date and place, but more often is a specific theme. Next to ‘Islamic’ symbols and images similar to those displayed on the posters, the covers often feature small photographs of the preachers. As poets earn money by selling poems after public readings of poetry, so preachers earn money by selling CDs at the waz mahfil, and media entrepreneurs pay a lump sum for a preacher’s permission to market a specific sermon. For the preachers, however, the most important aspect of the mediatized sermons is their function as an advertisement for their sermons, which lead to further invitations. Preachers are ‘entrepreneur[s] of moral and market economy’,194 but their real interest in recordings is mostly as a tool to spread word of their skills. Hosen reports that when his first cassette was produced in 1994, he did not know about it. When the demand rose, he thought ‘hey, there is some honey (madhu) in this!’ And today he boasts that ‘wherever there are Bengalis in this world, I, Tophājjol, am also present!’195 The cassettes are a means of making the audience know and recognize the preacher, who can spread his fame far beyond the locations of live performances and therefore hope to receive invitations from hitherto untapped markets. During the time of my research, the sale of CDs and VideoCDs along with other entertainment in shops and by travelling agents carrying them on transport rickshaws or at shops close to mosques was in a deep structural crisis due to the ever-increasing dissemination of mobile phones and internet. It is difficult to foresee where this will lead, but it seems that the influence of professional media designers is decreasing as they lose out to the voluntary economy. With the arrival of mobile phones having recording functions, the role of the audience in documenting their listening experience greatly increases. This seems to be most important in the case of mahfils that are not otherwise recorded. In madrasas, for example, students may try to work their way up to the speaker and put their mobile on the table placed in front of him. As can be imagined, collections of freely available recordings from friends can be quite large. When signs at waz mahfils state that video recordings are forbidden, this only testifies to the fact that nowadays, even in the most conservative quarters, audio recordings are a common part of receiving the mahfil. Waz mahfils have, to my knowledge, never become established on radio or television.196 With more television stations coming into being, attempts have been made to air waz sermons. Studio recordings however proved to be unsuccessful for reasons easily guessed on the background of the waz mahfils’ performative set-up. Hosen complains about a failed television recording. In the studio, he felt ‘listener-less’ (śrotābihīn) since there were ‘only three cameras’.197 This inability to speak without an audience in front of the ‘bare’ microphone again emphasizes the importance of the

 Waz Mahfils 69 ‘living audience’ for the preacher.198 Moreover, the time slot allotted to Hosen was too short for him, and it was impossible for him to perform particular parts of the sermon without getting in the mood by the usual order and timing of the sermons. ‘Small media’, on the other hand, have the advantage that they can leave the waz mahfils’ performance form relatively untouched, adopting their duration and setting to the original setting. Media still record rather than produce waz mahfils. This media orientation is also telling about the sensory hierarchies in waz mahfils. Gestures are, as noted above, parts of guiding the audience, and some preachers employ what we might call mimetic gestures imitating the actions of characters depicted in the sermons. However, quick, subtle shifts in facial expressions that are important to TV production do not (yet) play an important role for waz mahfils. The most common visual perspective in video recordings is that of a frontal focus on the upper body of the preacher, sometimes showing in a half circle the entourage and the banner of the mahfil put up behind the preacher. If the technique used is a little more advanced, the audience is at times included by a camera panning through the mahfil tent. As this allows little visual variation, some VideoCDs at some points of the sermon overlay pictures of nature, pictures of holy localities or symbols, thereby adding a visual dimension that fits the beautiful, sublime or practical content of the sermon while the preacher’s voice continues on the soundtrack. Mediatization of waz mahfils not only influences religious mediation within the sermons, but also transforms the appearance of religion in public,199 for example, by affecting the roles and relations of preacher and audience. A common image at the end of waz mahfils is that of people jostling around the preacher, trying to touch him once he descends the stage and walks towards the organizer’s house or his car. From Hosen’s perspective: ‘A passion occurs and they want to touch me with their hands. Such a pressure and such a crowd that five to seven people can’t push away the people. They have such high hopes that they think if I once make my hand meet the Huzur’s my day was successful.’200 This description shows how hierarchies and role models change from the inside to the outside of the mahfil. While a minute before the preacher had been one of the sinning supplicants to God joining the other attendants of the congregation, he now is shielded from the crowd and driven away. On the other hand, again there is a distribution of roles, and pushing the audience members away is the task of the preacher’s helpers, thereby allowing the preacher to keep his image as being approachable – he himself does not need to distance himself from the community members. A similar excitement reaches back as far as to popular preaching in medieval Iraq201 and conforms with other requests by audience members to the preachers as carriers of baraka, new dynamics occur in a situation in which the preacher can be known without being personally present. When Hosen described contact with the audience, he made a comment that reveals transformations of expectations and gender dimensions. He stated: ‘At the mahfil’s end, in the pandal that is put up separately for the women, the women capriciously insisted: “make the Huzur stand on that side of the pandal’s curtain (pardā). Huzur can stand on the stage, we can see him a little.”’ And upon seeing him, they add: ‘I wanted to see (you) so much, now Allah showed you (to me) and I am satisfied.’ So far, we have treated waz mahfils as a merely male affair – which it is, from the perspective of the

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event at the mahfil tent, with male preachers and male audiences. However, there have been new trends that in many respects rely on mediatization.202 Anthropologist Elora Shehabuddin relates that ‘since 1997, Saidi has set aside at least a half-day during the waazes to be devoted entirely to, as he calls them, “the mothers and sisters”. Cassettes of these women’s sessions are available separately for sale and distribution.’203 Shehabuddin is correct in scrupulously following terminology, as the women’s sessions she talks about are not waz performances, but are called samābeś by the organizers and referred to by Sayeedi as a ‘programme’ or ‘event’ (anuṣṭhān).204 Their structure is a question and answer session reminiscent of Zakir Naik’s television show, but not of waz mahfils. This format suited the overall characteristics of the BJI’s women groups, whose internal sermons, by women for women, stress rational personal advice and are based on frequent references and citations. Unlike waz mahfils, a delivery that is too personal and emotional is looked down upon and rather ‘standards of composure and emotional neutrality’ are kept.205 Things probably changed in the early 2000s, when ‘women were strictly segregated from the men by curtains (but able to hear the preachers clearly thanks to amplification)’.206 The video recording of Sayeedi’s mahfil from 2006 shows a ‘women’s pandal’, and Sayeedi refers to it in the sermon.207 In 2010, even the Deobandī preacher Olipuri states that he had women’s tents ‘since last year’.208 Even without pandals specially constructed for them, the sound amplification at waz mahfils allows women to come together to listen to the mahfil’s sound broadcasting in houses of relatives and friends close to the event, and sometimes groups of women walk around waz mahfils and take part in the general nocturnal mobility the waz mahfil allows. Amplification bridges and brings together female and male spheres in a joint sonic space. Take, for example, the weekly school mahfil at a komi madrasa in Rūpsī with predominantly female students. There was a pandal for the girls built up on the madrasa’s roof, while the male teachers and some boys took their place on a separate stage at the madrasa’s entrance. The announcer who also sat downstairs had a list with the names of the students who were to perform at a particular point in the programme and with their respective speech’s theme. In the sound dimension of the mahfil, there was no gender segregation whatsoever: judging only from the voices of the announcer and the children, transmitted equally loudly (so loudly that children covered their ears), it was one and the same mahfil. Hosen exaggerated when he told me that more women listen to his sermons than men. But at the same time his awareness of female audiences is acute. He selfconsciously chooses topics and styles of presentation that fit the media channels and his ideas about female reception. Hosen claims that his most prominent topics, the suffering (kaṣṭa) of mothers, are particularly popular with women.209 Hosen considers emotions, the mainstay of his sermons, particularly suited for females, who, in his opinion, cannot stop their passions as easily as men can. This general trend of increasing importance of women as listeners of mediated sermons is important. It complements the ideological analysis offered by Shehabuddin, who sees the discourse about mothers and women as deriving mainly from the BJI. Following my analysis, the turn to women can be perceived as an old commonplace and a new trend fired by

 Waz Mahfils 71 media opportunities. Rather than originating from one actor, it is shared by preachers with very different ideological aims and means of persuasion. By relying on mediatized sermons to a greater degree, women are ahead of the men as far as their ability to perceive gestures and facial expressions goes, as the video brings these out more clearly than the live performance. Hosen is well aware that the pleasure (tr̥ pti) of both seeing and hearing surpasses that of merely listening.210 This leads to a situation in which we can say that the preacher and the male audience are self-consciously engaged in a performance for the camera and for being reproduced, first in the women’s tent and second on a reproducible medium detached from the event itself. Hosen’s above-cited comment about the women’s wish to see him and their satisfaction upon fulfilling this wish also tells a lot about the raising and satisfaction of expectations in ways that would be impossible without the possibility of repeating what before was a unique performance, and creating a media personality and a voice as an entity of its own, no longer linked to a particular body and spatio-temporal performance. Seeing the preacher ‘in person’ for the female audience is fulfilling an expectation raised before by recordings and by the projection during the waz mahfil. That recordings can be possessed ‘as a thing’; that their time flow is ‘arrested’211 and can be manipulated by its owner; that the preacher’s voice is no longer ephemeral and fleeting212 calls into question some presumptions that are inherent in the classification of the waz mahfils as ‘oral poetry’ on which I touched when stressing the parallels of call-and-response patterns in waz mahfils to those of the American folk preacher. The thesis of a composition-in-performance implies that ‘all is traditional on the generative level, all unique on the level of performance’.213 It is true since the sermons treat ‘traditional’ topics. It is also true that because of the feedback loop with the audience and the necessity of the performance affecting the preacher as well, no performance is exactly the same. However, this does not mean that preachers do not also repeat passages of sermons exactly. In fact, they have to do so to provide the satisfaction of the audience matching the performance with what they expected and because of the importance that narrative and affective structures have for waz mahfils. Comparing a promise of redemption given in two sermons Hosen held at different occasions exemplifies the process. In both cases, Hosen adopts the voice of Allah addressing the angels. Between the two performances, the interjections remain the same, only varying slightly in their order. Both performances of the section take thirty seconds and Hosen employs the same melody to deliver them. What we might call ‘blocks of themes’ are readily available to the preacher, whose composition-inperformance might well be near-identical over the course of several performances as much as between recorded and live versions. On the other hand, while preachers have to ensure recognition, they are also driven to innovation. The repeatability and marketing of sermons via recordings can also lead organizers to ask preachers not to perform the ‘same sermon’ again. The preachers build up a ‘repertoire’ that shows a range of possibilities. This repertoire widens over the years with each season as it seeks to attract the interest of the organizers anew. The market of VideoCDs is fast paced: CDs from previous seasons, with the exception of the sermons marketed by stable organizations, particularly the BJI, are not stored.

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Preachers always have to come up with new sermons – and this often means new narrations – to remain up to date. But mediatization not only creates possibilities for branding and personalization; it also detaches preachers from their voices. Hosen told me about his surprise when he came to hear his own voice from the recordings and playing the game of inquiring about the cassette without being recognized by his interlocutors – a story reminiscent of that of the king roaming through his own kingdom incognito.214 When listening to recordings, listeners need not know the preacher’s name, particularly when recordings of sermons are put on in buses, at tea stalls and in shops. Of course, those interested in waz mahfils know better. This means that while waz mahfils have relatively homogeneous audiences and frames that mark specific group affiliations, the mediatized sermons listened to at some place or the other are piecemeal parts of a general discourse of sermons and preachers, without prior boundary markers. In their mediatized form, waz mahfils can repeat and normalize, or introduce, clichés from the position of an anonymous Islamic discourse. To cater to wider audiences, media producers often cut out parts of recordings that concern specific on-the-spot communication as much as parts that are part of in-group communication but might be offensive to a wider audience. Linguistically, they reduce dialectal variation. The prejudice that waz mahfils are very ‘local’ and hence dialectal is for the most part already refuted by the above-discussed importance of travelling preachers. These retain their local speech colour, but when outside their home region have to adopt a commonly understandable idiom. This is, of course, not the ‘high’ Bengali of Calcutta or Dhaka variants or language heard on television, but a more colloquial variant; however, it is standardized enough to be understandable to people from other regions. In short, approaching wider audiences, mediatized mahfils work towards a general comprehensibility, in this way forming an antipole to the sermons of local preachers. This situation is different in the diaspora, where local characteristics become important markers for home. The Sylheti community in London, and the importance of attracting it as a sponsor for waz mahfils in Bangladesh and preachers travelling internationally, leads to a relatively strong presence of Sylheti dialect even in mediatized recordings by the international preachers Ansari and Olipuri. Sylheti becomes an important idiom of Bengali Islam far beyond Sylhet and Sylhetis; and waz mahfils become endowed with a meaning of locality that is not the same as in Bangladesh. Listeners to recordings can choose to take the preacher’s voice and the mahfil’s atmosphere with them and listen to it in portions, at times and places convenient to them. The not too dense and often repetitive style of presentation makes the waz mahfils appropriate for distracted listening. The relatively little visual stress of the performance of waz mahfils and its long duration cater perfectly to their reception as a sort of radio play. Recordings of waz mahfils can, for example, be played in the early morning hours during Ramadan as a means to stay awake. This significantly alters the usual timing of waz mahfils and is an example of the extension of aesthetic and pious practices by modern media. Similar to cassette sermons in Egypt, the recordings of waz mahfils can be used as ‘pious relaxation’, in the evenings and after work, or when driving a car.215

 Waz Mahfils 73 The possibility for multitasking is one of the main driving forces for consuming audio recordings. Particularly fond of recordings of waz mahfils are people who work in solitary jobs that do not give any free time but allow people to listen to something while working. In urban areas, this situation is typical for drivers and night guards. The driver of an auto-rickshaw expressed that while listening to sermons, he could make use of his time effectively. Like other people, he told me, he was always too busy to have time for religion. Of course, he conceded, he would not be able to raise his hands during the final prayer, as he had to hold onto the steering wheel, but he could at least join in saying āmīn. He was attracted to the sermons of his favourite preacher, Hosen. Listening to the sermons on parents and particularly mothers gave him an occasion to think dearly of his mother, whom he loved above all else. While he was already pious before (‘had a fear of God in my heart’), listening to the sermons made his heart soft and compassionate, inspiring him to think about and donate to the poor. In general, he very much liked the chanted passages of the sermon and saw these as being the main difference from the sermons by the TJ, which he listened to on a weekly basis as well. When walking through urban areas at night, it is not uncommon to suddenly hear snippets of sermons coming from the night guards who are awake, sitting or standing at the entrance of large buildings. These men often do not live together with their families whom they left in rural areas, but sleep in dormitories together with other night guards. While they cannot listen to anything there because they do not want to disturb the others (even talking on the phone might not be allowed), they do exchange waz recordings to listen to while at their respective places of work. On watch, they have plenty of time to listen to the sermons, which they just pause in case they have to do anything more than simply be present. In this way, a night guard told me, it takes about two hours to listen to a waz mahfil of one and a half hours. While they might listen to the same sermon repeatedly over a couple of days, they do not do so more than a couple of times, as it gets boring. One of the night guards told me that Hosen would say many other things besides the Quran and Hadith and include gajal, stressing that he would like it despite being aware that it might be criticized. The explanation of the taxi driver is noteworthy as it shows the importance recipients of mediatized sermons ascribe to the sermons’ aesthetics rather than to their sectarian background. The reception of the night guards, too, exemplifies individual choice as much as the justification of what becomes an individual ‘taste’ for one preacher. We will soon be able to understand how the drive for newness is incorporated into the sermons’ poetics. To achieve this, we have to finally turn to the words that listeners follow so closely.

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Aesthetics of religious language Code switching and connoisseurship of the poetic

In this and the following chapter, I analyse the key linguistic and narratological features of the sermons. I show how the genre’s poetics interweave religious interpretation and aesthetics of communication, how the preachers’ roles of exegete and religious authority overlap with their roles as translator, master of a multilingual aesthetic repertoire, and narrator of educating and thrilling stories. I stress the overlaps between religious, emotional and aesthetic messages in ways that are specific to the genre as they are built into a sermon’s form. At the same time, I use parameters of interpretation that are as accessible as possible and useful for drawing comparisons: sociolinguistic terminology in this chapter and a narratological toolbox in the next. Taken together, the two chapters provide discussions of the sermons from beginning to end. This chapter starts with the introduction of the sermons and the next closes with the sermons’ final prayer; both overlap in dealing with different aspects of the middle and main part. This chapter focuses on the poetic effects of sermons’ multilingual aesthetics, which is characteristic for their idiom. This aspect of the sermons lies close to their raison d’être of educating listeners in the often multilingual Islamic tradition. The most prominent example for the reference and citation of another language are the quotations from the Quran, but there are many more examples of including other languages.1 In the preacher’s performance, multilingual code switching and the interpretation and quotation of canonical religious texts are not two separate phenomena but are interwoven into one process. This process requires, and builds, the competencies of the preacher as well as those of listeners. It relies on language usage outside the sermons, but also contributes to building multilingual relations within and beyond the sermons. The linguistic relations shift and are reiterated over the course of each sermon and stand in particular relation to the parts of speech and specific functions. For the analysis of the multilingual poetics of the sermons, the formal vocabulary of semiotics and sociolinguistics is useful. Semiotics perceives culture as a set of communication processes that rely on the transmission of signs by codes, which must be ‘fully, or at least partly, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message)’.2 Messages contain different codes that are related to their different, yet simultaneous, functions. The different levels of the sermons’ performance can be seen as creating different codes. In relation to the level of multilingual relations, I highlight the importance of code switching. Sociolinguistics

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has defined code switching ‘as the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems’.3 Of particular interest is the reference (‘indexicality’)4 of speech styles (such as bureaucratic language, sociolects or dialects) to social situations or groups. This always includes a dialectical process: if a speech form is associated with a context of authority, it may come to be perceived as an authoritative language. When a person then uses this language, he can project himself as being an authority. Because of its focus on Arabic Islamic sermons, research on Islamic sermons has until now focused on linguistic varieties and formalities of speech within one language rather than on different languages. Analysing an Egyptian Friday sermon from the 1990s, Reem Bassiouney observes a pattern of the Quranic verse cited in Quranic Arabic, then explained in Egyptian colloquial Arabic and finally shifting to formal Arabic. She argues that through this code switching, the speaker can ‘establish a oneto-one relationship between him and the audience on the one hand, and between the audience and God on the other. These two very different relationships cannot be expressed as appropriately using one code, as they can using two.’5 From Bassiouney, we also learn that while the shifts are anticipated, and perhaps even conventional, this does not mean that they are not at the same time ‘marked’ as differing from everyday speech and charged with an indexing function. This means that each code is assigned a communicational direction and rhetorical function. Bassiouney, for example, associates Egyptian colloquial Arabic ‘with family, friends, intimacy, informality and concreteness’.6 Similarly, Patrick Gaffney, in his description of a sermon held in Egypt in 1978, notes a conflation of the preacher’s roles with the switching to Egyptian dialect, in contrast to formal fuṣḥa: ‘Since Friday sermons are supposed to be delivered in the standard language, Shaykh Uthman is able to combine the august authority associated with the Qur’an and the classical tradition with the familiarity, concreteness, and creativity that are usually available only in the local patois.’7 A valuable contribution that deals with linguistic configurations of Islamic sermons other than Arabic is Julian Millie’s study on the indexicalities of Sundanese and the national standard language of Indonesia.8 Millie argues that the switches make it possible to bridge different orientations of preachers and listeners as to whether sermons should be transformative and contemporary or more ritualistic and gratifying in situ. Fitria Aida Marfuaty describes the even more complex situation of the usage of the national language, Indonesian, different variants of Javanese, and Arabic in Islamic preaching videos. Significantly, she goes beyond seeing the main effects of code switching in the familiarity and relaxation provided by the local, colloquial languages and draws attention to the development of a ‘hybrid’ Islamic language in Java.9 The Indonesian cases resonate with the Bengali sermons I describe. While switches to dialectal forms of the language are important, they are less significant than switches that occur between Bengali, Arabic, Persian and Urdu. And while ‘hybrid’ is not a term I would use – its counterpart, a non-hybrid language, does not exist – it in one word captures the composite nature of the idiom employed by many preachers in Bangladesh, too. The Indonesian cases also show that the multilingual relations in which code switching is embedded and the effects it has cannot be universalized. The main effects of code switching in waz mahfils do not parallel the Indonesian case,

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 77 where Indonesian indicates transformation and Sundanese affective communication and provides relaxation.10 To understand the specificity of the Bangladeshi case, it is necessary to go into some basics about the related linguistic phenomena in the history and contemporary social dynamics of Bengali.11 Studies of Bengali up to the nineteenth century point towards a long history of multilingualism, posing, as elsewhere in South Asia, challenges in terminology and research.12 In East Pakistani times, Qazi Abdul Mannan drew attention to a variant of literary Bengali that is characterized by a large number of loanwords from ‘PersioArabic’ and ‘Hindustani’. He writes that this linguistic variety, called dobhāṣī, originated as a literary language of Hindu authors. Only ‘in the 18th century Muslim poets themselves had begun to adopt Dobhāṣī as their own peculiar language’, and therefore, ‘as a literary diction, it was slowly being accepted as the preserve of Muslim writers’.13 Thibaut d’Hubert describes that in the multilingual environment of Arakan in the seventeenth century, there was not necessarily a hierarchy between the different languages involved (Middle Bengali, Persian and Sanskrit), a situation that dramatically changed in the following centuries.14 He traces the origins of dobhāṣī concretely to eighteenth-century Sufi Śāh Garībullāh and emphasizes its adoption in several contexts, ranging ‘from communalism to creative linguistic hybridity’.15 Beyond historical origins, Mannan’s study tells us a lot about perceptions of language in independent Bangladesh. For example, he quotes Enamul Haq, who speaks of ‘two extremes of Bengali style: the one extreme being the “Urduised” style of the Muslims, the other the “Sanskritised” style of the paṇḍits’. And while Mannan agrees that ‘the word, Dobhāṣī, obviously means derived from two languages, and is, therefore, an over-simplification, as the language contains elements from more than two languages, namely, Bengali, Arabic, Persian and Hindustani’, he argues that the three languages apart from Bengali form ‘one group’, as they ‘came into Bengal as part of Muslim culture’. Hence, they are differentiated ‘from the indigenous language, Bengali, with which they became mixed’. Dobhāṣī ‘therefore, can be interpreted as meaning Bengali and Islamic’.16 Again, this view is historically incorrect, as dobhāṣī developed contemporaneously with Urdu/Hindustani, and hence cannot be a mixture of Bengali and such ‘outside’ forms. But while it does not tell us about origins, it tells us about a long-standing linguistic variety of Bengali that is characterized by Persian/ Arabic/Urdu lexicons and perceived as ‘Islamic’. One reason for this perception is the adoption of dobhāṣī as an idiom of religious reformers since the 1870s, and the linkage of language, communal identity and employment of Arabic words since then. ‘Authors of Islamic-Bengali works, writing as late as the 1870s, variously use the terms, “Islami Bangla” or “Hindi Bangla”, to describe the language they used – the identification clearly being with both, language and the religion.’17 Because it was possible to print texts cheaply for example in the Battala presses, finally, these idioms became huge successes in the print market.18 Conventions of print, such as binding books from right to left, similarly became markers of variety and style, but also identity.19 Aijaz Ahmad pointedly summarizes that many South Asian languages as we know them today were deeply influenced by religious reform movements. These reform movements ‘had the effect, first, of pressing the modern Indian languages

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into service for proselytizing, and, second, of greatly enhancing, at the same time, the prestige of scholarship in the classical language (Vedic and Sanskritic knowledge for Hindus, Arabic and Persian for Muslims) as the language of religious textuality’.20 The knowledge of Arabic became increasingly important and achievable for a Muslim public in South Asia.21 This public has been linked to educational institutions, such as the madrasa system of Deoband, to which many of Bangladesh’s komi madrasas adhere. These Islamic schools in Bangladesh relied and rely on public subscription. They need to persuade the public to give them funds, not the least by communicating students’ success in learning, for example, Arabic, to the outside world of possible supporters. While the role of Persian in South Asia in general and in Eastern Bengal in particular has declined considerably since the nineteenth century, the importance of Arabic continues to rise in the context of Islamic education and the opportunities of the petro-dollar economy. The inclusion of Urdu lexis in Bengali has, in the twentieth century, taken new twists with the history of Bangladesh as East Pakistan. This history includes the efforts of Muslim Bengali literati and journalists to create a space for idioms of the Bengali language distinct from domination of the bhadralok of Calcutta. On the other side, while many Bengali Muslims dreamt of Pakistan before the end of British rule, and Urdu was not perceived as the Other of Bengali,22 the language policy of the newly founded state that claimed Urdu as the more Islamic and sole national language was shocking for many. The Bengali language movement against Urdu dominance took off as an early protest against Western Pakistani domination in other spheres. The siding of the BJI with the Pakistani regime during Bangladesh’s War of Independence, and particularly its involvement in the war’s atrocities, was, in state narratives and common perceptions during the time of my research, often linked to a general questioning of the ‘Bengaliness’ of Islamic actors.23 Again, this is not to strengthen identity constructions or paradigms such as ‘regional’ vs. ‘global’ Islam. But when trying to trace the performative dimensions of one Islamic Bengali idiom, the perceptions of the languages involved is important, and the history of language perception plays into the meaning particular idioms carry with them. Bengali as the national language is a particularly strong marker of national identity in Bangladesh, which is, compared to other South Asian nations, more linguistically uniform.24 Nevertheless, multilingual code switching is, as in other regions of South Asia,25 part of everyday life in Bangladesh. Bangladeshis switch between different regional variants and a ‘Bangladeshi Bengali’ widely understood and used by the media. It also involves distinct languages, such as different Adivasi languages, Urdu and Rohingya. Switching between Bengali and English is most noticeable in urban middle and upper classes and is socially linked to employment in transnational companies, ‘Western’ NGOs and the rise of English-medium education. Switching between Bengali and Arabic is linked to labour migration to the Gulf countries. The Urdu bits of language come from or are perceived to ‘belong’ to the often Urdu-medium madrasas and the Tābligī Jāmāt (TJ). The set of languages preachers employ broadly positions the sermons and the listeners in a social space that is linked to lower middle classes seeking international migration opportunities in the Middle East and cherishing the Islamic competencies taught at madrasas. At the same time, there is no easy one-to-one social

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 79 relation and it is quite common within the same family to have sons pursue different careers in secular as well as religious education or even for individual students to move between different institutions and their respective sociolinguistic profiles. When marking languages, it is important to underline that I always talk about perceptions of languages, and do not want to ennoble any of these perceptions by proving them right or wrong with an outsider’s linguistic analysis. When I mark words in my analysis, it is not the etymological background of words that is decisive. One Arabic loan word might be perceived as Bengali, while another one might be perceived as Arabic: while the Bengali gharib would be unmarked, miskin would be marked as Arabic, although both are of Arabic origin. I also do not mark ‘Arabic’ words such as nabī, when pronounced in the Bengali way with the first vowel realized as open . Already these examples show that the ‘indexicality’ of words is quite nuanced. Arabic words might specifically refer to ritual and therefore have a different indexicality than words with an Arabic origin known from the everyday or political sphere. Preachers typically integrate these words into their sermons in their Persian/Urdu form with ‘tāʾ marbūṭa’ transformed into -at and so on. In specialized sermons to a madrasa audience, whole Urdu sentences are built into the Bengali sermon.26 That preachers and listeners can make out such fine differentiations requires us to think about linguistic competencies in a nuanced and graded manner. When Roman Jakobson stated that a code must be ‘fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee’,27 he did not describe the nature of that partiality. For the topic of Arabic in Bengali sermons, however, it is exactly the ‘partial’ nature of understanding the code that is decisive. I am not at all convinced by the view that Arabic is a liturgical language, which is little understood and of no semantic importance,28 as such a view does not do justice to the audience’s competences. Many listeners have studied in a maktab, a pre-primary Quranic school, where they memorized parts of the Quran and acquired reading skills, which means that they are capable of differentiating and recognizing Arabic phonemes. Another important location for acquiring competency in Arabic is Islamic ritual: most of the listeners of waz mahfils are familiar with the Arabic parts of the obligatory prayers, nearly all of them with many parts of the Arabic Friday sermons, and everyone with the call to prayer. And there are, among the listeners, people with either experiences or aspirations of travelling to the Middle East, as well as graduates and students of Islamic schools. All of this makes plausible the claim that Arabic quotes do not just stand for ‘Arabic’ as indexing ‘sacred language’ – which they also do, and this is no less important29 – and are otherwise undifferentiated. Rather, they form a complex mix of recognition with different degrees of familiarity. Working with listeners and assistants transcribing sermons for me, this variation also became apparent. Sometimes Arabic and Urdu words and combinations were understood with stunning precision, while other listeners simply omitted or misheard them. This underscores that partial recognition, or filling in and acquiring competencies, is how listeners receive the code; they are not passively listening. Alongside perceiving listeners as people engaged in the process of learning, my analysis also takes into account the fluid nature of linguistic indexicality and the fact that it is shaped over the course of each performance. For example, the accent and meaning of linguistic codes is not the same in every part of the sermon for the simple

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fact that the linguistic composition of the parts of the sermons differ from one another. The process of performance and the process of reception together turn the sermons into more than static carriers of linguistic ideology. Focusing on them opens up fresh perspectives on the role of language choice and religion.

Framing religious and social speech acts in introductions of sermons The beginning of each sermon contains the specific ‘contract’ between those present in the tent and the speaker about the kind of speech act they are going to take part in30 and about the marking and indexicality of linguistic codes. The introduction is the most distinct and standardized part of the sermon. Preachers in interviews provide explicit guidelines for it, while they can only ‘show’ other parts of the sermon in performance. To a large degree, the introductions confirm the listeners’ prior expectations and opinions, reducing uncertainties of the preacher and the audience. The introduction has two main communicative directions: it draws on conventions from the Friday sermon and situates the sermon in continuity with ritual,31 and it addresses the audience and the locality, thereby linking to power and community in the here and now. Analogically, the basic rhetorical work of the introduction – to make its addressees attentive, receptive and benevolent towards the preacher – is directed to God and the audience in the tent. Both these directions are related to language choice. Arabic is particularly important as a marker of ritual continuity and Bengali and Urdu as means of address in the here and now. At the same time, both codes are increasingly interwoven over the course of the introduction. The recitation of Quranic quotations in Arabic, other well-known formulas and poems raises attention and sets the sermon in a devotional frame directed towards the otherworldly. Fittingly, during this ritual framework of addressing, praising and blessing the Divine, the preacher is typically withdrawn, as if he himself were not present, but rather as if he were serving as a medium for the divine word. Most commonly, the sermon begins with the Arabic greeting ‘Peace be upon you and God’s mercy and His blessing’ and ritual Arabic formulas, usually performed in a calm and serene manner. This beginning is mostly comprised of Arabic sentences that are known from the Arabic Friday sermon. When preachers described it to me, they indeed often metonymically referred to this part as khuṭba. First comes a praise of God (ḥamd), the seeking of His help and forgiveness (istighfār), the profession of belief in Him and relying on Him, as well as, less commonly, the acceptance of His sovereignty in choosing whom to forgive. After the confirming amen, the preacher recites the Arabic formulas admitting guilt and calling for forgiveness, and the audience seeks refuge in Allah from the badness of the soul and bad deeds. Another common part of the introduction is an ‘extended’ profession of faith. Instead of only one sentence for professing belief in Allah and His Prophet Muhammad, the profession of faith is split into two parts, thereby leaving space to enter praising titles before or after the Prophet’s name. At this point, many preachers insert a short

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 81 citation from the Quran or Hadith that they find fitting for the topic of discussion. Quranic quotes are often introduced with Arabic formulas that highlight the reference to the Quran.32 This referencing draws attention to the ritual of Arabic ‘ritualizing’33 the preaching event. This creates a ‘“controlled environment” that enhances audience reception of the sermon’.34 Linguistic and poetic forms, the sacred language and the pleasure of poetry are interwoven in the idiom of the waz mahfil. Although the audience may recite certain phrases, up to this point the preacher’s voice dominates. In the following, sometimes after the Arabic formula ‘hereafter’ (amma baʿd), the discourse becomes more interactive. The initial framing of the basmala and the istiʿādha are at this point recited jointly by preacher and audience in a well-known performance pattern that usually precedes each Quranic recitation. First, the speech acts of professing, asking, accepting and confessing, which the well-known Arabic phrases entailed, were uttered by the preacher on behalf of the audience. Then, the audience not only mumbles along with the preacher but recites loudly. We can say that the audience places itself in the frame created by the Arabic recitation and contributes to building a space with an audible performance. Although the pandal is spatially only demarcated by panels of fabric, the density of the recitation of ritual formula is perceived physically and builds up a space, which is not only entered by the audience but constructed by joining in the recitation. At this early point of the sermon, preachers often engage the audience in ‘an essential, sometimes it would seem, the essential of the life of salvation and devotion’.35 They call upon the audience to ask God to bless the Prophet (denoted as taṣliya in Arabic and durūd in South Asia). In a sense, this ritual element foreshadows and condenses the waz mahfils’ overall promise of salvation. While the fervent devotion associated with it cannot be reduced to the expectation of a simple automatism of salvation, there is a strong connection between blessing the Prophet and the Prophet’s blessing.36 The blessing and intercession of the Prophet provided a counterweight to predestination since early Islamic theology. Having gained in importance since the late Middle Ages, in contemporary South Asia it is connected to the powers of supplicatory prayer.37 The joint recitation of the durūd for the Prophet at the beginning of the sermon lays the foundation for sermons to interweave analogies of mercy and (Prophetic) presence in the sermons’ narrative parts. Participating in the Arabic frame not only is a form of ritualization, but already foreshadows the elaborations in the narrations of the main part, and the promises of salvation of the final prayer. The performance of the durūd in waz mahfils is both genre specific and stable over time and across sectarian boundaries.38 Preachers initiate it by reciting either the profession of faith or the Quranic verses Q33:45–46, followed by the formula ‘and Allah has verily said in respect to His Beloved’. The most common indication to the audience that they will soon join the preacher in blessing the Prophet is the Arabic couplet from the Persian poet Saʿdī’s masterwork, the Gulistān (Rose Garden). While written in Persian, its introduction features two couplets of Arabic praise, and it is these Arabic verses that preachers (re)cite: He attained exaltation by his perfection (bikamālihi) He dispelled darkness (kashafa ad-dujā) by his beauty

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Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh Beauteous are all his qualities, Benediction be on him and on his family (ṣallū ʿalayhi wa ālihi).

After the quotation either from the Gulistān or from the Quran, the preacher quotes the Quranic call to bless the Prophet, and the audience joins him in fervently asking God, in Arabic, to bestow blessings on the Prophet. The Gulistān’s verses hint at a background of Sufi thought, consisting in intimate reciprocal love and the joint striving for blessing. They include the beauty and perfection of Muhammad as the insān al-kāmil and the revealing (kashf) of divine mystery. As the poem is one of the best-known parts of the sermons and the audience often recites it along with the preacher, at least catchphrases are recognized. Even beyond the quoted couplet, the Gulistān provides sets of metaphors that fit central axioms of the waz mahfils. It describes a repenting sinner going to the ‘court of heaven’ (dargāh-e khudāwand) and being granted forgiveness upon shedding tears – a clear parallel to the mahfil as a place where Allah holds court (darbār) and the supplicant turns to Allah in tears. The performance of preacher and audience relates to this particular conceptualization of the mahfil space. It now remains to connect this performative and imaginative ritual frame to a communicative one, to relate the ritual to a specific location and sociality. To accomplish this, the preacher performs a gradual linguistic shift. He had already started doing so with the interactive Arabic performances, when he issued audience instructions in Bengali. Up to this point of the sermon, the preacher, and then the preacher and the audience, addressed the Divine, predominantly in Arabic. The role of the preacher was that of a mediator,39 to enable the audience’s connection to the Divine by speaking on their behalf and guiding them in their own Arabic addresses. In the following, the preacher addresses the audience in Bengali and Urdu predominantly as a public speaker. He communicates personal sympathy and creates bonds through well-established honorary addresses towards the audience, the organizers and notables. At the same time, this address in another linguistic register and direction of speech repeats, one after another, the main speech acts of the preceding Arabic part: greeting (salām), praise (ḥamd), seeking refuge (istiʿādha), and forgiveness (istighfār). In each case, however, these speech acts are reconfigured to fit their new direction, and set the sermon that is to follow according to the specific outlook of different preachers. First, the greeting as-salāmu ‘alaykum wa raḥmatu ‘llāh(i) (wa barākatuhu) is now directed towards the audience, which responds energetically. If the mahfil is held at a religious school, the name of the school, its founder, and scholarly and spiritual lineage are mentioned; if it is located in a village, the preacher refers to the name of the village. Frequently, he mentions how many times the waz mahfil had been held in that particular setting, thereby establishing a locally specific series. Present are the honourable imams and preachers who have come from different mosques and the dear respected teachers who have come from different madrasas and schools. The mahfil has been organized by our Youth Forum. From the Forum my very dear chairman, friends, and selected members are present. Present are the

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 83 father-like honoured elders (murubbian-e keram); my very dear young friends; and the honoured mothers and sisters present behind the veil. I again greet (all of) them: as-salāmu ‘alaykum wa raḥmatu ‘llāh.40

The preachers specifically thank the host and organizers, most often employing the Urdu-Bengali formula shukrīya ādāẏ karchi. The honorary members, such as the chairman (sabhāpati) and special guest (biśeṣ atithi), are seated on stage together with the preacher. The preacher at this point repeats information from the posters announcing the mahfil, but can include members of his own entourage or unexpected guests. Along with mentioning individuals, the preacher thanks specific organizations, such as the Ahl-e Sunnat wa ’l-Jamāʿat UK,41 the Islamic Society Welfare Association in the case of the mahfils organized by the BJI, or local foundations that have organized the occasion, often given creative names such as ‘the abode of forgiveness’ or, generically named local committees such as the ‘Islamic Youth Committee of …’. Through this procedure, the organizers and important members of the village are associated with the religious field and their names are placed within the frame of worship. This is a faint reflection of the importance of mentioning, or omitting, the name of rulers in the Friday sermon to ascertain political authority that was prominent well into colonial times. In the context here, being mentioned or addressed by name in the mahfil enlarges one’s standing and forges bonds between sponsor and performer as well as between sponsor and audience. This affiliation complicates any direct interpretation of populist rhetoric in sermons seemingly pitted against the powerful. While the politicians and wealthy ones ‘out there’ might be criticized in harsh terms, the lower layers of the powerful are often patrons of waz mahfils. After greeting the organizers, the preachers address the general audience (janagaṇ) according to social and occupational groups. They welcome ‘the honoured scholars’ (muʿaẓẓam, mukarram ʿulamā-ye kerām) or Imams; principals and ‘teachers of madrasas’ (mādrāsār śikṣak); journalists and reporters (sāṃbādikbr̥ nda); the ‘honoured inhabitants of the area’ (sammānita elākābāsī); businessmen, workers, legal servants and rickshaw drivers and pushers; students; or the ‘honoured attendees’ (muḥtaram hāẓirīn) in general. Finally, the most overarching addresses are directed to the ‘mothers and sisters behind the veil’ (pardār aṛāle mā o bonerā), and to the audience as ‘brothers’ (āmār bhāïrā) or ‘brothers of Islam’ (braderān-e Islām). These addresses create forms of belonging and social imaginaries. Unlike the individual naming of the prominent members, calling the male audience ‘brothers’ hinges on the anti-hierarchical imagination of an equal relationship before God and emphasizes equality not only among the audience members, but also between speaker and audience. The group address in the second-person plural is, unlike the ‘personalized’ conversation that has been described as a characteristic of Egyptian sermons in mosques and television preaching,42 decidedly public and general: the listeners are always addressed as a collective. At the same time, preachers involve audience members in the double bind of what Althusser and others call interpellation and hailing: once people react to a name and category they are called by, they admit to that category’s classificatory regime.43 The generality of listeners, for example, constitutes them not only as a collective, but also as one that

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is implicitly distinct from the honourables mentioned before, and hence in a way subaltern. Women are prominently addressed, but thereby excluded from the other ‘male’ domains. While they are represented by the preacher, they are bodily absent from the congregation. The addresses vary with the respective preacher’s vision of society, as different preachers want to promote different ideals to which the audience as subjects must respond. There is, at one extreme, a tendency for mahfils at madrasas to be oriented towards the madrasa world, with its scholarly hierarchies and emphasis on scholarly and spiritual lineages. As a consequence, these mahfils largely ignore other parts of society, reflecting the fact that it is mostly madrasa students and staff who participate. In waz mahfils situated elsewhere, other social groups are named, opening the mahfil to a wider population and arranging a coexistence of Islamic and non-Islamic professional groups. Preachers might, in other circumstances, use addresses to promote their specific theological affiliations. For instance, Qaderi addresses his audience as ‘lovers (premik) of Allah, lovers of the Messenger and lovers of the saints (alī from walī)’, thereby aligning the audience to these Barelwī identities.44 Sayeedi uses the address to position his mahfil in the broader, and political, public sphere. Addressing journalists, for example, shows to the whole congregation that they are participating in a meeting that is connected to a wider public, not ‘just’ a religious ritual. He also uses linguistic indexicality in a particular way when he greets non-Muslim attendees, ‘all the Hindus, Buddhists, tribals (upajatīẏa), and nonMuslims (ghair muslim)’. He does not greet them with as-salāmu ʿalaykum. Instead, he welcomes them by saying susvāgatam and ‘best wishes’ (śubheccha).45 As the BJI is known for its deliberately communal approach and exclusionary and at times violent stances against minorities, this might be a counterfactual address (as hardly any nonMuslims will be present) and an ‘inclusive gesture’ that serves to depict the BJI in a light that it does not live up to in its attitudes or actions elsewhere. At the very least, Sayeedi consciously builds on and expands the link between different languages and different religious communities. This inclusion of a marked Other gives a particular twist to his address to a utopian community, which is united across all boundaries under Islamic leadership. In relation to multilingual code switching, it is significant that the social imaginary communicated by the introduction of the sermons often relies on Urdu expressions as markers of specifically Islamic aspects of identity. Preachers use phrases such as ‘honoured scholars’ (muḥtaram ulamā-ye kerām) whereas in Bengali the non-Islamic guests would be ‘honoured inhabitants’ (sammānita elākābāsi). The fact that each address is marked with one language is exemplified by the circumstance that preachers do not combine linguistic indexicalities into something like muḥtaram elākābāsi. Urdu, like Bengali, relates to the here and now and the social aspect of the sermon’s vision, but stands for particularly Islamic groups and identities. After greeting the audience (salām), preachers in the Bengali part of the introduction typically repeat the praise of God (ḥamd) and ask that the joint prayer at the end of the sermons be accepted. At this point, preachers explicitly ask the audience to utter the Arabic formula together with them, with a particular inner attitude and for a particular purpose. A collective intention is formulated and performed.

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 85 This formulation of thanks and intention gives the preachers the chance to define the specific kind of speech act that the gathered men aim to perform. At a mahfil at a komī madrasa, the preachers emphasize an inner process of thanks and participation in an activity of the ‘madrasa of pure religion’ (khāliṣ dīnī madrasa).46 At the very minimum, the preacher and the audience express thankfulness for being able to participate: We are offering thousands and millions of thanks at the court of the Pure Allah that this noble-hearted master of mankind (mahān rabbu ‘l-ʿālamīn) gave you and me the privilege to attend this last session of the mahfil in the spring (phālgun) month. To thank (shukrīya) we all say ‘praise to God’ (al-ḥamdu li-llāh)!47

Often, preachers include the locality into the speech act of thanking, thereby stressing once more the spatial connection between the ritual and the ‘real’ space. The joint praise might also express intentions of how to apply the sermon’s teaching beyond the mahfil. Mazhari, for example, foreshadows his sermon’s narratives of corporeal suffering: ‘Allah the Pure has granted us success (tawfīq) to come and sit at this gathering with the goal of hearing the bloodshed message of holy Islam and of applying it in the vita active (ʿamalī jindāgī); that’s why we offer thanks and say: al-ḥamdu li-llāh!’48 The phrase ʿamalī jindagi is a typical example of an indeterminate expression that fosters consensus as it connects to different interpretations. In praise of Nuri, this very same expression is connected to correct and steady belief,49 thus similarly pointing beyond the sermon congregation itself, but still towards a quite restricted inner and religious sphere. Sayeedi shapes the speech act of praising to include the paramount importance of Allah and the name of the gathering as a Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphil’: At the court (darbār) of the great worshipped one (maʿbūd), the king of kings, the emperor’s emperor, the paramount sovereign of heaven and earth, Allah, the master of mankind, with utmost humble mind and respect-throbbing voice we bring forward thanks (shukr) that the great maʿbūd granted us success (tawfīq) that we could become participants (sharīk) at this last day of the five-day Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphil – with articulate spontaneous voices, all of you say loudly ‘praise to God’ (al-ḥamdu li-llāh)!50

After salām and ḥamd, preachers and audience jointly and elaborately seek refuge (istiʿādha) and forgiveness (istighfār). Here, too, they shape collective intentions, which are now directed to prepare the prayer at the sermon’s end. Preachers stress that the mahfil should be a medium for divine mercy, which is to be showered down on the congregation by God. In order that Satan cannot, at today’s barakat-filled (barakat-pūrṇa) huge mahfil, spoil (maḥrūm karā) anyone’s final prayer (munājāt) or today’s important (gurutva-pūrṇa) discussion, all of you recite together with me (Arabic): ‘I seek refuge to Allah from the cursed Satan, in the name of Allah the allcompassionate.’51

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The preconditions and certainty of the expected redemption varies. Preachers at Deobandī madrasas might carefully insert a caveat on the possibility that God might not grant what is asked for. It is difficult to temper expectations of the sermon’s potential to redeem listeners, however. Take, for example, the following hedged formulation that treads the narrow path between promise and scrupulousness: If Allah accepts (kabul kare nen) your and my appeal (ābedan), if Allah accepts (our) participation in today’s joyful assembly (jalsa), if it gets accepted (maqbūl), if Allah kindly accepts it – then we can hope that Allah the Exalted, only because we are present at today’s assembly, Allah the Exalted can grant you and me escape on the Day of Judgement.52

Other preachers are more certain of the success of their sermon’s prayer power. Sayeedi, in a sermon from 1987, asks Allah for forgiveness for the organizers as well as the congregation and himself. He denotes the mahfil as a medium by the same word as is used for the Prophet as an intercessor: ‘Rabbul ʿālamīn, those who have organized this mahfil, and those who came to listen to it, at the Day of Judgement, during the time of calamity (musībat) grant us escape (nājāt) by means of (zarīʿa) this mahfil.’53 Hosen describes the interaction between a believer and Allah in the following manner: ‘My dear, call Allah during this dark night. Once this invocation infused with inner love reaches Allah’s throne and finds resonance – for only one call in our life, Allah can then pass the final sentence (phaẏˡsālā, pronounced phāẏˡsālā for being closer to Arabic) granting us escape.’54 As in the durūd, preachers elaborate on mutual responsibilities between God and believers for each other’s happiness. They analogically liken the mahfil attendants’ extra efforts to being a particular version of jihad or to spending money.55 Hosen illustrates the intention of making God happy as the inner motivation for supererogatory devotional acts by comparing the time spent at the mahfil as ‘being paid’ for by Allah: My Prophet has taught us that the servants will spend time to please (khuśi karār) Allah. During the time that you stay sitting here, if you stayed in this manner in your shop all day long, then maybe you did some business or other – be it governmental or non-governmental. In case of a job, it’s eight hours duty, scheduled time. If you invested this time, at the end of the month a good salary would come. But today you are sitting at the mahfil having abandoned house, home, and bed. This is not obligatory ritually (farḍ) nor obligatory legally (wājib), not even recommended (sunnat). The question will come: ‘Huzur, then we don’t get anything concrete for sitting here?’ Well, the return for sitting at the shop is business. The return for doing duty for eight hours in the job is the certain salary at the month’s end. So, those who are sitting here today, even if it is not farḍ nor wājib, it is not even sunnat. But the return of that is not to be compared with the business of any shop of any money investor. The income of that sitting, the reward – it will this time be given by Allah Himself.56

Taken together, the introduction thus far tells us a lot about the genre of waz mahfils and the role of emotions in them. The idea of divine punishment and reward during

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 87 the Day of Judgement seems to align the discourse of waz mahfils with judicial rhetoric. However, unlike there, preachers make no effort to mount a defence by proving, through references to the past, that no bad deed had been committed. Just the opposite, it is taken for granted that those assembled are sinners. To avoid punishment, the community aims at building a relationship to God as the judge and to the intercessor close to Him. This is accomplished by praise, which is performed in the present. Furthermore, the waz mahfils actualize only one of the two corresponding emotions of the judicial and the epideictic genres: judgement is restricted to ‘mildness’ (excluding severity) and praise to joy (excluding hatred). The main persuasive intention explicitly uttered in the introduction is to ‘persuade’ God to forgive and to do so by praising him. As Allah and His Prophet are already mild and receptive to praise, there is, from a rhetorical point of view, a decided lack of ‘dialectic tension’. As the rhetorician Heinrich Plett has worked out in detail, in such a case, the poetic relative competencies outweigh the rhetorical ones. As there are no opposing propositions, the ‘judge (listener, reader) is then no longer called upon to make a decision that mediates between the opposing positions’. In what Plett calls a ‘monologic’ text, the ‘aestheticizing’ features gain in prominence.57 In the special case of ‘persuading the Divine’, the efficacy relies on a successful, and this means also beautiful, poetic form and performance.58 Preacher and audience are equally responsible for a successful performance. As the persuasion and praise of the Divine is a joint goal, there is no reason, or space, for doubt or difference. Everyone belongs to the same side, works together towards a joint goal. In this way, the frame of the waz mahfils guides the listeners to a ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’: within the frame established here, listeners are co-performers who aim at the joint success of the mahfil, bearing their own responsibilities in bringing about this joint success. This encompasses following protocols, correctly timed answers to didactic questions, and knowledge of recitations, as well as following the speaker attentively and in agreement with what he says. The suspension of disbelief is extended to the reception of the narratives as well as of persuasive messages connecting to the here and now that the preacher might include in his sermon. The sermon’s religious framing hence has important repercussions for the rhetorical possibilities. The introduction of the sermon provides a crucial ‘threshold’ between the everyday world and social reality on the one hand and the world of discourse that is to follow on the other.59 The listeners step over it into the idealized space of the mahfil, leaving behind the ‘present’ world, which is often spoken about in negative terms. Nesari, for example, distinguishes the ‘time of chaos’ (phetˡnār jāmānā) – in which ‘a four-year-old child is raped and killed’ and ‘the battery of the youths is fused by dish antenna, by internet on their mobile phones’ – to the unimaginably positive fact that people come to his sermon.60 As in literature, the introduction in sermons forms a threshold that helps to take language out of its pragmatic context. Both literary and religious language overlap in performing particular speech acts. In the religious semantics we deal with here, ‘reading’ (paṛā) is often synonymous with ‘performing’ speech acts and ritual acts.61 However, unlike fictional genres, which might intentionally include contradictions between different paratexts to create a need for the readers to question their truth status and figure out fictional relations on their own,62 the introduction of the sermons does

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not aim to create contradictions. Its stress on ritual continuity reduces the possibility for confusing and irritating relations. In this sense, the introduction is not quite a threshold, but an airlock that helps the listeners ‘pass without too much respiratory difficulty from one world to the other’.63 In the waz mahfils, the frame stands for continuity and relatively ordered and stable communicational codes, which provide the basis for an increasingly innovative and idiosyncratic communication that interweaves different forms and languages in the sermons’ middle part, to which we now turn.

Expanding and naturalizing ritual competency The teaching of Islamic languages, most often Arabic, is one of the most graspable cases of conveying religious knowledge, and hence central to the listeners’ goal of gaining knowledge about Islam. The didactic communication of the preacher as teacher and the audience as learners is interlinked to communicating success among audience members as well as to those outside of the tent. At a waz mahfil held at the inception of a newly founded (but not yet built) madrasa for young boys, for example, Nuri recites the sayings of the Prophet to an audience of enrolled or prospective students. Nuri furthers the learning success of the audience members by repeating set phrases with set speech melodies, which thereby can be memorized more easily. Both the preacher’s role as a teacher and the children’s success in repeating the Arabic words were communicated to the area around the boys’ school, as their voices were included in the transmission by loudspeakers. It is thus also part of the obvious persuasive process of advertising funding for the madrasa. Last but not least, repetition not only furthers learning and fundraising success, but also enriches the sermon with the linguistic indexicality of Arabic as a divine language. What Nuri and, following him, the boys, repeat prominently features ‘the Prophet’ and the Arabic eulogy ‘peace and blessings be upon him’. Key Arabic phrases might have sectarian leanings. Let us look at one example in which Qaderi teaches a Hadith about the importance of the visit to Muhammad’s grave. He clearly positions himself and the audience in relation to Prophetic presence and intervention, basic points of contention between the Deobandī and the Barelwī schools. Qaderi emphasizes that Muhammad can guarantee what, according to Qaderi, no pīr can guarantee, namely ‘that I will take you to paradise if you visit my grave’. After the audience expresses its wonder, Qaderi cites the Hadith in Arabic: ‘I [Muhammad] gave the guarantee that whoever visits my grave (man zāra qabrī)’ – [to the audience] say loudly, ‘man zāra qabrī’, each of you who recite along with me, [preacher and audience together] ‘man zāra qabrī’ – will get an answer. May Allah, by the medium of this hadith, grant us success to see the Prophet in our dream. All of you say: amīn!64

At this point, Qaderi again recites, bit by bit, the Hadith in Arabic, each time leaving time for the audience to repeat what he just said. The audience thereby subscribes to a school opinion by learning the authoritative proof at the same time as it acquires performative and phonetic competence in Arabic.

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 89 The sectarian leaning becomes even more evident when Qaderi translates the short Arabic quote in a way that turns it into a dramatized narrative. In this narrative, the supplicant addresses the Prophet while standing (qiyām) and by direct address (‘oh Messenger of God’). The narrative also relates that the Prophet is present in his grave and can answer the believer. The Prophet himself describes the ideal way of addressing him. Intercession will certainly be provided for anyone who ‘comes to my grave to visit (ziyārat)’ and ‘stands before me, the Prophet’, ‘closes his eyes, sheds tears and says: “Oh Allah’s Messenger, oh Allah’s Beloved! I haven’t seen you in my entire life, oh Allah’s Rasul! Now I came to your court (darbār) and greeted you (sālām dilām). Lord, please pray for me (ektu doẏā karen).”’65 Switching back to the preacher’s voice, Qaderi closes with the Prophet’s proclamation that he is obligated to answer the prayer of the believer, namely the Arabic sentence that the audience had started to learn: ‘If any woman, any man cries like this at the Prophet’s court, then the Prophet says: “wajabat lahu shafāʿatī – it has become obligatory (wājib) for me the Prophet to speak in favour of you (supāriś) on the field of Hashr.”’66 Preachers stimulate participation by including Arabic citations that are well-known from ritual practice. As the listeners know these phrases, they provide points for vocal audience response: the audience here actively partakes in shaping the sermon’s linguistic indexicalities to Islamic ritual. When uttering ritual phrases, the men cite their role of performing Islamic rituals. Preachers in this case do not need to address the audience as explicitly as in the case of overt teaching, but can rely on the audience’s competence and readiness to proudly co-perform. Take, for example, the profession of faith. It is not only well known to everyone, but everybody is used to performing it in daily ritual. It indexes belonging to the community and affirms the Islamic credentials and congregation’s direction towards the Divine. As soon as it is uttered by the preacher, the audience immediately recites it along with him, knowing rhythm and melody. Preachers often turn to the audience and ask them to ‘recite the kalema loudly’ or ‘with full voice’. This performative dimension is linked to the performative power of zikr, and Nesari advises the audience: ‘To bring belief (imān), you have to recite [audience joins in] “lā ilāha illa ‘llāh wa muḥammadu ‘r-rasūlu ‘llāh”.’67 The high degree of participation and role switches of the audience reciting Arabic formulas open up narrative possibilities. When the profession of faith is cited, it is often built into the narratives and ascribed to characters of the ‘stories’ that the preacher tells. This technique is already found in a Bengali waz manual from the 1920s, where the profession of faith is cited in the prayer of an intranarrative figure to which God responds in a ‘message from heaven’ (ākās bānī).68 Let us turn to a narrative of Siddique, who in his sermon highlights the power of the Quran by describing how it attracts even Muhammad’s strongest enemies. He exemplifies this attraction with the story of the conversion of Abu Jahl’s son ʿIkrima. One day, ʿIkrima sneaks away to Muhammad’s house and is immediately convinced by the beauty of Muhammad’s smile and Quranic recitation: After ʿIkrima sees [sic] the sweet words of Allah’s Prophet, after he sees the sweet smile of Allah’s Prophet, he slowly approaches the Messenger and says: ‘Dear Prophet, oh Prophet, please be so kind (Ur./Beng. meherbāni kare) as to (help) me

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The citation simultaneously operates on two levels: on that of the narrative and that of the communicative situation inside the waz mahfil. Thereby, a doubling of roles is achieved. The preacher – as Muhammad – advises the convert in the story, and the preacher – as preacher – advises the audience to recite the profession of faith. Reciting along, the audience at the same time recites the profession of faith as audience in the here and now and as the character of the story with whom it identifies. This double identification works well due to the audience’s spontaneous recitation of the profession of faith, and due to the ambiguous directionality of the imperative ‘recite’, which is as much an invitation of the Prophet to ʿIkrima as it is one of the preacher to the audience. The active recitation, at once accompanying the words of the preacher and those of Muhammad, is simultaneously a bodily action on the part of the audience and is linked to descriptions within the narrative. In the latter, the recitation’s effect is described as sensorially desirable. ʿIkrima, upon his conversion, becomes immediately fragrant. Fragrance (ʿaṭr) is cherished in Bangladeshi Islamic culture and is a common part of the attire of participants of waz mahfils. The double role plays on metaphorically transporting some of the inner narrative qualities to the listeners in the tent, at least not an uncomfortable image. The importance of the overlap of narrative layers and vocal audience response is evident from a much less enthusiastic audience response in another part of Siddique’s narration, where the profession of faith is not embedded in the narrative context as densely.70 The firm knowledge of the profession of faith can also be used as a springboard for other Arabic expressions that might be inserted into narratives. In relation to performance, this makes it possible for preachers to build on the competence to the audience’s readiness to participate and at the same time introduce variation and newness. Sayeedi, for example, cites the prayer of Jonah, who realizes his sin, picking out a Quranic verse whose beginning is identical with the first half of the profession of faith: ‘Sitting in the fish’s stomach, Hazrat Jonah cries out. What did he recite? Recite along with me, all together: (Q21:87, Ar.) “There is no god but Thou. Glory be to Thee! I was one of the evil ones (mina ‘ẓ-ẓālimīn).”’ In his following Bengali translation, Sayeedi renders the Arabic ẓālimīn into part of the stilted expression: ‘I committed a sin (ẓulm) upon myself.’71 He here transfers the root of the Arabic word to Bengali, thereby influencing its lexis. Setting an Arabic quotation as a prayer to God employs and strengthens the indexicality of Arabic as the language with which to communicate with the Divine and from which to expect salvation. Sayeedi narratively proves this point by narrating how Jonah is forgiven. The ritual Arabic phrase provides a stable truth that transcends different times and narrative layers. By directing the audience to recite along, Sayeedi furthermore establishes himself as the primus inter pares of the reciting community, which under his guidance performatively merges separate layers of time.72 Another well-known Arabic phrase that preachers frequently build into their sermons is the call to prayer. Like the profession of faith, it refers to a basic consensus, here the importance of prayer, and is highly performative. The call to prayer publicly

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 91 summons the community to assemble for prayer, which resonates throughout the everyday life of Bangladesh. As a performative citation of the preacher imitating the muezzin’s call, the call to prayer in the sermons creates a conflation of the sonic experience of the sermon, of its narrative and of a sound listeners are familiar with from their everyday life. The emphatic reproduction of the azan’s recitation clearly stresses continuities between the narrative and the everyday world. When following along, learning and applying the Arabic phrase, the listeners actively merge the two. Uniting realms of experience is supported by the preachers’ narratives. Here, the call to prayer can be used in such a way as to thematize its function of overlaying and navigating between different levels of narration. In the following quote from Sayeedi, the story’s hero, Ali, is awakened by the call to prayer. Romantically, his dream remains – in the taste of a date that he had imagined in his dream: [Hazrat Ali] dreamt that he prayed the morning prayer behind Muhammad (s.a.w.) in the mosque of the Prophet. After the prayer was finished, Hazrat Ali (ra.) saw that an old man entered the door with a bowl in his hand. He came to the Prophet and said: ‘Oh Messenger of God! This box is full of dates from my garden. Please eat them, and distribute them among the honoured companions.’ The Messenger asked the gentleman with the box: ‘What’s your name?’ ‘My name is Abu Sayed Khodri (Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī).’ ‘Take six.’ … At last, it was Ali’s turn. Huzur said: ‘Who are you?’ ‘Huzur, I am Ali!’ ‘Take one.’ Hazrat Ali took one date from the Prophet, took it in his mouth and started chewing it. Hazrat Ali, in the dream, chewed the date’s stone in his mouth. At that time, they came to hear the sound of the call to prayer, of the morning’s Azan. Aṣ-ṣalātu khayrun mina ’n-naum. Hazrat Ali’s sleep was interrupted. He indeed woke up, but in his mouth the taste of the date the Prophet had given him was still conspicuously present.73

Within the narrative, hearing the call to prayer separates dream and reality. In relation to the audience, however, the citation of the call to prayer serves to bind together outer and inner levels of narration. The experience of being awakened by the call to prayer is well known to the listeners, and might be part of everyday narratives preachers relate. Contrary to the intranarrative experience of Ali, it does not disrupt dream and reality, but rather ‘directly’ refers to an element that is shared between the narrative and the listeners’ lived experience. It thereby furthers a perception of individuals’ lifeworld being built around a stable religious tradition that is represented in the performance of the Arabic call to prayer. It does not matter that this perception is not historically correct, as the call for prayer has greatly developed over time and most likely has only accomplished transcultural consistency since the advent of CDs and their reproduction and circulation. As in case of the inclusion of ‘traditional’ song genres in Indian cinema, what matters is the performative and imaginative connections that are formed.74 The inclusion of the call to prayer persuasively suggests an unchanging ritual and heightens the perception of ritual as something real and natural. Literary theorist Roland Barthes has pointed to the importance of narrative elements that do not further the narration, but are ‘just there’. He has ascribed to these features an ‘effect of reality’.75 I argue that the ritual citations create a similar ‘referential illusion’. However, they are

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elements not from ‘natural’ but from ‘ritual’ reality. If realism, according to Barthes, relies on the directness in which the signifier seems to refer to the referent (in this case, to reality), we would have to speak of a style of ‘ritualism’, as ritual citation refers to itself in an unmediated manner. As realism champions, changes and naturalizes reality, the narratives in sermons champion and at the same time change the role of ritual and organize perception around it.

Religious nationalism and the politics of religious language The reference to particular linguistic codes is also highlighted and discussed explicitly in Sayeedi’s advice to include Arabic to mark Islam in everyday habits. He makes a special explanatory effort to establish the sermons as a medium of language politics. He inscribes his discourse into the linguistic possibilities of the sermons to change the sermons and change social language usage through them. While every linguistic performance strengthens certain indexicalities and weakens others, Sayeedi’s comments are an example of nationalism’s link to linguistic politics as ‘the circulation of linguistic forms through popular media itself articulates social boundaries and enables the configuration of linguistic identities’.76 An early example of Sayeedi explicitly using sermons as a venue for the politics of naming is his 1987 reference to Chittagong as Islamabad, which historically was a name for the city under Mughal rule. ‘The (real) name of Chittagong is Islamabad. What is its name? Say it loudly! May Allah accept it as Islamabad, say loudly: amīn!’77 Alongside rechristening his regional stronghold, Sayeedi in the same breath highlights its role in the creation of Bangladesh: ‘On the earth of this Islamabad, the very first flag of independence in Bangladesh was hoisted.’ On this conflation of past temporal layers, Sayeedi lays bare his future vision: ‘The flag of Islam will be hoisted where the flag of independence was first hoisted! Say loudly: in shaʾa ‘llāh!’ Sayeedi frequently links everyday language to political identity. A well-known example is that of replacing the commonly used farewell formula Khodā hāphej (from Pers. Khudā ḥāfiẓ) with Āllāh hāphej (Allāh ḥāfiẓ). Substituting the ‘Persian’ word for God, Khodā, with the ‘Arabic’ Allāh only creates a difference against the background of exchanging linguistic indexicality: Arabic stands for a supposedly more authentic Islam than its equivalent in any other language. There has, in all of South Asia, been a multitude of motivations and actors arguing for this replacement, be it as a marker of piety or of social or religious difference using Arabic to show that one knows better or arguing that Allah would be the specifically Islamic God. In Bangladesh, an insightful article noted how the state introduced the new farewell formula in TV spots and road signs in the early 2000s under the BNP–BJI coalition and that the decision was partly linked to party politics.78 Nevertheless, rather than perceiving the change of indexicality as a unified political strategy, we should think of it as a complex dynamic that the BJI, among others, tries to co-opt. By spearheading and usurping an ongoing change in everyday language, they can inscribe specific political messages into everyday language and combine ‘high politics’ with religious beliefs, and connect everyday social behaviour to party ideology.

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 93 In a sermon he held in 2006, Sayeedi explicitly argues for abandoning Khodā Hāphej by saying that Khodā is not among the ninety-nine names of Allah. He also advises his audience to use ji, the ‘Muslim’ ‘yes’ as opposed to the standard ‘West Bengali’ variant hẏā, and the Arabic phrase ‘in the trust of Allah’ instead of ṭā ṭā, an informal way of saying farewell that is particularly common among children, often combined with the English ‘bye-bye’. Teach your kids the same. When the children go to school, the mother bids them farewell. She says to the child, ‘ṭā ṭā’ (bye-bye), the child says, ‘Bye-bye, yāi yāi (I go), I might not come back.’ Say: ‘No, I seek refuge with Allah (nā aʿūdhu bi-llāh)! Our identity is Muslim, what is our identity? Muslim. We don’t a hundred percent agree with those who deem us Bengali. They want to erase, with a rubber, the border of 1947. The thing is that we speak Bengali and the people of our neighbouring country speak Bengali. So our identity, our nationality as a nation [English] is that we are Bangladeshi. What are we? Bangladeshi. The first and foremost identity is that I am a Muslim. What is the first identity? Muslim. The second identity, in respect to the country, is that I am a Bangladeshi. You have to educate your children well. Is it OK when the boy, the small child is going to school and says: ‘Bye-bye, ṭāi ṭāi’ [echo construction]? You should say when the child goes to school, putting your hand on his head, ‘fī amāni ‘llāh’ (I leave you into the hands of Allah). Don’t you want to say ‘praise to Allah’? The mother puts her hand on her child’s head and says: ‘Allah, I put my heart’s piece, my heart’s piece into your hand! Please return it into my hands again.’ Praise to Allah! What nonsense is this ‘ṭāi ṭāi, bye-bye’. Don’t say it ever. Promise?! Teach ji to your son, to your wife, to your daughter, to everyone. Not Khodā hāphej but Āllāh hāphej. Will you remember all of that? What’s the harm saying Khodā hāphej? That among the ninety-nine names of Allah, there is nothing called Khodā. Is it there? Believe me, if you say Khodā a million times, it won’t be equal to saying Allah once. Never, never. That’s why one will see off the other by saying Āllāh hāphej, fī amāni ‘llāh. Praise be to God! Isn’t it beautiful? You have to remember these words.79

In respect to linguistic indexicalities, Sayeedi here creates a juxtaposition between Arabic farewell formulas on the one hand and Bengali and English farewell formulas on the other. Building on the naturalized association of Arabic with Islam and speaking as a preacher with a seemingly universal message, Sayeedi activates an opposition between Islam and the West and linguistically connects the ‘Bengali’ farewell to negative stereotypes of the ‘West’. Merging ṭā ṭā and ‘bye-bye’, followed by the slightly ridiculing rhymes yāi yāi and ṭāi ṭāi, Sayeedi playfully connotes laxity and maybe even alludes to the usage of the phrases in popular songs that move between movies and ‘folk’ performances. In another similar instance, Sayeedi promotes saying al-ḥamdulillāh when asked ‘how are you?’ and, as in the case of ‘bye-bye’, mocks the everyday answers usually given. In all these cases, as the quotation shows, linguistic indexicality is a direct reference to identities framed by nationalism. It serves to substitute common Bengali terms with Islamic ones as markers of a specifically Bangladeshi national identity connected to global Islam but distanced from West Bengal (and by implication from the Hindus in Bangladesh).

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Sayeedi furthermore marks and indexes Arabic through pronunciation. To contrast the true and pure version of a term from the current usage, he often emphasizes fine performative differences – another typical feature of international Islamist rhetoric that Sayeedi uses to redefine old terms or coin new ones that fit his utopian ideology.80 For example, he argues for the formalization of the Islamic education sector and rejects criticism about the fatwas (religio-legal opinions) in contemporary Bangladesh by distinguishing between the ‘pure’ Arabic fatwā and the Bengali phatoẏā, which is pronounced slightly differently. At the same time, Sayeedi accuses critics (the ‘NGOs’) of using the term in a polemical manner by adding the suffix -bāj, which denotes ‘full of ’, ‘skilled in’ and so on. Those are the rules of Islam. What the village leaders say, what the chairman [of the Union Parishad] says, that’s not a fatwa. That’s not what a fatwa is. Today, the papers and press and NGOs just say: phatoẏābāj, phatoẏābāj. The word phatoẏābāj is a malicious word. Just like ‘troublemakers’ (hāmˡlābāj), ‘lawsuit-filers’ (māmˡlābāj), ‘devoid of morals’ (durnītibāj), a word like this. No such bāj is to be tagged to fatwa! Those who say phatoẏābāj are certainly manipulating (matˡlabˡbāj)!81

The self-inflicted victimization and contestation over terms of alleged enemies, like the discussion of phatoẏābāj, can be found elsewhere, too. Another example of this is Sayeedi dismissing fundamentalism as an insult, a dismissal that spares him from dealing with opponents’ arguments: ‘Who is insulting Islam by calling it fundamentalism (maulˡbād)?’ This strategy is not a new one. In the sermon from 1987, Sayeedi discusses the alleged accusation of students who joined the ‘communists’: ‘What do they call the Muslims? Blindly religious (dharmāndha).’ In reverse, Sayeedi states: ‘And they are progressive (pragatibādī, pragatiśīl). They become progressive. The more they insult Islam, the more they write poems insulting the Prophet, the more they become progressive (pragatiśīl, pragatibādī).’82 The same argument circulated on YouTube in a sermon allegedly held by Olipuri at a gathering of the HI. While I cannot confirm anything about the authorship and context of the sermon, it is noteworthy that the preacher in this instance puts the ‘insult’ of calling others ‘blindly religious’ into the mouth of a professor of Bengali literature who was a professed atheist, thereby continuing the juxtaposition against the atheists (nāstik) against whom the sermon thunders.83 Sayeedi also uses the potential for reinterpretation by referring to an etymologically ‘preceding’ and allegedly more authentic Arabic term to position himself vis-à-vis other Islamic and secular groups. He takes up orientalist discourse in which Sufism is formed as an entity and etymologically derived from the Arabic taṣawwuf, a term unusual in the context of Bengal. With this reference, he distances himself from shrines and pīrs in Bengal while at the same time maintaining that taṣawwuf (Ar. for Sufism) is ‘a great issue. A holy (mahān) issue. This issue has fallen prey to business. Since the conception of the unity of God is unclear, polytheism and unlawful innovation have increased.’84 As these corrections are based on knowledge of etymology and Arabic, Sayeedi is able to prove his own superiority and the superiority of others who are aware of

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 95 this differentiation, and he links this status to theological and political positions. He heightens the markedness of terms as Arabic and works to make them refer to ideological formations. His goal is reached once all ‘Islamic’ language is identified with the BJI’s ideological interpretation. This strategic coinage and usurpation of Islamic terms aims to push out other actors pursuing similar strategies. The military ruler Ershad, for example, declared ‘jihad’ against corruption. This reference to Islamic indexicality in the political field immediately enraged Sayeedi, as it threatened his monopoly over such indexing.85 Sayeedi’s christening of his sermon gatherings as Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphils is also important. He held his first such mass gathering in 1979, the year of the Islamic revolution in Iran and two years after the constitution of Bangladesh had been captioned with the basmala by Ziaur Rahman. In the year’s election, Ziaur Rahman’s party, the BNP, was elected, and the BJI, which had been banned after the independence of Bangladesh, was allowed to participate in the election under the name Islamic Democratic League. It was hence a historical situation in which there was space to put Islamic politics in Bangladesh on new tracks, and the invention of a new kind of preaching seemed possible. By including ‘Quran’ in the name of his sermon gatherings, Sayeedi referred to the most agreed-upon term in a contested field. Much of the authority of the preacher rests in taking part in the undisputed authority of the Quran, which he is capable of (re) citing. The Quran is seen as a guarantee for Islamicity, erudition, correctness, divinity and so on. As argumentation means successfully connecting to jointly accepted axioms, establishing a connection with the Quran is of prime argumentative importance. The citation and interpretation of the Quran is the most obvious and allegedly most foundational part of any sermon. Nesari states in his sermon: ‘Which topic is talked about, friends? It’s a class of the Quran!’86 The more the sermons incorporate the Quran, the more they are valued by commentators.87 To ‘let the light of the Quran shine’ is a common street slogan. In his sermon, Sayeedi even places the Quran on his table and lifts it up in a gesture reminiscent of evangelical preachers. Also with regard to the sermons, Sayeedi interprets and shapes the name in a particular way, fitting political purposes. In a book section justifying his terminological innovation, Sayeedi classifies waz mahfils as mere ‘religious services’ (dvīni khedˡmāt) by means of which it is, in his opinion, impossible to change state and society.88 He juxtaposes them to his korān māhˡphils, which work towards ‘establishing (kāẏem karā) Allah’s rule in state and society’.89 In his sermons, Sayeedi often stresses his efforts to change society for the good by spreading the Quranic message. In a mahfil held in 2009 in Sylhet, for example, he polemicizes against the government that believes in working for a corruption-free society with ‘songs played in buses’ while, at the same time, banning his mahfils.90 But what does this name change mean for the structure of the sermons? While it is descriptively correct – and an important point to take into consideration for Islamic studies – sermons are part of the exegetical tradition of tafsīr; we still need to question many claims implicit in the new name. This is particularly important because other actors, particularly those with a komi madrasa background, have also begun calling their sermons Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphil. The politics of naming hence seem to have

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relation to claims to orthodoxy and the positioning of religious groups. Scrutinizing the structure of several Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphils, I could not confirm claims of a closer allegiance to the Quran in the sense that the sermon followed the order of the āyāt. Preachers might include a programmatic Quranic recitation at the beginning of the sermon, and even refer back to it in order colour the sermon as scholarly. They also might pick up exegetical positions of their school of thought. However, the structure of Taphˡsirul Korān Māhˡphils I analysed was dominated by lengthy diversions that were not prompted by the Quran, but by the preacher’s persuasive stances. In a sermon by Olipuri, for example, long digressions shape a dualistic, legalistic framework with the preacher playing the role of a jurist who knows the rational and transparent answer.91 Sayeedi in one case follows Maududi’s exegetical model, but also deviates from him, in turn himself becoming a model for female exegetes in Quran reading circles. In all these cases, the Quran does not provide unified structural guidance in the sense that the sermon is subordinated to the Quranic verses or their order. The occurrences of Quranic quotations can be influenced to a large degree by the particular outlook of the preacher, by his polemics against enemies, by interpretations of narratives, exegetical work or political agendas.92

Translation, argumentation and connoisseurship Rather than perceiving a unidirectional influence from the Quran on the sermons, we can follow the important roles of translation processes in religious interpretation and communication. One would imagine that such translation practices have been dealt with extensively, as the majority of the world’s Muslims rely on processes of translation in their perception of the divine word. Surprisingly, it seems that the importance of such translation processes for the interpretation of the Quran has not been considered by Western scholarly work on Quranic exegesis.93 In the waz mahfils, translations are, while ubiquitous, for the most part rendered opaque by a model of direct interpretation and communication of the Quran. A supposed directness of communication underlies the view of the exegetical practice in waz mahfils by both the ‘fundamentalists’ and the ‘secularists’. Let me illustrate, and at the same time deconstruct, this model of direct communication. I do so by referring to a quote from a sermon in which Sayeedi discusses the ‘mission’ of Muhammad that listeners are to follow. In the quote, I have marked, very approximately, the perceptions of the respective linguistic code. I have rendered the Quranic recitation and Arabic expression in bold, and have underlined parts of the Urduized idiom. Referring to Muhammad’s illiteracy, Sayeedi describes the following situation: When the holy Quran was sent down (nāzil hata), the Highness (ḥuẓūr) s.a.w. made a lot of effort and hurried to learn it by heart. He again and again struggled to move his tongue, so that no āya would be lost. Allah, the Master of Mankind, upon seeing this burden (taklīf) of His Highness, declared: (Q75:16) ‘Stir not thy tongue herewith to hasten it.’ Oh Prophet (nabī), to learn the Quran by heart you don’t have to hurry (tāṛāhurā karar) so much. You don’t have to move (narācarā)

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 97 your tongue so much. When Jibrail sends (abatīrṇa karen) the Quran to you, then you just have to read together with my Jibrail once. The Master (malik) who makes you know by heart the whole Quran in your heart (sīna), that’s me, Allah. I will make you know it by heart! Not only will I let you know it by heart, I will also enable you to read. You will be able to recite (tilāwat karte), by reciting you will be able to communicate it to (bujhāte) the people – also that power I, Allah, will bestow upon you (dān kare debo).94

This passage has a typical syntax. The Bengali translation of the Quranic citation keeps the structure of the dramatic dialogue between God and His Messenger while at the same time naming the protagonists. It considerably lengthens the quotation to include parts that were not contained in the original quote. As typical for such translations, it relies on enumerations and sentences such as ‘not only x but also y’, particularly when it comes to Allah’s power and the boons he bestows on believers. In relation to transmitting the Quran, the quote includes performative and auditive aspects. As is stressed by tilāwat karā, knowing the Quran by heart is equivocal to knowing its recitation. Furthermore, the process sketched in the quotation also implies that being able to recite the Quran means that one is able to persuade others of its message, a message that is considered to be grasped and accessed directly. From this point of view, both the process of interpretation (finding the message of the Quranic text) and that of rhetoric (communicating the Quranic message to others and persuading them to follow the message) are glossed over, and with them the role of the preacher as exegete (mufassir), as orator (baktā) – and as translator between different languages. Even if a consensus existed about exegetical method and the interpretation of the Quran, another consensus about how this foundational axiom would be built into the argumentation and communication of the sermon would have to be achieved. How do both aspects, the exegetical act and the act of communicating what is exegeted, relate to each other?95 Part of the answer lies in the relation of the translation of the Quran to the multilingual idiom and dynamics of code switching in waz mahfils. The inclusion of different linguistic codes in the main part of the waz mahfils can be roughly described by the rules ‘the more the merrier’, ‘the quicker the better’ and ‘the closer the better’. The first rule seems to be loosely related to the transfer and accumulation of blessing (baraka), which can be contained in objects but also speech, most notably the Quran. Fitting to the conception of the mahfil as a space full of baraka (barakatpūrṇa) in which Allah’s mercy is showered upon the participants, the accumulation of Arabic phrases performatively indexes this religious benefit. Many Arabic catchwords are easily recognizable even in distracted listening. Qaderi, for example, says mobārak each time he mentions anything related to the Prophet’s body, and even Aisha’s uṛna mobārok, with which she catches Muhammad to feed him more dates.96 Repeatedly referencing a certain set of Arabic words equals other rhetorical characteristics of devotional preaching, such as: huge numbers and gestures that form traditional parts of popular Islamic preaching’s expression of unfathomable mercy;97 the typical additive phrase ‘not only x but also y’; and the uttering of the name of God as in zikr.

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Second, one outstanding feature of the code switching in waz mahfils is that often words in different languages are simply enumerated. God may be invoked as Khodā, Allāh, Bidhātā, Malik, Razzāq, Āindātā.98 Third, in the sociolect of the madrasas, Bengali and Urdu are close enough to one another to only be marked by differences in pronunciation. Bengali sometimes only maintains the grammatical frame, while the semantics of the sentence are dominated by ‘Bengali-Urdu’. Examples are ‘Among you the faith is not strong enough’ (imānī kamzorī (Ur.) āche tomāder mājhe (Beng.)); ‘to yourself achieve some goal’ (nijer kano maqsat-ke ḥāṣil karār janya);99 or ‘in the era of chaos’ (phetˡnār jāmānāẏ).100 Typical single words of the idiom can also range between languages, such as ‘lesson’ (chabak/sabaq), ‘meeting’ (malākāt/mulāqāt) or ‘accordingly’ (matābek/muṭābiq). Idiosyncratic composites combining different linguistic codes are common. Examples are ‘five times’ (pā̃cwaqt), typically combined with ‘prayer’ (namāz), or ‘wrong’ as a composite of the Persian negation prefix be- and Bengali ṭhik (correct). The same prefix is also part of the expression bepardāgiri karā (being obscenely without veil), which is combined with the Persian parda pronounced as Bengali pardā, and the Bengali suffix -giri, which, if combined with karā, denotes acting ostentatiously.101 I argue that quotations from the Quran become part of the code switching in the sermons. I explain below the dynamics between translation of the Quran and code switching in the idiom of waz mahfils with three exemplary quotations from different preachers at three different gatherings. In all cases, the quotations show how a Quranic quotation is closely followed by further instances of multilingual code switching. In a sermon held in a tent built on the street close to one of Dhaka’s indoor markets, whose shopkeepers had organized the gathering, the preacher Khalilur Rahman elaborates a Quranic phrase that listeners know well and is a standard part of Islamic sermons: Q7:23a ‘Oh our Lord! We have wronged ourselves.’ In his translation, Khalilur Rahman does not simply repeat the ritual formula, but extends it: Riches and goods (dhan-sampad), sense and perception (jñāna-buddhi), honour and prestige (mān-ʿizzat): you raised us with everything that is necessary, oh you guarding (pālnewālā) God (Khodā)! … (Q7:23b) We have wronged ourselves (ẓalamnā anfusanā). Oh God (Khodā pronounced with an emphatic d), we live on your earth, from your light and wind. With the hands you gave us we have been disobedient to (nāfarmānī) you; with the eyes you gave us we have been disobedient to you, with the power of the sense and perception (jñāna-buddhi), honour and prestige that you gave us we have been disobedient to you – therefore we became great sinners, delinquents, transgressors (Beng. baṛa Ur./Beng. gunāhgār, Beng. pāpī, Ar. ẓālim).102

The elaboration of Allah’s favour as well as the supplicant’s wrongs – and thus the extended translation of the āya – is structured along three pairs of synonyms: ‘Riches and goods (dhan-sampad), intelligence and knowledge (jñāna-buddhi), prestige and honour (mān-(Ur.)ʿizzat).’ One of the rhetorical effects of synonyms is, as in every kind of repetition, emphasis. Here, it is more elegant because it is not the same word that is repeated, but one closely

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 99 related to it. We can learn about further effects of synonyms by drawing on Arabic rhetoric. Here, synonym pairs similar to the ones employed by Khalilur have been described under the term muzāwadja. The subcategory called itbāʿ explicitly deals with synonyms that are, as the ones in the above example and typical in Bengali sermons, asyndetical, ‘performed by simple juxtaposition, without a conjunctive particle’.103 For the context here, it is important that the itbāʿ is linked to playful pleasure and oral expressivity. Like repetition, its effects are described as creating emphasis and intensity: jāmiʿ-māniʿ (of unassailable thoroughness), shayṭān-layṭān (a veritable demon). The synonym pairs are also linked to echo words and word pairings. These are mechanisms of asyndetical adjacency of words typical for and ubiquitous in South Asian languages. Among the dimensions of echo words and other ‘pairings and doublings’, scholarship has often focused on the semantic distance of the combined words. Consequentially, categorizations differentiate between ‘synonyms and nearsynonyms’ on the one end of the continuum, and ‘accumulative meaning’ created by ‘two meaningful lexical items’ on the other.104 Preachers make use of semantically close combinations at weighty parts of the sermon. Some forms include ‘revolt-opposition’ (bidroha biruddhita)105 or ‘low and despicable’ (jaghanya nikr̥ ṣṭa).106 The extreme other end of the continuum, with pairs of very distinct meanings, is the case that Ruth Thompson somewhat cryptically describes as: ‘Opposite terms combine to give a comprehensive meaning.’107 For us, it is important that whether the semantic distance between the combined words is great or little, in each case a degree of indeterminacy is inserted and a possibility for tropes arises. Preachers can play with the ways in which the terms are similar or distinct from each other. The synonyms concerned here not only emphasize but also add a dimension of play and fuzziness. I argue that it is important to take into account what scholarship has described as ‘de-centring’ a notion108 or, in Rabindranath Tagore’s expression, ‘signifying “etc.” and “indeterminacy” (anirdiṣta-prabhr̥ ti-bācak)’.109 This de-centring and indeterminacy, commonly used particularly in echo words of spoken Bengali, has its own rhetorical effects (de-centring a name is insulting). When two terms are combined, as is the case here, it can furthermore be employed to re-centre a notion. This re-centring relies on the fact that synonyms are never identical. If one word is paired with a synonym, a subtle difference is introduced that serves as the basis for shifting meanings. We therefore inquire into the semantic shifts enabled by synonymizing the not-sosimilar synonyms. This process, which we might call synonymization, always implies a positing of identity, a powerful semantic device that gives preachers considerable room to knit new semantic nets, or at least to expand the semantic field of a word, for example, by switching between intensional and extensional meaning. This means that it opens up a plethora of rhetorical possibilities: unlike with echo words, the synonym pairs do not just de-centre the notion, but also re-centre it, as the second part of the pair indicates the way in which it is de-centred. This can be done in a rhetorical or directed way. I argue that such possibilities for semantic shifts increase when the synonyms stem from different languages. From the point of view of multilingual code switching

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considered here, it seems important to notice that while linguistic surveys of South Asian languages have described these phenomena, they have not considered multilingual relations. In the case that synonyms stem from different languages, the synonymization of words involves (and conceals) a translation. The synonymization of gunāhgār, papī, ẓālim for ‘sinner’ at the end of the above quotation shows the wide range of combined terms. For example, ẓālim (literally ‘oppressor’) is probably surprisingly included among those asking for mercy. Its inclusion, however, takes up the Arabic ẓalamnā in the Quranic phrase it translates in another morpheme, and thereby directly links to the Quranic quotation. This brings us back to the dimension of indexicality. With multilingual relations being marked and indexed in the specific ways described above, we must complement the inquiry about the semantic shifts of synonymization with the inquiry into multilingual relations, which sometimes supplement or run across semantic distinctions. Thompson, for example, mentions iśārā-iṅgit under the rubric of synonyms, as both words denote gesture, and ākār-iṅgit under that of accumulatives, as ākār, shape/form, is more different from the meaning of iṅgit. However, Thompson does not touch upon one dimension of the linguistic form that I think is crucial for the linguistic formation of the waz mahfils, namely, the indexicality to (supposed) etymologies and belongings of language. From this point of view, the two parts in iśārā-iṅgit are further apart than those in ākār-iṅgit in that they combine synonyms of Arabic and Sanskrit origin. The waz mahfils thereby also create relations among not only levels of semantics. Spheres of discourse are also linked to the indexicalities of the linguistic codes employed. Among the three pairs of synonyms Khalilur employs in the above quotation, mān-ʿizzat not only involves a re-centring of the notion of mān along the semantics of ʿizzat (and vice versa), but also achieves a merging of two linguistic codes and their indexicalities. Furthermore, the accumulation of words for sinner not only emphasizes the meaning by including the different semantics of gunāhgār, pāpī, ẓālim, but also achieves an accumulation of the different linguistic spheres (Bengali, Persian, Arabic and Urdu) and a synonymization of these languages’ different indexicalities. Let us have a look at another case, this time in a village in Bangladesh’s southeast. At this mahfil, Nesari recites and translates an āya (Q51:56). As I had just met him minutes before the performance, his flexible way of including me in his sermon stressed the importance of the ‘composition in performance’ typical of oral poetry.110 Note how he expands the translation with continuous commentary: (Q51:56) ‘I created the jinn (al-jinn) and humankind (wa ‘l-insān) only that they might worship Me (liyaʿbudūn).’ Say: Allāhu akbar! Allah the master of mankind said: ‘I have (created) the jinn’ – the jinn community (jāti), that’s not us, the jinn community stays above and is created from fire, isn’t it? – ‘and humankind’ (wa ‘l-insān), that means humans (manuṣ). You, me, my German friend, and all the Bangladeshis that are in this world, all are humans. Humans: Insān means human. Say: isn’t that so? Allah has said to all of them: ‘I created (you) only, without exception, for worship (ʿibādat), to serve (bandegī), for servitude (dāsatva), for servility (ghulāmī)’ – say ‘Praise be to God!’ (subḥāna ‘llāh).111

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 101 While Nesari does not translate but explains jinn, he translates and explains insān to mark its all-encompassing nature. After establishing the universal nature of his address, the remainder of what he emphasizes as direct speech of Allah is a translation of liyaʿbudūn. Nesari here uses the synonym-chain ʿibādat, bandagī, dāsatva, ghulāmī. These synonyms stress Allah’s command by repetition; are aligned to the Quranic text by taking up the root from the quotation before in ʿibādat; widen the semantics by adding those of the other words; and, finally, re-centre the notion of ‘worship’ in the direction of ‘submission/servitude’. This influence, of course, is not a one-way process but has repercussions on each of the synonyms. Dāsatva, like the term pāpī, is a Sanskrit term of Vaiṣṇava theology,112 and is by its surroundings aligned with Allah’s order. An important effect of such rows of synonyms is the way they reorient the audience’s attention. Semiotics, following Ferdinand Saussure’s linguistic analysis, distinguishes between syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures. Even though it might sound technical, I think it is relevant that the chains of synonyms shift attention away from the syntagmatic and towards the paradigmatic. By spelling out multilingual ‘synonyms’ one after the other, the paradigmatic (the possible substitution of one word by an equivalent) is spread into the syntagmatic dimension. In this way, the paradigmatic operation stands in competition with other syntagmatic procedures, most importantly with argumentation. The paradigmatic relation between synonyms also becomes evident where multilingual synonyms are not adjacent to each other, as they are in the pairings or longer chains discussed thus far, but are instead scattered over several sentences. In these cases, the synonyms might take the same syntactical position in stock sentences, thereby creating equivalences in a paradigmatic dimension. One very common case is the synonymization between abatīrṇa and nāzil for ‘sending down’ the Quran. Both synonyms might follow one another, or two identical sentences might be repeated one after the other, only substituting nāzil with abatīrṇa, or vice versa. As in the other cases of synonymization, this choice influences the semantics of both terms, which have a long history of interaction. Let us consider some of the rhetorical effects of this structure by turning to a third example, which is taken from a recording of Sayeedi’s yearly gathering. As Nesari in the last example, Sayeedi here translates a word of the Arabic root ʿ-b-d as denoting servitude: (Q7:194a) ‘Lo! Those on whom ye call (tadʿūna) beside Allah are slaves (ʿibādun) like you.’ The Quran taught the believer and servant: Those besides Allah to whom you take refuge (āśraẏ grahaṇ karo), whom you invoke (ḍāko), whose help you want (sāhāyya cāo), they are like you, my servants (Ur. banda) and my slaves (Ur. ghulām).113

Alongside the translation of ʿibād by the two synonyms banda and gulām, we find a rendering of the Quranic tadʿūnā into three Bengali expressions. Sayeedi recentres the semantics of tadʿūnā and builds up a tripartite structure. However, he does not yet include different linguistic indexicalities. These follow in his next sentence: ‘Hence what creates in you respect (maryādā), self-respect (ātmamaryādā), personality (Engl.),

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identity (Ur., shakhṣīyat) – is (your) belief (imān).’ In this sentence, the different indexicalities play major roles, and the synonymization binds together quite different terms. The indexicalities point to the ‘modern’ by a technical term of the discourse of collective psyche and identity (ātmamaryādā), and to wealth and prestige of English and English education by ‘personality’. At the same time, they ennoble the row with the Urdu indexicality of shakhṣīyat, which distinguishes it from any Westernized community. The tripartite structure, a common feature of Bengali folk narration, links both chains of synonymic expression to one another. The structural parallel between ‘ātmamaryādā, personality, shakhṣīyat’ and ‘those besides Allah in whom you take refuge (āśraẏ grahaṇ karo), whom you invoke (ḍāko), whose help you want (sāhāyya cāo)’ smoothly links the Quranic translation to a part of the argumentation that is otherwise not connected to the Quranic statement. In this way, Sayeedi’s vision of monotheistic belief as the basis for indomitable personality can be ‘deduced’ from the Quran. The linguistic indexicalities Sayeedi employs furthermore charge this personality as modern and successful, yet Islamic. The argumentative leap evades attention as the synonymization and its structure are in place. These examples show how Quranic quotations become part of multilingual code switching. This influences the hermeneutic attitude to the Quranic text. The Quranic verse is not connected to the verses preceding or following it. Rather, it is integrated into its Bengali context in a particular manner, namely to provide a prompt for multilingual synonyms. This point of view does not deny the Quranic basis for the sermons under consideration, but rather asks about the level on which this basis is played out in practice. Rather than producing a negative image of the popular preacher using Quranic verses arbitrarily,114 I argue that there are indeed mechanisms that guide the inclusion and translation of the Quran, but that these, to a certain extent, lie in the multilingual code switching described above. Let me elaborate on the processes that link argumentation and code switching with one another. The synonyms each time encapsulate, in an extremely condensed manner, the processes of learning and applying what has been learned, of recognizing and applying nets of equivalences. This is a process of joyous listener participation, as it is a learning process that often includes new combinations but also, as we have learned with the ritual formulas, the well-known. It is a poetic pleasure because it relies on the approximate and the phono-centric. With its relation to echo words, it connects to everyday word games. The pleasurable listener participation is facilitated by the loosening of terms, the new or well-known combination of them with new terms from the other code: a competence involving poetic operations of language play. This play emphasizes form, and more specifically, multilingual forms of substitution and the accumulation of alternatives. The recipient is continuously engaged in creating the code115 without being able to relate to any prior code found elsewhere. This process and the role of the listeners can be interpreted through the reception of literature. While ‘code switching’ is a term from sociolinguistics, the perspective here focuses on its literary effects. Unlike sociolinguistics, which focuses on ‘conversational’, everyday code switching, we discuss a specific convention of code mixing in a context of oral poetics. The mix of codes and the ‘foreign’, ‘half-known’ codes and their continuous exchange and decentred qualities in many ways resemble qualities of figurative speech,

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 103 which Aristotle linked to exotic, ‘strange’ expressions.116 Their effect is not created by the mere coexistence of different codes, but by a deliberate combination of the codes in performance. In this manner, the perspective here deviates from the historical analyst who tries to map changes in composition over time, regarding each point in time as ‘frozen’.117 The multilingual code switching is considered here not as a defective communication nor a by-product of the sociolect, but as a deliberate rhetorical register.118 Against this background, it is worthwhile to turn to Bengali literary history once again. Significantly, Thibaut d’Hubert argues that the seventeenth-century Arakanese/ Bengali poet Ālāol displays ‘a conscious will to literarize vernacular poetry while retaining its association with music and performance, the promotion of multilingual literacy in multipolar social gatherings’.119 And Mannan, in passing, also highlights that the ‘poetic quality’ of dobhāṣi had been noticed by contemporaries.120 I similarly argue that the poetic effect of code switching in performance is not created by the mere fact of different codes, but by their combination in performance, or, from the perspective of the recipients, over the course of reception. One way the poetic form of code switching affects the message is that of integrating and relating to other translation processes that we encounter in the waz mahfils. While the translation encapsulated in synonymization is not equal to the argumentation of the preachers, the pleasure it develops stands in relation to argumentation. From this perspective, the very productive role of the Quran lies in part on a deductive-argumentative level (i.e. in terms of the Quran as law), but more than that, it adds to an aesthetic effect of translation and code switching. I here want to connect to a thought about the rhetorical argumentation developed by Roland Barthes. Rather than criticizing the rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme, either for its only probable premises or for hiding one premise,121 he parades the pleasure of the enthymeme by giving the listener the feeling that he has brought [the argumentation] to an end himself, by his own mental power: the enthymeme is not a syllogism truncated by defect or corruption, but because the listener must be granted the pleasure of contributing to the construction of the argument; it is something like the pleasure of completing a given pattern or grid (cryptograms, crossword puzzles).122

The translation and interpretation of the Quran that relies on the waz mahfils’ multilinguistic configuration, the fuzziness and wordplay by near-synonym pairs and their gaps form one part of the pleasure of listeners during their ‘journey’ through the waz mahfils. The code switching bridges gaps between languages, spheres of profaneness and holiness. It creates belonging to a community of listeners and competency for becoming part of a larger community. Competencies of religious hermeneutics reach out to a wider public with their poetic qualities, and their poetic qualities shape these hermeneutics.

Quotation of Urdu aphorisms and poems A more explicit use of poetic language in waz mahfils is the citation of aphorisms and poems. When citing the Quran, preachers often follow specific recitation styles and

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melodies, and employ various languages – Bengali, Urdu and Persian. The short lyrical forms preachers employ are referred to by the preachers and listeners as kabitā when they are in Bengali, or as shěʿr if in Urdu or Persian. While the inclusion of poems is a common feature of Islamic sermons, its effects, particularly in respect to multilingualism, remain understudied. In the Islamic Friday sermon, citations of poetry ‘had been, and continued to be, a common practice … . Half-lines, single lines, or two or three lines, were cited, and they occurred anywhere in the oration, at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or at the end.’123 In the Middle Ages, the last part of Arabic waʿẓ sessions in particular consisted purely of poetry,124 a format reported even in Egyptian sermons of the 1990s.125 Poetry in Arabic Islamic sermons so far has mainly been interpreted as an ‘emotionalizing device’. Tahera Qutbuddin persuasively argues that literary techniques like the citation of poetry were central for evoking ‘emotions like anger, shame, fear, and hope’.126 Similarly, Ibn al-Jawzī’s poems at the end of the sermons were ‘less concerned with a logical connex, than with evoking a basic mood of the soul and to make it last’.127 Among the particular emotions connected to Ibn al-Jawzī, Angelika Hartmann emphasizes ecstatic sorrows of love as a prefiguration of ascetism, while Hirschkind, in relation to Egyptian sermons of the 1990s, stresses the connection of poetry ‘to instill fear into the heart of a listener so as to steer him or her toward correct practice’.128 In Islamic South Asia, the association of poetry with emotions and particularly with passionate love was and is common in Indo-Persian and vernacular poems. In Urdu Shiite sermons, verse was a standard form of sermons up to the first decades of the twentieth century.129 The inclusion of Persian mas̤ nawīs on the topic of ecstatic love for the Divine remained a crucial element in Urdu Sunni sermons.130 The Ahl-e Ḥ adīth’s Punjabi preacher S̱anāʾullāh Amritsarī (1868–1948) inserted into his sermons citations from the Bible and the Quran as well as Urdu poems.131 The emotional effect of poems in sermons are explicitly mentioned in the fatāwā of Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, who discusses the inclusion and translation of Arabic, Urdu and Persian poetry (ashʿār) in the Friday sermon and mentions the elicitation of fear and desire (taghrīb o tarhīb) as their goals.132 Despite their differences in the adoptions of earlier curricula to colonial modernity during their institutionalization in the nineteenth century, the Islamic schools in South Asia until today share high regard for Persian and Urdu poetry. Also Bengali waz collections from the 1920s emphasize citations of poetry in several languages. Kaphiluddin Siddikī sets his entire collection into a framing story in which Muhammad, in paradise, calls upon the various famous Persian poets to recite beautiful poetry in his honour ‘aloud, so that the kindly assembled ones can hear it’.133 Waz is here situated as a heavenly poetry gathering and again we are reminded that the waz mahfils share many characteristics of the Urdu poetry gathering (mushāʿira), such as a nearly identical sequential protocol, timing and spatial set-up. However, the rhymed or metrical citations in the waz mahfils do not follow a unified pattern. Rather, their function and effect varies with languages, the poetic forms and their position within the sermons. Skills of preachers and audiences are important, and preachers addressing madrasa audiences in particular are likely to cite Urdu couplets, often employing a similar repertoire in several sermons. The couplets that they cite

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 105 are commonly maxims, aphorisms and take-home messages that use poetic form as a dense encapsulation of central thoughts. These restatements in an ennobled register of Islamic piety and etiquette link the waz mahfils concretely to the Urdu school tradition. When arguing for the importance of following Muhammad by an exact adoption of his sunna (ittibāʿ), Mazhari translates the Quranic ‘then follow me’ (fa-‘ttabiʿūnī) into Bengali while naming the Urdu concepts ittibāʿ-e sunna and ittibāʿ-e nabī.134 Immediately after this translation, he quotes an Urdu couplet that shows the negative consequences of not following his teaching: ‘If you have no connection (taʿalluq) with Mustafa’s realm (dār-e Mustafa), then don’t try to reach Allah (Allāh pāne kī).’135 After a translation of this verse into Bengali, Mazhari again re-quotes the Quranic āya, this time accompanied by the following Urdu verse: ‘If you have no love for the realm of Muhammad, then don’t try to reach paradise (jannat jāne kī).’136 The Urdu poem here exhorts the audience on one aspect of the Quranic verse, the need to follow Muhammad. The Quranic quality of encompassing universal and eternal truths is transferred to another language, which is closer, more easily memorized, and moves easily to poetic and rhyming form. Dense Urdu aphorisms can explain central values of the school tradition. On humility and the greatness of tradition, Mazhari cites a somewhat funny account of someone who wants to challenge Ḥ ājjī Imdādullāh (1817–99)137 in a competitive discussion (baḥth). An Urdu couplet warns of such an endeavour: ‘Don’t fight with the great ones (baṛoṉ); they are greater than we. If you fight, you will be ruined (laṛoge to tabāh ho jāʾoge [sic]).’138 Mazhari translates this warning using an analogy in Bengali from everyday life: ‘If a small private car collides (dhākkā dhākki) with a truck then it will come under the truck’s wheel and be finished.’139 Values such as humility can be dependent on language-specific discourses, and preachers can use poems to connect to Urdu etiquette. When Mazhari praises the founding principle of the Lālbāg madrasa, Māolānā Śāmˡsul Hak Pharidˡpuri, he tells his audience that Pharidˡpuri ‘added before his name: “nothingness (nā chīz) Śāmˡsul Hak.” Nā cīz – “I am no ‘cīz, I am no thing (jinis). Who thinks “I am a thing” is a boaster (ahaṅkārī).’ But, Mazhari explains, ‘Allah the Pure adds to the respect and worth (sammān) of whoever thinks “I am nothing.”’140 Switching to a poetic citation, Mazhari expresses this message with an Urdu couplet that relies on the homonym khāk as ‘nothingness’ and ‘earth’: ‘Extinguish your being (hastī) if you want some dignity (martaba) / So that from meeting the earth (or: nothingness) a bed of roses (gul gulzār) comes about.’141 As these school-specific semantics and set pieces of discourse indicate, Urdu maxims and poems, far from being triggers of a universal religious feeling, are connected to specific school orientations. They may be emotional, but they are so by reference to group-specific canons, and they focus on emotions that are championed by different groups. Urdu quotes also serve to intensify and expand narratives. In a typical narrative of Moses’s inescapable situation,142 Mazhari incorporates an Urdu poem that expresses the trapped situation of Moses and his people and prays to Allah. When Mazhari dramatically translates it to Bengali, he concretizes Moses’s plea to Allah and His answer. Allah advises Moses to use the ‘sceptre of belief ’ (imāner ḍanḍā). After everyone

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gathers, and he shouts, ‘Allahu akbar’, Mazhari once more cites Allah’s answer, first the Urdu maxim and then its Bengali contextual translation: (Ur.) Take the stick of belief (imān kā ḍanḍā) in your hands, take the flag of Islam (Islām kā jhanḍā) in your hands, and the whole world is yours. (Beng.) You have the sceptre of belief (imāner ḍanḍā), use it! See who will be victorious, the belief or the sea. The worldly power of the sea and the worldly power of the Pharaoh will all be razed (mesmār from Pers. mismār). Just use your sceptre of belief.143

For Mazhari, the Urdu line and its rhymed connection of the key words ḍanḍā and jhanḍā encapsulate resistance against great enemy forces. Soon after, he recites it again in the context of Abu Bakr’s heroism.144 The poem, in two different narrative contexts, establishes a similar and transportable rationale linking the Islamic community transhistorically and aligning Musa’s stick and the Islamic banner. Furthermore, some poems are stable parts of narratives told by different preachers in different eras. Mazhari in 2013 and 2014 cites the same poems by Muhammad Iqbāl as Sayeedi had in 1987. In one case, both preachers even integrate the same couplet from Muhammad Iqbal’s Shikva (Complaint, 1909) into the same narrative. The preachers depict the situation of the Prophetic companion and army commander Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ and his army successfully crossing a river, even though this seems impossible. While both preachers frame the situation slightly differently – in Sayeedi’s narrative, Saʿd is on the way to Africa to spread Islam, while in Mazhari’s, he is advancing to resist (makābela karˡte) the Meccan enemies – both accounts are about the unconditional dedication to Islam. In Mazhari’s narration, the enemies had even destroyed the boats, but the Prophet’s companions unanimously decide that ‘even if there is no boat made out of wood, no ship, then still we certainly have the boat of lā illāha ilā ‘llāh!’ And Saʿd orders: ‘You all (hagal) go. With the belief of lā illāha ilā ‘llāh, we’ll cross with the boat of belief (imān).’145 In both Sayeedi’s and Mazhari’s sermons, citing Shikva marks the triumphal climax of the narration. The felicitous outcome – 30,000 horses transport 60,000 soldiers safely to the other side, without a single one drowning – had already been reported. At this point of the narrative, the preachers recite the Urdu couplets: ‘Deserts are (merely) deserts – we didn’t leave aside even seas! / We galloped our horses in the Sea of Darkness (baḥr-e ẓulmāt meṉ)!’ Alongside adding to the mood of heroism and dedication, the poetic expression and the surrounding narrative are linked by the image of the horses galloping into dangerous waters. Unlike the horses, however, the ‘Sea of Darkness’ (baḥr-e ẓulmāt) in the poem is quite obviously metaphorical. Mazhari hence remains on the allegorical level that his ‘boat of belief ’ (imāner naukā) had already embarked on. Sayeedi takes the other route, and by explicitly announcing it, distances the poem from the narrative to the effect that its allegorical interpretation does not interfere with the concreteness of his narrative. After reciting the poem, he again returns to a concrete sensory perception that evokes the Sea of Darkness in an exceptionally powerful description: ‘At the vastest expanses, in a dark, thick, lightless night, we have chased the horses above the rain-filled stream of the river, unto the terrain of Africa we have raised the

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 107 flag of Islam – that’s the kind of Muslims we are!’ (prāntata prāntar / andhakār ghor / kr̥ ṣṇa rajanīte / śrābaṇer kharsrotā nadīr upare / ghoṛā dhābṛiẏe / āphˡrikār bhūkhaṇḍe āmār / isˡlāmer patākā tulechi / āmrā sei musalmān).146 Sayeedi and Mazhari both quote couplets from Iqbal’s ‘Song of the Religious Community’ (Tarānah-e millī, 1910). As in the case of Moses’s Urdu prayer, Mazhari quotes the Urdu verses as part of a self-declaration of a heroic companion. Showing his enthusiasm to fight, Miqdād b. ʿAmr declares: ‘Oh Messenger of Allah! … We won’t remain here and say “we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t do it.” We will say “we can do it, we can fight at your front, from your right, from your left we can fight, we can fight from behind you.”’147 After the obligatory takbīr expressing the audience’s proud appreciation, Mazhari recites the Urdu poem: ‘(VI) We are not, oh sky, ones to be oppressed by falsehood (bāt̤ il) / a hundred times you’ve already tested us. (II) The trust (amānat) of Oneness (tawḥīd) is in our breasts / it is not easy to erase our name and sign (nām o nishāṉ).’ Sayeedi puts the same verses in a heroic context, too. However, he relates them not to the heroism of the companions, but to the heroism of the audience. After quoting the couplet from the second stanza (II), he translates and expands the verses. While he does not explain or translate ‘trust’ (amānat), he includes heroism as opposed to cowardice in his Bengali translation: ‘We have the amānat of monotheism (ekātmabād) in our breast. We don’t fear anyone. Because we are not cowards. We are real Muslims (madd-e muslim).’148 And in his translation of stanza (VI), Sayeedi expands on the collective heroism, turns falsehood into opponents, calling them ‘the false ones’ and last but not least counts law among the oppressors. Note also how close Sayeedi’s poetic translation is to the formulation of the well-known Tagore song ‘āmār mātha nata kare dāo’ (Let My Head Bow), which Sayeedi turns on its head. ‘We are not the community (jāt) that bows down in front of the false ones (bāṭil). Oh heaven, oh earth! You saw it many times. We have passed a trial (parīksā uttīrṇa haẏechi). We have never stooped before a man-made law (manuṣer tairi karā āiner sāmne). Because we are Muslims!’149 The comparison of the ways in which Mazhari and Sayeedi build the same quotation into their sermons shows the transferability of poetic citations between sermons. It also shows the usage of Iqbal’s poems to evoke collective heroic zeal, which might be interpreted allegorically or concretely, but in any case warns us against conflating poems with subjective emotions of love or repentance. It is noteworthy how Sayeedi cites and expands couplets from Iqbal’s Bāl-e Jibrīl (The Wing of Gabriel, 1935). Criticizing the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union to further his polemics against the communists, he recites a couplet, which he claims Iqbal had written on a visit to the USSR: ‘Oh heavenly bird (Lāhūtī)! Oh heavenly bird! Death is better than this subsistence (rizq), which clogs your flight.’ Interpreting the bird’s impediment to flight as a loss of being free (svādhīn and āzādī), Sayeedi translates: It is a thousand times better to die independently than on a subsistence, which has lost the freedom, the blue of the sky. Rather than eat this subsistence, oh upwards-flying bird, rather than eat this subsistence, it is a thousand times better

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to independently stop flying altogether (ye rijeke / harila ājādī / nīl ākāśer / ālo tāhār cāite / svādhīn maraṇ / hājārguṇe bhlo).150

Employing poetry as a call for action, Sayeedi reads another couplet from the Bāl-e Jibrīl as an action-inspiring antithesis. First, he recites the Urdu lines: ‘In the flowerbed, the red (rose) has been waiting long / in the flowerbed, the red (rose) (lāla) has been waiting long / wanting a tunic (qabā) from the Arabs’ blood.’ His Bengali translation transforms the first line into a repeated question: ‘Since when has this (flower) bud eagerly been waiting to blossom? Since when has it been waiting, needing a little wind’s touch to blossom?’ This translation creates a text reminiscent of the Baul song: ‘The lotus heart has been blossoming for ages … . It blossoms and blossoms and blossoms without end.’151 Re-quoting the Urdu line and connecting it to the question, Sayeedi answers that it needs the little push of the morning dawn’s breeze to come out of the bud. Instead of treating the third line in a similar fashion, Sayeedi shifts and expands it to impersonate the proud and heroic Muslim: ‘I am a Muslim, Allah’s flower, I don’t need the morning’s wind to blossom (prasphuṭita). I need a martyr-coloured shirt (jāmā) from the martyrs of Uhud. If a shirt of the martyrs’ blood is put on my body, I will be admired in the entire universe!’152 The Bengali translation not only interprets the poems on the level of content. The form of their wording itself adheres to poetic principles. Both Bengali translations of Sayeedi’s quotes from the Bāl-e Jibrīl are structured along a flexible Bengali folk metre (chaṛār chanda), which relies on a somewhat flexible rhythmical recitation (tān-pradhān). Its basic textual rhythm gives a subtle poetic quality to the prose speech. I tried to indicate this rhythmic quality in the transcription by separating the units, by one solidus, adding another one in case the preacher actually performs this unit by breath pause. This process, which results in a form of ‘concealed poetry’ inside Sayeedi’s Bengali prose,153 is not restricted to translations of the Urdu poems. Rather, the latter, even beyond their translation, influence the Bengali prose narrative into which they are embedded. Sayeedi’s evocation of the Sea of Darkness of Iqbal’s ‘Shikva’ that I quoted above featured a similar metered structure. The clearly marked citations of poems are thus part of a larger yet less obvious shift in the speech’s poetic nature. Another distinct genre of poetry frequently cited by some preachers is naʿt, ‘devotional poems sung in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and of what is often considered his city, Medina’.154 Their recitation, naʿt khwānī, ‘is a tradition of verbal art in which performers are judged according to how intensely they move emotions and how their voices stir attachment to and love for the Prophet Muhammad in listeners’.155 They are hence very close to the waz mahfils’ devotion and effort to be close to the merciful divine. At the same time, like with the citations of Urdu poems of Iqbal, this genre too is a marker of group belonging. Urdu naʿt and Bengali gajal are mostly performed by preachers linked to or at least leaning towards the Barelwī movement. They can occur in other contexts of group practice outside of waz mahfils. In Chittagong, even larger than the large gatherings of the BJI by Sayeedi are the processions for the Prophet’s birthday (milād al-nabī) called jashn-e julūs.156 As with the TJ’s biśva ijtema held north of Dhaka, here also speakers from Pakistan are invited. The processions

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 109 are distinguished by the fact that they rely on an embodied (by walking in rhythm and chanting along) musicscape of naʿt and zikr. The naʿt performed by preachers such as Nuri and Hosen are often inspired by contemporary Pakistani and Indian naʿt performers. Nuri and Hosen were both reciters of naʿt and Quran before they started preaching, and both of them are still very popular for their Islamic songs (naʿt and gajal), which are marketed separately from their sermons and which they claim to compose. An important dimension of the resulting ‘entextualizations and recontextualization’157 of naʿt is that their texts and melodies are partially known by the audience beforehand. Naʿt and even more so gajal are meant to be recited along with the audience. Again, poetic form carries feelings of community allegiance rather than individual and interior emotions. Building on the general devotional mood of the sermon gatherings, chanted naʿt adds group-specific praise practice and passion in a poetic form. They revisit tropes of poems that were already used in the introduction to express devotion to the Prophet, such as, in Urdu: ‘It is your favour (terī meherbānī) that we are the Muhammadan community / this is only your generosity (karam)’, or ‘It is your heavenly journey (miʿrāj) to reach the heavenly board and pen (lauḥ va qalam) and it is my journey to reach your feet (terī qadam).’ A Persian quotation from Jami asks the ‘cool breeze of early morning (nasīmā)’ to ‘inform Muhammad about my states (zaḥwālam)’. A Bengali couplet that many preachers recite close to the performance of the durūd praises the Prophet’s birth: ‘Having spread Islam in the cities of Mecca and Medina, the Prophet lies in Medina / All creation says, today it’s our special day of joy (moder khuśir din) / Today he, the mercy for mankind, kindly ennobled (taśrīph) the threeworld (with his presence).’158 My research adds to the descriptions of the effects of ‘new contexts of audition’ enabled by the introduction of audiocassettes and CDs.159 In this vein, Eisenlohr mentions that the naʿt performance at a marriage ceremony in Mauritius enacted the address held beforehand. Naʿt and sermons are even more interrelated in the waz mahfils. This allows us to make more specific observations on the persuasive function and the ways in which naʿt are embedded and reframed in sermons. The relations of the naʿt to the neighbouring sermon text may, for example, be far from a simple enactment of the same emotion. Nuri emphasizes in a sermon that the emotions of love and kindness were introduced by the Prophet. The compassion (māẏā), softheartedness (mamatā), love (bhālobāsā) we have today, where have we got them from? We got them by means (uchilāẏ) of the Prophet. That’s why I said that the largest favour, the niʿmat-e kubra, of Allah the Master of Mankind, is the dear Messenger (s.a.w.). We got such a great Messenger. By means of the Messenger, of the Prophet, we got mercy, compassion, tender affection (snehā), love, brotherhood (bhrātr̥ tva), all of it.160

Describing this love as a quality of the Prophet as much as of humans endowed by the Prophet, however, is only the stepping stone for Nuri to move to the controversial practice of celebrating the Prophet’s birthday (mīlād). The naʿt, from the pen of the founder of the Barelwī movement, Ahmad Riza Khan, emphasizes the celebration of

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mīlād as a heroic deed in opposition to the wahhabīs of Najd, a polemical name for the enemies of the Barelwī movement. So won’t we be happy to have got this Prophet? Not for one day, not for two days, not for three days. What did my Allah the Pure [sic] say, do you know? (Ur.) Until the Day of Judgement (ḥashr) will we celebrate the festivity of the Maula’s birth Like horsemen, we will make the castles of Najd fall we are content once the enemies are burnt and the castles become dust As long as life is in our blood (or: as long as we have breath), we will pronounce his zikr.161

Here, the naʿt encapsulates the attachment to the emotional community of those who loudly pronounce and celebrate the love of the Prophet. This community ritually distinguishes itself by extended durūd at the end of the mahfil, with everyone rising to their feet to honour the Prophet’s presence (qiyām). At this point, Nuri intersperses an Urdu naʿt in between the Arabic durūd: (Beng.) I finish this mahfil of today, come, we stand up to pronounce salām on my Prophet: (Ar.) Oh Prophet, peace be upon you, Oh Messenger, peace be upon you, oh Dear, peace be upon you, prayers are upon you. (Ur.) The medium of the family of worshippers The gift of the best of women [Fatima] And of the martyr of Kerbela [Husain] Hundreds of thousands of greetings (salām) on Mustafa (Muhammad), the life of mercy Hundreds of thousands of greetings on the evening of the festivity of guidance (shām-e bazm-e hidāyat). (Ar.) Oh Prophet, peace be upon you, Oh Messenger, peace be upon you, oh Dear, peace be upon you, prayers are upon you.162

Let us now turn to a sermon in which the naʿt is part of the concrete persuasive goal of the sermon. A recently founded organizing society had invited Nuri because of his vocal capacities and because of the movement he runs against the acceptance of dowry. Nuri told me on the way to the gathering that he was specifically instructed to speak about usury (sud), and he accordingly mentioned this topic at the beginning of his sermon. At the passage just before the recitation of the naʿt, he strongly condemned rich and influential people, who, by means of interest on loans, extort the poor. By this process, he summarized, ‘the capitalists (puñji wālā) will remain the capitalists, and the poor stay poor’. But, he thunders, ‘usury is haram, usury is haram!’ At this point, Nuri

 Aesthetics of Religious Language 111 brings in the coming to earth of the Prophet: ‘That’s why Allah sent my Prophet to the world, to free (mukta karā) the whole world from this darkness.’ The following easy contemporary naʿt by Zulfiqar Haider Parwaz is partly recited by the audience. It fires the revolutionary undertone at this point of the sermon: Mustafa has come, the revolution (inqilāb) has come a way of speaking out the cries (kalkāroṉ) has come In a moment are the clouds of unbelief cut in the hour when the light of Truth came without veil (niqāb).163

Nuri cites the example of the Prophet as voluntarily choosing poverty (daridratā), even though he is the king (bādśāh) of all beings. Again, he encapsulates these messages in naʿt, both in Bengali and Urdu. When he praises Muhammad’s greatness, Nuri is joined by the audience, who together chant: ‘The light of Muhammad, ṣallī ʿalā / you (tumi) are the king of kings, the great one (jallewālā).’164 Nuri then narrates how Aisha misunderstands that Muhammad had chosen to be poor, and Muhammad explains to her that even the mountains would come running if he ordered them to do so. But, switching to Arabic, Nuri cites the Prophet declaring ‘verily I love poverty!’ followed by the usual exclamation of ḥamdu li-’llāh! by the audience. Immediately, Nuri recites in Urdu: He never ate to full satisfaction (jī bhar kar) Himself remained hungry, a bound stone (pathar) Gave to others, filling their sacks What to say to your steadfastness oh Lord Oh Ahmad the sent one, light of God What to say to your tranquility and contentment.165

Here, as in other instances and in the poetic Urdu maxims, naʿt is endowed with authority, which is only partly derived from Ahmed Riza Khan as a possible author. It is also based on its form in a specific language and recitative style. Urdu, Persian and Bengali poems in waz mahfils do serve a variety of functions. Rather than encapsulating a uniform emotional effect, for example, of religious longing, the poems can add to specific persuasive points, constitute take-home messages and strengthen sectarian identity. In respect to form, they add to the linguistic play of the sermons and add another layer of multilingualism and connecting poetic form and religious authority. As the other instances of non-Bengali expressions and forms, they too are integrated into the Bengali speech, and exert effects on the Bengali parts of the sermons. Listeners and preachers cherish and cultivate this idiom, in which religious and poetic languages and their competencies overlap. Political and religious identities are performed in encodings of multilingual poetics. Both religious hermeneutics and public mobilization work through these poetics.

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Heroes of courage and compassion Public piety between mobilization and melodrama

The central and longest part of the sermons consists of narratives about the Prophet, his companions, Islamic saints or the everyday life events of the listeners. By including such narratives, the preacher’s speech during the sermon is always related to another act of telling, such as hagiography or the transmission of the word of God to the early Muslim community.1 At the opening of this book, I quoted one example of the interrelatedness of such tellings, a dialogue in which the listeners of the waz mahfils were brought on one narrative level with the Prophet and his companions. Bringing in such narratives is entertaining for the audience. They keep the listeners’ attention at the waz mahfil, and they play an even more important role in recorded sermons where the interactive aspects of the live setting are missing. By evoking pleasure, they have a function similar to the interspersed jokes, the recitations of poetry and the Quran, and the sermons’ multilingual texture. However, narratives are more than entertaining and entertainment is nothing trivial and unidimensional. Pleasure may strengthen the sermon’s didactic power. The narratives contribute to wider processes of subject formation. The intriguing analyses of Islamic sermons by anthropologists have shown that the multivalent semantics of stories provide opportunities to allude to political events or village life.2 Hirschkind has argued that narratives of Islamic preachers in Egypt can play a role in the shaping of ethical conduct. They not only motivate actions, but shape their emotional undertones and the ethics that inform them.3 Julian Millie maps two strands of rhetorical ideals on sectarian and social orientations in Indonesian Islam: individual transformation and providing socially pleasing experiences.4 My analysis in this chapter similarly stresses the relevance of narratives for subject formation. However, the tellings performed by preachers in waz mahfils differ from those of the sermon genres described by researchers thus far. One main difference is that they are often more extensive and give more space to the story instead of stressing the preachers’ overt interpretations. Narratives include long, dramatic scenes of vivid narrative that are relatively unimpeded by the preacher’s voice in the sense of authorial and interpretative commentary, while giving considerable space to the voices of the dramatic figures. These narratives hold together long sections or even entire sermons. They help the audience develop emotional responses and identify with the characters in an incremental manner. With their length and formal characteristics, these sermons

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differ considerably from the narratives that can be provided in other formats of Islamic preaching: from the Friday sermon or other preaching styles with a strong authorial voice, and from multivocal scenes in Indonesian preaching, in which in short narratives can be found to draw on the language of comedies.5 The narratives in waz mahfils are in this sense more poetic than persuasive and didactic. The preacher in many respects assumes the role of a storyteller and often presents the events of the stories without guiding the listeners overtly as a preacher, scholar or exegete. Instead, he emphasizes the original communication within Islamic (hi)story. Interestingly, while individual preachers have been criticized for being mere ‘storytellers’, the waz preachers, in general, have been granted greater narrative freedom than probably any other public figure speaking for Islam in Bangladesh. The poetic qualities of idiom and role seem to be directly related to increased liberties.6 It is hence important not to construct a false binary between dogmatic truth and narrative entertainment. A 100 years ago, Tor Andrae, dealing with the life of Muhammad, had critically evaluated the ‘decidedly impious’ goals of entertainment in ‘folk literature’, with its stories that have ‘intruded on Islam from the outside’ and have to be brushed aside by historical analysis.7 However, sixty years later, John Wansbrough had, in his analysis of Muhammad’s biography, called ‘salvation history a distinct literary type’.8 On the other hand, the identification of aesthetic enjoyment with liberal or antiestablishment impulses is also mistaken. While it is true, as Shahab Ahmed stresses, that narratives and non-canonical narrative genres are of central importance to the development and understanding of Islam, the variety of interpretations and values they transmit are not confined to ‘alternative’ visions of dominant discourses. The type of public piety exemplified in waz mahfils, piety centred on religious narratives instead of commemorating party symbols or state holidays, is often linked to the promotion of conservative Islamic movements and visions of society. There is no opposition between narrative pleasure and mainstream Islam: in the world of waz mahfils, they reinforce each other. While the preachers’ narratives are often characterized by the relative absence of direct auctorial involvement, they are nevertheless constructed with specific aims in mind and are part of persuasive processes.9 Indeed, it is precisely their seeming disinterestedness and directness of presentation that proves more effective in involving listeners emotionally, because it enables listeners to immerse themselves in the story and imaginatively identify with characters in the narrative. Narratives and their particular form provide opportunities for preachers to involve and guide the imagination and emotions of listeners in deep and nuanced ways. Listeners of waz mahfils build relationships to the characters within the preachers’ narratives. Again, these characters can be seen as models to follow, and analogies are often employed by preachers to drive home explicit morals. However, when thinking about the ways in which stories are employed to energize young people to participate in political activity, to get audiences to experience theological tenets in ways that are connected to their everyday world, it is crucial to go beyond explicit didacticism. I look at the specific ways in which preachers portray figures of the narratives to their audience. I ask questions about the ways in which these figures perceive their world,

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 115 how their perspective relates to the overall narrative. For the narrative design of the waz mahfils, it is crucial to ask who tells the story – the preacher as narrator, or the preacher ‘citing’ the words of the figures. As is fitting for sermons aimed at being popularly received, the characters presented in the sermons are generally types painted with broad strokes rather than nuanced individuals. The narratives focus on fundamental turning points, such as life and death or changes in identity. It is the perceptions by the characters revealed in their self-declamations that provide models for passionate identification. The perception of so-called focalizers or reflectors organizes the audience’s perception of the narrative world and caters to this identification. The presentation of these reflectors’ thoughts and perceptions as much as the direct speech in dramatic scenes gives them a sense of immediacy. It is such narrative techniques that allow the audience to become immersed in the story. While listeners can distance themselves from the texts and take a critical standpoint, this is not what the narrative and performative design asks them to do nor what the recipients strive for. After all, this would endanger the sermons’ desired religious, emotional and communal effects, which rely on identification and displays of emotional engagement. The fact that listeners voluntarily identify with characters intertwines their identification with the stories’ characters with their individual subjectivity even more strongly.

Mobilizing heroic courage The first set of stories that I want to analyse in depth is part of a larger emotional disposition preachers frequently evoke and refer to, namely, the strength of Islam and Muslims. We already encountered this commonplace – the most emblematic formulation and reference is the victory of Moses over the Pharaoh – when considering the heroic zeal encapsulated in Urdu poems preachers cite.10 There is an inescapable situation with Pharaoh’s well-armed army on one side and the sea on the other. Moses typically relies on the ‘strength of belief ’ (imāner bal). He prays to God, who responds immediately: ‘Allah the Pure says: “Why shouldn’t I make a road? Where do you keep your sceptre of belief (imāner ḍanḍā)? Just use it and immediately a way will appear.”’11 The same wonder is encapsulated in the miraculous intervention of the Islamic Calif ʿUmr. He warns his military commander in a kind of telecommunication: ‘Suddenly, in the middle of the khuṭba, he [Umr] burst out: “Oh Sariya, look at the mountains!”’ Later in the narrative, Umr explains to his companions that he saw the battle and the danger presented by the enemies ‘preparing to attack from behind. … But Sariya and his group don’t know about this. They are going [forward] and are preparing to attack the enemies. At that point I told Sariya: “Sariya, look to the mountains!”’12 Hearing about this wondrous victory-bringing incident, the audience of the waz mahfils exclaims a loud takbīr. While such narratives connect the strength of belief to the worldly strength of the community, they do not raise the need – or give the opportunity – to describe personal courage or heroism. They serve as foils for believing in God and His miraculous acts

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rather than for activating the listeners to become heroic individuals. This is different in narratives of the hero as a fearless individual who fights not for himself but for others and who resolutely follows his cause without fear of death and despite all odds (which makes his deed seem irrational or even reckless). This hero does not speak about his emotions, rather he denies having them. However, this does not mean that his deeds are devoid of emotionality or emotional effect: the non-reflective, unconditional pursuit of his goal bestows upon the hero a ‘pathos of unconditionality’. Here, not causality but the symbolic value of the deed matters. A conflict is needed in order to set the stage for the ‘heroic’ deed that transforms the protagonist into a hero. Furthermore, it is always the hero who acts and remains at the helm. Never is he passive or suffering. He might be in an inescapable situation but the initiative lies with him. Such heroes are not ahistorical archetypes, but are situated in specific cultural and political contexts. In Bangladesh, heroes and politics are, for example, linked by the figure of the freedom fighter as the superhero, or by the staging of military rulers like Zia in jeans and a T-shirt.13 In the 1980s, along with changes in the country’s social structure, the cultural model of the māstān emerged. This ‘young, urban, armed, and testosterone-charged’ hoodlum is a rebel in his attire, his outlook and his disrespect of elders.14 The Islamic hero presented in the sermons I analyse is in many respects an alternative and counter-hero to the māstān, but may parallel its masculinity. At the same time, as this chapter shows, the Islamic masculinity depicted in the sermons cannot be reduced to a singular option: simultaneously and possibly complementarily, there is also the needy and suffering relationship of the male hero to an overwhelmingly compassionate mother. The following interpretation of the cool and manly hero in contrast to his emotional female admirers is linked to the wider discussion about youth and media culture, which has, in relation to Islam, garnered increased interest because of fears about ‘neoSalafism’ and the Islamic State (IS).15 Emerging thinking about youth culture is relevant for the interpretation of the sermons analysed in this section. Yet, the sermons are not simply local versions of narratives with global reach. The narratives I analyse show the importance of analytically perceiving a broad range of Islamic role options, their regional trajectories and contextual appropriation. For example, HI, one of whose mahfils provides a prime example, can be seen as a youth movement insofar as its followers are mostly young people. However, the movement still retains particular values and aspirations. Many of the HI’s followers explicitly distance themselves from ‘Western’ youth culture and adhere to models that stress, for example, emotional balance and a passionate yet disciplined love of the Prophet. The relations to media images are all the more complicated in the context of komī madrasas. Students of the madrasas do not consume ‘secular’ media as much as in other parts of Bangladeshi youth culture, but the need for heroes is the same. In the following, I analyse a cool and self-sacrificing Islamic hero who is elaborately developed in two sermons that each aimed at impressing and mobilizing a young audience, despite the preachers’ different theological and political positions and the gap of nearly thirty years (1987 and 2014) separating them. Both sermons were held by preachers who take up prominent positions in Islamic organizations that are active

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 117 in politics: the first was held (and repeated in similar form in the 1990s) by Sayeedi, associated with the BJI; the second by Taphājjal Hak Habigañjī, a madrasa principal and regional leader of the HI. Before tracing the fascinating parallels between the ways in which each sermon presents the hero, let us have a brief look at their specific settings. Sayeedi’s sermon was held on the parade ground in the south-eastern harbour city Chittagong, centre of the region that later became the stronghold of the HI. The sermon was clearly oppositional in the sense that it criticized efforts by the then president, Ershad, to play the Islamic card, exemplified by such measures as the zakāt ordinance and his declaration of ‘jihad’ against corruption. Sayeedi supported elections and fiercely attacked his political opponents, particularly communists and other Islamic parties. He claimed to speak for the real Islamic movement in Bangladesh, and he vigorously campaigned for his idea that a more social and egalitarian society would be certain ‘if Islam comes about’ and people lived under the ‘rule (rāj) of the Quran’.16 Taphājjal Hak Habigañjī of the HI included the narrative of heroism in a sermon he held in the spring of 2014 at a large komī mādrāsā in Maulbhibazar District, south of the town of Sylhet. It had been roughly a year since a large HI rally had been suppressed close to the śāplā cattvar, a square in the capital’s business district of Motijheel named after the national flower, the water lily, which is honoured with a monument in the centre of the plaza. During the police operation in the early morning of 6 May 2013, many people were killed. The HI claimed that large numbers of peaceful religious men were killed and wounded. The commemoration of this event loomed large in the sermon’s narratives of martyrdom. A sense of urgency was noticeable among the relatively homogeneous audience of madrasa students that assembled on the courtyard of a madrasa situated a significant distance from the surrounding villages. Among the different speakers, Hak was the one most explicitly representing the HI’s organizational standpoint. He was, for example, concerned with making connections with other organizations, most importantly the TJ. He added a clear allegorical meaning to his narrative: the ‘flag of Islam’ in the heroic narrative stood for the succession of the responsibility from the TJ to the komī mādrāsās with the joint goal to ‘save Islam’ (which also is the literal meaning of Hefāzat-e Islam).17 Both preachers aimed to mobilize a predominantly young audience to become active in their respective movements, be it by voting for the right party, by contributing financially or by taking part in demonstrations. For this, they needed heroes who do more than suffer or rely on the strength of their belief or divine intervention; they must do their duty, but still inspire the young male audience. The solution for both preachers lay in narrating very similar accounts of the Battle of Muʾta where the Muslim army is reported to have fought a much larger Byzantine army with the enthusiasm of becoming martyrs. Since we are concerned here not with historical veracity or possible exaggerations of the accounts, but rather with their styles of narration,18 comparison to other renderings of the story is informative for understanding how the preachers at waz mahfils carve out a particular form. The expedition to Muʾta is included in the biography of Muhammad by Ibn Hishām, which was translated into Bengali by the Islamic Foundation Bangladesh.19 A more well-known rendering is found in the Stories

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of the Companions of the Prophet, which are part of the vade mecum of the TJ, the largest Islamic movement in Bangladesh; they were initially composed by Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalawi between 1928 and 1940. The Stories of the Companions are structured according to ‘the virtues cultivated above all by the Sufis: steadfastness, fear of Allāh, abstinence and self-denial, piety and scrupulousness, fidelity to the canonical prayer, salāt, sympathy and self-sacrifice, heroism, zeal for knowledge, and devotion to the Prophet’.20 The account on the expedition to Muʾta is included in the chapter ‘Valour (and Courage) and the Yearning for Death’ (Ur. bahādurī aur maut kā shauq / Beng. bīratva, sāhasikatā o mr̥ tyer āgraha).21 Narratively, it includes citations of the protagonists’ speeches and poems. While Stories of the Companions does include some accounts of the battle, it primarily focuses on the martyrdom of the three commanders, who had been ordered by the Prophet to take up the flag of Islam during the battle. It is exactly this focus on martyrdom that the preachers take up. However, they expand it to make it into a story of active and appealing heroism supplanting the TJ’s general message of yearning for the hereafter (ākhirat ke shauq) over the transient world. Part of this is accomplished by the historical framing: Hak stylizes the Battle of Muʾta into the final battle for the defence of Islam on the precipice of being wiped out by an overpowering enemy. But even more important for this transformation are the detailed descriptions and dramatizations of the heroes’ emotional stances that both preachers provide when talking about the farewells from their families to the martyrsto-be and their martyrdom in the battle.

Cool heroes, emotional wives The farewell from their wives to the martyrs can only loosely draw on templates from the Prophet’s biography and the Stories of the Companions, as in both these cases, the heroes proclaim their valour to the general public and not to their beloveds. Both Sayeedi and Hak, by contrast, describe at some length how the martyrs see their wives one last time. They do so in order to prove the heroes’ disinterested determination. This determination valorizes the stoicism of the heroes; they are selfless actors characterized by a notable absence or even explicit denial of their emotions. For example, the heroes refuse the efforts of their wives to make them stay or promise to return from the battlefield. At the same time, both preachers describe adoring communication and attraction between the spouses. Sayeedi’s account of the farewell of Jafar, the first of the three martyrs and flag bearers, mainly consists of dialogue. Sayeedi intensifies its dramatic effect when he imitates the specific style of the wife’s prayer. At the same time, he emphasizes the hero Jafar’s aloofness by ‘citing’ the formal language Jafar uses when he tells his wife that he is not able to fulfil her marital ‘right’ (hak) as he goes to battle against the ‘Romans’ and asks her to forgive him ‘by the courtesy of Allah’ (Allāh wāsṭe). His wife replies: ‘Oh my husband! Allah’s Prophet has ordained that, so I don’t have the power to turn you from this path. I rather pray to Allah: “Master of Mankind, my husband

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 119 goes to the battlefield of jihad. Make my husband a ghāzī [as opposed to a martyr, shahīd] and return him to me alive!”’ Hazrat-e Jafar, with his sword, with the back of his sword, touched mildly (mr̥ du āghāt) onto the arm of his wife. He said: ‘Oh wife (bibi), don’t make a wrong prayer! Allah the Master of Mankind won’t accept your wrong-headed prayer. As the Prophet has said my name in the middle, there is one before me, and one after me. Today, in this very moment it is invariably the last time you will see me in this life. Never will I see you again. I bid you farewell.’22

The scene ends with the hero abandoning the involuntary affection of parenthood and symbolically turning his back on his family. He is, however, explicitly concerned with serving as a role model for his children, which in turn functions as a broad hint to the audience: ‘My children remain, look after my children. Form them along my path.’ Hazrat Jafar left. The wife started gasping. Like a cut pigeon, the wife ran hustling behind, the two children, her heart-pieces (kalijā ṭukˡro), who ran behind, crying ‘Daddy, daddy!’ The fighter (madd-e-mujāhid) Jafar didn’t look back even once, (to see) who cried, who ran.23

In Hak’s account, too, the manly martyr hero is concerned about those who follow him. After telling his wife that he will certainly not return, he counsels her to make sure he will only be replaced by a hero and not by a coward: Once I die you will get the news that I became a martyr. You will marry a hero fighter (mujāhid) like me, a soul dedicated to Islam, someone like this. Not someone who wants to die without Islam. Just wants to survive. Wants to run away like a goat. Don’t like such a guy (chelepele).24

Similar to Sayeedi’s version, in Hak’s account Jafar’s wife tries to impede through prayer the hero’s determination to become a martyr. Hak, however, dwells on the prayer much longer. He interrupts the dialogue between the spouses in order to make an extended comment on the efficacy of a prayer by someone who sets out for the battlefield of Allah. In this comment, he compares the power of a prayer recited by someone following Allah’s directions to fight in a battle to the prayer of someone who ‘just’ joins a missionary tour of the TJ. He here constructs a clear hierarchy of the ‘real’ act of travelling on Allah’s path as being more worthy: ‘This is not the miraculous power of some old missionary’ (tabligir murubbir kerāmat). With this statement, Hak re-actualizes the belligerent semantics of what have become conventionalized metaphors in the TJ’s language. Besides, the valuation fits Hak’s general message that the TJ has been succeeded by the komi madrasas, that is, by the HI, and the HI’s more active political role. In the scene, Hak ‘cites’ the prayer of Jafar’s wife by imitating a typical prayer’s formulations and vocal performance, interspersed with personal longing (‘I have the desire (ākāṃkṣa) that you will return my husband victoriously (bijaẏī beśe) into my

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lap.’). Again commenting, Hak praises this prayer as ‘beautiful’, creating suspense and surprise among the audience members. When he asks them what they think, they do not to respond to his question unanimously. Cashing in on this uncertainty, Hak puts the audience reaction in dialogue with the hero Jafar: Some of you say, it’s good, some say, it’s bad. And what does Jafar say? He makes a funny gesture with his left hand. ‘What kind of prayer do you make?’ In his right hand he had his sword. With the tip of his sword, he made a stroke on (his wife’s) hands (raised for prayer). ‘Down! Put your hands down with amen. Take your hands down. This is not a mere joke (ṭāmˡchā, from tāmāśā)!’ The lady says to him: ‘I don’t understand what fault I have committed. I was slapped and got the stroke of the sword on my hands.’ Hazrat Jafar says: ‘Ofat, you don’t understand. My Prophet made a prayer that I will become a martyr for Islam. You say that I shall come back. You made a prayer opposed to the direction of the Prophet (nabir ulṭā doẏā), therefore I slapped you.’25

After this demonstration of the hero’s determination and the absoluteness of his martyrdom, his romantic dedication is proven. He gives his fearful wife an ultimate vow of endless love that cannot be broken by death. Hak also gives more space to the wife’s perspective than does Sayeedi. Hak repeats the hero’s sentence ‘I will certainly be a martyr’ (shahīd aibai) as part of the wife’s perception. She realizes the futility of her attempts to dissuade him from leaving, and the listeners of the sermon participate in her perception. After this realization, the wife presses Jafar: As long as you won’t be tied to me by a promise I won’t leave your hand. Promise me (ōẏādā karo) while holding my hand that you won’t forget me even when you get the houris of paradise. I want to stay with you in paradise. I don’t need any other husband. Promise me. What if you forget me when you get the houris?26

Even though the wife’s attempt to trick him into a prayer and her mild blackmail of not letting Jafar go unless he agrees to her wish seem questionable from a moral point of view, it is precisely her emotional reaction that adds to her personality and lends the scene its emotional contours. Finally, the hero promises: ‘If I go to paradise, you will surely accompany me.’27 Both preachers also include a farewell scene with the third commander, ʿAbd Allāh b. Rawāḥa (Ibn Rawaha). While the other scenes had no parallels in the Stories of the Companions, here they seem to draw on and reconfigure a section of the TJ’s compendium. The passage in the Stories of the Companions tells how Ibn Rawaha pauses in battle and persuades himself to continue his fight. He addresses his heart (dil / man) and tells it that he would work against its every desire, such as his love for his wife.28 Both preachers reconfigure and dramatize this soliloquy in their farewell scenes. Sayeedi turns it into a flirtatious game of attraction between the two newlyweds. He tells his audience that it was ‘the day of Jafar’s (wedding followed by the ritual of) joining at the bridal bed (bāsarśajyā) studded with flowers (phulśajyā)’. When Ibn

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 121 Rawaha stood at the chamber, he heard his wife reciting the Quran. When he bids her farewell, his wife responds: ‘Husband! You know that I am this town’s beauty. I also know you are the handsome man of this city. But I haven’t seen you even once filling my heart. Come into the chamber just for a moment so that I can see your appearance (cehārā) just once in my life.’ The husband says: ‘I won’t enter the chamber. If I enter the chamber once, then my infatuation (āmār premer ākarṣaṇ) for you will increase, my love will increase.’ The wife says: ‘I swear I will not entice you to love. If you enter the chamber swiftly, then I will just catch a glimpse of your figure. So that I will be able to make you out among the innumerable men at the court of God on the Day of Judgement and accept you as my husband.’29

Ibn Rawaha, as all the heroes, remains steadfast and assures her that she would recognize him. Still, while the heroes are too cool to cave in or even express their own worries, the audience is made familiar with their beautiful wives and the sensuality of the conversation. While Hak stresses the allegorical dimension of the story more than Sayeedi, he, too, presents role models and dialogues of domestic melodrama. The farewell scenes are hence doubly effective preludes to the heroism of the battle.

Bodily disintegration for the flag of Islam When the two sermons narrate the acts of martyrdom, the focus is on how the three commanders give up their bodies for what in the Hadith had been a relatively abstract symbol, the standard carried to the battlefield and upheld by the commanders. This symbol is already uplifted to a concrete and precious thing in the Stories of the Companions and tells readers that it was made by the Prophet himself. It goes on to describe that Jafar first took the flag in his right hand. The enemy cut his right hand, so that he would drop the flag (jhanḍā gir jāʾe). He at once transferred it to his left hand. When that was cut off, he took the flag from his arms into his mouth and held it tightly. His body was cut into two by somebody from behind and he died. He was thirty-three years old.30

In the sermons, the flag’s symbolic value is further enhanced as the ‘flag of Islam’ (Islāmer jhanḍā / patākā). This name shows its utmost importance and yet is ambiguous enough to connect to different visions of what the symbol stands for. The matter-offact description of Jafar’s martyrdom is transformed by the preachers to include bodily gestures such as Jafar pressing the flag to his breast with what is left of his amputated arms. Sayeedi’s narrative retells the martyrdom three times, each time from a different

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perspective. First, the narrator describes the situation. Second, the hero himself tells his own story and is, as expected, not at all concerned with his obvious suffering, but instead focuses on his promise to the Prophet and his approaching death, which he sensorily perceives as a pleasant aroma. Taking the flag (jhanḍā) in his hand, Jafar proceeded to the front. The unbelievers surrounded Hazrat Jafar. They cut off Hazrat Jafar’s left hand. Hazrat Jafar took the flag in his right hand. They cut off his right hand. Now the two arms were hanging. With his two arms cut off, he held the flag of Islam pressed to his breast and called the companions standing close: ‘Companions of Allah’s Prophet! Tell the Prophet my farewell greetings. And tell the Prophet, that as long as my soul was in my body, I had the flag (patākā) of Islam. Following the order of Allah’s Prophet, I didn’t let the flag drop on the earth. I think I will become a martyr, as through my nose I am already smelling the aroma (sughrāṇ) of the paradise of Allah the Pure.’31

In a third report, two companions tell how they discover the heroic deed, testifying about it to their fellow soldiers, and, by extension, to the audience: We came to bring the flag. Far away, we see that the flag is flying high. We thought: ‘Who raised this flag, who went there before us?’ We went and checked. The unbelievers had cut Hazrat Jafar’s hands and feet. The cut right hand was lying in one direction and the left in another. The two legs were cut and thrown in different directions, the body in yet another. Only the head (and) neck (were left), lying on one side. Jafar was holding up the flag of Islam with his teeth.32

The heroic narratives are not restricted to these parts but affect other parts of Sayeedi’s and Hak’s sermons. Sayeedi weaves their semantics into comments he provides on the political situation at that time, sixteen years after Bangladesh’s War of Independence and shortly before the first national elections. Drawing on the ambiguity of the word Western, Sayeedi classifies West Pakistan, against which Bangladeshis fought, as a ‘Western power’. He also makes clear that ‘they have fought against the oppressors (jālim). They have not fought to establish socialism.’ This is clearly opposed to framing the War of Independence as a fight against an Islamist state ideology and the ‘consciousness of the liberation war’ (muktijuddher cetanā) as secularism, a position held by Bangladeshi secular nationalists. Sayeedi explicitly refers back to the materiality and symbolism of the flag that were established in the heroic narrative. He puts a statement into a freedom fighter’s mouth that parallels the War of Independence with the war to establish ‘Islamic rule’: At this my mahfil today, the secretary general of the Bangladesh freedom fighter association has clearly said – in front of you – he has said to me: ‘I took the wrapping (gelāph) of the holy Kaaba and prayed: “Allah! Just as I had put up the flag of independence (svadhīnatār patākā) – so equally grant me success, Allah, to put up the flag of Islam (islāmer patākā)!”’33

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 123 The martyrdom of the three commanders is also important for Sayeedi to create his version of nationalist sentiment. To do so, he builds on the determination and willingness to sacrifice in the narratives of the bodily disintegration to save the flag, and adds the semantics of blood that are crucial for Bangladeshi nationalist mobilization. Most Bangladeshis know the famous lines from the 1971 speech given by the founding father of Bangladesh, Mujibur Rahman: ‘The history of the Bengali people is the history of staining the streets with the blood of the People of this country’, or ‘as we have given blood, we will continue to give more blood’. Similar ‘bloody’ semantics are reproduced in memorialization of the ‘martyrs’ of the War of Independence and are deeply ingrained in the imaginations of political culture in Bangladesh.34 Sayeedi adopts these semantics to those of his narrative of martyrdom and typical phrases of his and the BJI’s political vision: ‘You must come to that (battle)field, to the field of martyrdom. If you come running to this field, and try to establish (kāẏem) Allah’s religious code (dvīn), then you have to give your blood, you have to give your wealth (māl).’ The energy of nationalist enthusiasm merges with the acts of the Prophet, who ‘himself gave his blood’, and from ‘whose blessed (mubārak) body blood has been shed’.35 While the metaphorics and rhetorical effects of nationalist symbolism are kept, they are carefully realigned. New imaginaries and prefigurations of the occasion and legitimate concern of heroic deeds evolve. Sayeedi goes on to frame his appeal for followers to ‘come to the field of martyrdom’ as a religious imperative called for in the Quran. He does so by linking the Quranic verse Q2:193 with a partial and out-of-context quotation of Q8:73, translating both to Bengali as: ‘If you don’t involve yourself (partake) in this struggle, if you don’t become a partner (śarik) in this jihad, then a great destruction and catastrophe will befall you.’ At the same time, the more concretely Sayeedi describes the general obligation and the giving of blood, the more it loses its active dimension. Sayeedi ultimately ends up equating the martyrdom of the followers of the Islamic movement with enduring social and state-sponsored discrimination and punishment. If one has not been punished, he tells his audience, one is not devoted enough to the joint utopia: My brothers! For that work the Messenger of God has given blood. Has he given (blood) or not? Say hasn’t he done so? What have we been able to do? Up to now we haven’t been jailed even one day, not fined, we haven’t given blood, we haven’t been reviled. If one joins the Islamic movement (islāmi āndolan), one will be reviled, worse things happen. Defamation and abuse will follow. One will be beaten. Jail and fines will occur. You will have to endure. As long as this is not the case, Allah’s rule (dvīn) can [dramatic pause for the audience to answer] not be established.36

Sayeedi channels the enthusiasm of the heroes of martyrdom into action as concretely as possible. He heightens the young listeners’ sense of responsibility, and propagates the ‘Islamic movement’, another general term he tries to occupy for the BJI. When it comes to acting out opposition, he stresses the passive aspects of endurance, probably because he cannot incite people to act against the state. In this sense, Sayeedi oscillates between a revolutionary outlook and a political situation in which democracy is the most promising path to political change.37 At the end, the pragmatist gets the better

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of him. Sayeedi explicitly chooses democracy, without, however, renouncing other possibilities. Violent activism remains an option in a democratic contest: By Allah’s grace an election might come about. If elections happen, then there is a democratic way to establish Allah’s dvīn. There is an opportunity. To make any ideal (ādarśa) achieve success, there are two ways: one is revolution; another is democracy. The way of revolution is slippery with blood. And the way of democracy is easy and effortless.38

From the perspective of the genre of the sermon, something more is at stake. Sayeedi aims to personalize and embody the revolutionary courage of the sermon’s narrative and allows the audience, within the frame of the mahfil, to perform as a courageous community. In doing so, he works to transform public piety into a mass meeting that demonstrates in the political realm the strength of an Islamic movement and its leaders. Sayeedi in 1987 links the symbolic value of the flag to the successful establishment of Allah’s rule in an Islamic state. Hak, in 2014, turns the flag into a metonymic symbol that stands in for the whole of Islam. He, at the same time, brings it in line with the language of honour and blasphemy, and thereby directly connects it to the HI’s demands for draconian blasphemy laws. Jafar, he explains, protects the flag of Islam from being dishonoured (abamānā) and keeps it flying. ‘Hundreds of thousands of soldiers unite and attack Hazrat Jafar’s right hand’, which holds the flag. ‘If the banner (jhanḍā), if the flag (patakā) falls down, then just by this all is lost, all is lost. Even if by giving up one’s life, the flag has to be saved. That’s why their target is the flag, is the flag.’39 Hak goes on to further the concrete identification of the flag not only with the whole of Islam but also with his audience, which overwhelmingly consists of students and staff of the komī mādrāsās. Continuing the semantics and logics of blasphemy, Hak presents both Islam and the madrasas as under attack and in need of protection, while also receiving these attacks as marks of distinction: The Islamic flags of today are the komī mādrāsās. Why are the komī mādrāsās so disrespected? Because of the anger (directed) towards the flag of Islam. The anger of atheists, apostates, unbelievers (nāstik, murtād, beimānrār ākroś). To tread on the flag of Islam, to insult the flag of Islam. If anyone insults the state’s flag, then he is tried in court as an enemy of the state (rāṣṭradrohī). If anyone treads on the flag of Islam and insults the flag of Islam, then he is tried in court as an enemy of the state of God, in God’s court.40

Hak clarifies the metaphoric meaning of the flag before he describes the heroic fight and it reduces the narrative’s dramatic autonomy. On the other hand, it infuses the main symbol and the heroism of the story with an overabundance of meaning. He who saves the flag, who prevails by his selfless determination, saves everything at once. The emphasis on divine judgement is voiced in terms of clear opposition to the judicial system, dangerously close to giving space for vigilante violence.

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 125 When Hak plunges into the scene, he adopts a slow narrative speed. This gives listeners enough time to imagine the hero standing there, amid all the enemies who must join forces to disassemble the hero’s body: Hazrat Jafar. His hand was cut. But he didn’t drop the flag. He took it with his left hand. … So the right hand remained hanging. He pulled the cut part and threw it away. The flag is in his left hand. The enemies see it: ‘Oh, the flag is our target! We cut off the hand. But again we see the flag is lifted.’ Then they attack the left hand, and cut this one, too. A little bit remained hanging. Jafar tore it off with the teeth, and took the flag between his teeth. He is holding on to the flag, the flag of Islam, with his teeth. One has to protect the flag of Islam with one’s life. He holds on to it with his teeth, biting. The blood from his cut arms is streaming out. That’s how he holds it tightly. The flag of Islam. The enemies say: ‘We have done it; we have cut off his arms. But the flag of Islam doesn’t fall to the ground. What’s the matter?’ They see that he holds it with his teeth. ‘So what’s the trick now?’ ‘Cut off his head.’ They swing the sword together. To cut off the head of Hazrat Jafar. When they hit the head, it flies far away. But the flag does not fall to ground. He holds on to it with his teeth. And the body simply remains standing. … Isn’t it supposed to fall? The body remains standing. When the enemies see: ‘We have cut the head but the flag didn’t fall to the ground and the body remains standing’, they say: ‘Is this a human body or a ghost or what??’ and all run away. Hundreds of thousand soldiers all flee.41

As Sayeedi’s third depiction of the martyrdom was an outward one, so Hak narrates Jafar’s death via the dialogues of the enemies, who are scared by the hero’s determination even in the face of death. But the hero’s dedication does not end with his death. His task is not completed until he has fulfilled the preordained ‘serial’. Even 300 companions, Hak tells his audience, cannot remove the flag from Jafar’s dental grip. But then Ibn Rawaha pushes them aside. He tells Jafar that he is Commander Number Three (tin number senāpati) and reminds Jafar of the Hadith in which Muhammad had declared that the flag will pass on to him after Jafar’s death. He assures him that he ‘will not make any fuss (gāddāri) with the flag’ and ‘will not be faithless’ (be-imānī). Upon these words, ‘the flag automatically came into the hands of Ibn Rawaha’.42 Hak goes on to connect the pleasure of fulfilling the Prophet’s preordained expectation to yet another persuasive point. Just as the flag flew into the hands of Ibn Rawaha, ‘the flag of the Tablighis falls, as fate decrees (kudratibhābe), into the hands of the komī mādrāsās’. He appeals to his audience that ‘we have to save (rakṣā karā) the flag of Islam. As long as we are alive, we won’t allow it to be trodden upon. We won’t allow it to be insulted. We won’t allow it to fall down on the earth. We will save it insha’allah!’43 Once the audience enthusiastically subscribes to his call, Hak substitutes the word for save (rakṣā karā) with hefājat karā, thereby semantically subsuming the komī mādrāsās under the HI: ‘Once you go home, keep in mind (jāinā rāikhen) that all these komī mādrāsās are for what? To save (hephājat karā) Islam.’44

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Decoding the narrative of heroism allegorically helps to connect the sometimes contradictory roles Hak offers to his audience. On the one hand, he rationalizes the hero’s actions, showing that they only stand in for something else, rather than presenting them as examples that should be imitated. Hak emphasizes time and again that the komī mādrāsās stand for peace and against any kind of violence. When I spoke to audience members after the sermon, they also very clearly stressed that the depiction of violence in the story would in no way serve to justify violence in contemporary contexts. In a context in which violence against alleged blasphemers was at its peak, it is easy to question these assertions; however, the sermon does not call on listeners to repeat the heroes’ behaviour. On the other hand, the sermon conveys the feeling of being under attack, of heroically upholding the urgency of protecting an objectified Islam that is the ‘property’ of each believer.45 To the young men in the audience, it matters that the heroes are observed protecting Islam by admiring women and powerful but eventually thwarted enemies. As there is no one else to protect Islam, all responsibility and initiative lies with the particular movement of young men that are otherwise often socially excluded, the object rather than subject of social developments. The story of the flag emphasizes the centrality of the komī mādrāsās in general and the HI in particular. The identificatory patterns turn blasphemy into an emotional rather than legal issue. It is woven into a narrative populated with heroes who defend an Islam that is under attack and about to ‘drop to the ground’. It is noteworthy, furthermore, how similar the narratives of the two preachers are, despite the fact that they come from different sects with different followings, publics and political positions. We, of course, do not know if Hak was directly influenced by Sayeedi’s 1987 sermon. With only minor differences, both preachers dramatize the hero’s farewell from his family and his martyrdom with relatively uninterrupted storytelling that includes retelling decisive scenes from multiple perspectives, establishing dialogues and providing vivid details. Both preachers foreground the perception of the hero through the eyes of his beloved, fellow soldiers or enemies, while he himself chooses to let deeds, not words, speak. There is stable set of narrative situations and forms on which preachers can draw to provide their young audience with belligerent, active and determined heroes. Narratives of heroism are also taken up by preachers who do not aim to similarly mobilize their audiences. Their narratives amplify the reach of the heroic commonplaces, and at the same time, render them more diffuse, open them up to different interpretations of heroism, and sketch different kinds of masculinity. A sea of variations makes it difficult to maintain specific persuasive points. Take, for example, Hosen’s narrative about the famous tenth-century Sufi Abū l-Qāsim al-Junayd. The basic plot is quite similar to that of the heroic narratives described so far: an extremely asymmetrical fight in which the outnumbered Muslims nevertheless triumph. However, the narrative’s mood could hardly be more different from the belligerent heroism of Sayeedi and Hak. The account starts with a bet made by Junayd, who at that point of his life was not yet a Sufi, but a wrestler at the king’s court. Challenged by the king, Junayd responds: ‘Arrange a wrestling match (kusti). There is no one on this earth who could defeat

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 127 me in wrestling.’ A prize is offered to anyone who can beat Junayd. A relative of the Prophet, who is starving, sees the poster and decides to challenge Junayd. Hosen signals a humoristic distance to the heroic commonplace by colouring his exaggerated description of the asymmetry of the fighters with witty everyday speech: The king says: ‘Dude, do you wanna fight or die (right away) (laṛˡbi nāki marˡbi)? Have ya seen Junayd?’ He says: ‘No, I haven’t.’ ‘Go and have a look.’ He went to see Junayd and finds him. ‘Oh boy! What a guy! A wrestler like an elephant!’ The Prophet’s descendent (aulād-e rasūl) had an empty stomach, a lean and thin man. He says to Junayd: ‘Oh Junayd, I came to wrestle with you.’ Junayd counters: ‘Did you come to fight or to die right away? If I just lean my hand on you, then you’re finished.’ The Prophet’s descendent – one of the Prophet’s family! – says: ‘Junayd, wrestle properly. If I die, I die. Never you mind!’46

The Prophet’s descendant, like the martyr heroes, defies death and remains steadfastly fixed on his goal despite the obvious danger. Hosen stresses the asymmetrical strength once more by comparing Junayd to an elephant and the Prophet’s descendant to a mosquito. His bodily posture is less masculine and does not attract any admiration. Furthermore, instead of fighting, the Prophet’s descendant informs Junayd about his identity and the hardships he endures. Quoting Junayd’s reaction, Hosen relates how Junayd perceives his conversation with his opponent while at the same time he hears the voice of the Prophet: The man tells me (his story) in one ear, and I listen to his words with one ear. In the other ear, I hear how the Prophet, wearing his Sufi cloak (kamle wālā nabī), calls out to me from Medina: ‘Oh Junayd! Can’t you make a smile blossom on the face of my family’s descendant?’47

Hosen retells the incident once more in a narrator’s voice and describes the huge effect of the Prophet’s and his descendant’s words on Junayd, who sheds tears and lets his feeble opponent win the wrestling match. In short, the hero this time achieves his goal by professing his weakness and asking for compassionate treatment instead of sacrificing himself. Junayd does not continue to play the role of the enemy, but is transformed by the suffering of his counterpart. What started as a narrative of heroism turns into a narrative of renouncing – rather than celebrating – combat. Hosen’s narrative interweaves elements from narratives of heroism with those of the strength of Islam and adds a new element: the compassion of one of the dramatic figures with the other, who proclaims his suffering. In the following, I will trace how this compassion shapes preachers’ promises of divine mercy as much as the ways they affect their audiences.48

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From divine mercy to human compassion Discussing the spatial imagination of waz mahfils and the sermons’ ritual frame, I have stressed divine mercy as the central goal of waz mahfils. Preachers certainly advise their audiences that ‘prayer (namāz) is the key to paradise (behester/jannater cābi)’, or that paradise will be granted ‘in return for the daily five prayers’ (pratidin pā̃ c waqter namāz ādāẏ karār binimaẏe).49 Nevertheless, there are other ways to mercy and preachers frequently encapsulate God’s declarations of mercy within narratives. In a description by Siraji, God Himself hears the Quranic recitation of a son at his father’s deathbed. ‘At the beginning of the recitation (telāwat) he addressed Me, Allah, with Raḥmān, and he called My Prophet with (sūra) yā sīn.’ Typical for speech acts of mercy as they are told in waz mahfils, Allah’s subsequent proclamation of mercy is addressed to an audience within the sermon’s narrative, in this case to the angels: ‘Angels, be witnesses: I, the Raḥmān, have forgiven, because of the baraka of my servant’s recitation of the Quran, the sins of his father’s life. Not only that, by the baraka of my servant’s recitation of the Quran, I, Allah, have also removed the pain of this servant’s death.’50 When Siddique cites a similar declaration of mercy God granted for loving the Prophet, he emphasizes the servant’s friendship to God. The wordplay between the Urdu banda (servant) and the Bengali bandhu (friend) allows for proximity despite the disparate meaning of the two words. This play poetically hints at a smooth role reversal and alludes to an egalitarian utopia. At the declaration’s end stands a Quranic verse: ‘My Allah says: “Oh people of this earth, when the servant becomes my friend (Q3:31b, Ar.) and forgive you your sins; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”’ This verse is not the climax, and Siddique uses it to slow down his rhythm and heighten the suspense. He dwells on the severity and sheer number of sins and the extent of God’s mercy. He then quotes the Quranic verse again and translates it in a declaration of mercy all-encompassing in its promise as in its verbosity: ‘When the servant (banda) becomes my friend (bandhu)’, my Allah, the Master of Mankind, says, ‘even if the servant has as many sins as a mountain – even if he has more sins than the ocean – dear Prophet, if the servant has more sins than the Himalaya, see, see, oh servant, what a friend can actually do for a friend (Q3:31b, Ar.) and forgive you your sins; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. I, Allah, the Master of Mankind, will then forgive the sins and misdeeds of the servant’s entire life (tamām jībaner jindegīr gunāhkhātāgulo)’.51

Because of the mercy bestowed on them, believers need not despair. Similar passages are common at waz mahfils. After reciting Q4:64a, Qaderi translates: My Allah says: ‘Oh servant, keep in mind, you have to know. If, sinning and sinning again, you amassed a mountain of sins, if you are cast away (barabād), if you yourself are sure “there can’t be any other destination for me than hell. Hell to the right, hell to the left, hell above, and hell below. I committed so many sins Allah will certainly, certainly send me to hell.”’ (Then) my Allah says: ‘Impossible!

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 129 Servant, don’t lose your hope (nirāś) for my mercy (rahˡmat). Don’t you get frustrated.’52

There are sectarian differences. Qaderi stresses that the believer shall turn to the Prophet, Sayeedi focuses on repentance (tawba). However, both preachers make the promise of unfathomable mercy for every kind and quantity of sins and the plea that listeners shall not despair (nirāś) of Allah’s mercy (raḥmat). Sayeedi connects the latter thought to the Quran by presenting it as a translation of Q39:53, with Beng. nirāś as the equivalent to Ar. qaniṭa: Allah the Pure continues: (Q39:53a, Ar.) ‘Say: “O my people who have been prodigal against yourselves, do not despair (lā taqnaṭū) of God’s mercy.”’ Allah the Pure says: ‘Prophet, say to them, “oh all of you my servants, you who have transgressed, that means who have sinned, among all the people who came to today’s mahfil those who are adulterers, those who are drinkers, those who are gamblers, those who are bribe-takers, those who are usurers, those who have quit prayers, those who have committed the most deadly sins with Allah the Master of Mankind, all who have sinned anywhere in the world—”’ Allah says: ‘Prophet, call them and say: “don’t despair (nirāś haẏe yeo nā), don’t despair of Allah’s mercy (rahˡmat).”’ Praise be to God! How many sins have you committed? If your sins are (heaped up) like a mountain, then my Allah’s mercy is (high) like the sky. And if your sins are (heaped up) to the sky, then surely Allah’s mercy even exceeds Allah’s throne (ʿarsh).53

Sayeedi here enumerates all the different groups of sinners who are forgiven regardless of their various misdeeds. That the exact sin does not matter is emphasized stylistically by grammatically equalizing all sinners with parallel construction, parallel speech rhythm, repetition of the phrase ‘those who’ (yārā), and using words of equal length to denote sinners. The words for drinkers, bribe takers and usurers (madˡkhor, ghuṣˡkhor, sudˡkhor) share the same morphology and create internal rhymes, charging the passage with an additional poetic quality. Theological differences aside, the commonplaces of mercy establish attitudes and truths deeper than sectarian divides or concrete rhetorical goals. The mahfils stress the compassionate aspects of God and His Prophet more than they command the listeners to perform the right action. Mercy seems easily attainable and God is emphatically forgiving of all sins, so long as the sinner turns to Him openly and trusts in Him. His mercy can even be reached, Khalilur jokingly explains, when the listeners do not follow the preacher’s advice at all.54 The sinner is asked to deepen his personal relation to merciful figures like the Prophet while sinful acts and punishment are hardly dwelt upon. In the declarations of Allah, mercy is granted almost immediately. This joyous flash of mercy, at last, fits the hyperbolic rhetoric forgiving even mountains of sin. Allah performs the speech act of mercy at the end of the scene in long sentences that

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themselves follow a characteristic progression of rising tension, slowing and final release. They typically end with the preacher and audience exclaiming ‘Praise to Allah!’ to jointly express wonder and joy upon witnessing the act of mercy. These attitudes are far from new. A glimpse into the Bengali waz collections from the 1920s shows God addressing the angels as ‘witnesses’ to the emphatic forgiveness of ‘the totality of the sins of those who are sitting under the canopy of the light that I sent. Not even a single stain of sin will remain on their bodies.’ God furthermore asks the angels about the delivery of the sermon. They tell him that it was uttered ‘accurately and mellifluously’ (sulalita bacane). When He inquires about the feeling (bhāb) of the people upon hearing the preacher’s words, the angels report ‘some became drunk (mātoẏārā), floating on the boundless sea in the hope of obtaining your celestial love and are sacrificing tears with a mind purified by love (prembigalitacitte). Some have become listless in the love to the Noble Prophet (s.a.w.) and have fallen to the ground having forgotten their egotism (ātma-man).’55 Allah’s mercy then and now is not simply declared by the preachers as a promise to their audience. Rather, God Himself grants mercy to listeners who are moved by His message. This leads to the questions: How are listeners affected by the sermons? And how can they can reach the pious state that triggers God’s mercy? To answer these questions, we need to go beyond the declarations of mercy and the idealized description of the angels’ report and ask about the ways preachers build their narratives. My hypothesis is that the declarations of mercy are part of narratives constructed to bring listeners to the states they know will bring – from the very same narratives – divine mercy. The dynamics of this process can be disentangled by discerning the various dimensions of compassion.56 In particular, two aspects stand out. First, divine mercy is conceptualized as human compassion. Second, human compassion is described according to poetic principles that evoke emotions deemed worthy of compassion. Divine mercy draws attention to the position of the recipient of mercy and to the hierarchy that distances him from the one granting mercy. Compassion, on the other hand, is much more reciprocal: it is triggered by pain caused by seeing someone else in a miserable state and, often, the ability to place oneself in their shoes. Allah’s declarations of mercy cited so far were stable and unidirectional. Even the closeness to Allah and His Prophet are explicit ideals that sinners have to strive for in order to attain mercy. Listeners and the preacher can only marvel and express their wonder about the boundless mercy promised and performed in the dialogues between Allah and Muhammad. The sinner is the object of divine deliberation and mercy is situated in the distant, autonomous, merciful God. The process of attaining mercy sketched so far focuses on the act of mercy, while mercy remains an unfathomable quality of God. In the Quran, as in the examples I cited so far, mercy is predominantly an act performed by God and sometimes by Muhammad (e.g. Q9:128). For the believers, it is one of the most pressing issues, because it is the only way out of a nearly unavoidable punishment (Q16:61, Q35:45). All kinds of things occur because of God’s mercy: rain, seasons, wind, day and night, oceans, celestial bodies, divine revelation and not going astray.57 God does not need to, and maybe even cannot, ‘feel with’ the sinner that he

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 131 has mercy upon. And to say that Muhammad’s intercession would be motivated by Muhammad imagining himself in the place of the sinners might be absurd or even outrageous. Nevertheless, the dividing line between mercy and compassion is perhaps not as clear-cut as it seems. The friendship described in Siddique’s sermon involved a more reciprocal closeness and emotional relationship that includes the feelings of the granter of mercy. The semantic field of the equivalents of the Arabic terms for mercy – often derivatives of the roots gh–f–r and r–ḥ–m – in Bengali also encompass affection for someone and perceiving that someone is suffering. Daẏā includes kindness, love and compassion, and karuṇā means not only mercy but also compassion and pity. Sympathy in a narrower sense, sanānubhūti, is not used in the sermons. In an important article on the history of the idea of compassion in Bengal during the nineteenth century, Dipesh Chakrabarty tells us that aesthetic theory and literary depiction greatly influenced the interiorization of daẏā and karuṇā in the collective subject of modern Bengal.58 For my analysis, it is crucial that compassion transmits emotions between individuals in real life, and that compassion has been central to discussions about transmitting emotions from stage or literature to the recipients. The dramatic arts, be it in the analysis of Aristotle or Bharata, have proven to be particularly fruitful for developing models that describe how emotions are transmitted from one party (a performer) to another (an audience). Here, compassion, sympathy, feeling with another person were often taken as basic emotions important to group formation or even humanity at large. Most famously, Lessing declared that ‘the most compassionate (mitleidigste) human is the best human’.59 These discussions highlight the ethical dimension of poetics and show that because of its effects on emotions and its role in subject formation, poetic communication is inherently socially relevant. As rasa theory observes, emotions cannot be commanded into being, but must be induced by suggestion.60 Compassion is no exception. Literary theory provides elaborate models of how texts accomplish such suggestion, involving and guiding their recipients to particular affective states. The declarations of mercy alone do not allow listeners of waz mahfils to make the narrative ‘their own’ in the sense of compassion as a poetic principle. It is hardly possible to identify with Allah and Muhammad granting mercy; their roles are so different and detached from what the audience’s role is. In long narratives, preachers can motivate divine mercy in human ways and present the heroes of compassion to the audience in ways that favour the transmission of passion to the audience. The heroes of compassion do not endure their suffering stoically as the martyr heroes do. To the contrary, they express their passions in the biggest way possible. The pious stance publicly displayed, particularly during the final prayer, is prepared by and builds on the narrative upheavals of the whole sermon. The narrative is conducive to a redemptive process precisely because of its dramatic poetics. The central figure is a compassionate Prophet whose mercy is based on the communicative and affective possibilities of narrated compassion. The figure of the Prophet in waz mahfils connects ‘compassion as mercy’, ‘compassion as a social emotion’ and ‘compassion as a process of reception’. The paradigmatic and most traditional situation of the Prophet’s compassion is his intercession for the sinners.

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It has long since provided consolation to believers in Islam and is reported in various Hadith in the following contours: On the field of Hashr, on the Day of Judgement, ‘God gathers all mankind on a hill. The sun draws closer to them and they are overwhelmed by fear and grief. Finally they agree to seek someone who could intercede with God on their behalf.’61 The Muslim community goes from prophet to prophet (from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses), all of whom cannot intercede for them but plead for their own redemption, saying ‘myself, myself, myself! (nafsī nafsī nafsī)’. Finally, Jesus guides them to Muhammad. Muhammad prostrates before Allah, who says: ‘O Muhammad, raise thy head (irfaʿ raʾsaka) and speak. It will be listened to; ask and it will be granted, intercede (ishfaʿ) and it will be accepted’, upon which Muhammad utters the formula: ‘My community, my community’ (ummatī, ummatī).62 While the accounts vary on the number of prophets the sinners turn to, the number of times Muhammad intercedes, and the conditions that he sets before everyone can be forgiven, the key utterances ‘myself, myself ’, ‘raise your head’ and ‘my community, my community’ are constant features of all versions. The narrative frame is Muhammad telling the story of the incident to his companions. The narrative switches to the first person when Muhammad prostrates and pleads for his community. This narrative from the Hadith focuses on the intercession of the Prophet and the mercy of Allah. In most accounts, no insight into Muhammad’s inner motivations is given, and believers’ interactions with Allah – prostration, command to rise, praise – are based on distance, divine glory and mercy. However, there are versions that open up possibilities for a more internal motivation for Muhammad’s compassion. In the popular Hadith collection Riyāḍ aṣ-Ṣāliḥīn, Muhammad weeps while praying to Allah for his Umma, and Allah sends Gabriel to inquire about the cause of Muhammad’s weeping (mā yubīhi). Even though the reason for the tears is not given, Allah sends Gabriel to let Muhammad know that He will comfort Muhammad with regard to his Umma.63 Narratives of this incident at waz mahfils describe the setting in the field of Hashr in richer detail and include shifts in perspective. Qaderi, for example, narrates the dialogue with the prophets from the point of view of the sinners: The field of Hashr is too hot, the scorching heat of the sun is on our heads. Swimming in our own sweat we say, ‘myself, myself ’. ‘Oh father (Adam), please speak with Allah on our behalf so that he will forgive us.’ The Prophet Adam will say: ‘I myself say “myself, myself ”, I cry for myself. I am not in a position to speak in favour (supāriś) for you.’64

When the believers reach Muhammad, Qaderi continues, he will be prostrating and crying (kā̃ dben) with the words of the intercessory phrase on his lips: ‘My Lord, present me my community’ (Ar. hab lī ummatī). Muhammad receives them and takes them under his ‘black cloak’ (kālo kambaler bhitare).65 Siddique, too, takes on the situation from the Hadith and reconfigures it by omitting Gabriel as a mediator. In his account, Allah addresses Muhammad directly to inquire about his emotional state using vocatives that stress their close friendship.

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 133 Both preachers place considerable weight on Muhammad’s crying as an expression of his deep concern for the Umma. This concern is expressed in a ‘transtemporal, inaugurated and presentic eschatology’ that connects the now of the listeners to the future of the Day of Judgement.66 The dialogue creates a co-presence of God and Prophet, the Day of Judgement, and the listeners on whose behalf Muhammad intercedes. Furthermore, both preachers situate the act of narration in the Prophet’s lifetime, which they set as the story’s present. The framing narrative of the Hadith allows preachers to depict how the suffering of the believers on the Day of Judgement affects Muhammad, the living person. Anticipating the events of the Day of Judgement in a conversation with his daughter Fatima, ‘Allah’s beloved Prophet allowed blessed tears (cokher pāni mobārak) to fall from his eyes’.67 Another narrative includes a conversation about the Day of Judgement between God and Muhammad that took place at the time of the Prophet’s death. Back then, God wanted to take Muhammad ‘to him’, but Muhammad chose to stay in his grave in a typical gesture of intimate affection to stay close to his community. Muhammad refers back to this decision, inspired by affection, on the Day of Judgement, by accusingly asking: How could Allah be so cruel as to send his dear ones to hell in front of his eyes? The account leaves no doubt that Allah does not want to inflict pain onto the Prophet who would be forced to see the pain of his community members. The Bengali ‘lift your head’ (māthā oṭhān) is a faithful equivalent of the Arabic irfaʿ raʾsaka. But while in the Hadith the phrase indicates that Muhammad gets up from prayer, in the sermon it is invested with emotions, suggesting that Allah wants to say: ‘rise from despair’, ‘cheer up’. When tomorrow the resurrection ground (qiyāmat-er maidān) will be established, Allah’s dear one will fall prostrate (sajda) in front of Allah’s seat (ejˡlās) and cry: ‘My Master (rabbī), present me my community (hab lī ummatī), oh my community!’ Allah will say: ‘Oh friend! What happened to you? Today, on this harsh plain of Hashr, in front of my Court of Judgement, you are falling down in prostration and you are crying for the Umma for which you have struggled, behind which you have spent sixty-six years of your life? Oh Messenger, raise your head from despair, what happened to you, tell me!’ Allah’s Beloved will respond: ‘Allah, I don’t want anything else, only forgive my sinful community members! Allah I don’t want anything, the Umma I want, forgive the Umma! Oh Allah the Pure, at the time of my death, you had said: “Oh friend, after your death you will not stay in this world, you will come close to me.” I said: “I will stay embedded in the earth of Medina until the Day of Judgement, taking my community members on my lap (ummatguli kole kare kare). I didn’t leave my Umma behind. Allah, until the Day of Judgement, I, the Prophet, rested in the earth of Medina, holding my sinful ummats on my lap. How can you today, on this cruel plain of Hashr, in front of my eyes (āmār cokher sāmne) send my sinful ummats to hell? Oh Allah, forgive my sinful ummats!’

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Allah the Exalted said: ‘Oh friend, lift your head, you have cried for sixty-six years for the Umma, and today you will cry in front of Allah, lift your head (māthā oṭhān), oh Messenger of Allah, my friend, my comrade! Listen, without asking you, I Allah will not send a single community member to hell!’68

Another key dialogue between Allah and Muhammad set within the Prophet’s lifetime is a commonplace of popular Islamic devotional culture found as far away as in contemporary Levantine mawlid chants. In these chants, Muhammad’s pleading to Allah is recounted in the following way: ‘O Lord, I do not ask you for myself, Lord! O Lord, I do not ask you for Aisha, my wife, O Lord, and I do not ask you for Fatima, my daughter, Lord, and I do not ask you for my family – but I ask you, O Lord, for my community!’69 In this Lebanese version, the tension between the family and the Umma could be interpreted as one of formal allegiance and belonging. The transposition of the narrative to the Prophet’s lifetime in waz mahfils allows preachers to represent the Prophet’s emotions. Sirajul Islam sets the dialogue shortly before Muhammad’s death. Muhammad asks for Gabriel’s opinion as he lays dying, hoping Gabriel will object. Instead, Gabriel tells him: ‘The time has come for you to bid farewell to the world (dunyā).’ When he sees that Allah’s Prophet cries and sheds tears, Gabriel calls out: ‘Oh Messenger of God, oh beloved of God! Oh dear Prophet, for whom are you shedding your tears? I came to understand, I think you are shedding tears for your Fatima. Oh Prophet, you don’t have to cry for Fatima. Allah the Master of Mankind has already stated, oh dear Prophet, that your Fatima will become the leader of all women of paradise.’ ‘No, Gabriel, no, I don’t shed tears for Fatima.’ ‘Then whom do you cry for? I came to understand, I think you are shedding tears for Hasan and Hussain?’ ‘No, Gabriel, no, I don’t shed tears for Hasan and Hussain’. ‘Oh dear Prophet, then for whom do you cry?’ Allah’s Prophet calls out: ‘Oh Gabriel, I cry, oh, I cry for my sinful orphaned community (āmār gunāgār etim ummater janye)’.70

The Prophet not only sheds tears when praying to Allah on the Day of Judgement; he also cries and sheds tears during his lifetime (ten times in the above short excerpt alone). His denial that he cries for his wife, daughter or grandchildren leaves unexplained why exactly Muhammad cries. What does it mean for the Prophet to shed tears ‘for’ (janya in the Bengali waz mahfils, without the particle in the Arabic mawlid account) someone? Is it really, as mercy would have it, ‘just’ a prayer for the salvation of the relatives and the Umma? In the accounts from his lifetime, Muhammad does not shed tears because he is overwhelmed in the presence of the Divine, but because he is tender and compassionate towards his family and the Umma. What the preachers describe is an emotional reaction of a Prophet who suffers because of something else, that is, either along with his relatives and community or even because of their absence.

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 135 The generic expression of the ‘sinful orphan(ed) community’, uttered in the context of family members and in connection with the image of the Prophet taking his Umma on his lap, furthermore hints at an affectionate, filial relation between the Prophet and the objects of his compassion.

Passionate Prophet In the narratives of waz mahfils, the Prophet can feel compassion as a social emotion. This makes it possible for preachers to give motivation to – and therefore narrate – the unfathomable compassion of the Prophet. The Prophet’s compassion need not remain unexplained or ‘only’ motivated by divine attributes as it is in the case of Allah. The fact that Muhammad’s compassion can be placed in narrative terms has repercussions on the ways the preachers can communicate compassion to the audience, who know it as a social emotion from their own lives. ‘Compassion as a social emotion’ structurally overlaps with ‘compassion as a poetic principle’. Above I mentioned the importance of the compassionate hero expressing his emotions as being distinct from the stoic martyr hero. Well-known in religious history, particularly in Christianity and Shiite Islam, compassion for others is often linked to the passionate suffering of a compassionate figure. In many waz mahfils, too, the compassionate hero is able to be passionate, to suffer. Biographical aspects relating to his own suffering and passion that might motivate his compassion towards others are crucial. He becomes an individual with a biography rather than ‘just’ being a superhuman Prophet endowed with divine mercy. The preacher who makes the strongest connections between the Prophet’s compassion and passion is Hosen. He owes much of his popularity to his powerful narratives, which are particularly popular among young people who make up a visibly large part of the crowds he draws. At a waz mahfil near Komilla, I witnessed the atmosphere of excitement that had built up for his sermon. While the liberties he takes in his narratives raise suspicion or resentment by more scholarly preachers or those stressing rhetorical as opposed to poetic principles, his role as a popular preacher who does not aspire to a religious scholar’s authority leaves enough space for him to explore narrative potentialities. I would even argue that the rhetorical possibilities he and other preachers have is in large part derived from the poetic principles of narrative. While he cannot pin down explicit theological truths, his influence lies with the implicit meanings and receptive roles that his listeners eagerly take up. Let us turn to one example in which Hosen forges an explicit link between the bodily suffering of the Prophet and the redemption of the Umma. The narrative begins with Aisha making a terrifying discovery in an intimate situation: One day I asked for permission to enter the Prophet’s chamber after he had bathed: ‘Oh Messenger of God (yā rasūlu ‘llāh)! Allow me to massage your blessed figure (cehārā) with oil!’ After I got permission and started to oil him, I see that the figure of my Prophet is so beautiful that it is impossible to turn one’s eyes away. But on this beautiful form, there are sometimes deep black marks (dāg) on the Prophet’s figure.71

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In Aisha’s inquiry about the story behind the marks below, several points are noteworthy. Remembering the cause of the marks causes pain for Muhammad. After hearing the story, Aisha feels compassion towards the Prophet and wants to remove the Prophet’s pains. The Prophet, however, explicitly links the marks of his suffering to the redemption of his community. When prophesying the events on the Day of Judgement, he emphasizes that he will not be able to stand hearing the cries of the sinners, just as in the narratives of the Day of Judgement discussed earlier. Allah, finally, accepts the logic of ‘preserving’ the Prophet’s scars and promises that he will expand His love for the Prophet to the Umma, to those who are compassionate and love the Prophet: Mother Aisha says: ‘I asked the Prophet: “Oh Messenger of Allah! I want to know: what are the deep black marks on (your) beautiful figure?”’ My Prophet turned his face towards mother Aisha. He let his tears flow, their drops covering his cheeks: ‘Oh Aisha, don’t ask about this thing, Aisha! My, the Prophet’s, liver-heart (kalijā) cannot bear the mention of these marks!’ ‘Huzur, I want to know where these marks come from. Are these from chicken pox?’ ‘No, Aisha, these are not from chicken pox, no, Aisha, that’s not it.’ ‘Then what are the marks from?’ ‘Oh Aisha, those marks are not from chicken pox, they are not from chicken pox, those marks are from the attacks of the youth on the park of Taif [town close to Mecca]! Oh Aisha, not only once, or twice – without any fault of mine, without any reason, they hit me so hard that I lost my senses three times. The marks from their stones stay on my body.’ Mother Aisha Siddiqa says: ‘Oh Messenger of Allah! If these marks are from the attacks on the earth of Taif, I am pained and shocked (kaṣta, byathā) when I look at them. Huzur, I know that my Allah accepts your prayer (doẏā). Please pray so that Allah will clear the marks.’ My Prophet cries: ‘Oh Aisha, no, no, don’t ever say this, oh Aisha! I won’t cleanse these marks. On the day the field of Hashr will be set up, the sun will come down half a hand above (everyone), the skullcaps will burst because of the heat, and the brains will drop out of the nose and mouth and ears. On that day, my sinful community members (ummats) will take the burden of their sins on their heads and run around like crazy. Oh Aisha, they will cry like orphans and call: “Where is the Prophet, where is the Prophet!” On that day, I, the Prophet, won’t be able to bear (sajya karˡte) hearing these calls. Then I, the Prophet, will claim, for each of the marks, the redemption (nājāt) of millions of sinful ummats!’ My Allah says: ‘Oh my friend, you saved the marks from the attacks of the youth on the field of Taif, come on, friend, I give you my word – do you really know how much I love you? I, Allah, have, during the thirty-six years of your life, not allowed one fly or mosquito to sit on your beautiful figure, nor allowed one bug to bite you, my friend – and you have saved the marks caused by stones on this

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 137 very figure for the redemption of the Umma. You can go now, I, Allah, gave you my word that those who will be your Umma, those who will live according to your ideals, those who will live up to your love, those who will give you love, friend, those who will stay on your side, I, Allah, will, if given the chance, I, Allah, will forgive them.’72

This quotation shows how Hosen narratively steers the audience to immediately feel the Prophet’s suffering, going far beyond forging explicit conceptual linkages. Framed as a Hadith narrated by Aisha, it features a narrator, presumably the preacher, who always prefaces Prophet with the word ‘my’. He moves the narrative from the description of facts (the black marks on the Prophet’s body) to the direct speech of Aisha and Muhammad. Then he disappears. The dialogue is interrupted only by short inquit formulas used to indicate who is speaking. Direct speech is emphasized by the extensive use of vocative particles (yā rasūl Allāh, Aisha re, Hujur, nāre Aisha, bandhu go) the two, and later three, dramatis personae use to address each other. It is no longer a communication between the preacher and the audience; it is now between the characters inside the narrative. First, the preacher as a narrator withdraws, and then even Aisha no longer serves as narrator of the story. The dramatic scene is now formed out of the characters’ dialogue alone. This reorientation of the deixis from the ‘here and now’ of the sermon to the ‘then and there’ of the scene is also supported by demonstratives, such as ‘this thing’ and ‘these marks’ that point to something ‘seen’ within the story.73 Of course, the preacher is always present as a performer, and there is never ‘direct’ communication between the dramatic characters and audience members. Still, the effect of such a scene is much more immediate than if the same events were told by a narrator, be it in indirect speech or as a summary of events (consider, for example, the lack of affective power of simply stating that ‘the Prophet was pained’). The opposition between the narrator’s depiction of events and the characters’ speech is called the ‘mode’ of narrative.74 It seems to be no coincidence that in delineating what narratologist Gérard Genette calls a mimetic as opposed to a diegetic mode, narratology has often had recourse to spatial and visual metaphors such as distance and closeness, and other commentators have put forth the metaphors ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. We could say that a mimetic mode of narration – scenes presented in which the characters speak – draws the listeners into the scene. It also creates a co-presence – here of Aisha, Muhammad, the listeners, their different layers of time and the Day of Judgement. All these techniques transmit emotions to the audience evoking the compassion of the audience in a literary sense. The passage, however, also has a ‘weakness’ in the way it connects the Prophet’s suffering to the act of mercy: the passion of the Prophet does not match his later act of compassion. The pains of the Prophet show his capacity to suffer pain, a capacity Allah lacks and thus makes it easier to perceive Muhammad as compassionate. However, the pains caused by the stones are not the same as the pains – he cannot bear to hear his Umma’s cries – that trigger his later compassion. What would be such a direct correlation? It is hinted at in the generic formulation of the ‘orphan Umma’ (etim ummat): Would not a Prophet be most compassionate to this orphan Umma if he himself had experienced the pains of being an orphan? And is not Muhammad

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an orphan? Let us turn to the description of the pains experienced by the child Muhammad when he longed for parental love. After narrating the account of Aisha inquiring about the black spots, Hosen describes several scenes of the child Prophet’s yearning for his father. The first is a juxtaposition of the orphaned Prophet to the other children. They are picked up by their parents in the afternoon, caressed and fed with different kinds of dates, khejur and kharmā, a commonplace of Bengali descriptions of Arabia.75 Again, the child’s pains are not merely narrated, but expressed repeatedly by the suffering hero himself. And, like in the scenes above, they are expressed in an intimate conversation. Muhammad tells his dear conversation partner, this time his mother, that her guess as to why he is suffering is incorrect: He was with his friends on the playground, with whom he went at night and in the morning. They pass the time playing until the afternoon, and the guardians of the friends come. The parents arrive, kiss the children on both cheeks, give them different kinds of dates, and set off, caressing the children, to their homes. My Prophet, the child Prophet looks right, looks left. All the friends have gone. My boy says: ‘Where is my father? My father has not taken me on his lap!’ He stands on the playground and cries, his shirt becoming wet with his tears. Someone has informed Amina. ‘Oh Amina, your dear child stands alone on the playground and cries.’ Amina runs there and hugs him and pulls him to her breast, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Oh son, why do you cry in this way, oh son? Tell me who has given you this pain, who gave you that sorrow, I will ask your grandfather for his judgement.’ My Prophet cries: ‘Mother, no one has said anything, no one has caused me sorrow, no one has caused me pain. Oh Ma, I cry because my mates all climbed on their father’s lap (bābār kole uṭhlo). They fed them dry fruits and kharmā, caressed them and took them home. I was left on the field; no one took me on his lap. No one called out to me, no one gave me khejur and no one gave me kharmā. Mother, I cry (and ask): Where is my father? Why does my father not take me on his lap?’ Amina went home, shedding tears the entire time. ‘How should I answer this question, dear boy? He is not there, not there, your father is not on this earth anymore!’76

In the following scene, the child Prophet begins searching for his father. On the way, he meets obstacles common for such a quest and displays special gifts. Particularly noteworthy is an account of another of Muhammad’s family members. Muhammad’s uncle Abbas recounts that he saw his nephew lying in his swinging cradle, which moved without anyone pushing it, and that the child was moving the moon with his finger. Muhammad explains his longing for a father to Abbas, again in the typical intimate communication of direct speech underlined with the vocative ‘oh Uncle’ (cācā go o cācā): ‘Oh Uncle, when the normal children of this world stay in the swing, oh Uncle, the mother pushes the swing. Uncle! When I was lying in the swing, and my mother had to go out for errands and my swing would start to slow down, before it stopped

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 139 – I don’t have a father, who would push the swing? Oh Uncle, by my Allah’s mercy (rahmate), he sent an angel who pushed my, the Prophet’s, swing.’ ‘Son, I got an answer to one question, answer another one, oh son.’ ‘Which question?’ ‘I saw that you turned the heaven’s moon with a gesture of your finger. How can someone on earth move the moon in heaven? What’s the matter with that, that’s what I want to know, oh son.’ My Prophet shed tears: ‘Uncle, oh Uncle! You reminded me of something sad. Uncle! When the normal children on this world are born and lie on the bed, oh Uncle, the father brings flowers from the market and hangs the flowers up in front of their eyes. Those children look at the flowers and play. If they are a little older, they stretch out their hands, make “o, ahh” sounds, and if they are even a little older, they stretch out their hands, grasp the flowers and want to play with them. Oh Uncle, there was no one on the earth of Medina to buy such flowers for me the Prophet. When I, the Prophet, wanted to play, I didn’t have a father who would buy flowers for me. That’s why my Allah made the full moon in heaven (ākāśer pūrṇimār cā̃d) a flower for me and kept it hanging in front of my eyes.’77

This description of the Prophet’s pains takes the form of direct speech from the suffering hero and conjures up a well-known image of a child lying in a cradle. While narrating, Hosen also uses gestures to give power to this dramatic image. He first puts his arms together in front of his belly and rocks them to and fro as if they were a cradle, and then slips into the child’s role gesticulating as if playing with flowers hung up in front of him. While Hosen again emphasizes the child’s suffering and longing and Allah’s paternal substitution, in the next sections of the narrative, Muhammad continues his quest to reach his beloved father’s grave. To stop his nephew’s tears and lessen his ‘heart’s desire’ (maner sādh), Abbas decides to form a caravan to Medina: The Prophet’s mother cried again and again, hitting her breast. The Prophet asks repeatedly: ‘Oh Mother, whose grave is it that you cry so much?’ My Prophet’s mother Amina cries: ‘Oh child! Beneath this grave your father is lying in eternal slumber.’ My Prophet sits down at the grave’s right side and cries ‘Dad, Dad.’ No answer. He cried at the left side of the grave, no answer. He cried at the head’s side, no answer came. Then he sits down at the feet and cries out: ‘Dad, oh Dad, how did you become so heartless (niṣṭhur), oh Dad? All the kids of Mecca climbed on (their) dads’ laps, only I haven’t climbed on (my) dad’s lap once. I came from Mecca to Medina, oh Dad, please get up and caress me, please!’ It is as if Abdullah [the father] is crying from within the grave: ‘Oh Lord! Remove the earth from my grave, so that I can take my orphan Muhammad on (my) lap once!’

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My Allah says: ‘Oh Abdullah, don’t act crazy (pāgˡlāmi karˡte habe nā). You remain sleeping, you don’t have to take him on your lap. I, Allah, for my little friend, I have commanded the whole world, all of creation (kull makhlūqāt): you all have to love this Prophet of mine.’78

This time, the dramatic model of direct communication between Muhammad and Allah does more than make animals speak or allow Muhammad and Allah to converse with each other, as was the case in the previous scenes. Now, even the deceased Abdullah speaks. His speech is tagged by the fictionalizing ‘as if ’ (yena): the dramatic scene breaks the mould of ordinary possibilities and opens up new imaginaries. This underlines the active role of imagination in the narratives, which open up possibilities according to their dramatic logic. Yena has been linked to ‘the subjunctive, an impromptu exploratory of alternatives to the world of strict agendas as found in the traditional categories of theology, history, and law’.79 Abdullah’s cry might not have actually taken place, but it is precisely this imagined conversation that motivates God’s final speech act, which this time is not a promise of compassion, but a command to love the Prophet. It is the child’s longing for fatherly love that prompts Allah to step in as his father, and His declaration marks the end of the child’s search for parental love. The child cries for his parents out of personal longing and not out of concern for his parents’ salvation. Allah’s order to love the Prophet stresses the reciprocity of the love between the Prophet and his community. This in turn relates to the co-suffering and compassion sparked in the listeners. They, too, have to love him because of his suffering. Suffering along with the Prophet becomes part of the love for him, just as his suffering with the sinful community is part of his love for them. The repeated description of the child’s pains and the narrative closeness of the dramatic scene further the possibilities of such compassion within the listeners. The personal passion of the child affects the Prophetic compassion. When Aisha, later in the Prophet’s life, sees him grieving and crying, she immediately senses that his pain might be caused by experiences from his childhood: ‘Why so many tears? What pain, what grief! Even his body became black. I understood that there was grief in (my) lord’s heart. Not once in his life had he had the chance to address his father (bābā kaiẏā ḍāken nāi).’80 She continues to reflect upon and add details to the orphan’s sorrows, such as his never having held his father’s hand, never having been given festive dress, or his never having been fed caringly by his father. At this point, Hosen mixes the dialogue between the Prophet and his wife with the dialogue on the Day of Judgement, in which Muhammad tells Allah that he would not plead for Aisha or his family. Together, both scenes underline that the Prophet’s tears are not only cries for mercy, but also caused by his longing and sympathy: ‘Oh Aisha, I do indeed have that pain inside me, oh Aisha! But I don’t shed today’s tears for my father.’ ‘So did the memory of your mother come to your mind?’ ‘No, Aisha, I don’t cry for my mother.’

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 141 ‘On that day, having lost your mother, having lost your father, you went to your grandfather. Grandfather was drawing you unto his breast, hugging your neck. Being caressed (ādar pāiẏā) by this grandfather so much, you forgot even your parents. Having cared for you until the age of eight years, two months, and ten days, this grandfather has now gone to the grave. I understand that you are crying out of pain for that grandfather.’ My Prophet is answering: ‘Oh Aisha! Listen for whom I cry! Not for grandfather, nor for father, nor for mother – today’s tears, oh Aisha, are for my sinning community!’81

The Prophet feels passionately for his community. He does so as an approachable and suffering hero who can in turn be adequately pitied by the audience. The mimetic and immediate presentation of his pain brings him closer to the listeners of the sermon, and his role as a child is tangible and easy to relate to. Hosen also includes explicit praise of listeners who suffer along with the characters of the narrative. Muhammad explicitly refers to the compassion of the listeners. Addressing his companions, he says: ‘Oh companions, listen up, (I will tell you) who my friends are! One thousand four hundred years, one thousand four hundred and fifty years from now, my crazi(ly loving) community will sit down to listen about me, the Prophet, hour after hour, night after night. When they hear about my, the Prophet’s, sadness, they will moan, “Oh, ah.” Some will shed a rushing stream (jhar jhar kare) of tears.’ The companions say: ‘Master, we’re surprised! They will, without having seen you, shed tears out of compassionate love (māẏā) for you, and remain seated at night, hour after hour and make moaning sounds, “oh, ah.” Huh, what an astonishing matter. So many years later, they will have so much love, so much compassion.’ My Prophet says: ‘Oh companions, don’t be surprised! You will be witnesses: I, the Prophet, am telling you that my community from that time will be my, the Prophet’s, friends!’82

The narrative does not proceed retrospectively, from the present of the listeners to the past of the Prophet, but prospectively, with the Prophet being identified with the present. Muhammad in the narrative anticipates the painful emotions of his community 1,400 years later – ‘prolepsis’ in narratology and ‘prophecy’ in theology.83 Moreover, the statement involves a leap in the narrative position of the listeners at the waz mahfil, who are no longer outside the narrative (heterodiegetical) but become part of it (homodiegetical) when they are addressed by the Prophet. Overall, this technique achieves the permeability of the communicative situation of the preacher addressing the audience and that of Muhammad addressing his companions and the audience. It is, on the one hand, a conflation of profane and salvific time. On the other, it emphasizes awareness of a historical difference84 meant to be bridged by compassionate identification. That the Prophet is distant in time and space evolves as an advantage that today’s believers have over the Prophet’s companions:

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by overcoming the great distance, they can demonstrate their emotional closeness.85 The Prophet’s sadness conveyed by the sermons is linked to the compassion of the audience, and this compassion in turn becomes an integral sign of their love towards the Prophet. The bodily signs of tears and exclamations are caused by a particular attitude and relation to narratives depicting the Prophet’s passions and by being compassionate with him.

Tears of the aggrieved mother Having the Prophet as a child suffer and long for his parents and directing the audience to suffer with him allows preachers to forge connections with narratives from outside Islamic history that feature similar roles and emotions. These narratives lie at the heart of Hosen’s explicit efforts to narratively open up Islamic (hi)story, an approach decidedly different from other opinions in contemporary Bangladesh, which view Islamic history as a self-contained universe that is universally important and can be repeated.86 Hosen preaches in a way that moves audience members to relive the emotional essence of the past by being told stories that have a comparable, and hence supplementary, emotional effect. Taking up the example of his sermon ‘Earth of Uhud’ on the early Islamic battle, Hosen told me how he introduces narratives ‘from reality’ – such as an incident of a woman hacked to pieces by her daughter-in-law – to produce a new sermon with a new focus: The theme of Uhud is a heart-splitting event. But what occurred doesn’t occur again. And it won’t do so (in the future). If now, after a sermon on this topic, someone says: tell us a new ‘Earth of Uhud’, then I won’t be able to do so. Some things such as the descriptions of the Prophet’s birth occurred just once. The Prophet’s death occurred once. In between these events, during their discussion, there are some topics that did not happen before but happen now. Like the cutting of the mother into three pieces: that was not there before, it happened now. Say the main presentation is ten words. I put one word in front and bring in nine words from reality. Hence the cassette became new. They have not heard this discussion. For example, that the mother was cut into three pieces is something the residents of Belabo have not heard. So in my discussion I raise questions such as how has this been done? What person, what human could have done it! Say, can he be counted as a human? Or does he taint the word ‘human’? A discussion about this takes half an hour. With this half-hour discussion, the previous talk about the Prophet’s life is not considered old as I have interspersed it with the new. In this way, the half an hour (of the new incident) became the cassette’s main part. … Probably in this case people will remain seated for so many nights until two o’clock, and say again: ‘hold the waz the whole night, we will listen the whole night.’ So some things like that, some newness has to be given. That the people are interested in remaining seated for this newness. The main thing is that in Islam there are no new things. What’s there is all old. So in the discussion a new form (natun rūp) has to be given. A new

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 143 form has to be gripped that the listeners have never listened to from nowhere. That’s the thing.87

Hosen entering this sensational everyday example in his sermon parallels similar trends of filling ‘harmless’ folk genres like the kicchā pālā with spectacular content.88 On a more abstract level, Hosen describes his blunt technique of adding new incidents to Islamic history as ‘adding some spice’ and ‘pepping up’ his sermons. The allegory of fresh and dry chillies at the same time shows that Islamic history can be updated without being abandoned: It’s like (the popular side-dish of) spicy mashed potatoes (ālur bhartā). Mashed potatoes are prepared with fried dry chillies. I am saying that preparing mashed potatoes with dry and fried chillies is all right. But come, we look how the mashed potatoes (taste) if prepared with fresh chillies. I left the dry chillies, forget the dry chillies. I said that this is good, very good. Now let’s see how it is if we fry the mashed potatoes with fresh green chillies a little bit. You will see how tasty it is. The thing is the same. The mashed potatoes are mashed potatoes. But dry chillies in the place of fresh chillies, and fresh chillies in the place of dry chillies. That’s how I do my presentation.89

It is not only that the parallel narratives from everyday life provide newness. Narratives of everyday heroes that Hosen presents to his listeners as ‘real incidents’ (bāstab ghaṭanā)90 present characters that are closer to the recipients, in roles that could be their own, and in environments that are known to them in every detail.91 This has repercussions on the ‘emotional identification with the action and situation of the character’,92 which is influenced by the hero being ‘better or worse than we are, or similar to us’.93 Reception theory has stressed that recipients cannot establish as close a relationship with a perfect saint as they can with someone from similar circumstances. Furthermore, as the plots of the new incidents are not well known, Hosen can work with methods of creating suspense in other ways than he could in cases of well-known narratives. ‘Reality’ is always mediated by narrative, and the familiarity of the people from the everyday narratives not only pertains to a familiar setting and relation, but also follows from a familiar form. Hosen’s narratives are not only dramatic. They build on and relate to the suspense, visuality, and sensationalism of family melodrama, and most specifically the relation of mother and son. The mother figure is an ideal type that links up to a myriad of meanings in contemporary Bangladesh. Informed by stories of the Mother Goddess in Bengal, the mother has been ubiquitous in different kinds of media over the last 200 years. She became a focal figure of personal emotions and is used for political emotions, from Indian nationalism to contemporary politics in West Bengal.94 As her love and affection (māẏā and ādar) are important parts of the mother as type, so is the specific form of addressing her, in direct speech, as ‘Mother’ (mā). This invocation is part of urban poetry as much as rural songs and sermons.95 The figure of the mother serves as a reference for emotional belonging in exile magazines and TV series, such as the popular serial I Am Fine Due to Your Prayer,

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Mother! (Tomār doẏāẏ bhālo achi mā), which started at the beginning of 2014. While this series is about migration to the gulf countries, its title specifically refers to the ubiquitous religious concept of the ‘mother’s blessing’ (māẏer doẏā). This blessing is evoked in everyday speech and is written, for example, on rickshaws and autorickshaws.96 Preachers in their sermons ascribe their own well-being to their mother’s blessing. The mother is one of the most consensus generating, basic and emotional figures that everyone can relate to on various levels and through a variety of (real or fictional) experiences. This is important for popular preachers like Hosen who aim to attract people of many social and ideological groups and not blame (doṣārop karˡte) anyone. In waz mahfils, narratives of the mother are often explicitly connected to religious concepts by the mother’s compassion being a metaphor for Allah’s compassion. This is, of course, not new in the history of Islam. The Arabic root r–ḥ–m is in raḥim (the womb) as well as denominations of Allah such as al-Raḥīm and al-Raḥmān (‘the merciful and the compassionate’) and related verbs such as raḥima (showing mercy) or nouns such as raḥma (mercy).97 The favourable comparison of Allah’s love for his servants with a mother’s love for her children is already transmitted in a saying of the Prophet,98 and analogies between motherly love and Allah’s mercy have been reported as part of Arabic sermons.99 A well-known comparison in waz mahfils is that Allah gave only 1 per cent of the universe’s mercy to humankind, keeping 99 per cent for himself, hence further amplifying his mercifulness by showing instances of human mercy.100 Fitting this allegory of the mother to stand in for Godly mercy, preachers take up extreme examples. Preachers might describe how a son misbehaved towards his mother, even to the extent of maltreating her, but nevertheless finds her unwavering support; how the mother would shoulder the father’s anger, save the child from punishment by the police101 or care for her son even though his deadly illness – for tuberculosis (yakṣā) there is no rescue (rakṣā)102 – will kill her. The mother’s lap is the ultimate location for loving affection.103 Often, these narratives have ethical didactic impetuses. They provide models of filial piety and exhort the audience to honour their parents. However, as we learned from Hosen’s explanation, the narratives in his sermons do not aim primarily at allegorical decoding. Their success is measured in emotional effect. They are religiously as well as dramatically effective in the sense that they add to, train and deepen compassion. In the sermon about the child Prophet, the ‘real incident (that) occurred in our area’104 revolves around the aggrieved mother’s tears. The newly married son neglects his mother to the point that he does not bid her farewell before he leaves to work in the capital city Dhaka (a typical situation in a country with high internal migration)105 because he is so preoccupied with his family-in-law. He dies in a road accident. Hosen shifts the narrative to focus on the mother. The mother, having finished her morning prayer, sits on the bed and cries. She cannot bear it (kalijā māne nā), her heart is on fire (kalijāẏ āgun). A little later she leaves the house, steps on the street and cries there. The neighbouring women come and ask: ‘Hey mother, why are you crying like this? Give an answer, you poor mother!’

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 145 ‘Oh women, oh neighbours of this quarter! For some reason a fire is burning in my mother-heart (āmi mār kalijāẏ)’. … The mother doesn’t go to the kitchen and doesn’t cook. She cannot do any work. Breakfast time is passing by; the mother doesn’t eat breakfast, (she) is only crying. If the women ask, she gives the answer: ‘For some reason a fire is burning in my heart’.106

The mother’s special knowledge and the events concerning her son are told separately before merging at a later point. The two parts are very different from each other. What happens to the son is told in a summary of events and actions happening to him: he was oblivious of his mother’s blessing and dies in a road accident. The mother feels what has happened as a strong bodily sensation, behaves accordingly and talks about it. Unlike the listeners, she does not yet know the whole story. The simultaneity of the points of view is important for narrative tension and the evocation of the audience’s compassion towards the mother.107 This compassion is evoked long before the mother finally learns the truth about her son. At the climax, the listeners participate in her emotional response, which had already been prefigured by her tears and exclamations before. When the dead body finally reaches her, Hosen again presents her pain, adding a graphic description of the dead body: Having come close to the house, he [the driver of the rickshaw transporting the dead body] asked: ‘Hey, bhai sahib, have a look at the address, do you know it? The person’s name is Mannan. Where is his house?’ The man says: ‘What happened?’ ‘He died in an accident’. The man says: ‘Oh driver, there, there, on the crossing. Do you see the woman standing there and crying? That woman is Mannan’s mother.’ The driver sheds tears and cries: ‘Oh Mannan, why is your mother standing on the road crying?’ … The suffering (duḥkhinī) mother stands at the road and cries. The driver goes to this mother and calls out: ‘Why are you crying, is your son’s name Mannan?’ ‘Yes.’ The van driver is shedding tears: ‘Oh Mannan’s mother, don’t cry anymore! This here is your Mannan … . Your Mannan died in an accident.’ Immediately, the mother lost her consciousness, lost her mind. She fell backwards on the ground. Moving like a chicken with her throat cut, she became unconscious, doesn’t regain consciousness. The people take the dead body … and see that the brain is completely outside the head and that the whole body is red with blood, the tongue hanging out. The mother fell unconsciousness as she heard the news of Mannan. They sprinkled water on her head. A little later the mother regained her consciousness. The mother screamed out: ‘Oh you neighbours of the quarter, oh my people, make a little room so that I can see my Mannan to my heart’s desire.’

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The people stepped aside, stepped away to form a pathway. The suffering mother comes running, and looking in Mannan’s direction, sees that, oh, he is red with blood, the tongue is hanging out. The suffering mother is drawing the dead son to her chest hugging him, kissing him on both cheeks, the pain-stricken mother kisses the tongue.108

Similar graphic descriptions in another narrative of a pain-stricken mother affect the audience with her pain. This time, Hosen himself bears witness to the mother’s suffering, and accordingly uses a first-person narrative with himself as a homodiegetic narrator. He tells his audience about his philanthropic effort to help a woman who was about to deliver a baby, but could not afford to go to the hospital. Death looms over her and her child. Hosen succeeds in raising money and persuades the doctor to try the necessary operation. However, the doctor makes clear that even with the surgery either the child or the mother will die. While the grandparents want to save their daughter, the pregnant woman begs the doctor to save her child. Afterwards, the doctor exclaims what had been feared: ‘The child was born, the boy’s condition is good, but the mother will not survive.’ The woman is crying, her father is crying as well, everyone weeps together, the girl will die. I went inside and saw how beautiful the child is. It is crying, making waa waa sounds. The suffering mother cannot get up at all. Looking towards the child she is shedding tears, looking towards the mother she is gesturing, as she cannot speak. She wants to explain to the mother: ‘Oh mother, take the baby on your lap! If you don’t take him on the lap then give the baby to me, raise it to my breast!’ But she cannot express her thought. At long last, I see that the suffering mother wants to take her own child on her own lap. She wants extend her arms to the child, but she cannot do so. There is no strength, this is the very last moment, she is looking towards the child, is pushing her two hands forward (samˡner dike dhākkāiteche). Gradually, the two hands are coming close to the child. If she had been able to only push the hands a little more, then the mother could have taken her child in her lap for the last time in her life. But the hands cannot reach the child. Looking at the child, shedding tears, the mother passes away.109

In both cases, the climax of the mothers’ pain is linked to expressions of that pain, to others being pained by observing her, and to a graphic description of the causes and effects of that pain described by Hosen as an omniscient narrator. Alongside the choice of the topic of family drama and the montage technique used in the first example, these graphic details add to television-image style of narration. In the last moments of the second narrative (and the mother’s life), the narrator–preacher–observer ‘sees’ how she is struggling, reaching her hands forward, nearly touching the baby – how else to describe a camera zooming in on the mother’s hands? The next focus is her face, a tearful standstill. When Hirschkind highlights the ‘rhetoric of visual realism’ in the sermons of the famous Egyptian preacher Shaykh Abd al-Hamid Kishk, he is describing the preacher’s adoption of the voice of the ‘on-site investigative reporter’.110 This hints at an important

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 147 difference between the media intertextualities that characterize the sermons of Kishk and Hosen. Kishk links his narrative to the news by adopting a reporter’s voice and making the listeners feel as if they were hearing the national news. Similarly, Shaykh Uthman, as described by Gaffney, refers to the experience of watching television in an explicit commentary – without, however, reproducing techniques of visuality and montage in his narrative. In contrast, Hosen links his narrative to family melodrama by diving into the visual details of what could be images from a televised melodrama. His way of narration is visual in the way not of the painter but of the cameraman, whom Walter Benjamin – fitting for the hospital scene – compares to the surgeon. As the surgeon penetrates the patient’s body, the cameraman ‘penetrates deeply into the web of a given situation’ (dringt tief ins Gewebe der Gegebenheit ein) and records a picture that ‘consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law’.111 The images created by Hosen’s narratives zoomed into the suffering and were pieced together in order to visually evoke compassion. This is not the realist depiction – disassembled objects are depicted without any other reason than just ‘being there’ – but a melodramatic depiction in which everything that is there has a heightened meaning.112 The pious public is addressed by means of melodrama, and the melodramatic mode leads back to heightened religious feelings.

Linking emotionalizing narratives to the collective climax of final prayers Each waz mahfil culminates in a final prayer113 called doẏā (from Ar. duʿāʾ, call, invocation) or, less commonly, monājāt (from Ar. munājāt, verbal noun of nājā, to have a secret and intimate conversation).114 Preachers are always aware of its supererogatory nature and stress the importance of the ritual prayer, even to the point of apologizing for making the congregation listen to waz. It could hamper their evening prayers and, since they will be tired the next morning, their morning prayers, too.115 But this is a formality and does not at all diminish the importance of the joint prayer at the end of the waz mahfil. The final prayer is announced and led by the evening’s last preacher. He often links back to the liturgical beginning of each sermon by repeating well-known ritual phrases, partly along with the audience, such as the istiʿādha, basmala and the profession of faith; a durūd-e Ibrahim may be performed or a ḥawqala recited. Almost always, the Arabic prayer admitting guilt and asking for forgiveness that had featured in the introduction is repeated. The nature of the prayer as a distinct part of the sermon is emphasized by a change in the preacher’s role, who may even say explicitly that his discourse has ended. During the final prayer, he becomes part of the praying community and most typically speaks for the whole of the congregation when pleading to God in stock phrases such as ‘we raised our hands at your court (darbāre). Please forgive the sins in our lives’ (āmāder jindegir gunāh māph kare dāo). The preacher asks God to ‘send down your mercy’ (rahmat nāzil kore dao)

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or ‘accept (kabul kare nāo) this mahfil’. The congregation offers its repentance: ‘We repent (tawba kare dicchi) small sins (gunah-e saghīra) and big sins, sins of shirk, sins of bidʿat, sins of prayer, sins of breaking fast, sins of the hands, of the eyes.’116 Nesari, in a typical prayerful pose, performs the repentance on behalf of the assembled in a crying voice, rhythmically rocking along with his upper body while his hands remain folded in front of his heart with the audience joining his rhythmic āmīn. The prayer’s communal nature can hardly be overrated. The whole congregation turns to God together. The praying ‘conversation’ is not between individuals, but between God and the congregation of supplicants. While it is not explicitly stated that God either forgives all or forgives none, the supplication aspires to joint salvation. The piety performed here is not only public, but also collective. This is a crucial difference to other settings. For example, the munājāt held by the BJI women’s organization has been described as powerful because of its ‘ability to beseech Allah in one’s own language’, and it ‘facilitates the cultivation of intimacy with Him’.117 The prayer at the end of waz mahfils is certainly intimate. This intimacy, however, is not heightened by being private. Instead, intimacy is multiplied by the close proximity of a collective, by the unity of as many feedback loops as possible and by addressing God in one unified speech act.118 The community includes local hosts but at the same time includes those who are far away. The prayer might ask for reciprocation of the local hospitality in the hereafter: ‘Allah, the honoured member [of the local government, member sāhib] has fed us, Master of Mankind, he has honoured the religious scholars – God, I don’t know which relatives he still has, God, provide food for them in paradise!’119 At the same time, the collective that the gathering prays for transcends its immediate surroundings. Preachers include students who are going to exams, or might pray for the sick at home or far away, sometimes by name. At this point the preacher can receive information from the organizers. They pass on written notes or mumble requests into the preacher’s ear, for example, praying for a newly established mosque next to the grounds of the mahfil. Preachers name religious scholars or ‘those who teach religion in dire circumstances’ in sermons held at religious schools, for husbands in sermons preached to women, or for the preachers themselves: ‘Oh Allah, Master of Mankind, I make a special lamentation (khāṣ kare fariyād) for those who preach the word of the Quran, those who are scattered in this country or abroad, save them from all sorts of torture (niryātaner hāt theke).’120 Absent members of the community who no longer live in the locality can be included in the gathering by the preacher reading out their requests for prayer along with their names. This function is ever more important given the migration from villages to cities and internationally, and long lists of international locations of diaspora communities may follow. Less commonly, the final prayer might include political references. The prayer may include the international plight of the Islamic community, a transnational commonplace of Islamic prayers, or a prayer for Islamic dignitaries, and for the establishment of an Islamic state in Bangladesh. Concrete aims, such as recognition of the kāmil degree as a master’s degree in a sermon by Sayeedi from 2006, are the exception.121 Rare are also

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 149 maledictions such as the one by Sirajul Islam, who refers to Adam’s antagonist Nimrod (Namrūd) and the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat: Those who want to expel the Quran and sunna from this Bengali earth, those who want to eliminate this country’s Alems, give them right guidance (hidāyat), and if they can’t be so guided (hidāyat yadi kopāle nā thāke) destroy them, one by one, by root and weed, as you have destroyed Namrud, as you have destroyed Sadat.122

Muhammad’s role as a mediator and his presence are evoked by liturgical acts. Preachers pray that the religious merit they earned shall reach the Prophet: ‘Bring all of it, as a present, to the blessed grave of the compassionate (daẏālu) Prophet in golden Medina.’123 ‘Master of Mankind, oh elevated God, let the merit of our discourse, the merit of the durūd and salām reach the blessed soul of the Prophet – peace be upon him!’124 The liturgical counterpart to such prayers – not practised in all waz mahfils – is the rising (Ar. qiyām)125 of the audience members at the end of the sermon. In ‘a physical action that expresses an affective relationship’,126 they pronounce greetings (salām) and blessings (taṣliyya) for Muhammad as if he is among the congregation. The final prayer is connected to the preachers’ narratives. The collective of the men praying and those they pray for are intertwined with those who listen to the narratives and the characters within the narratives. The joint speech act of prayer fits into the joint reception of the narratives, and the commonplaces of prayer often correspond to the declarations of mercy by Allah within these narratives. The prayer explicitly and implicitly builds on the emotions raised in the sermon. The audience builds on the emotions they had felt when they identified with the Prophet. Now it is time to remember his suffering and become worthy of his compassion. Preachers do more than simply refer back to the narrative’s commonplaces. In the prayer, they conjure up roles that the listeners performed while listening to the narratives. For example, the congregation typically approaches God as a helpless orphan: ‘Oh Malik, we, your few sinning servants, have for such a long time discussed all different things, have recited durūd and salām for your Beloved, Allah, we have, like an orphan, a penniless, helpless one, stretched out two small hands.’127 This role fits particularly well to the most common wish of the supplicatory prayer: the salvation of the parents. It is typically invoked by the Arabic phrase ‘Lord (rabb), forgive the two of them [the parents] as they brought me up (rabbayānī) when I was small’. Often, the preachers here evoke the longing for the parents. Hosen involves himself as part of the suffering community and intensifies individual experiences of audience members: ‘I don’t know who at this gathering does not have a mother, … Allah, a mother! I myself am missing my mother. I don’t know, oh Allah, who like me stretches out his hands without a mother!’128 We only have to recall God’s declaration to the suffering child Prophet in the narratives to see the close relations to prayer. In the sermon’s earlier narrative, God had promised: Oh my friend, if any motherless child cries like you in this very manner, if he cries on his mother’s grave, I promise that for each drop of tears (ek phõṭā cokher pāni)

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that he, like you, can show me, I will, by the medium of the child’s tears, build his parents’ grave into a heavenly garden.129

Preachers often refresh the connection to their earlier narratives by inserting into their prayer little narratives or comparisons that motivate the supplicants’ need. When Sayeedi prays for the parents’ graves to be turned into portions of paradise (jānnāter ṭukˡro), he adds a comparison to international migration. Even in the case of a relative who goes to a foreign country, he says, there are letters, and one can get news on the phone. ‘But (from) our parents, those who left the world years and years ago, we have not received any news.’130 Another micro narrative takes up the care given by the always-present and always-caring mother. Siraji narrates the moaning of the child, and remembers: ‘When no one in this world listened to my call, mother broke (hārām kare) her relaxed sleep (ārām ghumke), pulled me to her breast, kissed me and said: “don’t cry, I am your mother.”’131 The transition between narrative and prayer might be blurred even further by attaching the prayer directly to a narrative. In a sermon narrating the death of a person and the ritual of his burial to evoke the commonplace of the grave, Siraji integrates a short summary of that narrative into the prayer: On that day when Azrail with his monstrous shape will appear (hājir) before us and the bird of life (prāṇpākhi) will depart; on the day we become dead and deceased (lāś ār murdā); on that day, four bearers will take us on their shoulders, lay us on the stretcher, pack us in white cloth, spread roses and perfume over us and read the funerary prayer (janāza). On the day we will be laid to sleep in the dark grave; on that day please make all of our graves gardens of paradise!132

Hosen even brings in a full narrative into the supplicatory prayer. After invoking Allah for forgiveness, he reports a meeting he had with his nephew who lives abroad. The young man requested him to perform a supplicatory prayer for his mother. The nephew expresses, in direct speech, his painful longing for his mother. Hosen quotes himself performing a supplicatory prayer for his nephew’s mother. In this narrated prayer interspersed in the ‘real’ prayer, Hosen includes his own address to the archetypal mother (mā) and the reception of this exclamation: I myself witnessed what those boys staying abroad do for their mums and dads. When I went on my pilgrimage, I went to Medina first. My nephew found out … and threw himself at me in a big hug, crying out: ‘Ain’t ya coming from home, uncle?’ ‘Yep, son, I am just coming from home.’ ‘Uncle, ain’t ya seen my mum? I ain’t seen her for three years!’ He invited me to their camp where all the Bengalis are sitting together and tells me his sorrows: ‘Reverend, I’m at work all day, when I lie down at night I can’t be consoled (āmār man māne nā), I cry and moisten my pillow with my tears. Reverend, please pray a supplication (doẏā) for our parents!’

 Heroes of Courage and Compassion 151 When I raised my hands (for prayer) and was calling out saying ‘mother, mother’, the boys were breaking down with gurgling sounds, becoming unconscious. One of them said: ‘Reverend, don’t ya speak of the mothers, I have not seen my mother for three years!’133

After this fresh account of passion towards the mother and witnessing this suffering, Hosen swiftly switches back to the prayer and asks God to be compassionate towards the parents. He continues the narrative, restating that the boy is crazy for his mother and writes monthly letters to her.134 Then the dramatic conflict: two months before he will return home, his mother is diagnosed with cancer and immediately cries at night: ‘Son, you will not see (dekhˡbi nā) your mother’s face anymore!’ Immediately, she wakes her husband, crying: ‘Take my hand and promise me that you will caress and love my child.’ And even on her deathbed, the mother cries: ‘Oh Abdur Rahman, you didn’t come, you did not see me!’135 As in the narrative of the son’s death analysed above, but in reverse roles, the son immediately realizes the death of his mother, through a dream. When the son finally flies home to see his mother, he is anxiously awaited by his brother and father. In the detailed scene of their reunion, his brother and father, foreseeing the pain the news would cause the son, remain mute in answer to his questions – just as Amina and Abd al-Muttalib did not respond to Muhammad’s questions about his father in the narrative of the sermon’s main part. And just as Amina had cried instead of answering the child, so the father’s tears are streaming when he says: ‘Oh Abdur Rahman, when we are home you will see how your mother is.’136 The son eagerly presents the gifts he brought for his mother. The father breaks out in tears and begs the son not to show them to him, but to his mother once they reach home. Arriving, the son calls out for his mother one last time: ‘Mum, mum, oh mother, mum, after five years I come back, crazy for you (tomār pāgol)! Come out to me!’137 When the son finally hears the news and breaks down in the story, Hosen returns to the supplicatory prayer, bringing in the pain he just described: ‘Those who are in want of their mother like this, are pained for their mother, are motherless like me – when they cry, oh God, don’t you feel tenderness (māẏā)? Don’t you feel compassion? In this very moment, turn the graves of all parents into gardens of paradise.’138 The intertwining of prayer and narrative is yet another instance of the reciprocal interaction between religious forms and those from popular culture. Ritual acts from this point of view emerge as not only well-practised and bodily, but shaped by the poetics of the narratives surrounding them. These narratives are not timeless, but specifically bound to their environments and may relate to religious tradition by emotional effect instead of analogy. This further refines our perspective on Islamic collective prayers, one of the most powerful displays and experiences of public piety, which are most often combined with oratorical events. Hirschkind made an important point when stressing the twofold effect of the prayer: it is a felicitous condition for a religious speech act and at the same time effects change in the individual experience.139 However, the narratives analysed in this chapter highlighted a different set of emotions feeding into the final prayer and a different subjectivity. While Hirschkind stresses that the listener ‘must have cultivated the capacity for humility and regret’,140 compassion in waz mahfils can be connected to

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the model of the helpless child who is in need of emotional closeness. An even more crucial difference concerns the dramatic aspects of compassion. Hirschkind opines that the cultivated ethical–affective progression ‘should not be thought of through a generic, psychophysiological model of catharsis but as an experience of moral relief ’.141 While the model of catharsis certainly cannot be employed universally and has to be modified in each cultural context, it also cannot be rejected out of hand. The dramatic dimension, and hence models from poetics such as catharsis, cannot be easily dispensed with by the model of an ‘ethical’ Islamic listener. The imaginary and narrative techniques of the narratives in waz mahfils, which build up to and are referred back to in the final prayer, include processes such as sympathetic identification with everyday heroes. I have shown the usefulness of narratology and instruments from drama theory to describe these dramatic processes and to understand the ways in which the sermons situate and affect the listeners. The stimulating point, as is so often the case when thinking about waz mahfils, is that these dramatic emotions are not an alternative to the public piety and the religious experience: the dramatic emotions were evoked within religious narratives and culminate in a religious supplication. The heightened emotional reaction described by catharsis remains important. It is at the same time part of a ritual and religious framing; religious and narrative functions reinforce each other.

4

Melodic narration Performative exegesis, joint self-affection and musical valuation

In the first waz mahfil at the beginning of this book, we could imagine hearing many melodies. When Hosen arrives on the stage, he is accompanied by chants; the preacher leaving the stage continues chanting his sermon to retain the audience’s attention; and Hosen renders melodically the dialogue in which the Prophet, his companions and the audience interact. At Mazhari’s mahfil, madrasa students perform devotional songs, and the night guards listening to the sermons on their mobile phones appreciate the thick layers of melodies. This chapter analyses the different melodies and their overlap with the poetics of sermons. It argues that rather than being a superficial or peripheral addition, the melodic voice is crucial to explain the deep interrelation of religious, bodily and emotional experience in waz mahfils as well as their potential for political manipulation. In waz mahfils, elevated Quranic verses or clearly distinguishable poetic forms such as songs or poems are chanted, and passages of the main Bengali prose text of the sermon are put to music. This melodic rendering, which I call ‘prose chanting’, creates the signature sound of the waz mahfils distinguishing them from other religious and cultural practices within Bangladesh. The more I studied the chanted passages, the more I realized that their poetics are closely intertwined with questions I had about the affective narration of sermons. The analysis of these musical poetics provides the missing pieces to complete the puzzle of the generic system of waz mahfils. In particular, it helps us understand how the sermons’ narrative and imaginative processes are interlinked with bodily learning. In general, linguistic and narrative levels might offer distinct and possibly even antagonistic experiences from those elicited by vocal techniques. ‘Musical bodily pleasure’ might work in different ways than ‘religious instruction’. However, I argue that in waz mahfils, the melodic coding of narratives enhances, or even enables, the effects of affective narrative and multilingual performance. The musical–rhetorical analysis in this chapter highlights the potential of integrating both levels. It contributes to thinking about the relationship of music to text, an issue that has too seldom been discussed due to disciplinary restrictions on the side of both musicologists and literary scholars.1

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The in-depth analysis allows me to understand the strong links between body, imagination and affects as practised and shaped in congregations gathered to hear sermons. The preachers’ voice is the aspect of speech that is most closely linked to the body. Voice is produced in the body’s inner depths, carries along bodily states and affects the body even when no other meaning is understood.2 Focusing on the voice fits a rhetorical and poetic perception of language. It is integral to the ‘aesthetics of religion’, and scholars like Navid Kermani have emphasized listening as a central Islamic practice that cuts through layers of theology and hermeneutics.3 As the corporeal and material aspect of Islamic practice depends so much on the voice, its analysis is a fruitful way to correct narrow, text-based and belief-centric stances of religion that, in the case of Islam, often lead to perceptions of religion as a set of dogmas. As Birgit Meyer has highlighted in her approach to sensational forms in religion, aesthetics is not outside of power.4 Talal Asad has furthermore famously demonstrated that the ‘secular’ is distinct from institutional secularism and depends on aesthetic and affective practices, both religious and non-religious.5 Approached via the materiality of their aesthetic practices, the waz mahfils can tell us a lot about the experience of religion and power,6 and I will close this chapter with a concrete example for how melodic renderings can emotionalize and politicize religious messages.

Melodies in Islamic sermons, the Quran and poems Although historical studies of Islamic sermons lack aural sources in the narrower sense, they have, with references to textual structures or commentaries on homiletic practice, already worked out the importance of rhythm in early khuṭba sermons.7 Scholars working on Arabic waʿẓ preaching have focused on the volume of the voice.8 Studies of contemporary Arabic Islamic sermons show that a preacher’s strategic use of voice continues to be an important way to flex authority and instil fear. Jan Scholz explains that the particular ‘pulpit voice’ embodies anger and warning.9 He draws attention to an ‘alienated’ voice as a characteristic of ritual. Ritual’s formulaic nature makes arbitrary freedom of design impossible and is in accord with the authority of specialists.10 Hirschkind has noted that the tone of voice lies at the heart of the affective and bodily dynamic of sermons recorded on cassettes in Egypt of the 1990s.11 He explains that their reception is intertwined with ‘the physiognomy of aural comprehension and aural aesthetics’.12 Drawing on philosophical, linguistic and rhetorical reflections on music in Islamic traditions, Hirschkind links these aural aesthetics to particular sensibilities ranging from religious attitudes to forms of reason and explores the wide-ranging implications of thinking about the nexus between religion, community and feeling.13 Despite stressing the importance of sound, listening and musical characteristics of rhetoric in Islamic sermons, neither Hirschkind nor Millie has undertaken a musical– rhetorical analysis of the performance of Islamic sermons.14 Part of the reason for this is that other forms of preaching do not feature melodic speech as prominently as the sermons held at waz mahfils. Even Millie’s Hearing Allah’s Call largely limits its discussions of the musical aspects of sermons to meta-commentaries and evaluations. In my analysis of prose chanting, I want to get closer to the analysis of the voice as part

 Melodic Narration 155 of cultural processes15 and describe it as an important rhetorical technique sometimes referred to as bodily eloquence.16 From existing research, it seems that the musicality of sermons often resides in other genres that are adopted by preachers or included in the sermon context. A prime example is the Quran.17 The only case in which Millie analyses a preacher’s ‘melodic performance’ focuses on Quranic recitation and not melodic performance of the sermon text.18 Indeed, combining Islamic sermons and Quranic recitation was already reported by the famous traveller Ibn al-Jubayr, who observed that the rector of Baghdad’s Nizamiyya madrasa ‘ascended the minbar and the Quran reciters began their recitation in the designated seats in front of him. They aroused the fear of God (taqwa) and desire for God (shawq) and they produced a strange melody and a disconcerting and affective chanting.’19 Similarly, al-Jawzī’s Sunday sermon, which Ibn al-Jubayr attended, began with the chants of no less than twenty Quranic reciters with enormous effect.20 Discussions about the Quran’s musicality raise interesting questions about audience response and caution us against easily assuming a single model of ‘musical affect’.21 The emotional performance and effect of Quranic recitation is described in terms very similar those used to describe the effect of the recitation of erotic poetry.22 In the Arabo-Islamic tradition, both rely on ‘ṭarab, which captures the idea of “being moved (i.e., to a point where there is loss of self-control)”, whether to delight or agitation, sadness or joy’.23 But we should be wary about easy separations between rationality and emotionality. Certainly, no uniform conception of music and affect exists across the cultures in which Islamic sermons are performed, and neither does it across different forms of performance and recitation. Ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf draws the conclusion that the Quran is a crypto-rhetorical device that persuades irrationally. It is therefore more effective than any other persuasion and is nearly impossible for Muslims to reject.24 I would strongly question the automatism Frishkopf assigns to the irrational Muslim’s response to Quranic recitation. It seems to be a near-religious point of view. For example, the attribution of the Quran with a drug-like attraction that even its enemies cannot evade is similarly taken up by the child preacher Faruk Siddiqi in a narrative of the conversion of Abu Jahl’s son ʿIkrima. Siddiqi elaborates on Abu Jahl’s efforts to prohibit Quranic recitation, an effort that not only fails but cannot conceal his own unquenchable desire to hear more.25 Approaching the roles of melodies within sermons, we have to differentiate not only between different contexts within the sermons but also between various vocal codes employed. The effects of melodies might not necessarily add to each other: the comparison of recitation of the Quran to recitation of erotic poems by al-Jawzī might be different from comparisons between the Quran and naʿt by preachers in Bangladesh. The different forms that might be cited in waz mahfils are all part of a larger melodic phenomenology that forms the background knowledge of most listeners and allows them to identify the respective melodies. Students from Dhaka University, for example, excelled in imitating, one after the other, typical vocal codes of the varied soundscape of Bangladeshi culture, ranging from bus announcers to sellers to Quranic reciters.

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Let me introduce some common melodies that frequently appear within the sermons, which, like other forms of South Asia’s mediatized ‘folk’ traditions, develop in an ever more melodic manner.26 One occasion for melodic ways of performing is when preachers recite poems. Here, the melody distinguishes between different subgenres and languages, which in turn are connected to particular expectations and emotional effects, such as the Urdu naʿt encompassing more zeal (taʿaṣṣub) than the Bengali. Preachers chant Urdu poems according to the rules of melodic recitation and meter (tarannum). They voice Bengali poems in more diverse ways, ranging from normal speech to melodic recitation (ābr̥ tti) to veritable songs. Take, for example, a Bengali allegorical poem whose exegesis structured a large portion of Mazhari’s sermon. Here, a melodic recitation typical for the recitation of poems in Eastern Bengal set apart the poem’s text from the interpretation as well as from the interlaced Urdu poems and zikr. In this way, the recitation of poems serves to set them apart, as poems, from the rest of the sermon. Preachers reproduce melodies most precisely when they can enhance the reference to ritual. The interactive Arabic parts of the beginnings of sermons, for example, always feature a particular pronunciation and melody, which is specific to the respective ritual and textual basis. Salām and the durūd are also performed with similar melodies across different mahfils from different preachers.27 Being able to recognize, recite and use ritual phrases requires that the preacher and the audience both have knowledge of several decisive sonic qualities, such as timbre, tone rate, rhythm, accent and melody.28 Well-known melodies serve as concrete directions to the audience. In a zikr performed in sermons, the audience repeats lā illāha illā ‘llāh until the preacher changes the pitch of the illā to signal to the audience that the repetition is going to stop. The phrase is then brought to a close by the preacher descending to the keynote while uttering the second part, Muḥammadu ‘r-rasūlu ‘llāh. Text and melody are bound together in learning practices of religious recitations. Rules of Quranic recitation and Quranic Arabic are learnt together, particularly by Muslims who are not native speakers.29 In Bangladesh, naʿt is taught by singing in chorus, and particular attention is given to melody and pronunciation. Melodic learning can also be part of a waz mahfil. At the opening of a boys’ madrasa, Nuri used the opportunity to teach the students by repeating set phrases with set speech melodies, which makes them easier to memorize. When teaching two Hadith on the importance of religious knowledge (dīner ʿilm, dharmer ʿilm) to his audience, Nuri introduces each with the Arabic introductory formula ‘the Prophet, peace be upon him, has said’.30 As he repeats the introductory formula piece by piece before each Hadith using the same melody, it is easily recognized and learnt by the audience. The degree to which melody is interwoven with mnemonics and the authority of specific texts is demonstrated by two boys’ spontaneous performance at a madrasa mahfil. Over the course of eight minutes, they recited twenty Hadith, first in Arabic, then in Bengali. Each Hadith was introduced by the first child with the formula Nuri used in his teaching – ‘the Prophet, peace be upon him, said …’. The other child’s Bengali translation employed a similar repetitive introductory formulation in Bengali – ‘the meaning of this honoured Hadith is, Allah’s Prophet has ordained’ – after which he recited the Bengali translation.31 Significantly, both children rendered their respective

 Melodic Narration 157 version melodically, indicating performatively the proximity of the Arabic Hadith and its Bengali translation.

Learning the melodic texture of prose chanting On this basis, let us turn to the musical code that is a key characteristic of waz mahfils. I call it prose chanting because it is used to chant not singular quotations or songs, but prose sections of the sermon that are in Bengali. Preachers employ the technique in often relatively large portions of their sermons. Despite being so characteristic and omnipresent, preachers and listeners do not use specific and elaborate terminology to talk about this chanting technique. The most common way to talk about it is to say that the preacher speaks ‘in melody’ (sure/tāne) or ‘melodically’ (sur kare). Others talk about ‘giving a melody’ (tān/sur deoẏā), ‘driving in a melody’ (tān mārā) or ‘speaking with a melody’ (tān diẏe kathā balā). This already indicates a low-key, practice-oriented and ambiguous status of the chanting, and in a way my analysis is to make explicit what is engrained in this ambiguous practice. How do preachers learn prose chanting? Most often, they do so informally and individually, and not in teacher–disciple (guru–śiṣya) relationships. Most interviewees emphasize that it is a gift or blessing of God (Āllāhˡr dān / niʿmat). This downplays learning processes since something that is received as a gift is ‘just there’. When I insisted, however, preachers described detailed learning processes. Hosen compared his efforts to learn the chanting to my effort in learning Bengali. Nuri described it as something that ‘came about slowly, by doing and doing and doing’.32 Weekly madrasa trainings on Thursday evenings include opportunities to learn melodic chanting, even if this is often downplayed. Zaman, a recent graduate of Bangladesh’s oldest and leading komī mādrāsā, told me that the speech rehearsals of this institution included melodic speech and learning by imitation. However, no detailed feedback on the melodies is given by the supervising students because there is no time in the tight succession of speakers. This lack of explication is mirrored in homiletic manuals for madrasa students, which often do not mention chanting in sermons, leaving its status undecided and geared towards practice.33 Preachers learn how to chant by imitating other preachers. Young preachers often follow preachers they know or are related to as part of these preachers’ entourages. Nuri describes how he travelled with another preacher for quite some time to develop the sense of timing and melody this preacher employed. Only after listening for a long time did he start imitating the melody when he was alone, slowly developing his own melody. Of course, preachers stress that this imitation (nakal) cannot be achieved by everyone, and if others adopt their melody, they will not be as fluent as they are themselves. Sometimes following others is not possible, so preachers might pick up melodies from recordings. Hosen reports that he had ‘taken part in’ Juktibadi’s melody; Juktibadi, it was rumoured, was one of the first preachers to become popular on cassette. Zaman listens to Ansari, whose preaching style and melody he particularly likes. Playing a

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recording to me from his mobile phone, he explains that he listens to the melody even if he cannot understand the words very clearly.34 The melodies of prose chanting are a way for preachers to establish their own style and market themselves. Preachers strengthen individual differences in their recitation style. Different ‘ideological’ stances on the rhetorical aptness of chanting determine the degree to which a preacher chants and the preacher’s use of chanting is an important part of his ‘style’. Preachers are keen to highlight their melody’s idiosyncratic nature: ‘This is my personal (byaktigata) melody, not anyone else’s.’35 Rahman got angry when I told him that one preacher adopted another’s melody, stating: ‘You can imitate (nakal karˡte pāra) someone’s word, but you cannot imitate someone’s melody. This wouldn’t be right.’36 Due to the practical nature of the learning processes, preachers, when I asked them, did not talk about this process abstractly, rather they showed me how they perform. Zaman, for example, illustrated his success in slowing down the speed of his sermons by performing the same passage at different speeds. Speaking slowly is a challenge because the danger of the preacher speaking too fast and too loudly rises with his excitement, which increases with the number of listeners. In this way, the feedback of the audience during and after performances also shapes the melodies. Furthermore, his description highlights the fact that melody is not the only determining factor of the chanting technique; it is coupled with aspects like rhythm and speed. Preachers keep the rhythm by supporting techniques such as moving closer to or away from the microphone or making bodily movements. Zaman deliberately establishes a rhythm in his sermon by alternately raising and lowering each arm, which makes his body sway in a steady movement akin to the rhythm of a metronome. It is worthwhile to take up the challenge to go beyond the description of prose chanting as a ‘chant-like pattern’ and ‘near-chanting’ that can be adapted ‘to fit any ordinary prose sentence’.37 Of course, due to individualization, competitive innovation and little guidance from the rules of religion and ritual, the melodies of waz mahfils are not uniform, and different technical setups convey them differently. Nevertheless, when approaching the melodies of prose chanting, the basic melody employed by Sayeedi is a good starting point. Due to his outstanding position as a media pioneer and popularity, he serves as a point of reference, and often of emulation, for many preachers. While this dependency is not usually admitted by the preachers themselves, it was accurately observed from outside by the parodist Tanvir Sarkar, who called Sayeedi’s melody the ‘common melody’ (sur)38 of waz mahfils. When approaching the meaning of the melodies of prose chanting, we remember that the sonal aspects in religious recitations, for example in Hinduism as in the Quran, are not merely a medium to convey a message, but a message itself.39 Indian poetics has in detail described the interrelation between music, voice, melody, and words or meaning. It has developed very detailed descriptions not only of emotional semiotics of gestures, but also of sound.40 Particularly relevant for approaching the melodies of prose chanting in waz mahfils are similarities to recitations of South Asian Islamic narrative performances and to recitations of the Quran. These two musical ‘neighbours’ of prose chanting represent the narrative dimension and the signature sound of a global Islamic soundscape and authentic Islam.

 Melodic Narration 159 Many South Asian narrative practices share commonalities with waz mahfils including, for example, the musical aspects of climactic structures or the correlation between shifts in language and vocal performance in North Indian katha performances;41 or the inclusion of different poetic formats at different points of the Shiite sermons,42 which were being recited to melodies as early as the nineteenth century43 to aid the main goal of conveying and arousing grief.44 But the recitation of Urdu narratives (riwāyāt) on the occasion of mīlād performances is particularly close to the prose chanting in waz mahfils. The narrative of the example Regula Qureshi provides from a recitation she attended in Karachi in 1969 is reminiscent of the (com)passionate Prophet’s dialogue with Aisha in the previous chapter: it features an intimate dialogue and the Prophet shedding tears before commencing his speech.45 Musically, too, the melody notated by Qureshi shares common features with the melodies performed at waz mahfils. Its ambit is nearly one octave and the reciter often begins new sections, such as the speech of one of the dramatis personae, on the higher end, and ends the quoted phrase around the lower note.46 Another narrative tradition whose musical rendering has much in common with that in waz mahfils is the reading (pāṭh or paṛā) of pũthi, Bengali narratives in verse and of often religious content. In his in-depth analysis of the musical aspects of this performance tradition as it is practised today in the north-eastern Bangladeshi district of Sylhet, ethnomusicologist David Kane defines the musical parameters.47 Among the notations Kane provides, particularly recitations of the tripartite tripadī meter resemble the melodies employed in waz mahfils.48 Kane suggests that we understand pũthi performance as ‘melodic reading’,49 derived from the Bengali/Sylheti sur kari paṛā.50 This terminology is nearly the same as that employed most commonly for the prose chanting in Bengali waz mahfils, the only difference being that in the case of sermons, it is not reading melodically, but speaking melodically. The parallels between the recitational techniques and melodies of Bengali waz and pũthi chanting are perceived by preachers and listeners. Nazir, the Sylheti imām o khatīb of London’s Steppney-Green Mosque, mentioned pũthi as an influential part of the history of waz mahfils. The evaluative dimension aside, a YouTube user’s commentary on Hosen’s sermon, ‘Look at this person, he speaks like a [sic] reading “puthi”’51 and the uploader’s reply that ‘there are thousands of people who are strengthening their imaan by listening to his “PUTHI” type of bayan’52 both attest to a common association between both performance genres. The musical parallels of the prose chanting in waz mahfils and Quranic recitation are similarly not easy to determine. No uniform style of Quranic recitation exists53 and Quranic tajwīd does not fix melodies.54 It was only in the late 1950s and 1960s that something like a transculturally uniform melodic pattern of Quranic recitation was created, modelled on Egyptian Quranic recitation, in tandem with the spread of new media technologies, notably the radio.55 In Indonesia, this led to ‘local’ and ‘universal’ melodies existing side by side: while melodies in Quranic recitation mostly rely on Egyptian scales, they also draw on Southeast Asian melodies.56 In the Quranic recitation in waz mahfils, I did not notice any ‘Bengali’ way of chanting the Quran. The direction of transfer is the other way around: the Bengali prose chanting is in many respects aligned to Quranic recitation.

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As in Quranic recitation, preachers often cup their ear with their right hand when chanting, thereby using a gesture to signal the closeness of both recitations. Musically, too, there are similarities in the ways Quranic recitation and prose chanting build on a key pitch. This key pitch holds together the whole sermon, and maintaining it is one indication of the high musical skills of many preachers.57 The most general pattern that might be catchy for the listeners and which both prose chanting and Quranic recitation often embrace is that of a correspondence of the lower key pitch to a higher key pitch one octave above, with the higher key pitch ‘answering’ the lower.58 For a deeper comparison, I want to concentrate on a particularly characteristic part of the melodies of waz mahfils, their cadences. These are often stereotypical and descending, and serve the function of (partial) closure, similar to punctuation marks. ‘Cadences tend to be organized in a stereotypic fashion. It is not simply the final note of the cadence that is predictable; the final note is often approached in a characteristic or formulaic manner.’59 In Quranic recitation, the cadence resolves melodic tension built up before by returning to the starting pitch area.60 The resemblance between the final cadence of Shaykh Muḥammad Siddīq al-Minshāwī’s recitation as transcribed by Kristina Nelson and the melody of Sayeedi’s prose chanting strongly suggests a clear intermelodic reference.61 Unlike the chanting of waz mahfils, of course, Minshāwī’s recitation is highly melismatic. The whole cadence embellishes one letter, while in the waz mahfils a similar melodic curve would last the length of a sentence. The double ‘allegiance’ of prose chanting to melodic pũthi reading and the Quran are crucial. The melody derived from the final cadence of Quranic recitation is integrated with the tension-release model of pũthi reading and recitation of traditional Bengali metres in general. They draw on the performance of regional narrative forms. At the same time, the melodies are aligned to the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and associated with ‘Arabic’ aesthetics. The melodic performance of traditional narrative forms inspires the sermons’ melodic narration beyond the holy text. The ‘crypto-rhetoric’ of the (incomprehensible) Arabic Quran is replaced by a rhetorical text in the audience’s language. The musical code of Bengali prose chanting goes one step further than the multilingual code switching does: it combines several indexicalities at the same time, a step not possible on the linguistic level, as this would be akin to creating a completely new language.

Chanting and the sensory guidance of dramatic narration The relation between sound and text influences the production and reception of the sermons. The choice to recite and how to do it ‘can both enrich and multiply the possible meanings of text – or conversely render a lyric less ambiguous by intimating one meaning among many’.62 Preachers in Bangladesh stress that their listeners find alternating between spoken and chanted passages particularly attractive. How, then, are the narrative and imaginative layers of the sermons’ narratives combined with the bodily reception of melodies? What are the specific textual qualities that characterize non-chanted and chanted passages in waz mahfils?

 Melodic Narration 161 It is instructive to first ask when preachers do not chant. Preachers never chant throughout their sermons, generally limiting instances of chanting to the main and concluding parts of the sermon. Preachers do not chant explicitly ‘argumentative’ parts. For example, Sayeedi does not chant during his deliberate attempts to influence the indexicality of languages by meta-commentary. Preachers do not chant when explicitly making arguments pertaining to exegetical tradition. The participants at the ijtemā of the Dawat-e Haq, mostly preachers themselves, explained that chanting would not occur at this gathering as the communication here would be based on information (tattvabhittik) and would cater to scholars. In contrast, melodic chanting would be needed to address the regular people (sādhāraṇ manūṣ). Other preachers emphasized that they do not chant when they exhort or counsel the audience, that is, when giving naṣīḥat or upadēś. Indeed, passages of exhortation couched in short sentences and rhetorical and didactic questions are rarely chanted. If preachers address the audience directly as ‘my brothers!’, they usually do so in plain voice.63 Chanting is related to a particular direction of speech as well as to a particular mode of reception. Chanted speech is not directed primarily from the preacher to the audience, and its mode is not a call to action, explicit argumentation or scholarly analogy. Furthermore, chanting requires a certain length of text. Short texts cannot be chanted. Critics link this feature to chanting as superfluous,64 and Najrul Islam says that what could have been said in five minutes is stretched to fifteen minutes of chanting.65 Prose chanting, we can already guess, is part of the rhetorical approach of ‘narrative persuasion’. Long narratives involve chanting, trigger emotional exclamations (citkār) on the part of the audience and need to be construed carefully (gosāẏā).66 They are often juxtaposed to counselling the audience and ‘rational’ analogies in spoken voice. To understand the contribution of prose chanting to the narrative design of the sermons, we need to be more precise and determine where chanting is employed within these longer narratives. This connection is crucial, because textual, melodic and rhythmic qualities each raise and fulfil expectations67 that synchronize the shared reception process of the audience.68 There is a ‘habituation to the connection between a specific sound and a specific act’, and to the way ‘tonality affects our posture and disposition toward others as well as our thoughts and overall mood’.69 In the following analysis, I want to trace some of the habitual connections that preachers and audiences make between the narrative, chanting and their experience during the sermons. One possible and simple answer to the question of how melody and text are connected would be that chanting occurs with particular themes.70 For example, preachers tend to switch to chanting when they describe a child visiting his mother’s grave. Ansari, in his sermon on the story of Joseph, narrates how the caravan that takes Joseph to Egypt as a slave nearly stumbles over the grave of Joseph’s mother. Ansari starts chanting as he describes how Joseph ‘stands in front of his mother’s grave, shedding tears’ and addresses his mother in direct speech.71 However, I would like to go one step further and suggest that chanted passages are linked by their emotional effect. They can occur in very different thematic contexts, but share a common audience response.72 Hosen states that he chants during passages that feature passion (ābeg) and grief (duḥkha).73 Nuri describes how the melodies make the audience cry more and sometimes they react with ‘bustling shouts’

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(hā hullā citkār karˡbe). He adds that he would insert melodic passages after he elicited fear with descriptions of the transient nature of this world.74 I argue that we can grasp the occurrence and effect of chanting by linking it to the narratological analysis of the previous chapter. In the following paragraphs, I revisit some the sermons and supplement the narratological analysis with an analysis of the musical aspect of the preacher’s performance, which allows us to more fully understand the affective processes involved in the poetics of popular preaching.75 Hosen uses a dramatic mode of narration to communicate the Prophet’s pain, and I argued that this portrays the Prophet as an everyday hero in pain whose compassion matches the suffering of the audience listening to his stories. I drew on the example of a scene in which Aisha inquires about the black marks on the Prophet’s body. While the entire scene is set in Aisha’s direct speech, it is only with her address to Muhammad that the orientation of the scene turns to the inner-narrative world. Taking prose chanting into our analysis, we can understand the performative dimension of this narrative shift. Hosen starts to chant exactly at the point that the narrative shifts to Aisha’s dramatic address and he only stops chanting when Allah has voiced the intention to forgive His Umma. The switch to chanting is not always as minutely related to the shift in narrative as in this example, but a change in deixis towards inner-narrative dialogue is a stable feature of chanted passages in waz mahfils. I did a rough estimation of the occurrence of direct speech of inner-narrative figures and chanting throughout a recording of the sermon ‘The Parents’ Pains and Worries’ by Hosen: 45 per cent of the recording comprises direct speech of inner-narrative figures, and Hosen chants 43 per cent of the recorded sermon. Both seem to be very high ratios, and it is likely that the producers of the recording cut out spoken sections. However, the relation between chanting and direct speech should not be affected by these cuts, and it is this relation that is of interest here: the proportion of direct speech in chanted passages is considerably higher (69 per cent) than it is in non-chanted passages (28 per cent). Preachers either attach melodies to dramatic texts, or chanting produces dramatic dialogues consisting of the speech of inner-narrative figures – or both is the case. Next to dramatization in the sense of a mimetic narrative mode, chanted passages often involve reorientations of perspective. Siddiqi is just learning the performance and stays close to stereotypical preaching techniques. In a sermon I analysed, he ‘overemploys’ chanting, thereby lessening the difference between chanting and speaking. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that he chants for the first time when the sermon focuses more closely on one figure’s inner thoughts, namely the perception of Abu Jahl’s son ʿIkrimah just prior to his conversion sealed by his recitation of the profession of faith. Before, the narrative necessarily entailed an omniscient narrator who knows more than Abu Sufyan, Abu Jahl, Abu Lahab and ʿUtba – as only the narrative situation of the listeners knowing more than the figures brings out the awkward contradiction that they all avoided each other, not knowing that the others, to cannot resist Muhammad’s sweet, irresistible recitation of the Quran. In the following, the narrative starts focusing on ʿIkrimah. The first chanted sentence reveals ʿIkrimah’s discovery of the truth about Muhammad and is marked by the gradual disappearance of the narrator in favour of ʿIkrimah’s thoughts. The omniscient narrator allows space for ʿIkrimah to tell us

 Melodic Narration 163 what he sees from his perspective: ‘This person has such a beautiful smile, speaks such beautiful words. This person recites the noble Quran so beautifully and in such a sweet voice.’ Lastly, ʿIkrimah formulates his insight in direct speech: ‘Oh Allah, this person can never be a magician. Oh Allah, if my father says that this man is through and through a magician, then he’s an even greater fraud!’76 The heroism-turned-renunciation of Junayd Baghdadi involves similar shifts in narrative along with chanting. While the situation that leads up to the final(ly renounced) battle features some dialogues, it is framed by an omniscient narrator. He knows about the dire situation of the Prophet’s descendant and comments on the unequal strength of the two contenders. On the battlefield, the feeble figure is described in the narrator’s voice one last time, before the man’s voice is heard: ‘Now the descendent of the Prophet, the man from my Prophet’s family, lean and thin, without any food in his stomach, is shedding tears and says: …’77 It is at this point, with the decisive direct address to Junayd, that Hosen starts to chant. The vast majority (85 per cent) of the chanted scene consists of the direct speech of the inner-narrative figures. In Sayeedi’s narratives of heroism, chanting overlaps with dramatic dialogue and helps give the scenes cohesion. The heroism of two boys who eagerly want to partake in the fight and finally kill Abu Jahl is a case in point. The first occurrence of prose chanting in the sermon is the dialogue between the combative children and their doubting parents, ending with the children’s plea to ‘give us a chance!’78 After relating the reactions of Muhammad and the other fighters in a spoken voice, Sayeedi chants the description of the children’s fight against Abu Jahl and ceases to chant with the blow that kills the enemy of Islam. By chanting throughout the next scene, Sayeedi integrates the farewell of the martyrs from their wives and their martyrdom into one piece. The melodic rendering of the scenes guides the recipients to connect the martyrdom to the farewell dialogues. Both are again rendered in direct speech, which makes up precisely three quarters of these parts of the sermon. When preachers cease to chant, they often channel the emotions aroused in the chanted scene. Sayeedi, for example, moves from narrative to interpretation to explaining the ‘lesson’ of the scene. The last chanted sentence is the declaration of the dying Jafar who tells the companions: ‘I feel I will become a martyr, as I am starting to smell the aroma of Allah’s paradise with my nose.’ Sayeedi then comments without chanting: So there is no better death (mawt) on Allah’s earth than the death of martyrdom (shahādat-er mawt). Say loudly: ‘praise to Allah!’ If anyone does not have the wish (tamannā) for a death of martyrdom, it comes in the Hadith, if the wish for jihad, if anyone does not have this wish (icchā bāsanā) in his heart – then this death will be the death of a hypocrite (munāfiq-er mawt).79

Qaderi often concludes chanted passages with a spoken message directed to the audience, often about sectarian issues. When teaching the implications of Q4:64, chanting separates Qaderi’s interpretation from the promise of salvation presented in the scene of Muhammad’s intercession. After the citation of the Quranic verse in Arabic, he first chants Allah’s speech in Bengali, which culminates in the advice for the

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sinner to go to the Prophet. After a spoken explication, Qaderi again chants, taking up the perspective of the servant in a dialogue he has with the Prophet. At the climax of this dialogue, Qaderi ceases to chant and teaches the audience the gist of both parts: ‘If any servant commits a sin, then Muhammad the Messenger of Allah is the hope, station, address, medium (uchilā, mādhyam) to receive forgiveness for the sins.’80 Chanted passages often culminate in strong audience reactions and slogans intended to elicit audience response. Audience members are guided and habituated to being moved emotionally in chanted passages and participate in the preacher’s narrative. They then move to express these emotions in religious formulas, and make themselves heard collectively. Qaderi employs the prompts naʿrā-ye takbīr (God is great) and naʿrā-ye risālat (Oh Messenger of God) to which the audience responds energetically. And after the searching sinners in the narrative finally reach Muhammad and his caring protection, the audience breaks into a whole series of tasbīḥ, durūd and gajal, raising their hands in affirmation. The differences between chanted dramatic dialogue and spoken audience address or interpretation in waz mahfils are comparable to similar differences in other Bengali performance forms. The dialogic form, particularly between Allah and the saintly figure, is known from different song traditions prevalent in Bengal.81 The ‘distinction between lyrical and instructive-proclamatory aspects’82 is also observed in the religious idiom of Bangladeshi Sufi songs: there are different types of songs for expressing a state from within versus informing ‘about something’.83 The preachers at waz mahfils play with the subtle ambiguities of address inside or outside of the narrative, as does the ‘counsellor’, the nāṣiḥ, in the Urdu ghazal, or the ‘signatory line’ in South Asian (narrative) poetry (Ur. takhalluṣ, Beng. bhaṇitā).84 However, while the passages highlighted by prose chanting express states from within, they are less about reflection and more about dramatization and the creation and immediate relief of tension. Moreover, we noted that the combination of both forms in one narrative and performance is crucial. Prose chanting is an invitation to be immersed in and affected by a dramatic narrative that figures as part of religious instruction and general persuasion. Chanted scenes concentrate on the dramatic speech of the elevated characters of their sermons, and the preacher even withdraws as a narrator. Chanting thereby emphasizes and makes bodily perceptible a reorientation in directness, closeness and perception, and hence contributes significantly to making the world presented in the sermons tangible. As the classics of reader-response criticism and affective stylistics have shown,85 even a single sentence affects the reader sequentially: the emotional effect is generated by building on what has been read before.86 This is also true for the sequence of what Hans-Robert Jauß calls ‘primary aesthetic experience’,87 which is ‘the communicative framework for an imaginative consciousness which is prepared to enter into emotional identification with the action and situation of the character’.88 The vocal and narrative alternation of different perspectives and degrees of identification form a pattern of what Wolfgang Iser calls the ‘theme’ and the ‘horizon’. By this, he means that in the course of reception, the reader always perceives only one segment, which ‘always stands before the “horizon” of the other perspective segments in which he

 Melodic Narration 165 had previously been situated’.89 The combination of vocal and narrative modes in waz mahfils contribute to the ‘structure of theme and horizon’, which ‘ensures that the reaction of text to world will trigger a matching response’ in the recipient.90 This pattern reaches its emotional climax in the final supplicatory prayer: the listeners can conjure up the stock of images and the lived-through emotional responses as they listened to the sermon. The relationship between chanting and narrative in the sermons allows for a habitualization of parallel imaginative, emotional and bodily aspects of the experience of compassion. The melodic passages form a melodic thread throughout the sermons.91 As the frequency of their occurrence increases over the course of the sermon, so too does the proportion of the identificatory emotional experience brought about by these passages and the need to reorient towards the narrative world. At the end of the sermon stands the final prayer, most often rendered melodically. The melodic reminiscence helps link it back to the promises of salvation declared dramatically and melodically in the previous narratives.

Chanting and the performative interpretation of canonical texts Let us turn to how vocal performance and its link to dramatic narratives interact with, apply and remodel the authority of the Quran. Analysing single sentences as much as the structure of entire sermons, I argue that preachers cite and recite the Quran by turning the chanted Bengali translation into a veritable ‘recitation’ of the Quran. As the chanting is linked to direct speech, preachers tease out the potential of the Quran as a dramatic script. I have already noted that some preachers adopted gestures associated with Quranic recitation, and the melodies of prose chanting are connected to Quranic recitation and pũthi reading. In both cases, the performer performs not his own words but an authoritative text. Preachers build upon and reinforce the association between melody and textual authority by intermingling chanted passages with Quranic recitations. The role of the Quran at the beginning of chanted passages overlaps with the Quran’s role in prompting multilingual code switching. By transferring indexicalities of Arabic and Urdu to the ‘Bengali’ translation, the code switching aligns the Bengali speech of the preacher to the authority and aesthetics of the Quran. Prose chanting criss-crosses between the recitation of the Quran and the multilingual codes of the sermons: it might identify linguistic shifts as much as cover them up, or mark a personal style across languages.92 Preachers often quote Quranic verses at the beginning of chanted passages. In a typical case, Sayeedi introduces his recitation of Q39:53 with the formula ‘Allah the Pure has furthermore said’ and ‘Allah says’ to link it to his chanted translation. We can already sense the affinity of the Quran as Allah’s direct speech and the narrative situation of dramatic prose chanting. The approximation of Quranic text and translation by a musical hinge has repercussions for the link between the Quranic text

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and the preacher’s interpretation of it. The melody binds together the Quran and its translation and sets both apart from the preacher’s commentary. Let me revisit a code-switching example I discussed in Chapter 2. This time I underline the chanted sections in the quotation. We see that it ends after the translation of the Quranic verse. Only afterwards does Sayeedi link it to his interpretation, which he marks with the phrase ‘that’s why’ (sutarāṃ). Chanting here separates ‘translation’ from ‘interpretation’ and naturalizes and authenticates the translation, including all the variations of translating ‘call’ and ‘slave’: (Q7:194a) ‘Lo! Those on whom ye call (tadʿūna) beside Allah are slaves like you.’ The Quran taught the believer and servant: Those besides Allah to whom you take refuge, whom you invoke, whose help you want, they are like you, my servants and my slaves. That’s why, what creates in you respect, self-respect, personality, identity is (your) belief.93

Similarly, the synonym pairs jñāna-buddhi and mān-ʿizzat in the example from Khalilur’s sermon are marked as translation, not interpretation, despite the fact that they are not represented in the Quranic text at all. Khalilur chants throughout his extended translation, until he reaches the multilingual row of sinners (baṛa gunāhgār, pāpī, ẓālim).94 This is quite elegant, as his melodic marker coincides with readopting the root of the initial Quranic verse (ẓalamnā and ẓālim). The third example cited in Chapter 2 shows other ways preachers include chanted Bengali text and Quranic citations and how they render similar or distinguish the two from one another within their sermons. Nesari’s explanatory comment about the jinn is not chanted at all. The Quranic translation is set off from the preacher’s comment. However, the translation also includes the chain of synonyms: ʿibādat, bandegī, dāsatva and ghulāmi. The chanting performatively marks the synonyms as ‘Quranic’ and not as commentary, therefore rendering opaque their function as commentary and interpretation. Finally, in this case, Nesari first chants wa ‘l-insān in Quranic tajwīd recitation, but then picks it up in the melody of Bengali chanting. (Q51:56) ‘I created the jinn and humankind only that they might worship Me.’ Say: Allāhu akbar! Allah the master of mankind said: ‘I have (created) the jinn’ – the jinn community, that’s not us, the jinn community stays above and is created from fire, isn’t it? – ‘and humankind’, that means humans. You, me, my German friend, and all the Bangladeshis that are in this world, all are humans. Humans: Insān means human. Say: isn’t that so? Allah has said to all of them: ‘I created (you) only, without exception, for worship, to serve, for servitude, for servility’ – say ‘Praise be to God!’95

As dramatic narration overlaps with prose chanting, so does multilingual citation, and in particular, citation of the Quran. By reciting the Quran in a dense multilingual and chanted performance, preachers make divine speech part of their sermons, and their sermons part of divine speech. Let us follow the aspect of prose chanting as emblematizing authoritative speech in the Quran and Hadith.

 Melodic Narration 167 Preachers in waz mahfils use ‘chanted delivery to set off the hallowed events surrounding the Prophet from ordinary narrative’.96 Take, for example, the scenes prefiguring the death of the Prophet, who is reluctant to die because he does not want to leave his community alone. Qaderi presents the scene in a spoken lesson directed to the audience. He starts to chant when presenting the wonder of Azrail approaching the Prophet to ask for his permission (ejāj from ʿijāza) to take his soul. Preaching on the same topic, Siraji links the Prophet’s anxiety about what would happen to ‘my orphaned community’, expressed in chanted dialogue, to another prophetic story. He chants again when citing the exclamation of Sām’s painful recollection of his death. Siraji stops chanting when he relates what he sees as the lesson of the story to the everyday life of his audience. After this typical example of chanting as a marker of dramatic presentation of the revered figures’ words, Siraji adds a dramatic everyday scene. In this scene, he cites the thoughts of a dying man, the Quranic recitation of this man’s ‘Islamically educated son’, the man’s vision of death, and a conversation between Azrail and Allah. Although this narrative situation features many aspects typical for chanted passages discussed thus far, and although Siraji quotes the son reciting from the Quran, he does not chant at any point of this account. Chanting is here reserved for dramatic scenes of the Prophet’s times.97 Often, however, the association between Quranic translation and chanting is less stable and develops over the course of the sermon. In Sayeedi’s 1999 sermon, for example, chanting is coupled with Quranic recitation over the course of the first third of the sermon, thereby establishing a clear link between Quranic text and Bengali chanting as its translation. It is only during the prophetic story of Ayyūb, and more precisely during his prayer to Allah, that chanting occurs without corresponding to Quranic verse. Later in the sermon, however, this tendency is expanded. In accounts of Joseph and Jonah, the recitation of Urdu couplets becomes a structural substitution for the Quranic recitation and later Allah’s direct speech is cited in Bengali without prior Quranic citations. In the accounts of mercy and heroism that follow, chanting and Quranic recitation often occur in the vicinity of one another, but in a much looser relationship. Both sonic codes overlap with a decreasing hierarchy, leaving increasingly undifferentiated which of the two styles is subordinate (translating, commenting upon, etc.). Relating this observation to the increase of chanted passages over the course of the sermon, we could say that the sermon moves from exegetically oriented hermeneutics to increasingly dramatic principles. However, both aspects are interwoven and not contrary to each other. Instead of perceiving a ‘competition’ between the Quran on the one hand and dramatic, political or story-oriented preaching on the other, I propose a mutual relationship. The dramatic narrative and chanting has an effect on the preacher’s interpretation of and recitation from the Quran, and, at the same time, the readings from the Quran have an effect on the chanting. The Bengali prose chanting is linked to Allah’s speech in two ways. It is associated with the Quran, as the speech of Allah, and with direct speech. When preachers cite the Quran, they emphasize, or even create, dramatic and dialogical dimensions. The quotations above show that the Arabic quotations and their Bengali equivalents –

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equivalent in the sense of interweaving linguistic and musical indexicalities – always feature dialogue: dialogue between participants of salvation history as well as between believers and Allah. While the Bengali translation is made to resemble Quranic diction, this diction is interpreted and transmitted to the audience as a dramatic script of emotional declarations. Audiences are invited to participate in a process of salvation filled with dramatic tension and emotional release. When prose chanting includes and develops the dramatic logic of the Quran, it is part of a performative exegesis. Its narrative and melodic characteristics are part of reading out the Quran as personalized Bengali narratives. Quranic verses might be extended into whole scenes or only included as the speech of Allah who figures as one of the narrative’s dramatic figures. However, even in the latter case, the emotions elicited by the narrative remain linked to the divine word. The Quran becomes one more feature of the poetics of popular preaching and helps to increase the sonic and narrative possibilities of preaching.

Songs and disentangling critique of melodies in sermons Prose chanting is part of a field filled with melodies, but at the same time using melodies in Islamic expression is often hotly contested. To grasp the particular position of the melodies of prose chanting, I start by discussing the dynamics and contestations of the inclusion of songs (gajal, gān) in sermons. The contestation around emotional effect and music once more underlines the centrality of these aspects from the actors’ point of view and helps to bring together etic descriptions centred on the performance and emic perceptions and valuations. When preachers sing songs, the audience usually joins in – some close their eyes in immersion. This is helped by the fact that preachers often draw on tunes from other musical genres commonly known to the audience, and sometimes transform even ritual melodies into songs.98 Hosen sets tunes known from najˡrul gīti, songs of Bangladesh’s national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, to new lyrics.99 In the song ‘Go and See What Is in Mother Amina’s Lap’ (Torā dekhe yā Āminā māẏer kole), all but the opening line has been transformed by Hosen. Hosen swapped out the social revolutionary diction of the ‘rebel poet’, as Nazrul is also known, with the commonplaces used in his sermons with the typical voice of the suffering mother: ‘Mother Amina says, shedding tears / “Whom should my son address as father”?’ Another very popular song that Hosen sings together with the audience during waz mahfils builds melodically on the well-known song Doẏāl bābā kebˡlā kābā,100 set to new lyrics: Those who don’t follow their parent’s words will not receive the compassion (daẏā) of Allah’s Prophet If you make your parents sad, prayer and fasting will be fruitless God can’t bear it if you hurt the mother’s heart (kalijā).101

Easily learnt because of its well-known melody, the song stands in for Hosen’s sermons on the parents, and vice versa. Hosen states that he created it after his cassette sermon

 Melodic Narration 169 ‘The Parents’ Pains and Worries’ became a ‘hit’.102 The song serves as an advertisement for the sermon. Organizers demand songs when Hosen preaches: ‘In many areas, even though the mahfil has already started, they give me a slip: “Huzur, please sing a gajal at this mahfil, sing a gajal.”’103 In another instance, Hosen, as always unaccompanied by instruments, builds on the Baul song by the late folk singer Ābˡdur Rahˡmān Baẏātī. Hosen takes over the first line, but the following rhyming text creates its own intertexts to traditions of praise songs and uses Medina as a topos of longing: Leave your boat, boatman, we’ll go to Medina In the heart the Kaaba, on the eyes Medina Leave your boat, boatman, we’ll go to Medina In Medina, the Prophet cries out of compassion for the Umma The Prophet lies (shuẏā) in Medina, (out of) compassion (māẏā) for the sinning Umma you all become crazy out of love for that Prophet Leave your boat, boatman, we’ll go to Medina.104

When describing the reception of this song, Hosen particularly emphasizes the imaginative and emotional dimension of the song’s lyrics for the audience who chant along enthusiastically: ‘It occurs to them [the listeners] that they are going on that trip. A mood (bhāb) like that comes over them.’105 To understand this function of the songs within the sermons, we have to remember how the songs are built into the sermons. Audience and preacher sing ‘Leave your boat, boatman, we’ll go to Medina’ after Hosen narrates that ‘the compassionate Prophet (daẏār nabī), the loving Prophet, got up from his grave (raojā, rawḍa) in Medina and appeared in Junayd’s room’.106 The song serves to make the Prophet present on two levels. Within the narrative, it affirms the presence of the Prophet along with Junayd. Within the communicational situation in the mahfil tent, it provides the audience with the possibility to express the explicit desire to join this imagined congregation, and to directly address both figures. Furthermore, songs can be used as part of the narrative. After his decision to ‘give to destruction his own egoism, his own supremacy (ādhipatya)’ Junayd ‘sheds tears and sobbingly (gun gun kare)’107 sings a song to the Prophet. In another case, a companion who just escaped captivity sings: ‘Oh Messenger of God, oh Beloved of God! / In the last moments of my death (maut) / you, oh Prophet, will stay over my head when I lie on the bed / I will see you with tears in your eyes.’108 In each case, the audience not only adopts words of a narrative figure, but also partakes in the act of their performance. Hosen’s song is present in the times of the Prophet, and so are those singing along. When preachers perform Islamic songs (gajal), they refer to forms and contexts cherished in other genres with rhythms, sonic textures and melodies.109 Building such relationships is contested and observed with some anxiety both by actors who fear a dilution of what they deem original Islam with the intrusion of non-Islamic elements, such as Bengali folk traditions, and by those who fear that ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘pristine’

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Islamic practices such as sermons might integrate and eventually become substitutes for Bengali traditions. This leads us to discussions about the ambiguous status of music in Islam in general and Bengali Islam in particular.110 There are multiple perceptions and sources of authority that can be referred to when discussing the status of music ‘in Islam’. In Bangladesh as elsewhere, fine distinctions exist between the different kinds of texts that are put to music, and of what music actually is.111 This situation leads to the co-presence of restrictive views on what music is supposed to entail in Islam and a variety of practices. These practices are in turn evaluated along heightened sensibilities, which are actualized to different degrees in different contexts.112 Sermons and the practice of preaching are part of the discussions about music. In contemporary Bangladesh, Islamic music, at least when it is accompanied by instruments, is closely associated with the textual and ritual sphere of Sufi shrines (dargāh) and saints.113 The sermons build on and deepen this connection by offering sometimes poignant critiques against these forms of worship and expression. Importantly for the argument of this book, they often offer aesthetic critiques. Take, for example, the critique that songs transmitted via microphone ‘are so loud (lit. biting) that you can’t even go to sleep during their ʿurs’. A preacher cites the popular song Doẏāl bābā kebˡlā kābā in a distorted yet clearly recognizable form. He quotes the following lines: ‘Merciful father, kebˡlā kābā [saintly epithet] / craftsman of the mirror / Put the mirror in my inner heart.’114 After his satirical quote, he offers the following textual critique: I put the mirror. Even pilgrimage is not important. To make the pilgrimage is not necessary. They can read neither the Quran nor the praise of God correctly. Honored pīrs, renewer, universal holy men. These are Jewish-Christian teachings! To destroy the belief in one God in this country. The Māijˡbhāṇḍār (order) in Chittagong. Chittagong, Māijˡbhāṇḍār. When one goes there, one gets caught in a jam of ‘urs. Cows, goats, kids, and grandkids, all look the same (ekākār). Microphones all over the place, and melodies! My God! So many melodies (sur) and such a huge number of songs (gajal)!115

The ridiculing effect of the parodic ‘reproduction’ of the song’s melody leads to criticism of shrine-centred sacred topography and accusations about religious laxity and ‘treason’ against Islam. The parodic effect glosses over possible meanings of the original song, which is deeply steeped in Bengali Sufism. Instead of interpreting its images and commonplaces by linking it to tradition, the preacher refutes it altogether with a ‘literal’ reading. At the same time, as parodies of Daẏāl bābā are part of popular culture,116 we could say that the preacher’s parodic performance not only criticizes the song it parodies but also imitates the original and joins the ranks of existing parodies. In this way, the parody does not only present a different model, but follows the same structural model as preachers who employ songs ‘seriously’ – such as Hosen, who took over the melody with a completely different intention. Ansari, the next preacher mounting the stage, concretely relates songs to preaching. He claims that in Sufi sermons, songs are substituted for the Quran and then goes on

 Melodic Narration 171 to dismantle the songs. He alternates between parodic quotations performed in the respective tune (underlined) and subsequent spoken commentary: The Prophet came with the Quran, and the mystical lover (āśek) of our society come with songs (gān o gajal). … If they preach (waz karle) for two hours, there is not one single Quranic verse nor any Hadith, but ten songs. These songs are not based on reality. ‘One day we have to leave this world, oh great pīr ‘Abd al-Qādir Jīlānī!’ I have some followers who (upon hearing this) from afar shriek ‘eee eee’. ‘This great pīr ‘Abd al-Jīlānī / Hearing his name fire becomes water (pāni) / oh you great pīr’. This doesn’t have anything in common with reality. Hearing his name, fire will be extinguished. Kindling chaff but one cannot see it.117

Ansari’s performative critique of the song and recitation continues the ‘rationalizing’ parody of the previous speaker also refusing to enter mystical hermeneutics. The mimetic parody of the ‘shrieking’ audience response adds to the ridiculing of the expression of religious emotions by those appreciating the songs. By depicting an instantaneous and unmindful reaction, Ansari likens the reception of Sufi songs to listening to pop music rather than describing it as a carefully nurtured practice linked to inner insights. But again, there is a dialectic fluidity involved, as Ansari counts those he mocks among his followers. Lastly, Ansari parodies and polemicizes against the song ‘Leave Your Boat, Boatman, We’ll Go to Medina’, which is, as we saw above, also included in waz mahfils by Hosen. Ansari criticizes the song again by quoting it in a distorted manner: [quotes melodically] ‘In the heart (hr̥ daẏe) the Kaaba, on the eyes (naẏane) Medina / Leave your boat, boatman, let’s go to Medina!’ [comments] In the heart there is the Kaaba, in the eyes Medina, hey, we go to Medina by boat. Medina is already in the eyes [different, less poetical word than in the song, cokh], and the Kaaba in the heart (dilei). So why would you need a boat? Right. Say: ‘there is no reality.’ But there is the reality of Allah’s Quran!118

Ansari finishes his critique by juxtaposing his distorted presentation of the song to a beautiful recitation of a Quranic sūra (Q90:1–4, Q90:8). This aesthetically ‘proves’ the difference and superiority of the Quran vis-à-vis the above parodied form and its un-truths. The satirical parodies positively establish the preachers and foundational texts as secure guidance in a dubious world. They aesthetically dismantle songs sung as part of practices of Sufi orders and around shrines. According to the satires, these musical and poetic forms of expression have two main negative features: the music is mainly associated with ‘pop culture’ – blaring loudspeakers, idol cults and shrieking groupies – and the text is associated with nonsense theology, in which apparently contradictory and misinformed texts replace the real foundations of religion. The polemics include melodies that are part of sermons – they, however, interestingly omit prose chanting, and hence the most common, and loudest, melodic rendering in waz mahfils. Both sermons against songs employed prose chanting with considerable skill and frequency. Let us see if we can solve this apparent paradox.

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In a newspaper article, Olipuri criticizes Bengali waz by saying, ‘There exists the tendency to spellbind (bhakta) people by vocal melody (galār sur), entertain (cittabinodan) them by frolicking words, and manage huge sums of money.’119 Similar to the polemics against Sufi songs, he links chanting in waz mahfils to loud audio amplification and juxtaposes it to a core Islamic practice, the ‘traditional’ call to prayer without amplification. According to Olipuri, the unnatural voice literally drowns out the natural voice: I had a dream that I went to some mosque to pray. There were, ah!, many worshippers. But no one wanted to give the āzān to assemble for prayer. So I said that if no one else calls to prayer, I will do it. When I started to give the āzān, one group started to raise a hullaballoo with the mic to stop the sound of my āzān. Next to their microphone, my vocal āzān became faint.120

As in the polemics against Sufi songs as being merely ‘loud’, those who use melodies are denunciated as pop singers. Like the derision of folk practices as noise, these criticisms mobilize middle-class sensibilities.121 Although waz mahfils as a whole are associated with lower and lower middle classes, critiques of prose chanting show internal differences and aspirations articulated along lines of respectability. But we cannot conflate criticism against prose chanting with that against songs, and even the criticism of songs in large part relied on dismantling their texts rather than sound or melodies. While the criticism of prose chanting involves commonplaces that are shared with standard critiques of music, such as its potentially dangerous power and attraction, the dangers of superficiality and artificiality, and its abasement into ‘pure pleasure’, these commonplaces are coupled with criticism of the specific texts and their rhetorical style. Chanting is often evaluated using textual and rhetorical criteria. This kind of criticism too has a long tradition. The medieval Iraqi preacher Ibn al-Jawzī, for example, condemns all gestures and crying out, which he deems affectations that are ‘produced artificially, or with the help of the devil’.122 He places musical performances at sermon events, in which the waz preacher ‘recites and chants (yunshidu) poems’, in this context. As these ‘melodies are like music, they are moving for the soul and an intoxication (nashwatan)’.123 It is significant that Ibn al-Jawzī views melodies and chanting as emotionally moving. And while he only speaks about chanting during the recitation of the Quran and poems, he draws a connection between musical performance and artificiality. Artificiality is a constant criticism against prose chanting in contemporary Bangladesh, too. When I asked Nazrul if he spoke melodically, he answered that he would not speak with any melody, but rather ‘in a natural way’ (āmi svābhābikˡgatite māti).124 The implied claim that chanting is artificial is linked to the perception that preachers are superficial speakers who transmit via performance a message they neither own, nor have acquired by education or other inner processes.125 Naturally, it is easy to accuse such speakers of being ‘fake’ and doing ‘business’ (byabsā). The musical aspect of recitation, which was evaluated positively when related to the Quran’s rhetorical effect, becomes akin to hocus-pocus elsewhere. The ideal picture critics paint is that of

 Melodic Narration 173 an authentic and natural speaker who advises people to do good in a straightforward manner. It is easy to perceive this as an idealized self-image and a stable critique that has been voiced similarly at different times.126 Prose chanting is often evaluated by its relation to the persuasive stance of the sermon. A main criticism is that the melody is part of a preaching style that is only ‘sweet’ (miṭhā, miṣṭi) and does not include social goals or call people to the path of righteousness – in short, that it is preaching that lacks persuasion. Nazrul Islam, who deliberately avoids melodies in his sermons and criticizes others for using them, at the same time explicitly praised Sayeedi as a very good preacher. When I confronted him with the fact that Sayeedi chants in his sermons, he made an interesting argument, again underlining the intermingling of melody and rhetorical effect. He praised Sayeedi’s voice as being a gift from God, so sweet people want to hear more of it, and added that his melodies are accompanied by good language and suit the words well. The link to mobilizing persuasion and a particular set of emotions – namely, actioninspiring heroic zeal – is key to Nazrul’s evaluation. Sayeedi’s words, he states, do not aim to attract the people’s minds, but are words to make people strong and sharp (teziyān). Besides that, his speech includes a good sense (cetanā) of belief, a good sense of struggle, how one has to fight against wrong ones (bātil), how the honoured companions have died, how in the past the God-fearing ones have struggled. When he says all these words then zeal (josh) is created in the people.127

This criticism shows that preachers simultaneously perceive the attraction of the chanting technique and its connections to the chanted text. The assumed lack of persuasion of preachers who chant can be understood not only as a polemical stance but also as a commentary on different types of persuasion. It is based on the dichotomy between persuasion as a direct, non-chanted appeal to the audience and a narrative persuasion anchored in chanted dramatic scenes. Fittingly, criticism also connects chanting to long sermons and stories. In Nazrul’s idealized past, sincere preachers gave shorter sermons instead of acting out (icchā kairā bhaṅi kare) and lengthening the expressions as some preachers do today.128 Olipuri rejects the long digressions (abāntar kathābārtā) of the waz ‘events’ (anuṣṭhān). While Olipuri criticizes contemporary waz for not being persuasive enough, his views on persuasion are informed by a legalistic interpretation of right guidance and are less concerned with social change. He sees the persuasive role of waz as calling people to purify (saṃśōdhan) their beliefs and actions and tread the path of righteousness (hidāyat), which relies on ‘the difference between custom (sunnat) and unlawful innovation (bidʿat)’. Olipuri mentions emotional effect only indirectly and always in association with the topics he deems proper: ‘death, grave, Day of Judgement, heaven and hell’.129 These topics are close to the standard topics of the (Arabic) waʿẓ tradition and those Hirschkind describes as dominant in Egyptian cassette sermons from the early 2000s. However, it is important to keep in mind that Olipuri describes his vision as pitted against the mainstream of Bengali waz preaching, which is characterized by opposite tendencies. The attraction of prose chanting is acknowledged by its critics and by

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preachers who proudly ‘add melodies’ to their sermons. While Olipuri critically maligns the fact that preachers and listeners are ‘mesmerized by the melodies (purported to be) held in the name of waz’,130 this same effect is praised by preachers who chant prose because it is attractive.131 Both parties agree that melodies attract people: ‘While before, the tent might be empty, it is the melody that brings people in.’132 ‘If sometimes a little melody is given, then people’s interest (āgraha) in the speech rises.’133 Zaman, graduate of a komī mādrāsā and practitioner of a decidedly melodic preaching style, views the criticism against chanting in sermons as a mock fight triggered by a lack of skill. He states that it is merely a question of the capabilities of preachers if they add melodies to their sermons: many of them want to, but cannot. And those who cannot do it preach against it.134

Culture as nature: Prose chanting and self-affection Disentangling the alleged artificiality of the preachers’ emotions leads us to questions of intentionality, subjectivity and the situatedness of emotions vis-à-vis bodily and imaginative processes. The criticism of artificiality is largely based on the notion that preachers use chanting in a strategic manner, and thus that they can choose to deploy it (or not) at will. In contrast, preachers who chant stress that they do not add melodies intentionally (icchā kare). Rather, they say, the melodies ‘come’ (ese yāẏ) to the speaker, and some even say that the melodies come ‘automatically’, so much so that their appearance cannot even be explained.135 At the very least, the relationship between chanting and preachers’ subjectivity is not as superficial as critics charge. Saba Mahmood has deciphered the role of bodily movement as a technology of the self and a striving subject that slowly develops moral sentiments.136 Similarly, prose chanting is not, from the preachers’ perspective, something external and artificial, but is preconditioned on the development of affects during performance. At the same time, my analysis of the emotional work of prose chanting complicates Mahmood’s approach. The simultaneous combination of sonic and textual elements brings together body and imagination. It is not ‘just’ that the body is used as a means of self-technology, but the conventions of genre forge a connection between the bodily learning of the chanted melodies and the imaginative reorientations demanded by the narrative. The emergence of the melody is linked to the occurrence of emotions, which in turn is preconditioned on active imaginative acts prefigured by narratives. More than in the case of bodily rituals analysed by Mahmood, imagination plays a significant role in the bodily dimension of waz mahfils. Zaman stated that the audience was a key factor in his decision whether to include melodic ways of presenting his sermon. He furthermore stated that during a performance, he adds melodies after he sees that the audience is engrossed by his sermon. The preacher can only begin chanting well into the sermon, as he first needs feedback from the audience and has to get into the right mood himself. The importance of the feedback loop and length of the narrative also lies at the heart of Hosen’s negative experience with studio preaching. Without listeners and with only six minutes, the ‘mood (bhāb) for melody does not come’.137

 Melodic Narration 175 Preachers think melodies come to them inspired by their emotional states; they are not an external embellishment as critics suggest. As melodies co-occur with heightened emotions, often of suffering, they are likely to evoke tears. A preacher who does not cry himself cannot bring the audience to tears during the final prayer. To evoke tears, the preacher has to ‘have them himself ’ (nijer madhye thākte habe). Tears can overwhelm the preacher to the point that he cannot continue. Just like the melodies, tears cannot be predicted or planned, and the feelings bubble up while the preacher delivers his sermon.138 The cultural technique of prose chanting hence assumes a similar correspondence between voice and emotions as it is assumed in the ‘psychology of expression’. This thinking about the voice as the expression of psychological states of the speaker was pioneered in antiquity by Cicero and Quintilian and remained effective in Europe until the eighteenth century.139 Similarly, homiletic books circulating in madrasas in and beyond Bangladesh often describe the voice in terms of the emotions it expresses and carries. The above analysis of prose chanting allows us to go one step further. In the waz mahfils, the ‘natural’ correspondences of the voice are substituted by a cultural technique: the genre conventions evoke emotions not along the natural, but along the culturally coded, melodic, voice. I propose to connect prose chanting to another crucial aspect of Quintilian’s theory of affects and voice, namely to self-affection. Unlike in the case of a mere simulation of feelings (simulatio), Quintilian and others urge the speaker to feel the emotional states he uses in persuasion himself.140 This approach stands contrary to performers merely ‘acting’ but not actually embodying emotions.141 The Speech Class, the most comprehensive homiletic book on Islamic preaching in Bangladesh today, describes self-affection at some length. Its author, Yāinul Ābidīn, begins by quoting, in Arabic, what he calls an ‘Arabic proverb’: ‘The speaker is the first listener of his words.’ After having marked, by this quotation, what follows as ‘Arabic/ Islamic’, Ābidīn offers a description of self-affection that is very similar to how it was described in classics of antique rhetoric:142 To affect others by one’s own speech it is necessary that one be affected oneself. One has to deeply perceive each syllable and nuance. One has to ponder in an innermost way: ‘It is as if the words of agony and revolution which I am uttering are happening, in a burning reality, in my very own life. This is in front of my eyes. I am being torn apart. I am burning. A huge mountain of grief is in me.’ Talking about an agony which tires me and smears me in blood will evoke a special force of passion and faith (ābeg o biśvās) and will touch the listener’s heart. The feeling (anubhūti) will be stirred and will induce a revolutionary change in thinking and conviction. Otherwise, if the speaker is not involved with his words somatically, then the words will not leave any mark (dāg) on the listener’s mind. So, if you want to make others cry there is no alternative than crying yourself beforehand. You want to ignite the hearts of others? In that case, first burn in the same fire yourself.143

This is an amalgam of common rhetorical knowledge. The first sentence is almost identical with Quintilian’s advice: ‘The chief requisite, then, for moving the feelings

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of others is, as far as I can judge, that we ourselves be moved.’144 The last sentence is very similar to the famous Horatian phrase, ‘If you want to make me cry, you first have to be sad yourself.’ That it is not identical might be explained by the same deviation in Arabic preaching manuals,145 which Ābidīn may have accessed via the internet. But again, there are multiple possible trajectories: the last sentence is akin to wellknown aphorisms, such as ‘What you want to set afire in others must first burn within yourself ’, commonly ascribed to Augustine. No matter what its textual origins, the technique of self-affection as outlined by Ābidīn matches the rhetorical techniques described by preachers. It elucidates how statements are made ‘real’ as much as how body and imagination are involved. Preachers follow the advice that speech must have a relation to one’s own life in their stories of everyday life or in drawing on easy-to-recognize emotional experiences. Commenting on the incident of the child Prophet using the moon as a toy in his cradle, Hosen states: ‘Many (of the listeners) have small children. … And those who have not married can take it from their own childhood: “I was a child.” Thereby they make the grief their own (nijer madhye niẏe āse).’146 Ābidīn describes the crucial role imagination plays in making real the words of agony and revolution. This is yet another Quintilian thought, the importance of the visual imagination of the speaker is highlighted: ‘To achieve that arousal in oneself and others, one must be able to form “what the Greeks call phantasiai (let us call them ‘visions’ [visiones]) by which the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us.”’147 The preacher therefore emerges as an ‘euphantasiotos, … one who is exceptionally good at realistically imagining to himself things, words, and actions’.148 Again, this is not merely a theoretical concept. It closely matches Hosen’s characterization of his preaching style, and it links the visuality of his own imagination to mnemonics and to the listener’s imagination.149 In a long conversation I had with him, Hosen contrasted this technique with the image of a preacher who reads out scholarly sermons. Even though this other figure is probably invented by Hosen for the sake of argument and not based on a real preacher, it is informative about his selfperception: For example, one speaker stayed with me, a greater scholar (ālim) than me. … For half an hour of waz, he has to go (to the waz mahfil) after having consulted a lot of books. After we return, he says: ‘Brother Hosen, before I start preaching, I have to consult the books (kitāb). To preach half an hour I have to read for at least one hour. Nevertheless, in the middle of it, I continue consulting selected pages two or three times. I am amazed that you preach hour upon hour, one thinks that you can do it throughout the entire night, and the main point stays present before you; there is no disorder. I go, consulting select pages, which you don’t have to do.’ I said: ‘Look, you do waz after reading, I do waz after seeing (āpnerā oẏāj karen paiṛā ār āmi oẏāj kari deikhā). I go to the field of Uhud [place of a famous battle in early Islamic history] when I hold a sermon, the field of Uhud appears in front of my eyes, and I present the talk’s feelings. And let the listeners visualize (yena

 Melodic Narration 177 dekhteche) that the events occur right in front of them. This is when they shed tears.’150

Here, the commonplace or topos acquires its original mnemotechnical dimension: the preacher ‘visits’ a place. This place is not only a location for storing memories, but visually and imaginatively conjured up by the preacher. This allows him to keep things in order without the ‘secondary’ organization of scripture. Such acts of imagination lead to self-affection that at the same time encompasses the listeners who are affected by the same imaginative process. It is not a prior imaginative act of the speaker who then is affected and talks to the audience. Rather, audience and preacher partake in the same process, although the preacher is the primus inter pares of the joint self-affection. This process sets the waz preacher apart from the kathak, the parallel figure in Bengali ‘Hindu’ preaching of the nineteenth century, who evokes a common emotion ‘without committing himself ’.151 Using this imaginative technique as a basis, we can more firmly grasp the meaning of the common formula preachers use when entering a narrative. They call upon the audience to ‘come’ along with them (āsun, āsen): to visit and visualize the scene together, ‘smear the words on their bodies’. The result of this imaginative process is ‘enargeia, what Cicero calls illustratio and evidentia, a quality which makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it’.152 This is how Hosen describes the joint visit to such an imagined place, which evokes tears: The listeners, too, are as if they are seeing it: the events of the field of Uhud are happening (ghaṭteche) in front of their eyes, and this is the moment when tears are shed. They’re thinking, yes … when at that point the presentation is like that, then it is no longer the situation that we are sitting at the mahfil, but then the way is, one thinks (mane haẏ), we are right next to the event. Next to this event. No more thinking of house and farm – at this mahfil we think that we are next to the incident, like it appears before our eyes, and from our eyes tears keep flowing. … When I speak, the incident appears (bhāsteche) before me. I am seeing that from my eyes tears are flowing, the listeners also cry. As if I (see) the incident of Uhud’s earth, the following account: they are hitting the Prophet, my Prophet moves his hands and says: ‘don’t hit me, you know that I don’t have a father, don’t have a mother’. When I tell this incident, I tell it with that pain as if I can see the movement of the Prophet’s hand, but still they hit him. In such a heart-splitting (hr̥ daẏbidārak) incident I can’t control myself. Tears come to my eyes. Then the listeners, too, think with the thing before their eyes that ‘we see our Prophet is hit before our eyes’. Then they also cry. Some cry out and get up, some become unconscious, lose their senses, (involuntarily) move their hands and feet.153

Rahman describes an imaginative process similar to that elaborated by Hosen. At the same time, he explains the role of the imagination by using a metaphor of romantic dualism, of two kinds of eyes: the physical eye (carma cokh) and the mental or inward eye (mānas cokh). He says that while preaching, he can ‘see the scenery’ through his ‘inner eye’, and that narrating ‘while seeing’ makes it possible for the listeners to see the scene as

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well. ‘I make unseen things seen’ and ‘raise them in front of the people’. ‘This is my goal: I can take them with me for some moments to another world (anya ek jagate).’ Rahman characterizes this making ‘present’ of the past (atītke) in front of the listeners with an English phrase: ‘one kinds [sic] of psychology’.154 While this pertains primarily to the inward eye, the physical eyes are important during the performance: Rahman explains that they follow the inward eyes and help communicate the imagery to the listeners. What is created during this joint act of imagination, Rahman explains, does not need to be linked to outward action, but rather is associated with emotional attitudes, such as love for the Prophet’s family. When I asked about particular scenes, Hosen cited from his sermons at length. At one point, he was so affected that he started to cry. In general, he knows precisely the point of the sermon that will evoke emotion. ‘That’s where tears come to the eyes’, he explains when commenting on another sermon. When he cites the dramatic climax of the child Prophet standing at Abdullah’s grave and Abdullah calling out to Allah, Hosen explains: At this moment, the people, too, are thrown into passion. This is so much pain. The child calls out to the father: ‘Take me on your lap!’ The father wants that you take away the earth. Upon these things the people cry. It comes upon them; they consider it to be real (bāstaber mato). They listen to the words patiently.155

As Mahmood has argued, the listeners are involved in a ‘spontaneous expression of well-rehearsed emotions’156 building on long-term reiterability of essentially open performative acts. By this pious practice, attendees develop ‘virtuous emotions and affects’.157 I argue that this ‘practice’ crucially involves speech acts and acts of imagination. As the Prophet names emotions inside the narratives (‘my, the Prophet’s, sadness’, ‘I do indeed have that pain inside me’), listeners are better able to navigate their feelings.158 This process of affection fits the poetic principle at the heart of the listeners’ compassion with inner-narrative heroes: the listeners identify with the pain of the figures ‘shown’ to them. This same poetic principle, we remember, is also featured in the narratives themselves, and I have quoted how Muhammad pleads with God not to send the pained community members to hell ‘before my eyes’. We have to stress the role of vivid imagination as part of a process of self-affection – a process greatly aided by the chanting that draws attention to the imagined scenes and holds them together in a bodily and affective memory. The interlinkage of self-affection with a ‘non-natural’ vocal technique challenges our conceptual thinking. While the concept of self-affection to some degree resolves oppositions such as those between natural and faked emotions and shows that the voice is not proof of authenticity, at the same time, it relies on the correspondence between inner states and their ‘natural’ expression. Self-affection is so effective in communication because a natural correspondence between voice and emotions is presumed. The self-affection of the preacher shapes his voice in the way he wants and corresponds to the emotions he wants to evoke. However, the chanted voice is linked to both the divine world and dramatic presentation. The carrier of emotions is a culturally and religiously shaped voice, not

 Melodic Narration 179 a natural one.159 This interpenetration of religious and affective communication with poetic conventions once more highlights the importance of chanting as an indicator of ‘another sphere’. When Hosen prides himself on being a master of evoking tears, he indirectly refers to the fact that tears are elicited more easily in the imaginative realm than in ‘reality’. Narrated and directed perception can conjure up images and evoke heightened emotions more effectively than non-narrated experience: No one can bring about tears willingly (icchā karle), they don’t come. Hit him on the head, the head is split, but no tears come to the eyes. The hand is broken, but no tears come to the eyes. One gentleman who attended a mahfil at the Gokannagar village in the Bhairab district – at the end of my first sermon, after I finished the monājāt – this gentleman said … : ‘In the seventy years of my life not one tear has dripped out of my eyes; today, tears flowed out of my eyes.’160

The complex of chanted scenes and their dramatic forms of expression are a powerful tool for self-affection precisely because they are emphatically narrated, even staged. This might be frustrating for those focused on inspiring outward action. However, for the collective persuasion of the Divine by collective self-affection, such endurance is not necessary: the salvific emotions are already in the mahfil itself. The practice of public piety cultivates habitual performances involving acts of imagination triggered by narrative as much as by bodily acts.

Music–rhetorical encoding of emotions and political attitudes Thus far we have determined important aspects of the role of prose chanting in the poetics of popular preaching. I have combined narrative analysis and homiletic insights in comments and writings of both preachers and their critics. Together, this allows for a reflexive theory of performance that grasps the specific entanglement and mutual influence of Islamic hermeneutics, multilingualism and different layers of melodic performance and clarified the role of the voice as carrying culturally encoded but naturalized emotional expressions. A musical–rhetorical analysis of single scenes and even sentences will allow us to make further inroads into the relationship between melodic performance and narrative, between the culturally formed voice and emotions. In the following, I propose a methodology to trace emotionalization in narratives and to analyse the subtle emotionalization of political positions and value judgements achieved by a musical–rhetorical encoding. Recitation and chanting are in between singing and speaking. In Bengali, centuriesold differentiations between speaker (kathak), reader (pāṭhak) and singer (gāẏen)161 show that the language preserves distinctions between singing and speaking that have ceased to form separate categories in European languages and cultures.162 The union of text and melody leads the former to be musicalized and the musical form to be literalized and rhetoricized. Language is ‘lifted out of its everydayness’ and may even be

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‘transformed, by its musical resounding, into a liturgical action’.163 On the other hand, the musical form ‘reproduces or comments on the meaning and affects of the verbal expressions’.164 In his essay on ‘Literature in the Reader’, Stanley Fish focuses on the rhetorical power of the reception of individual sentences and emphasizes the importance of suspense created over the course of reading.165 Research on the relationship between affects and music also emphasizes the importance of expectation.166 Expectation is shaped by structure. Audience involvement in Quranic recitation is heightened ‘by means of delaying the resolution provided by the longer phrase: that is, the greater the sequence of short phrases, the more tension is prolonged’.167 When explaining the specifics of Bengali waz preaching, art student Anwar Chowdhury stresses that the melodies at waz mahfils are built on the use of a certain type of syntax. He refers to the tripartite scheme that we have seen in Allah’s declarations of mercy. Preachers prolong tension by repeating, but not completing the sentence until its third occurrence.168 They thereby create tension-loaded sentences, which arrive at grammatical and melodic completion (verb and cadence) only after a long delay. In this way, the melody-cum-text creates a particular process of reception. Suspense is heightened by the melody being inconclusive at first. It is at the same time confined; the melody already indicates a conclusion will be reached. Metaphorically put: the melody’s high part ‘hangs the listener in suspense’, while its return to the ‘stable basis’, the lower note, is ‘part of the movement’. Both text and melody move along with each other in parallel. When analysing the dramatic declarations of mercy in the last chapter, we could grasp how preachers create patterns of tension and final release. Syntactically, rhythmically and melodically similar is Nesari’s enumeration of powerful groups – ‘any president, any prime minister, any MP, any minister, the president of the United Nations, any doctor or engineer, or professor, be he Socrates’169 – before he concludes that none of them could bring youth back to an old person. Preachers like to use poetic devices that emphasize the parallel construction and rhythm within such delaying lists. Now think of the parallelisms in prose passages featuring ‘concealed poetry’! With a close analysis of melodies, we can follow the ways in which preachers imitate and appropriate melodies. When Zaman chanted the passage about Zulaikhka’s failed seduction attempt, he consistently adhered to one key (A-flat major or Bhairavi) and employed five basic melodic blocks dispersed relatively randomly. A comparison with the melody employed by Ansari helps us see the dynamics of simultaneously following the model and creating markers of ownership. Zaman’s key, for example, is similar, as Ansari employs A major in his sermon on the same topic, and two of the melodic ‘building blocks’ overlap between both preachers. However, Zaman differentiates his melody from Ansari by using other, dissimilar blocks. Overall, he stresses the musical nature of his prose chanting more than his older model does. While Ansari’s way of chanting is strictly syllabic, Zaman adds a lot of melismatic elements. Lastly, Zaman’s vocal technique adds to the sound system’s audio distortion. Zaman often takes up a ‘rough’ voice that is achieved by strongly pressing together the vestibular folds of the larynx as is famously done by some rock singers. He employs a ‘rough’ voice to strengthen the vocative particle go or the second-person address ending on /ɔː/ in the dialogue between Joseph and Zulaikha.

 Melodic Narration 181 This creates an overlay between the melodic voice and a vocal quality that transports emotions by correspondence to the natural voice of the person the preacher mimics. It is in this way similar to the way Nesari nearly sobs out the word nāfarmānī in the chanted ‘we defy (nāfarmāni) you’. In Hosen’s narrative of the story of the child Prophet, similar mixtures of mimetic and chanted voice occur. When the child Prophet addresses his mother Amina, Hosen embodies her by a markedly ‘soft’ voice, and when addressing the child’s father in the grave, his voice is full of tears. Hosen, like Zaman, extensively uses his vestibular folds (see Figure 3) to heighten the dramatic effect. Hosen, too, uses melismata, again most often in vocatives and addresses and adds a tremolo on the vocative particle re. The musical techniques of pressing together the vestibular folds and of melisma correspond to the ‘natural’ phenomena of having a coarse voice and calling out to someone afar or in great emotional distress. Both add expressive force to the dramatic dialogue and reinforce the deictical orientation of the scene. Figure 3 shows a transcription of the passage into a Western notational system. Of course, this creates its own problems of misrepresentation. I would, however, hold that in today’s transcultural world, any system would, even an ‘Indian’ svaralipi. To put it another way, I do not aim at any authoritative or singular interpretation. As with the narrative analysis, for me it is important that the method tell us something about the performance and that we always bring it into correspondence with the actors’ opinions and point of view. In the figure we see how the melody subtly shapes the scene’s rising tension and emotional contours. At the beginning of the scene, when the caravan with Amina and her child Muhammad set off to search for the child’s father and up at the point where Amina tells the child that this is his father’s grave, the passage is predominantly oriented towards D as a key tone, in what we could musically read as a church mode. Hosen shortly switches to a higher variant, oriented towards A, for Amina’s cry to her child, but then returns to the lower variant. The pitch level certainly makes a difference. The rising pitch is here associated with a rising level of tension and emotion. This tension is the highest when Hosen exceeds his normal ambit, to a seventh of the higher register. With the tension of the melody, the emotional intensity of the scene rises (see Figure 3). Hosen links these micro shifts in melody to subtle emotional shifts of his selfaffection. Usually, the chanting is relatively even, and I marked some parallel passages that make up the melodic building blocks. However, Hosen states that in passion (ābege), he cannot control himself and keep one steady melody. For example, there is a point where there is a lot of pain. Then the melody became a little rough. When expressing passion, at some parts it becomes a little slow. At some incidents, for example, when the child, in his desire for Abdullah, calls him saying ‘Father, I have not climbed on my father’s lap.’ … At this point the melody is often slightly exceptional.170

What I analysed as shifts between different pitch orientations is for Hosen a working of his emotional states. This process – pitch and possibly key shift accompanying the emotional shifts in dramatic scenes – is in many respects similar to the workings of film

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music. We might thus imagine this process as an application of a television melodrama formula to the waz mahfils. But melodies in the sermons are polyvalent and we should not follow Islamic critics in associating them with newness and pop-phenomena. Things are much more complicated and historically entangled.171 The beginning of the above notation from Hosen’s sermon, for example, features a marked similarity to a song from the jārigān tradition.172

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Figure 3  Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’, 51:37–52:55.

Let us get even closer to the musical–rhetorical structure of the sermon text. While there is no direct relationship between one emotion and one rhetorical figure, both are linked to each other: figures have been called ‘automatised means of affect’.173 But how to assess the impact chanting has on rhetorical figures? I want to demonstrate how the combination of textual and melodic levels persuades the listeners of a sermon that

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there exists a stark contrast between the Bangladeshi judicial system and the justice and mercy of Allah. The sermon in question (Sayeedi, sermon in 1999) takes as its topic the profession of faith. It establishes a contrast between this religious ideal and the present societal and political framework. This contrast is taken up performatively by the call-and-response patterns I described in Chapter 1, pitting Allah’s rule against that of de facto land ownership and democracy. Against this background, a later passage on the closeness to Allah can work to induce change. At the beginning of this passage, Sayeedi recites an Urdu verse, which describes Allah’s compassion as beyond that of any human: ‘He is always willing to give and becomes displeased (bezār) with whosoever does not demand from Him’ – while on earth, Sayeedi confirms in Bengali, exactly the opposite would be the case. Figure 4 depicts the melodic contours of the next couple of minutes along a summary of the sermon text.174 The passage summarizes the expectation of mercy, the intervention of Allah even in hopeless situations and the intimate communication between Him and the believer. It can be divided into three parts. In the first third of this minute, deep feeling and trust in Allah are described as a ‘felicity condition’ for successful communication with Him, a communication illustrated in the second third of the passage when the believer calls upon Him, who answers: ‘I am here’. The last third of this minute-long passage encompasses a Quranic recitation (Q4:110), which, again, reiterates Allah’s mercy: ‘Yet whoso doeth evil or wrongeth his own soul, then seeketh pardon of Allah, will find Allah Forgiving, Merciful.’ The melody follows the division of the passage into three parts, which are also reinforced by breathing pauses. Each of the three parts starts on the keynote in a high register (8). After briefly rising by a third, the melody descends to the note one octave lower (1). This basic structure of the chant builds up and releases tension and is maintained throughout the sermon with precision. The melody seems to imbue pitches with particular meanings – for example, the tension-filled high tenth indicates the servant’s realm, while the relaxing note is that of Allah. Thus the melody charges the human sphere with tension and the divine sphere with relief. The quoted Quranic verse contains a semantic triad (sin, seeking pardon, mercy), and this triad is marked melodically with a rise up to either the eighth or the fifth scale. It has to be emphasized that the lower note does not only relate to Allah, but also relates to the audience, who has been attuned to this note by jointly chanting the word ‘Allah’ at the preacher’s instruction. The musical mode (B-minor Lydian, or kāfī) holds together the whole sermon and provides grounding and orientation to the listeners. While it is the individual who is to imagine his personal encounter with God, the tuning to the common keynote ensures that there is a joint bodily reception. The audience, the preacher and the text of the sermon are bound together in each moment of passage through the melody as it comes from, and ends on, the keynote. After translating the above mentioned Quranic verse into Bengali in a normal voice, Sayeedi again picks up his tune for what is to be his central religious message – that is, if the believer repents and Allah accepts his repentance, he will be forgiven (see Figure 5). Melodically, this sentence is the characteristic final phrase identifying Sayeedi’s sermons. The fact that it is used here as the sermon’s melody mirrors the

 Melodic Narration 185

Figure 4  Salvic expectations and melody.

centrality and density of its wording. It entails the sermon’s key salvific promise, apt to obtain consensus among all listeners. As the melody is the trademark of Sayeedi, it also builds an intricate connection between this promise and his public personality (see Figures 4 and 5). After quickly restating this statement of salvation in colloquial language and in an everyday voice, Sayeedi next raises expectations of opposition by saying: ‘Allah’s ways are different.’ This is a standard phrase, found frequently in the sermons in exactly this form, in Bengali as well as in Urdu. Here, the implicit question ‘different from what?’ introduces an antithesis between the law of the country and Allah’s mercy (see Figure 6).

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Figure 5  Statement and melody condensed.

Figure 6  Antithesis between merciless mundane justice and the merciful justice of God.

 Melodic Narration 187 Let us analyse this important musical–rhetorical figure more closely. As depicted in Figure 6, it extends over the span of one minute. We find two juxtaposed clauses, (1) and (2). These are separated by a very short interjection to the congregation after half a minute (‘is that right or wrong?’). The first clause of the antithesis (1) describes the unforgiving way in which the state responds to crime. It is again split into two parts, each of which has the same content: man commits crime (A); man is punished by being thrown in jail and then released (B); but he is not forgiven: his name remains recorded in the ‘black book’ of the police (C). In the first half, there is a microrepetition (i) emphasizing the vicious cycle of being released from jail several times, a repetition mirrored in the melody and corresponds to the cyclic nature of this process. The beginning of the clause (1) is marked by an initial address to the audience ‘you will notice in the country (deśe)’ chanted on the tension-filled tenth. This tension is released when the melody descends by an octave and arrives at the lower note in (C), thus marking the end of the first half of (1). The second part is a repetition of the first, starting on the higher note and ending with the typical final phrase. Both parts of clause (1) have tripartite structures, as did the Quranic recitation and the initial statement just before the antithesis. However, while the rough scheme is adhered to in which a man and his crime occupy the higher parts of the melodic curve, the lower parts do not refer to Allah and his mercy but rather to human legal institutions and their unforgiving registration of crime (C). The employment of the characteristic final phrase at the end of (1) features the tension-resolving, descending structure ending on the lower note – but this melodic relaxation is not congruent with the wording. This creates a misfit, an oxymoronic relationship between the musical and the linguistic layers, and thus disharmony and tension. The aesthetic effect of this incompatibility is that the process described does not seem sensible and it does not feel good. At the same time, the fact that the melodic phrase associated with Allah is employed raises expectations that there might be hope. This expectation is fulfilled by the second clause of the antithesis (2), to which we will turn now. Following the short interruption of the chant for an address to the listeners in between the two clauses, the second clause (2) starts with a melodic parallel to the first clause (1), while the textual level marks the opposition of the second clause by the already prefigured sentence ‘but Allah’s deeds are different’. Sayeedi continues on the tenth for the misdeeds of man (A), albeit with a terminological shift to the religious register: it is not ‘crime’ but ‘sin’ that is the subject here. This shift places the terms ‘crime’ (aparādh) in (1) and ‘sin’ (gunāh) in (2) in a substitution relationship on a paradigmatic level. The micro-repetition of being thrown into jail and being freed (i) does not find an equivalent in (2), which is why the lower note is reached more quickly in (2) than in (1). While the first melodic phrase, also in (2), ends with the recording of misdeeds (A), on a syntagmatic level this recording is a step in the linear progression to the next segment, (B) – not to punishment, but to seeking forgiveness or repentance. This means that in the second clause (2), the steps (A) and (B) result in (C). Instead of the repetition of the vicious cycle depicted in relation to worldly justice (1), in the depiction of God’s dealings (2) we find a tripartite structure (A), (B) and (C) leading progressively to mercy. This is in full coherence with the three steps of the Quranic verse

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quoted before. Melodically, this triadic step is emphasized by attributing a single unit to each step, again in accordance with the melodic structure of the Quranic recitation. The final cadence, when it closes (2), does not create an oxymoronic relationship but is in harmony with the prior statement and the expectation of Allah’s mercy. The relaxing effect achieved is further increased by a suspense-creating delay (‘He will also say: “Not only have I accepted your repentance (tawba)”’), which heightens the experience of relaxation during the final bestowal of mercy through His own speech act (‘[but] I have also forgiven the sins and wiped out the names [from the black book]’).175 Viewing both clauses of the antithesis together, we can detect that this antithesis presents in a syntagmatic manner the paradigmatic substitutions of (A) crime by sin, (B) punishment by repentance and (C) non-forgiveness by mercy. The basic poetic operation of the antithesis is the formal equivalence of its two parts highlighting and foregrounding the contrast on the semantic level. What is remarkable in the case discussed here is that the poetic operation extends to the melody and is in turn extended by it. The parallelism of clauses (1) and (2) is emphasized by the musical similarities between them, particularly their beginning and end, (A) and (C). This characteristic cadence can be said to operate akin to anaphor and rhyme. Antitheses have been described as ‘enabl[ing] intensive experiences of meaning’,176 and the musical–rhetorical antithesis enables even more intensive experiences of meaning. Chanting highlights the passage’s importance to listeners; makes it more accessible via structural divisions; emphasizes existing connotations linked to the bifurcation of worldly and heavenly processes and between different actors (God and humans). It adds layers of meaning, for example, by musically transcending the range between the lower and upper notes when a human ‘oversteps the mark’, and by linking the lower notes with God’s mercy. These musical associations greatly contribute to the condensation of meaning and experience, emotionalizing this passage. Building on these effects, the musical–rhetorical figure makes possible shifts in the formal oppositions involved, leading to a repositioning of both religion and the world and their relationship to each other. The aspect of punishment is omitted in the case of religion; Allah’s justified anger is only present by implication, while repentance is foregrounded. This is a bold religious interpretation that serves to heighten the contrast between the ideal (God) and the actual (world), and creates a maximum distance between them, implying the need for radical change. With respect to the world, it is deś that serves as the counterpart to Allah’s doings – a word that can refer to ‘this world’, but also to ‘country’ or concretely to ‘Bangladesh’. Here, it arguably directs the emotional and change-invoking power of the sermon’s antithesis to the specific frame of national politics. This direction is further strengthened by the fact that the ‘other-worldly’ (2) clause incorporates references to everyday state actions: as the police write down the crimes (1), the angels (2) note the sins in a blacklist (kālo khātā). This polyvalent expression at once links with images of the black book of God in which good and evil deeds are recorded,177 but also links to the Bangladeshi judicial system. In this way, Sayeedi involves the foundations of the actual judicial framework he set out to change.

 Melodic Narration 189 The justice system here not only is abstract, but can also be concretely related to accusations against Sayeedi committing war crimes during Bangladesh’s War of Independence in 1971, crimes for which he was found guilty several years after the sermon discussed here. The passage creates negative connotations of worldly justice and renders it absurd; it teases out a lack of forgiveness as opposed to God’s mercy. This can be seen as ‘working’ on Sayeedi’s embattled image.178 While the speech act of calling upon God in order to obtain His mercy is shown to be successful, the inclusion of the antithesis allows the sermon to work against the felicitous conditions for speech acts in the worldly justice system (such as ‘I convict you’) by musical–rhetorical encoding that makes the listeners feel that such an approach is just not right. That such efforts have tangible effects is well documented in this case. At the outset of this book, I mentioned the surprising and unparalleled reduction of the death sentence against Sayeedi, while many other top leaders of the BJI were sentenced to death by the same court. In 1987, Sayeedi played with threats against him in a sermon: ‘Today, I found out that yesterday, the communists had a meeting to plan an attack on me. My brothers! As long as this voice stays vociferous (soccár), I am alive (beñce āchi).’179 While the message that he will be alive in the narrower sense is true only for an embodied voice, Sayeedi here also plays on the basic immortality of the recorded voice. Similar to the media hoax that portrayed Sayeedi’s head on the moon wearing an Islamic cap, this announcement at a sermon gathering stresses Sayeedi’s religious role. When he makes the claim, his voice is the preacher’s voice, and not that of the politician or accused. This voice connects him to the entire range of experiences that he so successfully guided by means of his voice. When we recall the role prose chanting plays in shaping the emotional experience of the sermons, their religious interpretation and their narrative pleasure, we can understand how valuable a resource the voice of a preacher as skilful and popular as Sayeedi is for him. Prose chanting relies on a bodily aesthetics that is not of the kind championed by modernist aesthetics or new media. At the same time, it is part of mainstream Islamic discourse, is associated with Quranic recitation and is adopted across Islamic sects. While discussions around prose chanting sometimes reveal doubts about the aesthetic process, its flourishing practice and differentiation leaves little doubt that it will remain an important resource in popular preaching in Bangladesh. And preachers will continue to vie for mastery over its usage in order to affect and guide listeners with subtle changes in the relations between music and text in the poetics of popular preaching.

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Humour From ridiculing the Other to parody of waz mahfils

Thus far, I have described aspects of the sermon gatherings that are geared to draw listeners into the sermons and allow them to identify with the dramatic figures. The basic mode of reception in these cases is closeness and willing suspension of disbelief. The emotions that build up over the course of long narratives, the bodily effects caused by the melodies, and the joint rhythm of preacher and audience all support immersion. This chapter concentrates on jokes and humour and a mode of reception that is somewhat different, although, I would argue, complementary. It entails distancing and relies on quick shifts, short durations and an often colloquial tone. This is not to say that humour is marginal. At the sermon gatherings, humour is ubiquitous, and laughter is just as common as crying. For reasons of propriety, the practice of joking is sometimes downplayed; it is in fact more widespread than moralizing statements would suggest. As jokes cannot be told twice with the same effect, their ubiquity shows the importance of preachers introducing newness and variation. Humour is built on contradictory expectations,1 on incongruity and on inhibition – often also on the inhibition of other emotions.2 Its collective mood constitutes one important side in the reception of sermons, with relief and disruption forming necessary counterparts to other emotional expressions and receptive attitudes, in particular to crying and immersion in the sermon. Thinking about humour in Islamic sermons challenges common prejudices, such as seeing religion and humour as opposites. While in Christianity humour was for a long time excluded from the religious realm, descriptions of Muhammad’s humorous side have been recorded in authoritative reports on him.3 The pervasiveness of humour in early and classical (Arabic) Islam has been the subject of several monographs.4 Still, ‘much more could (and should) be written about humour … as a register of Islamic meaning’.5 Humour tends to be equated with a critical stance that supposedly belongs to the secular realm, an equation that excludes other possibilities such as religious fun and critique.6 The following analysis aims to do justice to both genuinely ‘religious’ humour and humour as a method to question religious communication. Public narration, whether preaching or storytelling, is an important arena for humour. Humour is common at religious festivals in South Asia,7 as is ritual levity in South Asian religious traditions more generally.8 In Indian literary and performative

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traditions, humour has played a significant role across religions and contexts: the Panchatantra may seem remote, but humour is also essential to genres closer to the Bengali sermons, such as Bengali tales of powerful Muslim guides9 and the Urdu popular romance tradition.10 There are, of course, fine distinctions to consider. The laughter at a waz mahfil does not exceed a certain point, but neither is it as carefully restricted as it would be at a Shiite Muharram sermon.11 Expanding on Hirschkind’s study of the ethics of Islamic preaching, Millie emphasized the importance of laughter and enjoyment in Islamic preaching. Humour, he claims, evokes a listening pleasure that ‘does not relate so much to shared convictions about the value of Islam as to the skilful performance of preachers’.12 While it is true that humour is also, as Millie claims, a strategy that evokes ‘surprise, laughter, and sympathy’ and creates ‘feelings of comfort and belonging’,13 these feelings are not apolitical nor do they preclude being part of reformist projects of individual transformation. While Millie successfully undermines a hierarchy of emotions in Indonesian public discourse, in which transformation is valued over intimate in situ communication, he falls into another prejudice, namely that of perceiving humour either as absolutely harmless and apolitical, or as anti-authoritarian and hence liberal, perhaps even progressive. My analysis of humour in sermons emphasizes the political dimension of humour by grasping its transformative and mobilizing potential. It furthermore helps us see how religious discourse can, in a self-reflective yet not entirely harmless way, ridicule religious practice. Humour is part of the contentions about Islam as much as it is about power. And it is part of a conservative field. In contrast to the Indonesian public, Islamic discourse in Bangladesh maintains relatively strong boundaries against other forms of entertainment.14 As oral genres, waz mahfils and jokes share many communicational features. Humour and its receptive side, laughter, are communicated on several levels and by several actors: by the preacher’s voice, tone and language; by his facial expressions and gestures; and by the preacher’s followers and the audience, whose laughter quickly spills over to the whole congregation. The gestures of the audience are obviously a reaction to the humorous narrative, but the preacher’s own laughter in a way is too. Although laughter occurs spontaneously, it is learnt and performed collectively. Those assembled get into ‘the mood for laughter’, a mood that the preacher might take up by carrying on his humorous speech. Laughter ‘spilling over’ indicates it is always interactive and beyond the individual. By laughing, a person is transformed into someone ‘other than himself’, ‘makes himself, by laughing, other through all others’.15 Laughter produces, among those laughing, an identity in the strongest sense of the word. We can easily guess how important this effect is for the waz mahfils to build a community.16 It is the powerful communicative aspect of humour that led rhetorical theories of European antiquity to count it among the emotions directed towards the speaker (ethos).17 The audience likes a speaker who is humorous and at the same time keeps to ethical boundaries in the application of jokes. The authority of the preachers expands. Jokes need not be light, and even when they are, political points can be made, sometimes even more easily. The group coherence and the relationship between preacher and audience are transformed by humour.

 Humour 193 Linked to, but distinct from, internal group cohesion, humour is often premised on processes of joking about someone, and hence on collective Othering. Jokes in Bangladeshi sermons are always entangled with power relationships. Many preachers take a distanced or oppositional stance to the Bangladeshi state and polity, sometimes styling themselves and their audiences as subaltern counterpublics. Jokes can establish the group’s own superiority as part of a populist rhetoric against ‘the top brass’ or against other religious groups. Carnivalesque descriptions mobilize group identity and make ‘social conventions bearable’.18 In the following analysis, I rely on the rich discussions on the objects that evoke humour and in the ways they do so. Major thinking on this issue comes from the fields of rhetoric and poetics, sociology and psychology.19 In South Asia, discussions on humour, for example, feature in the rasa tradition. In Bharata Muni’s drama theory, as laid out in the Nāṭyashāstra, it is treated as one of the eight rasas, referred to as hāsya.20 Although humour did not give rise to a separate genre equivalent to the comedy in Europe, its conceptualization includes aspects that were central to contemporary discussions of the comical in Europe. The ‘unseemly dress and ornament’, which is also addressed by later Indian theorists such as Rudrata,21 could be taken as an example of incongruity theory and the violation of what is considered appropriate.22 The ‘strange movement of limbs’ is reminiscent of Bergson’s ur-comic figure. The idea that humour is mostly evoked by ‘women or persons of the inferior type’23 corresponds to discussions in Europe that have located humour in characters who are to be neither admired, nor hated, nor pitied.

Othering and unity in populist humour I first want to turn to the type of laughter that is called, in the rasa tradition, the ‘laughter of ridicule’ (upahasita), which is also the root for the Bengali word denoting satirical humour. It refers directly to the power dimension of laughter as emphasized in Hobbes’s Passion of Laughter. I focus on ridicule’s specific social configuration directed against those on the higher rungs of the social ladder of the listening community that here understands itself as the people. One occasion for preachers to poke fun at groups or individuals is by reporting incidents of how they were approached by ordinary Muslims who ask them for advice. In such stories preachers can present themselves as approachable religious authorities. They share, in an anecdotal manner, conversations that they purportedly had with ordinary community members. Because of the anecdotal character of the stories, reporting these conversations gives the opportunity to include colloquial speech and humorous descriptions of everyday attitudes. By telling of their interactions with ordinary Muslims, preachers show their flexibility in understanding specific contextual needs close to the audience’s lifeworld. At the same time, preachers can show their strict stance of defending religious duties. Thereby the role of the preacher expands somewhat. Mocking an ordinary believer’s cleverness, Sayeedi cites a community member who gladly receives the recognition of virtuousness that comes with spending his wealth

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and life for Allah, but cleverly suggests that he wants to spend his wealth only after his death. As a response, Sayeedi cites Q61:11 (‘You shall believe in God and His Messenger, and struggle in the way of God with your possessions and your selves’), which he ‘translates’ in an exaggerated colloquial manner as a response to the man: ‘Dude, first give your riches (āge māl de), then your life!’24 In a similar, yet more political account, Sayeedi tells the story of his conversation with a member of a philanthropic organization. This person claims that he does many good deeds, such as giving alms, sponsoring eye treatments and cold relief, and donating to organizations such as Rotary, Lions, Apex, Leo and Free Mission, and concludes, ‘I’m not a bad person. Only because I don’t pray, has my belief (imān) been hampered?’ Sayeedi quotes himself retorting: ‘I say “Dude (miẏā), you don’t have any belief in the first place, so what’s there to be hampered?”’25 In this mockery, one of the most basic and commonly shared convictions – the importance of prayer – serves as the basis for Othering a group by depicting it as not sharing these convictions. In the above case, it is secular philanthropists, by implication ‘the NGOs’, who do not pray. It also depicts the preacher as being steadfast and principled in the face of (potentially hypocritical) efforts to elicit approval of obvious wrongs. Qaderi proves himself similarly precise when he underscores that only the outer sign of a beard does not make a good believer by admonishing a community member who does not understand why Rabindranath Tagore cannot serve as a good role model: ‘Someone told me: “but he is quite a poet, a very good poet.” “Very well then, you said this well, but after he dies, what do you say? It’s no use to be a poet, (Ar.) (he is put) into hellfire.”’26 Viewed in the context of discussions on including poems by Hindus in schoolbooks and representations of Bengaliness, this is an unequivocal stance and a political message against the minority. One might also add critically that the preachers here legitimize and provide a model of a religious authority that does not engage in any real dialogue, but instead is worthy of mockery. Such irreconcilable and presumptuous humour might be directed at ‘polytheists’, ‘idol-worshippers’ or, more concretely, ‘Hindus’. As is often the case, cursing or jokes that border on the illegitimate tend to rely on simple and short word games. Ansari, for example, humorously describes an incident in which an idol, a statue, is left alone by its devotee and is not even able to defend itself against a dog urinating on it. This description shames the religious Other and is comical, as it builds up a comic contrast between sacred purity and profane impurity. The climax of laughter is teased out by the joke’s punchline, which creates, in a very condensed form, a conceptual closeness through phonetic association reminiscent of children’s mocking nicknames. The angry devotee asks the idol: ‘Are you a God (khodā) or a fraud (hodā)?’27 It is easy to transfer such a polemic joke from one context to another. The same question is posed by Siraji in a polemic description of a Hindu puja. Siraji links the Other of the Hindu God to yet another Other. He does so through a further phonetic pun, this time condensing the long-cultivated allegation of the ‘Hindu-ized’ Sufi by pairing the Sufi shrine, dargāh, with the Hindu Goddess, Durga.28 In both cases he employs small phonetic displacements to apply negative value judgements to new objects.

 Humour 195 Short phonetic jokes are, however, not limited to such concrete naming and blaming. In another sermon, Ansari builds on the relatively small phonetic difference between the semantic opposites ‘pure’ (śuddha) and ‘impure’ (aśuddha) to ridicule insufficient reasoning. According to the joke, the immature reasoning of the public (metonymically the name for an individual member of the public) relies on the phonetic, just like a child does; thus the public cannot grasp the great semantic difference once the phonetic difference ‘wears out’. Ansari supports this ‘wearing out’ by speaking indistinctly when uttering the decisive words three times: ‘If there is no religious scholar (ʿālim), then a normal individual (public) leads the prayer. Impure, impure, pure. Impure and impure together become pure.’29 Using this joke, Ansari argues for the importance of properly educated religious scholars, who really know how to distinguish right from wrong. The most significant kind of directed humour is the elaborate and humorous narrative built on the fundamental religious conviction of the rule of God. If opposed to earthly powers, this religious conviction is easily aligned with the populist perspective ‘from below’, thereby establishing waz mahfils as a counterdiscourse against the powerful. Given the largely lower-class audience, waz mahfils give the listeners a voice. It is part of a populist rhetoric that finds its counterpart in non-humorous, directly mobilizing forms, such as the preacher asking the audience to confirm the land’s real ownership: ‘Whose land is this?’, a question to which the audience shouts out the answer: ‘Allah’s!’ The humorous side of this mobilizing agitation is built on the simple fact that the consciousness of an ever-present and almighty God renders all human power comical, from this perspective human power suffers from the strong incongruity of megalomania. In the carnivalesque descriptions offered by preachers, it is not the ‘little man’ who is mechanically – and comically – controlled by someone else,30 but the powerful man. Let us have a look at some examples from the sermons to analyse different levels of this mechanism, which are applied to a range of narratives from Islamic history to contemporary politics. The comical dimension of megalomania can be teased out by referring to archetypal figures of Islamic history. Mazhari, for example, includes a satirical account of the pharaoh in his description of the exodus from Egypt. He recounts the well-known story of Moses leading the tribes of Israel out of Egypt. The pharaoh wants to pursue him and orders: ‘At cock’s crow at the end of the night I will start with my armed soldiers!’ However, the pharaoh’s expectations are thwarted as he did not reckon on God’s playful intervention. While the pharaoh ‘naturally’ relies on the cock’s crow, the cock’s true nature – according to the sermon’s perspective – is to be a servant of Allah. And Allah orders the cock not to crow. ‘So what does the cock say? He doesn’t say “cock-a-doodle-doo” but instead praises God: (Ar.) “Glorified (is He) Our Lord, and the Lord of the angels and the Spirit.”’31 By juxtaposing the inarticulate animal’s morning call the pharaoh expects to hear with an emphatic praise of Allah in Arabic, Mazhari tips the ‘natural’ expectations of the powerful in a comic moment. Mazhari evokes laughter by contrasting two imitations of a non-human or extra-human voice: quoting the rooster would have led the preacher to actually imitate the cock’s crow – a ridiculous thing that in itself is amusing. But then, this expectation is not met. It is exceeded, when Mazhari indeed alters his voice, but he alters it by beautifully reciting the glorification of God in Arabic.

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The praise (subbūḥ) of the rooster resonates with a superiority and feeling of wonder that is shared by the audience. As the audience is already in the mood to laugh, Mazhari continues his ridicule of the pharaoh. He again refers to animals, but adds a graphic dimension to the preceding joke, which mainly relied on auditory sense. When Moses parted the sea to make a path for the tribes of Israel, Mazhari recounts, even the pharaoh’s horse knew, better than him, about the divine intervention to come: ‘Everyone is moving forward, clattering fills the air. On this side stands the pharaoh with his horse. He says to the horse: “Go down!” The horse says: “Am I crazy? You’re crazy. You’re the craziest guy in the world (biśver śreṣṭha pāgal āpne).”’ After the initial laughter at this mockery of the pharaoh, Mazhari extends the comic effect with a graphic description of how the pharaoh finally descends when God orders the archangels to ‘help’ him. ‘He sends Gabriel and Michael. One from the front and one from behind. One is pulling from the front and the other is pushing from behind (dhākkā māre). That’s how (the pharaoh) goes down.’32 We can easily recognize two basic elements of humour here: the external control and the mechanical movement of the comic figure of the pharaoh. Hosen’s sermon provides another example of a carnivalesque depiction of an archetypical ‘enemy of Islam’ – this time Abu Jahl. Hosen depicts a scene that is based on a saying of Muhammad, also well-known from the Bible: ‘He who digs a hole for his brother will be thrown into it by God.’ Hosen teases out the potential of this story to elicit schadenfreude. Abu Jahl dug a hole and hoped that Muhammad would fall into it on his nocturnal path to the Kaaba, but Gabriel carried Muhammad over it on his wings. Going to the corner of the hole, (Abu Jahl) sees that from inside there is no way out. ‘Let me confirm whether he has fallen or not.’ … As in the darkness (Abu Jahl) can’t see well, he goes even closer. Allah says: ‘You dug a hole for my Prophet to fall into. Look how you like it if you yourself fall down!’33

The build-up of tension towards Abu Jahl’s fall is in line with the moral impetus of the Hadith, but Allah’s intervention and particularly His comment increases the comic effect. Hosen narrates that when Abu Jahl tries to climb up, whatever he gets a hold of gets loose again. Whatever he gets a hold of becomes loose and he falls down. … Finally one of the young men says: ‘Uncle, I will pull you up. Come up.’ The old man is stretching one hand above and the young man is reaching down with one hand. Allah says: ‘Gabriel, (the hands) shouldn’t meet before the Prophet arrives.’ Half a foot to go. They use a two-foot rope. They are adding a rope of two feet. Allah says [urgingly]: ‘Gabriel!’ [Gabriel justifying]: ‘Oh God, there is (still) half a foot left!’ They keep adding rope, seventy yards – but still, half a foot is not covered.34

Again, the narrative depicts the powerful ‘enemy of Islam’ as a comical figure. And again, this depiction is linked with divine intervention. It triggers reactions of wonder about Allah’s might. At the same time, God Himself seems to partake in eliciting and

 Humour 197 enjoying schadenfreude. Those laughing can easily imagine that they join Him in His laughter. Another mechanism of humour related to the populist ridiculing the powerful is based on laughing at the mistakes of scoundrels. Preachers create such opportunity with the redistribution of narrative information. The comic tension arises from the difference between what the narrator – and thus the audience – knows and what the characters know. This structure is taken up in relation to well-known legends and feeds into more political cases. An example for a joke of this kind is Ansari’s account of Joseph’s brothers faking Joseph’s death. To mislead their father Jacob, they drench Joseph’s shirt in blood, but Allah loosened a screw in their heads. They forgot to tear the shirt apart. They then went to their father, wailing ‘A tiger has eaten Joseph!’ Jacob ʿalayhi salām took the shirt … . ‘How could a preying tiger eat my Joseph from within the shirt without tearing the shirt apart, without even cutting it? What a learned (baṛa śikṣita) tiger!’35

This joke adds to Ansari’s reconfiguration, in the same sermon, of the story of Joseph by introducing an omniscient Jacob, as opposed to him not knowing the brothers’ intentions.36 In Ansari’s telling, a superior Jacob sees through the brothers’ ‘wailing’, which is revealed as fake to the audience. The narrative situation shows that emotional expression need not be sincere. Ansari’s performance strengthens this questioning by imitating the brother’s crying voices on a vocal level – thereby parodying one of the most important techniques of pathos in the waz mahfils. The joke depicts this pathos as hypocritical and ridiculing, and destroys it. Due to Jacob’s omniscience, he ‘sees through’ the brothers’ lie and does not have to wail (as he would be expected to do by the traditional account of the story).37 Rather, he mocks the brothers with irony. In passing, we can note that again, an interaction with animals is involved in the humorous narrative. Applied to the political sphere, the comical tension between different levels of information is played against rulers concocting secret plans at the expense of the people. An emblematic case is Harun Al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph known from 1001 Nights. Ansari describes him as even pretending to repent before God for his personal benefit. By quoting his ‘fake’ prayer of repentance, Ansari again, as in the fake weeping of the brothers, creates a comic effect and challenges the sincerity of the speech act that elsewhere is foundational for the religious performance at the waz mahfils. In a next step, Ansari transfers the incongruity revealed in the prayer to the attributes of rulers in general. Closer to the experience of his audience, he explains how these rulers are responsible for the increased price of rice, and react to it with yet another hypocrisy: they arbitrarily arrest innocent people to avoid being held responsible themselves.38 Exposed by the preacher’s narrative, the politicians’ scam becomes less painful to the audience and is made into a matter of laughter, just like the failed conspiracy of Joseph’s brothers. Humour is a means that allows listeners to cope with political realities and be comforted and to distance themselves from harsh realities.

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Some preachers concretize the link between religious conviction and populist suspicion about the ruling class and apply that logic to international ‘enemies’. This contradicts the ethics of preachers that require them to speak ‘neutrally’. Sharing opinions on international situations runs the risk of leaving the common ground of shared convictions. At the same time, pushing the boundaries of taboos might also be part of the speaker’s strategy. It certainly is no coincidence that it is Sayeedi who is most concrete in naming the political opponent whom he mocks. In an incident that in many ways is akin to the horse calling the pharaoh crazy, Sayeedi ‘reveals’ the ‘megalomania’ of the first Indian prime minister: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru visited a madhouse. When the madmen saw his wellmannered dress and good looks, they asked him: ‘Who are you?’ He said: ‘I am the prime minister of India, my name is Jawarharlal Nehru.’ The madmen said: ‘When we came here we too used such lengthy phrases. Stay with us for some days. Also your hot head will cool down (garam māthāo ṭhāṇḍā haẏe yābe).’39

While the metonymy of individuals as personifications of the powerful is very common, the next example discusses a joke in which ‘the West’ stands in for the powerful Other. Olipuri, who lives in the United States for much of the year, inserts a comic description based on cultural differences in comparison to the West into a discussion on the legal status of games in Islamic law. The description’s comic dimensions rely on a cultural understanding deeply ingrained in the upbringing and social behaviour in South Asia: feet, and everything attached to them, are dirty and must in no way to be brought close to mental matters like books or respected things in general, and to the upper regions of the body and the head in particular. This understanding, by the way, is referred to in another sermon: an important Sufi deliberately put dirt on his head in order to kill all of his pride.40 Olipuri exploits this shared cultural understanding to ridicule the West as the Other. Olipuri’s decisively ‘rational’ argumentation pits two dichotomized rule systems – Islam and the West – against one another in a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which each is competing to be the most civilized (sabhya):41 Its name is football. ‘Foot’ means foot, and the round thing is called ‘ball’. One plays by kicking this round thing with the foot, that’s why the name of it is football. It’s a game of foot-ball (ṭhyāṅger ball), if one touches it with the hand this is a violation. … . Now, if it is a violation to touch this football with the hand, if it is a violation to touch this foot-thing with the hand even, then is it civilized to touch this thing with the head? In the current football world championship, it is a violation to touch the football with the hand. To touch it with the head is a matter of pride (beṭāgiri). … Therefore no civilized Muslim can play this game in such an uncivilized manner. If he has any sense to understand what are good manners and ill manners (sabhyatā ār asabhyatā), then no civilized person can play football in such an uncivilized manner. … If a young lad goes to the market with his shoes on his head, this is a great incivility. … Or (imagine) he goes to the city with two shoes on his head. Upon seeing him, people will say: ‘How uncivilized! Why’s he doing this? Putting such foot-things on his head?’ If it is even uncivilized to put

 Humour 199 such foot-things on your head, if you can’t go to the market with shoes on your head – then what incivility is it to take the football to your head and be proud of it, while thousands are watching you?42

Valuations of the in-group need not be based as concretely on Othering processes. The next example encapsulates the madrasa milieu’s fundamental juxtaposition between an ideal religious world and the listeners’ lifeworld. Addressing students in the central courtyard of a madrasa, Mazhari states: ‘The workings of Allah are different!’ – implying, everyone understands, that they are different from worldly affairs. The phrase explicitly juxtaposes the tainted everyday world and the ideal world of God, a juxtaposition that is at the heart of the antithesis described in musical–rhetorical terms in the previous chapter. The centrality and authority of the quotation is underlined by Mazhari saying it twice, first in Urdu and then repeating it in Bengali. Building on the juxtaposition, Mazhari adds a joke related to one aspect of the relationship between God and world. He inserts it right after he quoted the Urdu couplet in which God is advising Moses to use his ‘stick of belief ’ – a dense expression, which is, as we remember from the narratives of heroism, also linked to the ‘flag of Islam’. The joke Mazhari tells at this point plays on the difference in speed, ease and finality of worldly versus Godly actions, of ‘building’ versus ‘creating’. He does so by referring to a strenuous experience everyone congregated at the mahfil – including me – had undergone several times. For several years, the main traffic hub close to the madrasa had become traffic chaos due to the construction of a new flyover, which Mazhari calls an ‘overbridge’ when juxtaposing the speed of its construction to the divine powers of the staff of Moses: Now Mūsā Kalīmu ‘llāh lets loose the ‘Staff of Faith’. … As soon as (the staff) falls down, the water of the sea recedes on both sides. In the middle, twelve extensive roads are created. Twelve extensive roads. Twelve roads for twelve tribes. This is not the overbridge of Yātrābāṛī – which is in the making, in the making (haẏteche ār haẏteche). No end in sight. People are strained and suffering. Coming to this sermon congregation, I had to sit in a traffic jam for three and a half hours! How arduous! It’s in the making, in the making. May Allah forgive! Allāh ke muʿāmalāt aur hai – the dealings of Allah the Pure are different. The way of Allah the Pure is kun fa yakūn: it will be and then it is – isn’t that right?43

Mazhari here unravels the comic effect of man’s vain efforts to complete even the smallest task, while God can accomplish everything without any effort. It works as a joke because Mazahri reproduces the juxtaposition at the level of narrative. The narrative speed is very slow when it comes to the overbridge. The durative and repetitive nature of the process is emphasized by the twofold repetition of the ‘overbridge’ being ‘in the making’. Is this not the unsatisfying state of so many affairs in Bangladesh, where corruption and political blockage often lead to repeated construction or its sudden halt? The punchline, conversely, is highly condensed. Its shift to Arabic emphasizes the shift to the sphere of God. Its formal brevity ‘proves’ its propositional content on the poetic level: the narrative speed of the condensed phrase of imperative and result

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equals the speed and ease of God’s creation. It furthermore comes as a sudden and surprising solution when listeners might expect a clause of a similar length to that of the first part of the antithesis. Imagining such a sudden and condensed application of God’s infinite power to a trifling aspect in the everyday world provokes laughter among the listeners.44 Mazhhari’s joke clearly values the utopian moment of imagining how easy things could be! Thus far I have dealt with humour that evokes shared feelings between speaker and audience often by mocking common enemies. This seems to be achieved particularly successfully when preachers link religious conviction to a populist criticism of the powerful or of imagining simple solutions to tedious problems. Humour draws religion close to political counterdiscourse. However, the criticism inherent in this discourse is not negative, but, in fact, is positive. Speaker and audience achieve a combined identity despite their different backgrounds. Humour leads the audience to be persuaded by the preacher for his own ends, and, based on the commonality with the speaker, they easily accept them as their own.

From role play to parody We have relied, until this point, on the assumption that humour can be directed for predefined ends quite easily. The remainder of this chapter argues that humour creates closeness among those laughing by creating distance to some Other, and that it necessarily produces a self-distancing effect – an effect that might be used for persuasive purposes, but which also opens the door to a more fundamental shift in reception attitudes. Even when directed at others, humour always ‘turns back’ to the one who utilized it. The distancing effect of humour that might be directed to the group’s opponents can lay the seeds for a distanced perspective of the preachers and the sermons. Humour in sermons is connected to humour about sermons. A parody of waz mahfils entails many of the crucial aspects of the genre analysed over the course of this book, and thus confirms the genre approach. Perceiving the waz mahfils through the condensed and fractured perspective of parody leads us out of their world. It helps us recognize forms of humour about the genre that evolve from the genre itself, rather than representing a ‘secular’ defaming of the sermons from the outside. Reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser has called humour a ‘tilt-phenomenon’45 to indicate that the collapse of the ridiculed Other also destabilizes one’s ‘own’ position. According to this point of view, it is the reproduction of this tilting and destabilizing process by the recipient that leads to laughter as an ‘answer of crisis’. In the following, I discuss the tilting aspect of humour in waz mahfils. I argue that there is a fluid passage from different elements of role play and humour, in particular parody, to a distancing attitude regarding the form in general and the important elements of the genre in particular. The combination finally paves the way to a parody of the genre as such. Preachers introduce a sense of distance and non-seriousness to be easy on their audience while uttering criticism, thereby performing the double role of admonisher and ally. To do so, preachers often ironically pretend to direct their criticism away from

 Humour 201 the audience.46 When Mizanur says, ‘Nowadays every house is full of mischief,’ he adds, ‘Of course, not here in your region; I am talking of another region.’47 Or after criticizing the excessiveness of the death penalty, Nesari adds: ‘They don’t behead people in Bangladesh, they only behead people in Saudi Arabia, right?’48 When criticizing corruption and black money, ‘left-handed income’, he gets back to the audience: ‘Don’t you have this? Oh, I see, not in Chittagong.’49 Nazrul allows the audience to literally point to others when talking about crime. ‘The people of this area are good, maybe they can’t tell about this (crime). But such things are happening on the other side, aren’t they, brothers?’50 Of course, when listeners laugh, they also admit that they understand that the preacher here indeed also means them concretely, and the laughter might be mixed with embarrassment. Preachers regularly perform deliberate role changes that ingrain self-distancing. Often, they indicate these with shifts in linguistic and vocal register. Preachers may suddenly switch from a register of public speech or prose chanting to a conversational and intimate way of speaking: lowering their voice; turning to their followers sitting next to them on stage, thus enacting an intimate space visible and audible to the rest of the congregation; choosing dialectal forms; avoiding theologically ‘loaded’ vocabulary in Urdu and Arabic in favour of everyday expressions; or engaging in small talk, such as personal accounts or jokes ‘among men’. Preachers in this way expand their roles from the admonishing and serious authority to a fellow who the audience may approach.51 Role shifts can temporarily lead to what we might call an ‘unreliable preacher’. In this role, preachers might play on usual roles they perform during waz mahfils. One such role is to establish the mahfil etiquette. Nesari exaggerates his duty to advise the audience to remain seated: ‘Whoever sits behind someone who gets up will be fined! … If someone gets up in front of you, you will make him sit down by grabbing his leg.’52 Another instance of playing on the usual performance is based on the tag questions. The function of these ubiquitous questions, we remember from Chapter 1, is to make the audience confirm what the preacher had said just before, emphasizing consensus among the group. If the response is not energetic enough, it is common for the preacher to repeat the question or to ask the audience to answer more loudly. Playing on these expectations, Tarek Munawar exploits the phonetic closeness of ‘in paradise’ (jānnāte) and ‘in hell’ (jāhānnāme) to mock the audience. After quoting a widespread Hadith that promises a house in heaven to those who build a mosque on earth, Munawar asks: ‘If we build a mosque, then where will Allah build a house for us?’ When the audience responds in a low, incomprehensible way, Munawar does not repeat his question but prefigures the wrong answer: ‘In hell (jāhānnāme)?’53 It takes a moment for the audience’s confusion to turn into laughter. To play with the established roles of the audience, to play with the common listeners’ expectations and to play the established role of the preacher is first and foremost a sign of the preacher’s confidence and mastery. Including his own role in this play shows that the preacher is able to let go of his authority – albeit only temporarily and in a controlled manner. In this way, even the tilting aspect of humour may not have the effect of destabilizing, but rather of stabilizing the role of the preacher. Playing on the preacher’s authoritative role is not the same as weakening it, and may even immunize him against criticism: an authority figure who recognizes and uses humour in advance rather than

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suppressing or forbidding it can hardly be ridiculed. The same holds true for a genre, and the common integration of humour in waz mahfils is a sign of stability and not weakness. Let us trace how preachers’ humorous comments about their own role nevertheless contribute to destabilization and tilting. Mizanur distances himself from a preaching attitude and moves towards what he perceives as mere ‘ear-pleasure’ by humorously likening a preacher to a self-contained artist who dissolves in his performance: I am not such a speaker, who is preaching (oẏāj karen) all night with closed eyes, preaching with closed eyes, preaching and preaching, preaching and preaching. Even when slowly, one after the other, the people get up and leave, he doesn’t open his eyes. When his sermon is finished and he opens his eyes, he sees one guy sitting there. The preacher lifts his hand above this young lad’s head and says: ‘Son! You are the only one who understands my sermon, no one of the others understands my sermons, you are a Master in the real sense of the word.’ ‘Reverend, please forgive me. Actually I am not sitting here to listen to your sermon.’ ‘What!’ ‘I am the microphone operator. As long as you don’t let go of the microphone, I can’t leave (āpni mike o chāṛen nā, āmi yāiteo pāri nā).’54

Mizanur, with this humorous narrative, seeks to distinguish himself from a role he does not agree with. If successful, its humour can contribute to discrediting such a role and uplifting the ideal he aspires to. It is an account about someone else, reported in the third person. There is no confusion about the difference between Mizanur as a preacher narrating the story and the other preacher he is talking about. However, does the account not, at the same time, open up the possibility for the preacher’s role in general to become an object of jokes? This ‘tilting’ dimension is even stronger in cases in which the preacher does not describe another preacher but he himself assumes the role he is joking about. We have already looked at some cases in which the preacher plays with his own role. However, these typically were quite short and always involved direct communication with the audience. They were akin to jokes of a good moderator and did not question the preacher’s authority in other situations. It seems that on the level of simple role plays, there is a clear limit to which aspects of the preacher’s role are subject to negotiation and which are not. At the same time, they lead us to humour about other aspects of the preacher and preaching, which more comprehensively feature in a particularly interesting kind of humour to which now we turn – parody. Parody is of great importance to the tilting phenomenon as it does not describe the object it jokes about, but mimetically imitates it.55 In this way, it is a mimesis of the second order: it relies not on ‘reality’, but on prior expressions for reference. The comic effect is produced by the tension between these expressions and their distorted imitation. This emphasis on form is particularly important because it makes it possible to see how humour achieves distance from individuals and individual utterances but towards speech forms and whole genres. Also in parody, there are different degrees of

 Humour 203 directedness and different intentions. For example, Alfred Liede distinguishes between ‘artistic’, ‘critical’ and ‘agitatory’ varieties of parody, which express different attitudes towards the original: admiring and positive, critical and distancing, or simply using the fame of the original to make one’s own composition catchier.56 In the waz mahfils, directly critical parodies expand upon polemic humour. In the previous chapter, I discussed the complex parodic appropriation and satirical imitation of Sufi songs and pũthi recitation, which aesthetically underline negative ‘rationalist’ interpretations that refuse to decode Sufi topoi and forms of expression. In the case of such melodies, it is important that humour has been conceptualized as the opposite of the sublime.57 Parody might therefore be said to be employed to ‘destroy’ the evocation of the sublime in Sufi songs. Political incongruence, which we found to be an important subject in the previous section, can also be addressed by means of parody. Nazrul Islam, for example, suddenly parodies a popular patriotic song after jokingly complaining about regional nepotism, in which relatives, friends and neighbours of politicians are entitled to political posts. His parody retains the original melody and lyrical structure, but substitutes the reference to the nation (Bangladesh) with a reference to one particular place (Tongi). Instead of ‘The earth of my Bangladesh (āmār bāṃlādeśer māṭi) / the earth of my homeland’, he sings: ‘The earth of my Bangladesh / the earth of my Tongi-quarter (taṅgīpāṛār māṭi).’ The next line, ‘Pure (khā̃ ṭi) as gold cannot be / Purer than you can say / is the purity of Bangladesh’s earth’ becomes ‘The earth of the Tongi-quarter all around me / is purer than my gold (sonār ceẏe khā̃ ṭi).’58 The contrast between the idea of nationalism with its aspirations of inward equality and universality on the one hand and regionally and relationally based politics on the other can hardly be brought forward more precisely. The parody, however, neither has to name the mismatch nor has to be upset about it. Rather than uttering and evoking strong anger or inculpating the ‘responsible’, Islam’s criticism is paired with the light emotions that accompany his parody of a popular song. Critical parody uses the popularity of the original song for its own purposes, but is at the same time transformed in kind. As I noted, parody requires that the preacher assume a double role. On the one hand, he embodies the person he parodies, and on the other, he is still himself, maintaining a distance to his own imitation. This mechanism was also at play in the ‘insincere’ (parodic) supplicatory prayer as well as the fake crying in Ansari’s sermon. In the latter case, the recipients had to understand that now the preacher embodies a figure of his narrative and does not speak in his own voice despite performing a typical religious speech act. Parody at the same time relies on a blending of both roles, leaving a certain degree of ambiguity. Often, there is only a fine and unstable line keeping the parody of the Other from turning back on the speaker and his medium. When Siraji parodies the act of praying to Sufi saints in order to delegitimize it, he has to immediately juxtapose these prayers with ‘legitimate’ ones.59 And Mazhari’s joke about the flyover does not only ridicule the slow construction work; it also contains the seeds for questioning the applicability of ‘Godly’ yardsticks to such a trifle, thereby opening room for what may be the necessary self-reflection on a highly idealistic world view.60 For us, parodies of preaching are particularly relevant. Like other parodies, these are potentially controversial, and the following example from Hosen’s sermon was

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cut from the VideoCD produced from the sermon. The aspect of preaching Hosen parodies is an interaction between audience and preacher, and one of the most direct instruments of mobilization of waz mahfils. The parody is complex, as Hosen again performs a double role in order to meet audience’s expectations and build on the popularity of the original, while at the same time twisting it into a parody. It is very hard to decide whether it was planned as parody from the beginning or just developed into it while engaged in the act of preaching itself. As I described in depth in the first chapter, preachers often ask the audience to subscribe to their positions not only by verbal response, but also by jointly raising their hands. This gesture is often linked to a strong proclamation of joint identity and is clearly reminiscent of political mobilization. When Hosen employs such a ‘call for action’, he frames it ironically. He asks his audience to fight not against any enemy of the ‘real world’, but against Abu Jahl, a villain from Islamic history whom he had introduced just before and whom we already know of from the previous section. This enables Hosen to recall all the gestures of addressing his audience as a heroic community while at the same time distancing himself from the political stance often associated with it. Hosen introduces his mobilizing call by connecting it to the ideal of a combative Muslim who equates belief and belligerence by announcing: ‘I need to test whether your belief (imān) is strong or not.’ After confirming the audience’s love for the Prophet, he asks: ‘If Abu Jahl came here and stood in the middle of our waz tent, would you continue to listen to waz or confront him?’61 The audience responds that they would fight Abu Jahl first, but at the same time some men start to giggle. Satisfied by this response, Hosen confirms that Abu Jahl would be scared and never dare face such a combat-ready community. Finally, he asks everybody to raise their hands if they were ready to be on the Prophet’s side. To this question, the men shout out ‘Ready!’ and raise their hands. A row of slogans is exclaimed by members of the audience: the common Naʿrā-ye takbīr and specifically Barelwī slogans towards the Prophet, Abdul Qādir Jilāni and the Ahl-e Sunnat wa ‘l-Jamāʿat are heard, closing with slogans reminiscent of the more political Islamic movements of Bangladesh: ‘Bangladesh is on the Islamic way’ and ‘We want Jihad, Jihad! We choose Jihad!’ After the slogans die down, Hosen continues with a hint of smile on his face and a slightly mocking tone: ‘Wow, you will do Jihad against Abu Jahl, do you really want to do that?’ upon which the audience responds: ‘Yes!’ Widening his smirk to a full smile, he asks: ‘Or (will you fight) against graves of saints (mājār)?’62 – a proposal that the audience denies in joint laughter. With this short and seemingly misplaced question, Hosen quite efficiently highlights that he sees a danger in a mobilizing technique that asks for fervour for the Islamic cause that would cause the audience to stand against saints. The parody, in this sense, is a sectarian statement against the BJI’s mobilization. Hosen’s parody, at the same time, draws attention to the general structure of the mobilizing call and response at waz mahfils. By addressing the collective act of lifting hands to a faraway enemy who will certainly not appear in the pandal, he relegates the audience’s uttering of consent to a realm of ritual action that is removed from everyday action. The parody indicates and elicits an understanding of the speech acts of waz mahfils and their specific felicity conditions as not being valid outside the ritual; in

 Humour 205 doing so, it restricts the consent to the experience inside the sermon tent. The parody, therefore, can be said to work against the direct translation of the reception of scenes from Islamic history towards outer action in the ‘real’ world, an attitude that fits Hosen’s melodramatic and cathartic presentation that relies on the suspension of judgement. After these examples of how preachers use parody, let us proceed towards the development of parody outside the context of sermons. But, one might ask: Is this not an altogether different topic, as we hereby leave the sermons and turn to a supposedly secular space where ridicule of religion is common? I argue that the contrary is the case. In the following, I describe a trajectory from humour in sermons to humour about sermons. When approaching a parody of the sermon genre in other spaces than at waz mahfils, we can still discern an intimate connection to the sermon genre itself. The waz mahfils present an even more intricate relationship between religious discourse and parodic imitation than the case of including of a parody about a preacher in a musical mahfil in Pakistan.63 This section will end with a parody performed by the most popular parodist of waz mahfils, Tanbhīr Sarkār. I want to present it because it not only is an excellent observation of the genre dynamics, but also provides some background to make us perceive how deeply this observation is rooted in the preaching practice itself. Sarkar was a madrasa student at the time he established himself as a stand-up comedian. While his parodies are by no means only limited to imitating waz mahfils, it was the parodies of preaching that allowed him to gain considerable fame among students of religious schools and beyond. In an interview, Sarkar pointed to a very concrete connection of his parody to the genre of waz mahfils, as he claims to have been inspired to perform public comedy by attending the waz mahfils of Nazrul Islam. And indeed, there seems to be a direct line from the sermons of Islam to Sarkar’s parody. Let us therefore, before turning to the parody itself, discern some aspects of the humour of Islam as a model for parody. I have already taken up Islam’s parody of a patriotic song, which was built on, and evoked, the pleasure and fame of the original. The sermon from which it is quoted is marked by role play that exceeds the usual forms described above.64 In one instance, Islam plays on the direction of emotions. Lamenting the lack of Islamic education, he recounts that students do not even know the names of the Islamic khalifas. He recounts that they misunderstand the word itself, which in local dialects might be a generic form for small artisans or village services such as potters, barbers and tailors (sorāb khaliphā, nimāi khaliphā, kārtik khaliphā, hāsu khaliphā). When the audience laughs out loud about this funny misunderstanding, he scolds them, jokingly taking up a serious role: ‘What are you doing! Listening to this, you’re laughing? Aren’t you sad?’ And while humility and modesty in what a religious authority can achieve are commonly expressed in sermons, Islam also overdoes this commonplace. He strongly condemns certain people, stating that they will never enter paradise, and jokingly adds ‘even if the Huzurs lift their hands in prayer (du‘ā’), that won’t do any good’.65 He ridicules himself to be so stupid to have travelled far to visit a place that is nowadays easily accessible via the internet: ‘My heart became delighted, my brothers! That you take the words of a stupid and lame old man like me to be waz. I went to the city of [unclear name], one hundred and eighty miles from Egypt … . Now the internet [studio] takes you directly to the place where Zulaikha married.’66

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Islam reaches the peak of role ambiguity when discussing Joseph’s forgiveness towards his brothers for the sake of his father. He emphasizes that it would not usually be possible for humans to forgive sins. The husband, for example, could not simply forgive the sins of his wife. Shifting from the ‘authoritative’ to the ‘colloquial’ mode, Islam then assumes the role of someone asking a pīr or Huzur to forgive his ‘little lapses (ekṭu anyāẏ kare)’ – a typical funny moment in which preachers joke about conversations with community members. Islam’s excess lies in the fact that he continues the ambiguity after switching back to the authoritative mode of speech, even picking up the chanting, which we know is linked to presenting dramatic and religious truth. For the listeners, a great uncertainty arises: Is what Islam says now still part of the joke, which would mean that Islam takes up the role of the religious authority ironically? Or has this episode already ended, with Islam now addressing the audience not by quoting somebody else, but by offering his own judgement? His words do not provide clear guidance to the audience: ‘If the wife eats something she has stolen from her husband’s house, this is no sin. And if the wife tells lies to her husband, this is no sin. On three occasions Allah has made lies permissible (hālāl).’67 The form of these sentences is typical for preachers educating their audiences about religious teachings, and Islam even quotes Arabic snippets of a Hadith that states there are occasions in which lies might be permissible, one of which relates to intra-matrimonial relations. On the other hand, is what he says here not the exact opposite of what he had said just before, namely, that sins cannot be forgiven by individuals? And does it not imply a matrimonial laxity that is impossible to imagine being propagated in a sermon? Islam finally resolves this uncertainty in favour of the ironic interpretation, as he – still in the authoritative mode of speaking! – quotes a ‘sinning’ wife. In a hilariously daring response, she self-confidently asks her husband to simply condone her misdeeds, leaving the men to imagine what these could have been, and asks him to take himself as the chaste wife (satī). Sarkar’s parody, as we will see, prominently builds on toponyms. This mechanism is common in preachers’ jokes, too. It was employed by Yuktibadi, who played on the homophony of Bangladesh’s capital Ḍhākā and the verb ḍhākā (to cover) in a joke about women’s dress: ‘Why do so many women go out in Dhaka without covering? Is the city named Ḍhākā or Kholā (lit. open)?’68 This joke obviously serves persuasive intentions, aiming to discredit ‘city women’ and their allegedly less strict maintenance of norms of dress and sex. Islam, however, uses the same principle without charging it with such obvious persuasive ends. In his sermon, he jokes about a man complaining about being served puntius, which is assumed to be a not very tasty kind of fish.69 The man happens to be in regions of Bangladesh whose names, Boẏālmārī and Śailkupā, carry parts of the names of supposedly tastier kinds of fish, Boẏāl and Śol. While it is difficult to translate these names of regions in Bangladesh, let us assume that these regions are called ‘Catville’70 and ‘Sunford’. The man unsatisfied with Puntius consequently argues – in a combination of words (Mischwortbildung) that ‘refills’ the previously ‘empty’ meaning71 of the toponym – that instead of puntius he should be served ‘catfish’ and ‘sunfish’.72 Let me briefly introduce some other features that are constitutive for Sarkar’s parody of waz mahfils. Alongside playing with toponyms, the parody combines several

 Humour 207 elements that I have already discussed. The long sentences filled up with multilingual synonyms and enumerations, combined with the poetic translations and the rhythm of the chanting, lead to a particular speech rhythm of the preacher. While playing on toponyms, Sarkar establishes a similar rhythm. He pairs each toponym (like the names of the fish in Islam’s joke, all of them existing districts of Bangladesh) with a figure or object of the story. Most decisively, Sarkar adapts the characteristic chanting, selfconsciously modelling his delivery on Sayeedi’s ‘common melody’. Although his pitch and key tone (G) is different from Sayeedi’s, the parallels between Sarkar’s and Sayeedi’s melodies are striking, and I marked it in the figure. More than the text, the melody of Sarkar’s performance reveals his reference to the genre of waz mahfils (see Figure 7). Following this chanted passage, Sarkar plays with tag questions. It would have been possible for Sarkar to achieve a parodic effect by asking the audience to agree to something opposite the usual teachings of the sermons, for example, as Islam did when he jokingly propagating the permissibility of lying to one’s spouse; or to lure the audience into a wrong response, as in Munawar’s play on heaven and hell as the rewards for building a mosque. Sarkar, however, does not choose such a straightforward denial. His tag question plays with the toponym ‘Chāgalnāiẏā’, which could be literally read as ‘Nogoat’. His tag question functions as a confirmation. It does not, however, confirm presence, but absence, and of course absence of something quite ridiculous in itself (we recall that animals are common features in the preachers’ jokes). Continuing the story of Farid, Sarkar tells the story and confirms the wedding gift he brings: ‘He didn’t have anything, so he came from Nogoat without two goats, without what (ki chāṛā)?’73 Parody of waz mahfils is not limited to the outstanding public example of Sarkar, but is part of the performance of artistic parody in contemporary youth culture. In a typical get together (āḍḍā)74 of university students I joined, alongside idle talk, those assembled surpassed each other in different musical performances over the course of the evening. Some of the students, and certainly the one who performed the parody I am about to discuss, knew Sarkar’s parody. Additionally, the students recounted humorous encounters with waz mahfils in their childhood, particularly in relation to the supplicatory prayer (duʿāʾ). Alongside learning how to (ritually) cry, and much prior to understanding the theological reason to do so, they remembered having imitated (parodied?) the crying jokingly, playfully. Based on such experiences, one of the young men offers a parody of the supplicatory prayer during the nightly soirée. To mark its beginning, he employs the typical stock phrases of the supplicatory prayer as any waz mahfil would have it: ‘Oh Allah! We, some sinful servants, have today raised our hands at your court.’75 When Chowdhury continues, he includes more typical phrases of the du‘ā’, such as declaring that the community has raised their hands to ask Allah to forgive the sins (gunāh) of their ‘whole life’ (tamām zindegī), and to evoke the Prophet (or a saint) as a ‘medium’ (wasīla) of intercession for the community. Based on these well-known phrases, he parodies: ‘Oh Allah, make the hands that you like best the medium to forgive us the sins of our whole life!’ Next, he jokingly extends the typical enumeration of the misfortunes for which relief is sought to typical sins of youth: ‘Oh Allah, Master of Mankind, of us who are assembled here, Allah, someone is sick, someone is stressed, some smoke cigarettes, some marijuana.’ Another variation of playing on the phrase of the ‘sins of the whole

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life’ is the following request, not for heaven, but for love: ‘Allah, please forgive me the sins of the whole day! Alas, Allah, please help me find a love! Oh Allah! All girls and boys, of the whole life, are bad. Oh Allah, please save us from the hands of such girls.’ Continuing, he extends the standard supplication for the parents in their ‘interim’ state of being in the grave, to include the grandparents. He thereby draws one of the most important commonplaces of the uncanny into the realm of the comic: ‘So many fathers

 Humour 209

Figure 7  Staff notation of parody.

and mothers have passed away. Allah, so many grandfathers and grandmothers have passed away. They are sleeping in their graves in darkness. Forgive them their grave’s

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torture.’ Lastly, the self-reflective impetus of humour that I discussed in this chapter leads the student to conclude his prayer by including his own activity: ‘Allah, forgive us, for all the fake imitation (bhaṇḍāmi) of ours during all this time.’76 The humorous deliberation of the genre tells us something important about its relation to religious ritual as well as to outward action. The receptive attitude that is built upon and furthered by humour makes it possible to perceive the medium of preaching from a distance, neither as part of ‘religion’ – this is what Sarkar, for example, explicitly says – nor as part of an action-oriented process. Emotions experienced in this frame might be more akin to the suspended emotions experienced during the reception of fiction. This would mean that thoughts about virtual experiences reaching from theories of catharsis to those about modern media could be applied to waz mahfils, and it could explain part of the frustration that politically oriented preachers feel towards the genre. It also implies that we are not dealing with a conflict between ‘secular’ humour versus an impassionate religious genre, but that it is the internal dynamics of the genre itself that allows religious immersion as much as aesthetic distance.

Outlook From comprehensive to comparative genre analysis

With the parody of waz mahfils we have come full circle. At the outset of this book, sermon gatherings in Bangladesh were an empty screen upon which pictures could be projected of anything from a fundamentalist threat to an insignificant folk religion. At the book’s end, we have been able to perceive, in the condensed form of the parody, a complex communicational practice with distinct and powerful appeals to the senses, religious aesthetics and popular politics. Following the form of Islamic speech in one of the most widely spoken Islamic languages, we gained an understanding of how public piety shapes the foundations of civic participation, and religious and political valuations. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that it is important to look at the specific genres of Islamic sermons beyond the Friday sermon to understand Islamic preaching and argued for the importance of supererogatory sermon gatherings in regional idioms. The well-established form of preaching in nocturnal sermon gatherings allows preachers to attain functions as mediators between different regions or groups and between universal aspirations and local concerns. Focusing on the framing of the gatherings and the explicit communication between preacher and audience, I showed how closely interrelated religious expectations are with communicative conventions. The gatherings form part of pious aspirations and practices: the preacher persuades the audience, and together, as one, they persuade God to grant them mercy. This joint striving can be directed to momentary enactments of political utopia, but is framed in a way that contains conflicts. Within the sermon gathering, a deep consensus is forged. Those gathered send out joint messages: to God to forgive them, to the surrounding community to engage in pious philanthropy, and to themselves and each other that they agree with each other. Small media transport this display of consensus to other, secondary, audience settings, which in turn create a second feedback loop to those gathered in the tents. As James Hoesterey has highlighted in his work on public piety in Indonesia, there is no single way in which popular culture and (political) Islam intersect, and an exclusive focus on new social media platforms would fail to explain specific successes and failures that, I would add, always build on existing mediascapes.1 Sermon gatherings are a form of mass communication that relies on the replicability of roles and general genre competence, and media recordings are one way to involve even more actors emulating these roles – particularly women, but also working men and diasporic communities. In Chapter 2, I stressed the importance of multilingual idioms for Islamic preaching and added suggestions on how to consider the link these idioms have to

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pleasure and aesthetics and to dynamic forms of identity construction. Global Islamic discourse is crucially mediated by multilingualism and region-specific sets of Islamic languages that pertain to particular functions to address, for example, concerns relating to scripture or social imaginary. I discussed how preachers employ forms of address to appeal, in Arabic, to God; to Islamic social imaginaries in Urdu; or to occupational groups in Bengali. I furthermore discussed concrete examples in which the religious idiom is explicitly connected to religious nationalism and a powerful means of language politics: using the religious authority and riding waves of sociolinguistic change, parties like the BJI can use sermons to effectively fuse this change with their political views. This is not a global, but a regional strategy carefully built on visions of religious authority as linguistic authority. On the basis of this authority, preachers can attempt to infuse everyday interactions with statements of group and party affiliations. In general, however, I argued that rather than perceiving Urdu and Arabic as external to the Bengali discourse of preachers, the inclusion of multiple languages stimulates linguistic awareness and creativity. Translation is part of the preachers’ poetic prose and evolves dynamically over the course of the sermon. Preachers build upon and shape the language perception, competency and connoisseurship of the listeners. I have shown that poetic effects are crucial. They simultaneously create a pious language that is striving and aspirational and they cultivate pleasures of language games and translation. Again, religious idioms and their aesthetic effects work together to form a community that does not follow unequivocal religious ideology but dynamic mediation. That these poetic effects do not entail a retreat to the individual or private is shown by the fact that preachers cite Urdu and Bengali poems as mobilizing takehome messages, rather than for inward-looking reflection. In Chapter 3, I proposed narratology as a way to understand the long narratives that hold together the main part of the sermons, with themes ranging from Islamic history to the quotidian. Focusing on ways that heroes are presented to the audience and how new perspectives evolve from constructions of dramatic scenes, I tease out how these narratives go beyond being mere examples of Islamic teachings. Pedagogy and education are much more complex than instruction. Preaching and religious aesthetics shape subjectivities in respect to gender and religious ideals. The possibilities sermons offer to the audience for identifying with different types of idols, ranging from cool, fearless heroes to the suffering mother. The listeners follow narrative forms that allow them to combine dramatic catharsis and salvific relaxation. Dramatic dialogues go well with the structure of Hadith and Quran. In the sermons, they are combined with focalization to further the psychological identification of the listeners with famous figures from the Prophet’s times. This orientation of waz mahfils towards the effect they have on listeners along poetic principles leads to the reshaping even of basic Islamic concepts. I traced the subtle processes by which the sermons replace divine mercy with compassion as a social emotion and poetic principle. The relation to the figures of the narratives, particularly to the Prophet, is key for the salvation of the listeners as religious subjects and is achieved by the listeners because they are affected by the dramatic mode of narration. Religious emotions in the final prayer build on emotions triggered in the narratives.

 Outlook 213 Stories known from different Islamic contexts are expanded and reshaped to fit the dramatic conventions of the sermons. Once they have been taken up in the genre, they can turn into stable commonplaces that different preachers can recall for comparable effects. The narratives of preachers of the BJI in the 1980s and the HI in 2014 remodelled a heroic plot in a similar fashion to infuse a sense of heroism into the young men assembled to listen to them. Next to stressing this similar configuration of narratives by both preachers, my narrative analysis pointed to differences in the way the heroic sentiments were transferred to the audiences. In one case it was more concrete and in the other more allegorical. When thinking about Islamic sermons, narrative analysis becomes indispensable and cannot be submerged by privileging sectarian or narrowly political statements. Discussing narrative forms in the sermon gatherings allows us to build up an understanding of popular preaching as part of popular culture. Instead of perceiving outward influences on a ‘religious tradition’, I suggest following the deep entanglements of Bengali Islamic discourse with dramatic performances. For example, I discussed Hosen’s preaching in depth. In many respects, it corresponds to Peter Brooks’s definition of melodrama as ‘the effort to make the “real” and the “ordinary” and the “private life” interesting through heightened dramatic utterance and gesture that lay bare the true stakes’.2 Hosen deliberately foreshadows gloomy events and puts them off to create tension. In his sermons, melodrama’s ‘eternal triangle of mother/son/daughter-in-law’3 figures prominently. The ‘special’ knowledge between mother and son reveals the true meaning of the situation by an obscure mechanism bordering on the magical as well as on the psychological.4 The emotional roles of the masculine and steadfast but flirtatious heroes in farewell scenes before battle narratives developed by Sayeedi and Hak, too, cater to their young male audiences in ways that overlap with the models in other venues of popular culture, most notably film. It would underestimate the productive role of these narratives to see them as a pale imitation of other forms of popular culture such as film or the culture industry of travelling theatre troupes.5 Rather, they are part of the same field, and popular taste and culture includes Islamic thematics, morals and roles. Taken together with the evergrowing importance and melodramatic structure of the master narrative of 1971, the case of sermons suggests the need to rethink the political roles of popular culture. The rise of populist politics and the lack of participation in the formal political sector imply an ever-increasing importance of alternative narratives and forms of public expression, and as the linguistic idiom, so the narrative forms provide an aesthetic alternative that can raise hopes for political alternatives. In Chapter 4, I explored the crucial role of vocal performance as not only articulating yet another aesthetic register, but driving narrative and emotional roles. The preachers’ melodic performance fits the above thought about popular preaching as a form of melodrama. Melodies lie at the heart of European6 and South Asian discussions on melodrama. In South Asia, song scenes provide links to popular performance traditions.7 Preachers’ melodic rendering of prose passages connects to patterns of Bengali narratives that were established in Middle Bengali literature and remained a common feature in popular printing until the early twentieth century.8 In this pattern,

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an altered voice highlights a dramatic and mimetic mode of narration. Chanting in the sermons builds on long-standing literary practices and audience expectations. This book methodologically demonstrated how religious and cultural studies can profit from joining expertise in their analysis of speech forms and religious performance. Chanted dramatic scenes shape a dramatic rendering of the Quran, in which preachers stress and extend the Quran’s dialogic composition. Chanted dialogues and (re)citations from the Quran are at the centre of the sermons’ emotional effect. Religious and emotional experiences overlap in the narrative and vocal performance of the sermons. The similarities in patterns of narrative and performed voice strengthen the equivalence between chanted dialogues in Bengali and Quranic citations. We can then trace a process in which performative poetics influences and creates religious authority. The poetics of narration and prose chanting reach deep into subjectivity. Dramatic scenes and their chanted performance are part of a culturally scripted, yet deeply felt process of self-affection that includes the preacher as much as the audience. It is not a prior imaginative act of the speaker who is then affected and speaks to the audience. In the process of preaching, preachers draw the audience and themselves into direct perception of emotionalized Islamic history. Their joint self-affection cuts across the divisions between production and reception, authentic and inauthentic emotions, and ‘entertaining’ and ‘serious’ messages. In the introduction, I suggested speaking of religiotainment in order to signal the intertwined nature of religious and pleasurable processes. But even this combination still carries along a bifurcation that occludes the degree to which both processes rely on each other. Participating in sermon gatherings means expecting that emotional affection and cathartic pleasure add up to religious advancement. To fulfill musical–poetical expectations of prose chanting is key for joint selfaffection. Self-affection and musical poetics are part of the preachers’ conceptions of their task. Preachers and audiences reach their aspirational states not by pre-mediation, but during the performance and reception processes at the sermon gathering. This underlines the fact that sermons shape a cultural and learned body that is impressed by acts of imagination. In the preaching process, narrative and vocal forms make heightened emotional experiences possible. It is not so much a particular topic that is cultivated in the sermons, but a particular intensity. Again, pleasure and aesthetics are not apolitical or merely beautiful. Understanding the poetics of prose chanting helps us to grasp how sermons influence emotional valuations of political judgements. On the basis of understanding the role of chanting to evoke emotions, we can perceive how sermons can be charged with attitudes towards democracy, social change and justice. These rhetorical possibilities go beyond direct appeals or allegorical allusions to political events. I disentangled how Sayeedi, personally and politically invested against secular justice, musically and rhetorically transported his valuation by skilfully building on the genre’s possibilities. On the basis of the sermon gatherings’ joint striving for mercy and the bodily habituation of musical patterns, he was able to render his ideal immediately acceptable and natural for everyone acquainted with the genre and to strongly contrast this ideal to the existing polity. This underlines that the success for any kind of specific appeal depends

 Outlook 215 on the degree to which it can built into the genre’s aesthetic preferences and processes of religious mediation. In Chapter 5, I described humour as yet another possibility for the preachers to communicate similarity among the group members and distinction from other identities and positions. Like the vocal aesthetics, humour is also not explicitly cherished in homiletic descriptions, but is crucial to successful preaching. It similarly shows that the aesthetic theories applied in the Islamic field need not match preaching practice. To put it another way, Islamic homiletics need not encompass all points that are crucial from a reconstructive point of view. Humour allows preachers to expand their roles as approachable religious authorities. By Othering and ridiculing common opponents, they, at least momentarily, create a likeness and identity of subject positions with the men listening to them despite factual differences in status and class. While humour is clearly a rhetorical device central to populist identity formation, I argue that its formality and distance can turn back on the preachers’ discourse, as it allows recipients within and beyond waz mahfils to step back and see through the genre’s poetics. My analysis of humour brings together existing scholarship that stresses the importance of laughter in Islamic preaching and ritual levity more generally with studies that emphasize the political dimensions of humour. Humour is not a ‘light’ emotion in the political sense. Analysing populist jokes in preaching, in respect to Islamic anti-heroes such as Abu Jahl and the pharaoh, or in respect to the powerful of Bangladesh, can enhance our understanding of anti-elite attitudes. Once more, it seems that the embeddedness in religious mediation, the ephemerality of the genre and the particular addressees provide possibilities to criticize – with the criticism always general enough to be able to pass as a teaching ‘far away’ from the local power dynamics. Even though direct political consequences are out of reach, this articulation of disappointment and the momentary inversion of power hierarchies matters. The importance of humour in preaching and its close connection to parodies of preaching outside of sermons challenge notions of secularism. It disturbs the idea that jokes could be allotted a clear place on the secular side of a continuum between (religious) blasphemy and (secular) free speech. I showed how secular and religious parodies feed into one another, just as they do in case of preachers parodying folk songs. More abstractly, parodies raise the question of how intimately (religious) form and essence are tied to one another. Among the religious actors I talked to, parody of preaching was not taken as a parody of Islam, despite the ubiquitous calls for blasphemy laws and religious hurt in other cases. For scholars of religion, the question remains whether the distancing attitude to religious form is a means of self-reflection and opening up a closed world of religious immersion, or if it is part of secularization processes that might eventually decrease the importance of organized religion. The question of distance and closeness concerns different levels of the preachers’ discourse, ranging from humour or to the fictional narrative situations, and a dialectic between strangeness and naturalization evolves. On the one hand, the particular poetics of the sermons creates a world of their own and differs from other communication situations and genres – a feature similar to the ‘estrangement’ (ostranenie) of formalism. The voice of the preachers, their subject matter and their

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calls to ‘go’ to another place, all are geared to lifting the sermons out of their immediate context. On the other hand, this formal estrangement is not put forward as such, but is accepted as natural. Preachers translate and interweave salvific processes, revelations and sacred communications in a familiar idiom. This idiom relates to the listeners’ quotidian life and builds on their expertise and connoisseurship. By self-affection, the chanted voice becomes a marker of being moved naturally. Listeners regularly attend sermon gatherings, are immersed in crowds that act and express their appreciation and discontent alike and at the same moment. They can normalize the performed ways of interaction, perception and feeling. As everyday metaphors, these become part of other communicative processes, providing the background against which action is possible or legitimate. While it is often argued that narratives have stronger emotional effects if they resemble or recall ‘reality’, I consider the sermons’ somewhat distant and fluctuating relationship to everyday life to be one of their strengths. The preachers’ alternation between colloquial and poetic speech forms is an important means of signalling this relationship. Structural and topical commonplaces indicate theatricality and rhetoricity. These, in turn, are not impediments to, but rather open up new possibilities for evoking emotions for the audiences who are acquainted with and cherish them. They shape long-standing motivations and are the background for broader civic engagement beyond politics organized in, for example, political parties. The effect that forms of narrations and of imagination have on wider political processes has also been exemplarily highlighted by Lynn Hunt’s work on the selfevidence of human rights. She argues that next to practices such as viewing pictures in public exhibitions, narrative forms in popular novels helped to spread both autonomy and empathy.9 The sermon congregations then popularize processes of collectively feeling not only about Islam but in relation to Islamic thematic foils, semantics and formulas. Preachers evoke emotions in an imaginative surrounding that attributes natural roles to religion, forms of social interaction and introspection. Preaching forms consensus and links to religious collectivity and practice, for example, in the joint prayer. One effect of listening to these narratives then is to internalize the melodramatic structures and the Manichaeistic world view and to engage in empathy with particular kinds of heroes, and not with others. And this engagement is not one of introspection, but a public and highly coordinated process, a manifestation of joint rather than autonomous imagination, affection and reaction. The voices and bodies of the preachers and the audience come together in the gathering.10 To focus on a form of public speech that is crucial to public piety and mediation in Bangladesh, but not among the leading public formats in ‘Western’ history and present, challenges our thinking about global publics. The importance and social effort that is put into Islamic speech in Bengali contains important aspects that are missing in modernization narratives that centre on public processes of an idealized public polity. From the latter’s point of view, as Habermas has recently argued, religious speech may be ‘a serious candidate to transporting possible truth contents’, but needs to ‘be translated from the vocabulary of a particular religious community into a generally accessible language’.11 However, this seems to be built on problematic universalisms of the category and place of religion.12

 Outlook 217 In this book, I wanted to set an example of appreciating the multiplicity of idioms and their inherent messages that are not easily flattened to one political declaration, because much of their message lies in the aesthetic, linguistic and narrative forms and the communication practices they model. These communication practices overlap with the political as a communicative space. However, this does not imply that different forms of media and public articulations are easily translatable to one idiom. In making important aspects of the communication in waz mahfils transparent, I have contributed to widening the scope of possible public processes and subjectivities – and thereby of the political – to include a yet unstudied form of Islamic discourse as one artful articulation that mediates self and community. Thinking about forms of Islamic mediations in terms of genre complements approaches that concentrate on the contestation between religious groups or traditions. Dietrich Reetz, for example, in his analysis of the Islamic (Urdu) public sphere, follows competing ideological poles that form a solid and rapidly expanding Islamic sector.13 His and similar approaches stress the often productive differences between different Islamic orientations, while different media and sensual forms are seen as carriers of distinct messages or grounds of contestation. The genre perspective I proposed begins by highlighting the specific roles and processes in which producers and recipients are related to one another. It perceives the forms of discourse as taking up consequential roles in creation and steering public processes. While the study of individual groups remains of value, my approach offers a fresh perspective by cutting across categories such as ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘Sufis’, and even more nuanced ones such as ‘reformist Islam’. The roles, truths and subjectivities that I describe are more fluid, processual and less articulate than positions or statements imply. A processual and partial approach helps us to rethink related concepts such as that of ‘civil’ or ‘political’ society. Instead of perceiving civil society as a particular segment – which in Bangladesh is almost automatically identified with the NGO sector14 – an approach focused on communication processes is concerned with models for civility that describe gradual processes open to everyone. They can be learnt, and they must be maintained by repeated practice.15 This does not mean to overlook the fact that processes of civility are often linked to particular segments of society or political positions. On the contrary, exclusion and contention about the definition of markers of civility are not merely perceived on the level of explicit statements – such as Olipuri suggesting that playing football is ‘uncivil’ because it involves touching the football with the head and therefore bringing together two bodily regions that in Bengal are to be kept apart. Preachers and audiences perform models of civil discourse and challenge the norms inherent in restricted visions of linguistic expression, topics of reference or relations to pleasure. My description of their civil mediations may at least help to gain a more adequate understanding of forms of participation in Bangladeshi civil societies, without at the same time relegating this form of participation to a merely pseudo- or pre-political programme. This does not preclude criticism of preaching practice. I have time and again highlighted limitations, for example, of a pseudo-participation triggered by the guided performance of consensus. This is not the least interesting in a historical perspective. In the nineteenth century, Munśī Meher Ullāh, a famous religious reformer, turned

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polemic contestations called bāhās into waz mahfils to ‘educate the Muslim masses’.16 In the 1920s, participation in these ‘consensual’ Muslim practices was pitted against participation in other forms such as ‘kirtans, yatras or kathakathas organized by the Hindus’.17 Also other roles of contemporary preaching and its idiom build on historical antecedents. In colonial Bengal, sermon gatherings provided occasions for ‘fun and entertainment in an otherwise monotonous rural life’.18 The influential scholar and preacher Karāmat ʿAlī Jaunpurī was a particularly remarkable example of the wanderlust of preachers. Preaching from the deck of his boat, he became ‘amphibious’ in his habits.19 A cursory look at older collections of Bengali waz sermons reveals shifts and continuities in a number of stock expressions, formats such as multilingual quotations, and audience instructions given by preachers. For example, Urdu poems in Bengali sermons today encapsulate less mystical longing than take-home aphorisms and whip up heroic sentiments and pride. The code switching of preachers today is an example of the continued relevance, in the oral sphere, of idioms that have been ‘out of print’ already for about a 100 years. At the same time, we, of course, have to be aware that speech forms can be traditionalistic in the sense of posing as old despite being new.20 Last but not least, communicative ‘Islamic’ commonplaces such as hailing Allah as the real owner of the land are meandering between ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ mobilization in Bengali history, as is the teasing out of revolutionary aspects of the profession of faith. Historical research on the idioms and forms of rural mobilization during the late colonial times and the era of East Pakistan points to the importance of mediator figures and public festivals in popular politics.21 Such historical trajectories, which future research will expand, highlight the importance of formats such as waz mahfils for visions of community and nationalism in Bengal. In 2006, Sufia Uddin explained that the ‘Awami League’s ethno-linguistic nationalism is so successful because it taps into an affinity for the native language with a rich literary heritage known to many Bengalis because of its oral nature’.22 Ten years later, after the AL’s success came close to having evinced the other competing visions of Bangladeshi nationalisms Uddin describes, popular preaching points to the continued importance of other heritages and literary expressions, particularly in the oral sphere. Next to historicization, my research points to the importance of comparison, and here at the end of this book, I want to briefly take up some promising examples. I hereby open up a perspective that is in a way complementary to the genre approach that I have argued for thus far. It is complementary and not contradictory: even if researching whole ‘media landscapes’, systems of citation, or complex subjectivities are the goal, we can only do this on the basis of having understood the worlds opened up by individual formats and genres. The few in-depth studies of popular culture in contemporary Bangladesh point to cross-cutting issues of transmediatization.23 Obvious and important points of comparison are regional and global Islamic preaching as much as preaching in other religious traditions. Historical descriptions of ‘Hindu’ storytelling in Bengal are more than reminiscent of their Muslim counterparts. The voice, the emotions evoked by it, and the forms of narration associated with it are particularly promising points for comparing traditions beyond sectarian boundaries and can guide further research on past and present ‘Hindu’ mobilization via preaching practices.24 A popular class of narrators in the nineteenth century were the storytellers

 Outlook 219 (kathaks) who ‘recited Vaishnava stories before rural gatherings’ in a ‘performing art requiring considerable histrionic skills on the part of the performer’.25 Social obligations and the search for religious merit (punya) led people to listen to a performance that took one and a half hours and was characterized by the kathak citing the Ramayana, explaining it and impersonating different characters, using their specific linguistic expressions, and adopting their voices.26 The religious reformer and novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay praises the effectiveness of the ‘folk education’ of kathakatā. He recounts how a ‘bulky black narrator (kathak) used to narrate (bibr̥ t) before the audience ornamented rhetorically, in ornamental Sanskrit and melodious voice’.27 Kathaks were ‘scholars, poets and finished singers’. Their extempore ‘oration was coupled with power of music, the effect of all which was heightened by their command over language and their great scholarship’.28 It was ‘the evocative power of kathā and dhvani (speech and sound) that impressed and lingered in the memory’29 of the audience. Other examples for comparison among the many public performative genres of Bengal range from the Muharram tradition of jāri gān, to poetic contestation of kabi gān, narratives of local goddesses and Sufis, such as manosā or rāẏ maṅgal or pālā gān.30 These performances often have spatial setups similar to those of the waz mahfils and provide meeting spaces for festivities relevant to the community, be they religious, memorial or political. Complementarily, studies of new developments in cinema and theatre, TV talk shows and the visual arts more generally, particularly since the explosion of private television channels,31 could teach us a lot about the involvement and expression of other social sectors. They could provide glimpses of cultural developments in an economic situation in which the privatization of public goods continues and the distribution of private wealth reinforces the detachment of the affluent. We also still lack in-depth research on even classical media such as newspapers and radio, or on contemporary pop music in Bangladesh. With the number of internet subscribers skyrocketing in the last few years, it is a truism that digital media shape the ways social interaction and public processes work. At the same time, new groups of digital activists have been victimized and suppressed and lost much of their public appeal in Bangladesh. While I would not wish to suggest a binary between secular bloggers and the audiences of waz mahfils, we cannot get a full picture by focusing only on digital media. Over the course of the book, I pointed to a more complex interaction between digital and mass media on the one hand and the mass of small and localized communications such as in waz mahfils on the other. Let me provide a concrete and relatively simple example for comparison that involves questions of genre and imagination of a popular Islamic format, even if in a different medium and sensorium than waz mahfils. Over the last few decades, ‘Islamic novels’ flourished in Bangladesh alongside other cultural activities. ‘Secular novels’, for example, by the popular author Humayun Ahmed, who reached beyond elite literary circles, while at the same time not losing his grip on middle classes who carefully distinguish themselves from readers of pulp fiction. In parallel, romance novels featuring ideal ‘Islamic’ characters such as those by Kāsem Bin Ābubākār continue to be popular among (lower) middle classes. Maimuna Huq sees these ‘Islamic novels’ as a genre that invites a ‘new approach to considering and presenting Islam’ to new, ‘modern’, audiences and blurs the

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boundaries between the religious and the secular by intruding into a field erstwhile exclusively fed by secular novelists.32 The sense of deliberate intrusion is strengthened by the fact that some of the authors and producers of these novels are activists in the BJI. This background and the fact that novels try to reach young people’s emotions and imagination, while at the same time introducing senses of propriety and moral lessons, has sufficed to characterize them as part of a ‘new Islamist public’. While I share worries about a public sphere that is not ‘unfettered, democratic and critical’,33 I think that an analysis of novels as mere containers of ideology misses the influence of genre and communication. Islam is not an unchanging ideology that is only communicated by different means. Pious – or even ‘Islamist’ – actors and their message are shaped by the cultural expression they choose. Maimuna Huq senses this as she tries to carve out specific potentialities that fiction holds for the experiences of readers and notices the similarities to secular novels. She also notices that cover design, producers and popular appeal overlap – only stopping short of acknowledging that the ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islamist’ novels in many respects follow the rules of novels and therefore reshape the meaning of Islam in Bangladesh alongside, for instance, the rules of the romance genre. I would argue that instead of a hermeneutics of suspicion, which perceives everything of supposedly ‘Islamist’ content as secondary or even a means to hide the ‘real’ processes, it is more instructive to take seriously the novels’ particular possibilities. The Blossoming Rose (Phuṭanta Golāp), for example, is a coming-of-age novel of its burka-clad heroine. And while Islam is a positive force in this novel, so is self-chosen romantic love. Above all, general middle-class propriety and conduct that looks up to, but also distinguishes itself from, the upper classes are other values seen as positive. Again, there are many possibilities for reading novels popular for their plots, heroes, introspection and pleasure. Their instrumental use is certainly not uniform and, as in the waz mahfils, may lie more in the ways to enable and structure experiences. To dissect these structures and compare them to those of other cultural productions, we would need to engage in deep discussions of the ways these novels involve their readers rather than assuming a unilateral propaganda model. Such an analysis would also allow for distinguishing the possibilities novels offer more clearly from those of the narratives in the sermons beyond obvious differences in complexity of plot and characters, the role of exemplary religious figures or the bodily experience of sermons vis-à-vis silent reading. Joining research on different communicational practices can help to arrive at a fuller picture of Bengali Muslim subjectivities. These are affected by listening to waz mahfils as much as to political speeches or by reading novels and watching movies. Particularly in their mobile form as recordings, long-established genres find themselves in new vicinities to each other, and choices individualize. For research in global Islamic preaching, this means to move towards considering different configurations of genres with their specific appeals to the senses, language and emotions. The relationship between popularity and piety is answered differently in each of these configurations, and preaching allows to combine and navigate between both. Waz mahfils need not maintain the focus described in this book, as other genres might take over their linguistic idiom, narrative forms or sensory appeals. Shifting

 Outlook 221 social developments and political rifts in Bangladesh change the distribution of who sits inside the tent and who watches it from the outside and the political position of religious schools towards the state. It might be that among the three gatherings I described at the outset of this book, the one directly linked to the BJI is already relegated to history, just as the official party is. This alters the position of the other gatherings, makes them turn away from articulating alternatives or open up to new political roles. Whether explicitly, via parody or in subtle shifts of preaching practice, trends such as overtly emotional preaching continue and new topics and linguistic forms, such as preaching for Rohingya refugees, open up. Among these shifts within and between genres, the poetics of popular preaching will play its role.

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Notes Introduction 1 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. All translations from sermons are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 My perspective, of course, owes a lot to the fertile soil ploughed by the subaltern studies. See also the discussion of public piety in Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 244–52 and the historical linkages of peasant and Muslim identities in Bengal presented by Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) and Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3 For a legal history that emphasizes the importance of cross-cutting multiple sites of the law down to the personal, see Julia Anne Stephens, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 4 For a large paradigm in the direction of poetic expression, see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); for the senses Patrick Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); for religious aesthetics and rhetoric Sabine Dorpmüller et al., eds, Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama – Sermons – Literature (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018). 5 For a wonderful study of vernacular rhetoric in India, see Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 6 This speaks to the many fruitful discussions in the wake of Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); and Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7 Formative for the intricacies of tracing a specific performance context, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali, reprint edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8 A wholly new line of research has been set off by anthropologists who tackled Islamic sermons in innovative ways. Throughout this book, I am indebted to Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), which is often read together with Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a non-Arabic context, cf. Julian Millie,

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Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), and for Bangladesh, Samia Huq, ‘Women’s Religious Discussion Circles in Urban Bangladesh: Enacting, Negotiating and Contesting Piety’ (PhD diss., Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 2011) and Maimuna Huq, ‘The Politics of Belief: Women’s Islamic Activism in Bangladesh’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 2006). 9 For new thinking about the importance of expectation, see Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak, eds, Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip P. Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 11 As often titles already encapsulate nicely: Joseph Allchin, Many Rivers, One Sea: Bangladesh and the Challenge of Islamist Militancy (London: Hurst & Company, 2019) and Hiranmay Karlekar, Bangladesh: The Next Afghanistan? (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005). 12 For the scope and limitations of research on Bangladesh, see Willem van Schendel, ‘Blind Spots and Biases in Bangladesh Studies’, Südasien-Chronik/South Asian Chronicle 4 (2014): 29–34; and Neilesh Bose, ed., Culture and Power in South Asian Islam: Defying the Perpetual Exception (London: Routledge, 2015). 13 Lotte Hoek, ‘Cinema and the Melodrama of Nationalism’, Himāl Southasian 28/3 (2015): 66–77. 14 Rejaul K. Byron and Shameem Mahmud, ‘Madrasas Mushroom with State Favour’, Daily Star, 4 August 2005, 1, available at http:​//arc​hive.​theda​ilyst​ar.ne​t/200​5/08/​04/d5​ 08040​1011.​htm (accessed 3 January 2018). 15 Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, chapter 5. 16 Bose, Recasting the Region, particularly chapter 5. 17 Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 191ff; Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 18 Neilesh Bose, ‘Anti-Colonialism, Regionalism, and Cultural Autonomy: Bengali Muslim Politics, c.1840s–1952’ (PhD diss., Tufts University, Medford/Somerville, MA, 2009), 404. 19 Bose, Recasting the Region, 188. 20 Ali Riaz, Bangladesh: A Political History since Independence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 5. 21 Banyan, ‘Final Sentence’, The Economist, 2013, available at https​://ww​w.eco​nomis​t.com​ /blog​s/ban​yan/2​013/0​9/ban​glade​sh-s-​war-c​rimes​-tria​ls (accessed 3 January 2018). 22 Māsud Kārjan, ‘Yuddhāparādher bicār ṭhekāte 10 sadasyer kamiṭi: Rimānḍe jāmāẏāter tin netār tathya’, Kāler Kanṭha, 6 July 2010. 23 Open Challenge Allama Delwar Hossain Sayeedi – 1997 – Bangladesh Jamaat e Islam, 26 February 2013, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=e68​OhlGb​7ug (accessed 18 January 2018). 24 See International Crimes Tribunal–1 [hereafter ICT–1], ‘The Chief Prosecutor versus Delowar Hossain Sayeedi’, Judgement, 28 February 2013, 01 OF 2011, available at http:​ //www​.ict-​bd.or​g/ict​1/ICT​1%20J​udgme​nt/sa​yeedi​_full​_verd​ict.p​df (accessed 25 April 2015). 25 For detailed statistical information surrounding madrasas in Bangladesh, see Abul Barkat et al., Political Economy of Madrassa Education in Bangladesh: Genesis, Growth, and Impact (Bangladesh: Ramon Publishers, 2011).

 Notes 225 26 ‘Hephājate Isˡlāmer 13 daphā dābi’, Pratham Ālo, 5 April 2013, available at http:​//arc​ hive.​proth​om-al​o.com​/deta​il/da​te/20​13-04​-05/n​ews/3​42494​ (accessed 5 February 2018); Banyan, ‘Final Sentence’. 27 First approaches evolve to analyse how extremist preachers in Bangladesh draw on IS propaganda, for example, Asheque Haque, ‘The Impact of Mufti Jashimuddin Rahmani’s Sermons’, University of Oslo, Oslo, 14 June 2019. 28 Md Saimum Parvez, ‘The Press, National Identity, and the Shahbagh Movement: A Study of the Contemporary Politics of Bangladesh’ (MA diss., Elliot School of International Affairs of The George Washington University, Washington, DC, 2015). 29 Abiśvāś, ‘Oẏāj māhˡphiler bhitar bāhir’, 2018, available at https://obisshash.com/ interview-waz/ (accessed 24 March 2019). 30 See introduction and chapter 3 in Huq, ‘Women’s Religious Discussion Circles’. 31 Dina M. Siddiqi, ‘Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: “Muslim” Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies’, SAMAJ 20 (2019): 1–17, here 4. 32 Quoted, for example, in Salimullah Khan, ‘Ahˡmed Chaphā: “āmi satyer prati abical ekṭi anurāg niẏe calˡte cāi”’, 2013, available at https://arts.bdnews24.com/?p=5523 (accessed 11 June 2019). 33 Ibid. 34 Benjamin Zeitlyn, Manpreet K. Janeja, and José Mapril, ‘Introduction: Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 9 (2014): 1–16. 35 Introduction in Nusrat Chowdhury, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). 36 Willibald Steinmetz and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘The Political as Communicative Space in History: The Bielefeld Approach’, in Writing Political History Today, ed. Willibald Steinmetz, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus, 2013). 37 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ed., Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2005). 38 Willibald Steinmetz, ‘“A Code of Its Own”: Rhetoric and Logic of Parliamentary Debate in Modern Britain’, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 6 (2002): 84–104, here 87. 39 For Foucault’s ontology rejecting hermeneutics and structuralism, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). At the same time, I do not share the general delineation of literature as counterdiscourse. 40 For the interlinkage of genre and emotion, see Francesca Orsini, ‘Introduction’, in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Francesca Orsini (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 41 Hans Harder, Sufism and Saint Veneration in Contemporary Bangladesh: The Maijbhandaris of Chittagong (London: Routledge, 2011); Mohammad Bulbul Ashraf Siddiqi, ‘The Tablighi Jamaat in Bangladesh and the UK: An Ethnographic Study of an Islamic Reform Movement’ (PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2014). 42 This is a main point in which Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002) differs from Habermas, Public Sphere. 43 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today’, in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

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44 Jenniffer Dubrow, ‘From Newspaper Sketch to “Novel”: The Writing and Reception of Fasanae Azad in North India, 1878–1880’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, 2011). 45 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 256. 46 See Hans Harder, ‘Migrant Literary Genres: Transcultural Moments and Scales of Transculturality’, in Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, ed. Laila Abu-Er-Rub et al. (London: Routledge, 2019). 47 For a great reflection on genres in the history of Islamic preaching see Linda Gale Jones, The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–20. 48 I stress the importance of the form of preaching in the same spirit as, but less restricted than, Millie’s preaching styles, see Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, 5. 49 For the importance of intertextuality and tradition in Bengal’s long literary history, see Thibaut d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 50 On the interrelation of narrative and imagination among a crucial Islamic thinker, see Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, ed. Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), particularly chapter 2. 51 Willibald Steinmetz, Das Sagbare und das Machbare: Zum Wandel politischer Handlungsspielräume: England 1780–1867 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993), 33. 52 The underlying theoretical foundations of this point of view are formulated by the German Konstanzer Schule, particularly Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, and in the United States by Stanley Fish. See, for example, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Stanley Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, New Literary History 2/1 (1970): 123–62. 53 For an overview of the scholarship, see Carola Erika Lorea, Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: A Journey between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 54 Harder, Sufism. 55 Steps into this direction are taken in some unpublished dissertations, such as Matt D. Yarrington, ‘Lived Islam in Bangladesh: Contemporary Religious Discourse between Ahl-i-Hadith, “Hanafis” and the Authoritative Texts, with Special Reference to al-barzakh’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2010); Siddiqi, ‘The Tablighi Jamaat’; Nurul Momen Bhuiyan, ‘Creating “Good Muslims”: Qawmi madrasa Schooling in a Rural Town of Bangladesh’ (PhD diss., Brunel University, 2010). 56 Margrit Pernau and Imke Rajamani, ‘Emotional Translations: Conceptual History beyond Language’, History and Theory 55/1 (2016): 46–65. 57 For a critique of affect theory, see Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37/3 (2011): 434–72. 58 William Mazzarella, ‘The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?’ Critical Inquiry 36/4 (2010): 697–727, here 722. 59 Ulman Lindenberger, Viktor Müller, and Johanna Sänger, ‘Intra- and Inter-brain Synchronization during Musical Improvisation on the Guitar’, PloS one 8/9 (2013): e73852.

 Notes 227 60 Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape. For a discussion of the work of Julian Millie, see below. The newer stress on affect by anthropologists Hirschkind and Millie builds on the rhetorical and hence affective responses to preaching that have also been dealt with in classics such as Jonathan Porter Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001) or even Johannes Pedersen, ‘The Criticism of the Islamic Preacher’, Die Welt des Islams 2/4 (1953): 215–31. For the long historical backdrop, see Jones, Power of Oratory; Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘A Sermon on Piety by Imam ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib: How the Rhythm of the Classical Arabic Oration Tacitly Persuaded’, in Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama – Sermons – Literature, ed. Sabine Dorpmüller et al. (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018); and Daniella Talmon-Heller, Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids and Ayyūbids (1146–1260) (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chapter 4. 61 Dominik M. Müller, Islam, Politics and Youth in Malaysia: The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). 62 Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam. 63 I thank Ali Altaf Mian for pointing to parallels in the performance of Urdu preachers from Pakistan such as ʿAbd al-Majīd Nadīm. As the comparison to Hindu preaching that I mention in the outlook, it would be wonderful to trace preaching practices across South Asian languages. 64 Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, chapter 8. 65 Again, the Subaltern Studies have been forerunners as well as the motor of this trend. Other important contributions were Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religions Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Freitag, Collective Action. 66 Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 67 Véronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 68 Chowdhury, Paradoxes. 69 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 70 Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. 71 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 274. 72 See Toby M. Howarth, The Twelver Shî’a as a Muslim Minority in India: Pulpit of Tears (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); Amy Bard, ‘“No Power of Speech Remains”: Tears and Transformation in South Asian Majlis Poetry’, in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, ed. Kimberley C. Patton and John S. Hawley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Justin Jones, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapters 1 and 2. 73 See, for example, Ali Altaf Mian, ‘Surviving Modernity: Ashraf ‘Alī Thānvī (1863– 1943) and the Making of Muslim Orthodoxy in Colonial India’ (PhD diss., Duke University, Durham, NC, 2015); and Thomas K. Gugler, Mission Medina: Da’wat-e Islāmī und Tablīgī Ǧamā’at (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2011). For a more sermoncentric approach, see Margrit Pernau and Max Stille, ‘Obedient Passion: Ashraf

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Ali Thanawi’s Sermons on the Love of the Prophet’, Journal of Religious History (forthcoming). 74 Again often following Habermas, Public Sphere. 75 Birgit Meyer, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 76 Patrick Eisenlohr, ‘Reconsidering Mediatization of Religion: Islamic Televangelism in India’, Media, Culture & Society 39/6 (2016): 869–84. 77 Lindsay Wise, ‘“Words from the Heart”: New Forms of Islamic Preaching in Egypt’ (MA diss., Oxford University, Oxford, Trinity Term, 2003); Yasmin Moll, ‘Islamic Televengalism: Religion, Media and Visuality in Contemporary Egypt’, Arab Media & Society 10 (2010), available at http:​//www​.arab​media​socie​ty.co​m/?ar​ticle​=732 (accessed 19 January 2018). 78 James Bourk Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-help Guru (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 79 Cf. Laura Kunreuther, Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 80 Cf. Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam, 26. 81 Nazmul Ahsan, ‘Social Theatre in Bangladesh’, TDR/The Drama Review 48/3 (2004): 50–8; Motahar Akand, Action Theatre: Initiating Changes, ed. Nicole Palasz (Minneapolis, MN: Center for Victims of Torture, 2007). 82 Harder, Sufism. 83 Naveeda Ahmed Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 84 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. 85 This is particularly the case in Patrick D. Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Reem Bassiouney, ‘The Social Motivation of Code-switching in Mosque Sermons in Egypt’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2013/220 (2013): 49–66. 86 Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call. 87 For examples from the field of Islamic preaching, see Jones, Power of Oratory, 245. 88 See Tony K. Stewart, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 89 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 90 Khan, sermon on 9 July 2014.

Chapter 1 1 Muphˡti A. Kāndhˡlabī, ‘Oẏāj Māhˡphil: Isˡlām pracārer camatkār ek mādhyam’, Banglanews24.com, 6 January 2016. 2 For a survey on the organization of Islamic homiletics and rhetorical knowledge in Islamic South Asia, see Max Stille, ‘Arabic Rhetoric and Islamic Homiletics in 20th Century South Asia’, Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien 35 (2018): 169–216. 3 Sāiphur Rahˡmān, interview by Max Stille, Dhaka, 30 March 2014. 4 The case is different for Shiite sermons, which might not feature an Arabic part. 5 See Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī, Kāmil Fatāwā-ī Rashīdiya (Lahore: Maktaba Raḥmāniya, 2003), 455.

 Notes 229 6 See Claudia Preckel, ‘Ahl-i Ḥadīth’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Kate Fleet et al., 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 7 See Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 8 I took this translation from SherAli Tareen, ‘The Limits of Tradition: Competing Logics of Authenticity in South Asian Islam’ (PhD diss., Duke University, Durham, NC, 2012), 101. 9 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008). 10 See the original preface from 1228H (1929 CE) in Ashraf ʿAlī Thānawī, Khuṭbātu 'l-aḥkām (maʿa aḥkām-i kẖut̤ ba, Karachi: Maktabatu 'l-bushra, [1228]), 14. 11 The West Bengali edition, Āś'rāpf Ālī Thānabhī, Khot'bātul Āh'kām: Bāra cã̄ nder 60 khot'bāh (Anubād o sampādanāẏ: Māolānā Āph'lādul Kāẏ'sār, Magrahat: Rah'māniẏā Lāibrerī, 2002), starts off with a sermon that is in the middle of the edition from Bangladesh (Āś'rāpf Ālī Thānabhī, Khot'bātul Āh'kām: Bāra cã̄nder 60 khot'bāh (Anubādak Māolānā Mohāmmad Iunus, Dhaka: Em'dādiẏā Pustakālaẏ, n.d.)). 12 Pernau and Stille, ‘Obedient Passion’. 13 See Ābˡdul Kādir, Āl·hājj Māolānā Śarīph Muhāmmād, Baṅgānubād khutbāh (Dhaka: Meś'kāt Aphˡseṭ Pres, 2002 [1949]). 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 The khuṭba that I heard on 13 November 2013 in the Masjid al-Rashīd in Deoband was also a repetition known to the students from khuṭba collections. Knowing and understanding Arabic in this case means knowing the Arabic text. 18 Hosen, ‘Khutba’; Anonymous, ‘Khutba’; Salahuddin, ‘Khutba’. 19 Āriphuj Jāmān, interview by Max Stille, 15 March 2014. 20 Abdulkader Tayob, ‘Performing Tafsir (Exegesis) during South Africa’s Transition from Apartheid to Democracy’ (presentation, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, 30 October 2014). 21 Fieldwork in Raʾs al-Khaima in January 2015. 22 Eid sermon on 17 July 2015 in the Stepney Green Mosque, London. 23 Compare the sermons by Shaykh Abdul Qayum, who also stressed this intention when I interviewed him. Shaykh Abdul Qayum, interview by Max Stille, East London Mosque, 27 May 2012. 24 Huq, ‘Politics of Belief ’, 124. 25 Ibid. 26 Maimuna Huq, ‘Reading the Qur'an in Bangladesh: The Politics of “Belief ” among Islamist Women’, Modern Asian Studies 42/2–3 (2008): 457–88. 27 Huq, ‘Women’s Religious Discussion Circles’. 28 Saifur, sermon on 6 March 2014. 29 Māolānā Tārik Jāmīl, Allāhˡke yadi pete cāo (Anubādak Māolānā Muhāmmad Yāinul Ābidīn, Dhaka: Māktābātul ākhˡtār, 2005). 30 This is the Bangladeshi version of the TJ’s huge gatherings in Rāʾewinḍ, Pakistan, and Bhopal, India. It is held in two parts since 2013 to accommodate the ever-increasing number of participants. 31 A gathering I attended in a komi madrasa was christened sunnāter māhˡphil, an innovation that was lauded by a preacher in his sermon. See Mazhari, sermon on 23 January 2013.

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32 See footnote 1 in Angelika Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen im Mittelalter: Ibn al-Ǧauzī und sein “Buch der Schlußreden” (1186 n. Chr.)’, Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte 38/4 (1987): 336–66, here 336 for a brilliant overview. 33 See Bernd Radtke, ‘Wāʿiẓ’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. H. A. R Gibb and P. J. Bearman (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2009). 34 For the free speaking didactic preacher, see Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen’, 339; for the free speaking as an important demarcation from yet another type of preacher, the qārī al-kursī, see George Makdisi, The Rise of the Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 162. 35 Berkey, Popular Preaching, 21. 36 See Jones, Power of Oratory, 262. 37 For the label of popular preaching for waz in Bangladesh, see also Huq, ‘Reading the Qur'an’, 472. 38 See Abdoulaye Sounaye, ‘Let’s Do Good for Islam: Two Muslim Entrepreneurs in Niamey, Niger’, in Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa, ed. Ute Röschenthaler and Dorothea E. Schulz (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016). For preaching in Ghana with similar terminology, see Benedikt Pontzen, ‘“Speaking for Islam” and Religious Authority in Zongos in Asante, Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa 47 (2017): 42–71. 39 For this summary, see Tony K. Stewart, ‘Popular Sufi Narratives and the Parameters of the Bengali Imaginaire’, in Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama – Sermons – Literature, ed. Sabine Dorpmüller et al. (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018), 175. 40 For a very similar impression in the case of Egyptian vocabulary, see Gaffney, Prophet’s Pulpit, 31. The enumeration referred to here is Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 41 The Bangladeshi Ministry of Education published the following numbers for the state-registered madrasas: dākhil 6969, ālim 1448, phājil 1033, kāmil 206. See Śikṣā Mantraṇālaẏ, ‘Śikṣā pratiṣṭhān samūher tālikā’, 2016, available at http:​//www​.moed​ u.gov​.bd/i​ndex.​php?o​ption​=com_​conte​nt&ta​sk=vi​ew&id​=300&​Itemi​d=301​ (accessed 12 December 2016). 42 For the offices, their overlap and the need for several sources of income, see also Naveeda Khan, ‘Mosque Construction, or the Violence of the Ordinary’, in Crisis and Beyond: Re-evaluating Pakistan, ed. Naveeda A. Khan (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 497–8. 43 This is contrary to Roy’s analysis in Olivier Roy, Der islamische Weg nach Westen: Globalisierung, Entwurzelung und Radikalisierung (Munich: Pantheon, 2006), 164–6. 44 Nuri, sermon on 24 March 2014. 45 Śekh’bāṛī Mādrāsā (Maulbhībājār on 14 March 2014). 46 Shafi, ‘Biography, Birth, and Standing Up While Blessing’. 47 Ābul K. Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014; Najˡrul Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 48 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 49 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 50 See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria: Institutes of Oratory, ed. Lee Honeycutt, trans. John Selby Watson (Iowa State: 2006), IV.1.9. See also Hans Harder, ‘Einleitende Paratexte in südasiatischen Neusprachen: Eine Erkundung’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 166/1 (2016): 153–80, here 164–7. 51 See Thibaut d’Hubert, ‘Histoire culturelle et poétique de la traduction Ālāol et la tradition littéraire Bengali au XVIIe siècle à Mrauk-U, capitale du royaume d’Arakan’ (PhD diss., École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2010), 152.

 Notes 231 52 Ājˡhār Ālī Bakhˡtiẏārī, Majˡmuẏe oẏāj śariph o hedāẏeter saral path, 6th edn (Kalikātā: Gaosiẏā Lāibrerī, 2003 [1927]), 38. 53 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 54 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 55 See Huq, ‘Politics of Belief ’, 124. 56 The leaflet is titled Majlise Dāoẏātul Haker karmasūcī o karmapaddhati and bears no information on publisher or author. 57 Such as the Ḥayātul Muslimīn, Jazāʾu ‘l-Aʿmāl (by ʿAlī Ashraf Thanavī), and the Āhkāme Jindegī (by the Bengali Hemāẏet Uddīn). 58 He also told me that he operates a network of twelve madrasas. 59 Taphājjal Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 64 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 65 Olipuri, ‘Sura Joseph’. 66 At the Dāoẏātul Hakk’s mārkājī ijtemā. 67 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. Also Mazhari, sermon on 14 March 2014, links to his illness. 68 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 69 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 70 Amit Dey, The Image of the Prophet in Bengali Muslim Piety, 1850–1947 (Kolkata: Readers Service, 2005), 84. 71 See Katy Gardner, Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 2. 72 Khan, sermon on 9 July 2014. 73 See Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 93. 74 Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 75 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 76 Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 77 Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 78 Many examples for this are found, for example in the following sermons: Shafi, ‘Biography, Birth, and Standing Up While Blessing’; Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’; Zaman, sermon on 13 March 2014. 79 Rajarshi Ghose, ‘Politics for Faith: Karamat Ali Jaunpuri and Islamic Revivalist Movements in British India circa 1800–73’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago, 2012), 216–7. 80 For an example of posters cf. Max Stille, ‘Islamic Non-Friday Sermons in Bangladesh’, South Asia Chronicle/Südasien-Chronik 4 (2014): 94–114, here 95–7. 81 See Usha Sanyal, ‘Generational Changes in the Leadership of the Ahl-e Sunnat Movement in North India during the Twentieth Century’, MAS 32/3 (1998): 635–56, here 642. 82 See Eckhart Olshausen, ‘Rednerbühne’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992–2015), 1061. 83 There are very rare instances in which the preacher stands.

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84 Interestingly, Lane furthermore notes that in Egypt, it also refers to ‘the elevated platform for the muballighūn in a mosque’. See Edward W. Lane, ed., An ArabicEnglish Lexicon: Derived from the Best and the Most Copious Eastern Sources; Comprising a Very Large Collection of Words and Significations Omitted in the K̇ ámoos, with Suppl. to Its Abridged and Defective Explanations, Ample Grammatical and Critical Comments and Examples in Prose and Verse (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863), 604. 85 Katherine B. Brown, ‘If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal mehfil’, in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67. 86 Ibid., 72. 87 Ibid., 74. 88 Email communication with Nathan Tabor, 26 March 2015. 89 Cited from Carla Petievich, ‘From Court to Public Sphere: How Urdu Poetry’s Language of Romance Shaped the Language of Protest’ (presentation, Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, 26 February 2015). 90 See Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 123. 91 See Qureshi, Sufi Music, 107. 92 See Bard, ‘Speech’, 153. 93 See Ḥaydar Jawādī, ʿAllāma al-sayyid Ẕīshān, Maḥāfil wa majālis (Ilāhābād: Maẕhabī Dunyā, 2007). 94 The most comprehensive publication of course is Marion Holmes Katz, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (London: Routledge, 2007). 95 The interest in South Asian mawlid traditions, particularly in South India, is rising. There are several interesting publications to come. Recently, Aram K. Muneer, ‘Poetics of Piety: Genre, Self-fashioning, and the Mappila Lifescape’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26/3 (2015): 423–41 has been published. And for the case of Bangladeshi migration to Europe, a rich description can be found in José Mapril, ‘“Maulana Says the Prophet Is Human, Not God”: Milads and Hierarchies among Bengali Muslims in Lisbon’, Lusotopie 14/1 (2007): 255–70. 96 See Schimmel, Muhammad, 148. 97 Gangohī, Kāmil Fatāwā-ī Rashīdiya, 255. 98 Magnus Marsden, Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, reprint edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 99 Newspapers checked in London on 6 May 2014. 100 Siddikī, Kaphiluddin Maulabī Sāheb al, Majmuẏe Oẏāj Nāmā bā Nachihate Hedāẏet, 5th edn (Kalikata: Gaosiẏā Lāibrerī, n.d.), i. 101 Ibid., ii. 102 Ibid., i. 103 Mazhari, sermon on 14 March 2014. 104 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 105 Hosen, ‘Excerpt Rhythm’. 106 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 107 Pernau and Stille, ‘Obedient Passion’. 108 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 109 Ibid. 110 See Lilli Mittner, ‘Schauspielmusik als Möglichkeitsraum: Zur Schauspielmusikpraxis in Norwegen um 1900’, in Theater mit Musik: 400 Jahre Schauspielmusik im

 Notes 233 europäischen Theater: Bedingungen – Strategien – Wahrnehmungen, ed. Ursula Kramer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014); Jauss, Aesthetic Experience, 13. 111 Culler states that literature relies on a ‘hyper-protected cooperative principle’ (Jonathan D. Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26). He thereby brings Coleridge’s classical formulation of literature relying on the suspension of disbelief into contact with ritual situations. 112 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Jain (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38–9. 113 Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1958), 28. 114 As does Meyer in Birgit Meyer, ‘Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana’, in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, ed. Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 295. 115 See Naveeda Khan, ‘The Acoustics of Muslim Striving: Loudspeaker Use in Ritual Practice in Pakistan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53/3 (2011): 571–94, here 582–5. 116 For an interesting comparison to the staging in the Third Reich, see Daniel Gethmann, Die Übertragung der Stimme: Vor- und Frühgeschichte des Sprechens im Radio (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 165. The overlays in Sayeedi’s sermons are clearly audible, for example, in Sayeedi, sermon in 1987 (12_16) from 03:27 to 03:47. 117 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 118 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 119 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 120 Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 123. 121 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 122 Kāndhˡlabī, ‘Oẏāj Māhˡphil’. 123 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 124 Anonymous, sermon on 24 January 2013. 125 Niamat, sermon on 16 March 2014. 126 Descriptions of waʿẓ gatherings from as early as twelfth-century Iraq testify to the effort and effect of the framing of Quranic recitations prior to sermons. See Muḥammad Ibn-Aḥmad Ibn-Jubair, Riḥlat al-kātib al-adīb al-bāriʿ Abi-'l-Ḥusain Muḥammad Ibn-Aḥmad Ibn-Jubair (Leyden: Brill, 1907), 219. 127 See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 7th edn (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 32. 128 Karim, ‘Congregation at Carmonai’. 129 As described in detail in Harder, Sufism, chapter 5. 130 See Ibid., 244–9. 131 ‘Mane baṛa āśā chila yāba Madināẏ’, which in turn is sung to a common folk melody. 132 Śekh’bāṛī Mādrāsā (Maulbhībājār on 14 March 2014). 133 Max Stille, ‘Sufism in Bengali wa’z mahfils’, in Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia, ed. Deepra Dandekar and Torsten Tschacher (London: Routledge, 2016), 305–6. 134 For more information on the political activism of the Carmonāi pīr, see Alam Sarwar, ‘Encountering the Unholy: The Establishment of Political Parties by Sufi Masters in Modern Bangladesh’, in South Asian Sufis: Devotion, Deviation and Destiny, ed. Clinton Bennett and Charles Ramsey (New York: Continuum, 2012). 135 Imran Mazhari Lalmatia.

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136 For co-presence in the context of theatre performance, see Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, chapter 3. 137 Bruce A. Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? The Art of the American Folk Preacher, revised edn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 80–1. 138 Huq, ‘Reading the Qur'an’, 472. 139 See Hans Robert Jauss, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 75 or Hans Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 410. 140 Olipuri, ‘Sura Joseph’. 141 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 142 Auerbach, Literatursprache, 27 (my translation). 143 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 144 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 145 Hosen, ‘Excerpt Rhythm’. 146 See David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 201–2. 147 A rare example for this inversion is Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013, in which he urges the audience to speak softly: ‘I will still hear it’. 148 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 149 Ibid. 150 For the platonic concept of the loving conversation between disciple and teacher, see Roland Barthes, ‘The Old Rhetoric: An Aide Mémoire’, in The Semiotic Challenge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994a), 19. 151 Anonymous, sermon on 29 January 2013. 152 In mushāʿiras, often the poet himself exhorts the audience towards greater dād denā, see Carla Petievich and Max Stille, ‘Emotions in Performance: Poetry and Preaching’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 54/1 (2017): 67–102. 153 See Choudri Mohammed Naim, Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C. M. Naim (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 5. 154 See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey, 6th edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1936). 155 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 156 Mazhari, sermon on 14 March 2014. 157 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 158 Cf. Radtke, ‘Wāʿiẓ’. 159 Throughout this book, I use the Quran translation by A. J. Arberry, unless the need to deviate arises to make specific points clearer. 160 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 161 See Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, chapter 5. 162 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 163 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 164 Mazhari, sermon on 14 March 2014. 165 Anonymous, sermon on 24 January 2013. 166 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 167 Cf. for this also the discussion in Elora Shehabuddin, ‘Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh: Women, Democracy and the Transformation of Islamist Politics’, MAS (Modern Asian Studies) 42/2–3 (2008): 577–603.

 Notes 235 168 Nuri, sermon on 16 January 2013 in village. 169 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 170 Ibid. 171 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 172 Ibid. 173 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 174 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 175 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 176 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 Margrit Pernau, ‘Love and Compassion for the Community: Emotions and Practices among North Indian Muslims, c. 1870–1930’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 54/1 (2017): 21–42. 181 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 182 And Sayeedi, ‘Lady’s Convention’ explicitly refers to both. 183 See Linda Gale Jones, ‘The Boundaries of Sin and Communal Identity: Muslim and Christian Preaching and the Transmission of Cultural Identity in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb (12th to 15th Centuries)’ (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004), 222; Katz, Birth, 136; ʿAbdu 'l-Ḥalīm Sharar, Guẕashta Lakhnaʾū (Nasīm Bukḍipū, 1965), translated as Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, ed. and trans. E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (London: Elek, 1975), 216; Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (London: C. Hurst, 2003), 100–28. 184 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 185 Chowdhury, Paradoxes. 186 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 187 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 188 Hirschkind sees the phenomenon starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 6. 189 On the concept of small media and Islam, see Hamid Naficy, ‘Cassettes’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, Vol. 1: Abba-Fami, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Annabelle Sreberny and Ali Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds, New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 190 Again, there are global parallels: cf. Abdoulaye Sounaye, ‘Gendered Media and Gendered Religion: Female Preachers, Audiovisual Media and the Construction of Religious Authority in Niamey’, CODESRA Bulletin 3–4 (2011): 27–31, here 27. 191 See Dorothea E. Schulz, ‘Promises of (Im)mediate Salvation: Islam, Broadcast Media, and the Remaking of Religious Experience in Mali’, American Ethnologist 33/2 (2006): 210–29, here 220. 192 While Sangeeta, an important actor, only runs the waz recordings and other Islamic content along its larger general sector, others like Ajmeer, ICB and CHP specialize in Islamic productions and only include some other genres. Needless to say, particularly in case of producers close to BJI networks such as Spandan Visual Centre, the visibility of controversial programmes varies with the political situation.

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193 194 195 196

See Schulz, ‘Promises of (Im)mediate Salvation’, 219. Sounaye, ‘Let’s Do Good’. Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. See S. S. Andaleeb et al., ‘Credibility of TV News in a Developing Country: The Case of Bangladesh’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 89/1 (2012): 73–90, here 74. 197 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 198 For a historical parallel cf. Gethmann, Übertragung der Stimme, 159. 199 Eisenlohr, ‘Religion’. 200 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 201 See Berkey, Popular Preaching, 25. 202 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 203 Shehabuddin, ‘Bangladesh’, 593. 204 Sayeedi, ‘Lady’s Convention’. 205 Huq, ‘Women’s Religious Discussion Circles’, 203. 206 Huq, ‘Politics of Belief ’, 174. 207 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 208 Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 209 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 210 Ibid. 211 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 160. 212 Paul Zumthor, Einführung in die mündliche Dichtung, trans. Irene Selle (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990), 128. 213 Michael N. Nagler, ‘Towards a Generative View of the Oral Formula’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 98 (1967): 269–311, here 311. 214 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 215 See Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 68, 72, 82.

Chapter 2 1 Of course, throughout history and in different world regions, humans have communicated and continued to communicate by employing different varieties of one language or several languages, for reasons of cultural contact and segregation, to fulfil different roles at the same time, or to mediate between holy texts and contemporary reality in religious communication. Arabic and South Asian studies alone have produced a plethora of historical (Tony K. Stewart, ‘In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory’, Social Scientist 40/3 (2001): 260–87; Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)) and contemporary studies, currently focusing on the interaction between South Asian languages with English (Rita Kothari and Rupert Snell, eds, Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011)). 2 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: Wiley, 1960), 353.

 Notes 237 3 John Joseph Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1982]), 59. 4 See Michael Silverstein, ‘Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life’, Language & Communication 23/3–4 (2003): 193–229 for a summary of and reflection upon different orders of indexicalities. 5 See Bassiouney, ‘Social Motivation’, 55. 6 Ibid., 52. 7 Gaffney, Prophet’s Pulpit, 172. 8 Julian Millie, ‘The Languages of Preaching: Code Selection in Sundanese Islamic Oratory, West Java’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 23/3 (2012): 379–97. 9 Fitria Aida Marfuaty, ‘Religious Language: Code-mixing in Islamic Preachings in Java’ (MA diss., Radboud University Nijmegen, 2016–2017). 10 Millie, ‘Languages of Preaching’. 11 Only few historical studies of linguistic blending are at hand and no corpora of contemporary usage exist. About the case of Arabic script used to write Tamil, see Torsten Tschacher, Islam in Tamilnadu: Varia (Halle (Saale): Institut für Indologie und Südasienwissenschaft der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2001), available at http:​//www​.sued​asien​.uni-​halle​.de/S​AWA/T​schac​her.p​df (accessed 13 August 2019); for the case of Malāyalam, see M. N. Karassery, ‘Arabic-Malayalam’, in Kerala Muslims: A Historical Perspective, ed. Asghar A. Engineer (Delhi: Ajanta, 1995). 12 Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual Literary History?: Lessons from Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century North India’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 49/2 (2012): 225–46. 13 Qazi Abdul Mannan, The Emergence of Dobhasi Literature in Bengal (Up to 1855) (Dacca: Bangla Academy, 1966), 63. 14 d’Hubert, Shade, 10. 15 Thibaut d’Hubert, ‘Literary History of Bengal, 8th–19th Century AD’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David E. Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 24–5. See also Thibaut d’Hubert, ‘Dobhāshī’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Kate Fleet et al., 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 16 Mannan, Emergence of Dobhasi, 186, 184. 17 Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 264–6. 18 See Gautam Bhadra, Nyāṛā Baṭˡtalāẏ Yāẏ Ka'bār? (Kalikātā: Chātim Buks; Paribeśak, Presiḍensī Lāibrerī, 2011). 19 Ghosh, Power in Print, 265. 20 Ahmad, In Theory, 274. 21 Cf. Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 22 Neilesh Bose, ‘Remapping Muslim Literary Culture: Folklore, Bulbul and Worldmaking in Late Colonial Bengal’, South Asian History and Culture 5/2 (2014): 212–25; Bose, Recasting the Region. 23 Harder, Sufism, 1–30. 24 Of course, this statement is to be taken only in comparison, and with at least a grain of salt, as, for example, the overview provided on http://ethnologue.com/ show. 25 For a recent overview of the genesis and configuration of modern South Asian languages, see Hans Harder, ‘Die südasiatischen Neusprachen im vielsprachigen

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Kontext des indischen Subkontinents: ein historischer Abriss’, ZWG (Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte) 17/1 (2016): 33–49, particularly 47–8. 26 Niamat, sermon on 20 March 2014. 27 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement’, 353. 28 Cf. Muneer, ‘Poetics of Piety’, 433–4. 29 On the important role ritual language might play even if the words are not understood, see Frits Staal, ‘The Meaninglessness of Ritual’, Numen 26/1 (1979): 2–22. 30 This aspect of the performance is part of a ubiquitous paratextual gesture across genres and performances, cf. Harder, ‘Paratexte’. 31 See Axel Michaels, ‘The Grammar of Rituals’, in Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual: Grammars and Morphologies of Ritual Practices in Asia, ed. Axel Michaels (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010). 32 Fa qāla ‘llāhu taʿāla fī kalāmihi ‘l-majīdi wa furqānihi ḥamīd. 33 Linda G. Jones, ‘Witnesses of God: Exhortatory Preachers in Medieval al-Andalus and the Maghreb’, Al-Qanṭara 28/1 (2007): 73–100, here 85. 34 Ibid. 35 Constance E. Padwick, Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use (London: SPCK, 1961), 154, emphasis in original. 36 Nesari (sermon on 14 January 2013) thanks Allah for turning the mahfil into a paradise garden. 37 Schimmel, Muhammad, 93. 38 For an early precedent, see Siddikī, Kaphiluddin Maulabī Sāheb al, Majmuẏe Oẏāj Nāmā bā, 47, where the citation is correctly attributed to Saʿdī, here referred to as ‘Sādī rāh’. In the earliest recording, Sayeedi’s 1987 sermon, a similar pattern is performed. 39 See Jones, ‘Witnesses of God’, 86–98 for a very similar analysis. 40 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 41 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 42 For examples from mosques, cf. Bassiouney, ‘Social Motivation’. The simulation of personalized communication of mass media has been extensively described in relation to Arabic TV preachers, particularly ʿAmr Khālid. 43 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2009), 203. 44 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 45 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 46 Abul Kalām Zakariyya at the Śekhˡbāṛī Mādrāsā (Maulbhībājār). 47 Karim, ‘Congregation at Carmonai’. 48 Mazhari, sermon on 14 March 2014. 49 Nuri, sermon on 24 March 2014. 50 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 51 Ibid. 52 Abul Kalām Zakariyya at the Śekh’bāṛī Mādrāsā (Maulbhībājār). 53 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 54 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 55 Sayeedi’s derivation of the congregation’s boon from jihād and Hosen’s derivation from inconvenience and spending time rely on the same basic logic. 56 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 57 Heinrich F. Plett, Literary Rhetoric: Concepts-Structures-Analyses (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 60.

 Notes 239 58 For this concept in Arabic devotional poetry, see Suzanne P. Stetkevych, ‘Rhetoric, Hybridity and Performance in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Devotional Poetry: Al-Kāfiyah Badīʿiyyah of Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī’, in Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama – Sermons – Literature, ed. Sabine Dorpmüller et al. (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018). 59 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a classic formulation of the question of performance and social context, see Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: AldineTransaction, 1969). 60 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 61 Compare namāz paṛā, kālemā paṛā, qaraʾa. 62 See Genette, Paratexts, 183. 63 For important thoughts on framing devices in literature, see Ibid., 409. 64 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 68 Siddikī, Kaphiluddin Maulabī Sāheb al, Majmuẏe Oẏāj Nāmā bā, 298. 69 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 70 Ibid. 71 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 72 Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), 53. 73 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 74 R. Vasudevan, ‘The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s’, Screen 30/3 (1989): 29–50, here 44. 75 L’effet de réel, see Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 185–6. 76 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Parsi Theatre’, Modern Asian Studies 37/2 (2003): 381–405, here 383. 77 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 78 Mahfuzur Rahman, ‘Khoda Hafez versus Allah Hafez: A Critical Inquiry’, Daily Star, 18 November 2003, available at http:​//arc​hive.​theda​ilyst​ar.ne​t/200​3/11/​18/d3​11181​ 50110​0.htm​(accessed 21 November 2018). 79 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 80 Deloẏār Hosen Sāīdī, Āmi kena Jām̄ẏāte Isˡlāmī kari (Dhaka: Global Printing & Publishing Network, 2003), 174, clearly states that no state in the world has yet reached the ideal promoted by him. 81 Sayeedi, ‘Lady’s Convention’. 82 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 83 Allama Nurul Islam Olipuri Saheb, Bangla Waz: 5 May Hefajute Islam, 2013, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=eAg​eVV8L​cC8 (accessed 14 August 2019). 84 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 85 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 86 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 87 Śāīkh M. Ganī, ‘Dāoẏāter anyatama path oẏāj māh'phil’, Pratham Ālo, 11 December 2015. 88 Sāīdī, Āmi kena Jām̄ẏāte Isˡlāmī, 170.

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89 Ibid., 171. 90 Listen to Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, Bangla Waz by Allama Delwar Hossain Sayeedi: Sylhet 2009 day 1 Part 1 (CHP), available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=okJ​ omxDO​HXc (accessed 12 December 2016), 07:37. 91 Olipuri, ‘Discussion of Sura Five Aya 3’. 92 Max Stille, ‘The Importance of Being Mediated: Poetic and Performative Exegesis in Bengali Sermons’ (Workshop Space and Speech: Discursive Environments across Non-Arab Islam, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 7 September 2017). 93 See Rotraud Wielandt, ‘Exegesis of the Qurʾān: Early Modern and Contemporary’, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 94 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 95 For the possibility of perceiving the Quran as a sermon, see Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen’, 337. 96 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 97 See Tilman Nagel, Die qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ: Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Bonn: Universitätsdissertation, 1967), 128. 98 For the deep historical dimensions of bidhātā, see Stewart, ‘Narratives’. 99 Niamat, sermon on 20 March 2014. 100 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 101 Niamat, sermon on 20 March 2014. 102 Khalilur, sermon on 11 January 2013. 103 See M. Bencheneb and Ch. Pellat, ‘Muzāwad̲ j̲ a’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam: Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1983–2007). 104 Hanne-Ruth Thompson, Bengali: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge, 2010), 664. 105 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 106 Sayeedi, ‘Lady’s Convention’. 107 Thompson, Bengali, 668. 108 Annie Montaut, ‘Reduplication and “Echo Words” in Hindi/Urdu’, in ARSALL: Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, ed. Rajendra Singh (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2008), 38. 109 Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur, ‘Bāṃlā śabdadvaita’, in Rabindra Racanābalī, ed. Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur (Kalikata: Biśvabhāratī, 1367 [1960]). 110 See Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 111 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 112 Cf. the importance of dāsya-rasa among the five rasas of the devotee is, for example, elaborated in the Caitanya caritāmṛta, cf. Kr̥ ṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmi, Edward C. Dimock, and Tony Kevin Stewart, Caitanya caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 629–30. 113 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 114 Nagel, Die qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, 127. 115 Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 64. 116 Barthes, ‘Old Rhetoric’, 86. 117 The point of view followed here therefore corresponds to the affective stylistics of Stanley Fish and the aesthetic response theory of Wolfgang Iser, who despite their differences in other respects come together in their processual perception. 118 Plett, Literary Rhetoric, 80.

 Notes 241 119 d’Hubert, Shade, 226–7. 120 Mannan, Emergence of Dobhasi, 61; ‘poetic quality’ refers to Bengali ras laye [Mannan’s transliteration]. 121 The first is the Aristotelian enthymeme, the latter the common definition from Quintilian onwards. 122 Barthes, ‘Old Rhetoric’, 60. 123 Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘Khuṭba: The Evolution of Early Arabic Oration’, in Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs on his 65th Birthday, ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Michael Cooperson (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 219. 124 Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen’. 125 Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 169. 126 Qutbuddin, ‘Khuṭba’, 222. 127 Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen’, 356. 128 Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 94. 129 Conversations with the family of the Lakhnawi preacher Ibn-e Ḥasan Nonaharvī (1899–1980) in Lakhnau, 2013. 130 On the example of Thanawi, see Pernau and Stille, ‘Obedient Passion’. 131 See S̱ anāʾullāh Amritsarī, Khut̤ bāt-i S̱ anāʾī, 2nd edn (Lahore: Muslim Pablīkeshanz, [ca. 1990]). 132 Gangohī, Kāmil Fatāwā-ī Rashīdiya, 454, 456. 133 Siddikī, Kaphiluddin Maulabī Sāheb al, Majmuẏe Oẏāj Nāmā bā, 47. 134 Mazhari, sermon on 23 January 2013. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 See Scott A. Kugle, ‘From Baghdad to Vrindavan: Erotic and Spiritual Love in Qawwali’, in Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India, ed. Pallabi Chakraborty and Scott A. Kugle (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009). 138 Mazhari, sermon on 23 January 2013. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 For the same topos in Arabic sermons, see Gaffney, Prophet’s Pulpit, 148. 143 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 147 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 148 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 For the Bengali text, see Tapanˡmohan Caṭṭopādhyāẏ, Bāṃlā Liriker Goṛār Kathā (Kalikata: Śrīprabhātcandra Rāẏ Grīgaurānga Pres, 1955 [1361 BS]), 44; and for the translation, see Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Roots in the Void: Baul Songs of Bengal (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1977), 55. 152 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 153 This term came up in the conversation with the Bengali poet Alokeranjan Dasgupta and fits Plett’s analysis of degrees of rhetoricity and poeticity, for example, Plett, Literary Rhetoric.

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154 See Patrick Eisenlohr, ‘As Makkah Is Sweet and Beloved, So Is Madina: Islam, Devotional Genres, and Electronic Mediation in Mauritius’, American Ethnologist 33/2 (2006): 230–45, here 231. 155 Ibid., 234. 156 On the Bengali poster it is announced as Jaśne juluche īde milādunnabī. Cf. Pnina Werbner, ‘Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among British Muslims’, Cultural Anthropology 11/3 (1996): 309–38. 157 Eisenlohr, ‘Makkah’, 237. 158 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’; and similarly Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 159 Eisenlohr, ‘Makkah’, 237. 160 Nuri, sermon on 16 January 2013 in village. 161 Ibid.; Ahmad Riza Khan, Ḥadāʾiq-e Bakhshish (Karachi: Maktaba al-Madīna, 2012), 157. 162 Nuri, sermon on 16 January 2013 in village. 163 Nuri, sermon on 24 March 2014. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid.

Chapter 3 1 Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986). 2 Gaffney, Prophet’s Pulpit, chapters 9 and 10; Richard T. Antoun, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), particularly chapter 4. 3 Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 200. 4 Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, chapter 8. 5 Ibid., 56–7. 6 For a longer trajectory of this phenomenon, which extends up to contemporary graphic novels, see Stewart, Witness to Marvels. 7 See Tor Andrae, Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söner, 1917), 26, 28. 8 See John E. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), ix. 9 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 10 Cf. Gaffney, Prophet’s Pulpit, 148. 11 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 12 Karim, ‘Congregation at Carmonai’. 13 See Arpana Awwal, ‘From Villain to Hero: Masculinity and Political Aesthetics in the Films of Bangladeshi Action Star Joshim’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 9/1 (2018): 24–45. 14 See Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 251. 15 For discussions in this direction, see Maruta Herding, Inventing the Muslim Cool: Islamic Youth Culture in Western Europe (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013); Susanne Schröter, ‘Gott näher als der eigenen Halsschlagader’: Fromme Muslime in Deutschland,

 Notes 243 new edn (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016), 299–331; and Julia Gerlach, Zwischen Pop und Dschihad: Muslimische Jugendliche in Deutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2006). 16 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 17 Hak, sermon on 14 March 2014. 18 For historical criticism, see F. Buhl, ‘Muʾta’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam: Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1983–2007), http:​//dx.​doi.o​rg/10​.1163​/1573​-3912​_ isla​m_SIM​_5637​(accessed 29 October 2018). For an early insight into the power of remembrance in an Islamic context, see Julius Wellhausen, Die religiös-politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam (Berlin: Weidmann, 1901), 71. 19 Ibn Hiśām, Sīrātun Nabī (sā.), vol. 4 (Dhaka: Isˡlāmik Phāunḍeśan Bāṃlādeś, 1994), 22–41. 20 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Living Hadīth in the Tablīghī Jamaʿāt’, Journal of Asian Studies 52/3 (1993): 584–608, here 587. 21 The Urdu title is from the table of contents in Muḥammad Zakariyyā Ṣāhib Kāndhlawī, Faz̤ āʾil-e Aʿmāl (New Delhi: Islamic Book Source, 1996) and the Bengali title from Muhāmmad Yākāriẏyā Chāheb Kāndhˡlabhī, Phāyāẏele Āmāl (Dhakan.d.: Dārul Kitāb), 117. 22 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 23 Ibid. 24 Hak, sermon on 14 March 2014. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Kāndhlawī, Faz̤ āʾil-e Aʿmāl, 93. 29 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 30 See Kāndhlawī, Faz̤ āʾil-e Aʿmāl, 93. 31 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 For a fascinating account of the visual of these semantics and their role in political violence, see Lotte Hoek, ‘Blood Splattered Bengal: The Spectacular Spurting Blood of the Bangladeshi Cinema’, Contemporary South Asia 21/3 (2013): 214–29. 35 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 36 Ibid. 37 Shehabuddin, ‘Bangladesh’. 38 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 39 Hak, sermon on 14 March 2014. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 47 Ibid. 48 Max Stille, ‘Conceptualizing Compassion in Communication for Communication: Emotional Experience in Islamic Sermons (Bengali waʿẓ maḥfils)’, Contributions to the History of Concepts 11/1 (2017): 81–106. 49 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 50 Ibid.

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51 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 52 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 53 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 54 Khalilur, sermon on 11 January 2013. 55 Siddikī, Kaphiluddin Maulabī Sāheb al, Majmuẏe Oẏāj Nāmā bā, iii–iv. 56 Two fundamental works on these two aspects are Käte Hamburger, Das Mitleid (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985); and Ute Frevert, Vergängliche Gefühle (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013). 57 See Daniel C. Peterson, ‘Mercy’, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 378. 58 For the fine differences of compassion, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Modern Subject in Bengal’, in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 59. 59 A detailed account of this interpretation is provided in Max Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles: Untersuchung über die Theorie der Tragödie, 3rd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1960). 60 See Śrīmān Biṣṇupada Bhaṭṭācārya, Sāhitya-Mīmāṃsā (Kolkata: Biśvabidyāsaṃgraha, 1948), 35; Sheldon Pollock, ‘Introduction: An Intellectual History of Rasa’, in A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, ed. Sheldon Pollock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 61 Schimmel, Muhammad, 84–5. 62 In Muslim’s Hadith collection, see Book 1, hadith 387. 63 The translation of this Hadith from the Riyāḍ aṣ-Ṣāliḥīn is slightly corrected from https://sunnah.com/riyadussaliheen/1/425 (accessed 19 November 2018). 64 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 65 Ibid. 66 Stefan Reichmuth, ‘Repräsentationen des Propheten und präsentische Eschatologie im Islam’ (Deutscher Orientalistentag, Panel ‘Der Prophet Muḥammad in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne: Repräsentationen und Vergegenwärtigung’, Jena, 19 September 2017). 67 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 68 Anonymous, sermon on 24 January 2013. 69 This fascinating parallel was opened up by Ines Weinrich, ‘Changing Aesthetics, Media, and Textual Practices: Contemporary Mawlids in Syria and Lebanon’ (Islamic Performance Traditions, Bochum, 9 June 2016). Many thanks for providing me with the source details. 70 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 71 Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’. 72 Ibid. 73 On the different deictic functions in language, perception and fantasy, see Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, reprint of 3rd edn (1934; Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius, 1999), 120–6. 74 I consciously deviate from the translation of Fr. ‘mode’ as Engl. ‘mood’ as suggested by Culler. The advantage of speaking of mode is that it is more technical and, particularly in works on emotions, does not easily get confused with other usages of ‘mood’ in the sense of emotional state. 75 See Ābˡdul Kādir and Rejāul Karim, Kābya-Mālañca (Kalikata: Nūr Lāibrerī, 1945), iv. 76 Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’. 77 Ibid.

 Notes 245 78 Ibid. 79 Stewart, ‘Narratives’, 178; Tony K. Stewart, ‘Religion in the Subjunctive: Vaiṣṇava Narrative, Sufi Counter-Narrative in Early Modern Bengal’, Journal of Hindu Studies 6/1 (2013): 52–72. 80 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 81 Ibid. 82 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 83 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 67. 84 This is a crucial difference to the effect of narrations as attributed to them by Hirschkind, who sees ‘an indifference to the pastness of the past’, cf. Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 162. 85 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 86 This position is explicitly taken by Nurul Islām Olīpurī in ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 87 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 88 Hoek, ‘Blood Splattered Bengal’, 223–5. 89 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 90 Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’; Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’; Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. A similar expression is also reported in Maimuna Huq, ‘A College Girl Gives a Qurʾan Lesson in Bangladesh’, in Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 91 For a parallel in European preaching, the Predigtmärlein, see Peter von Moos, Geschichte als Topik: Das rhetorische Exemplum von der Antike zur Neuzeit und die historiae im Policraticus Johanns von Salisbury (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1996), 114–17. 92 See Hans R. Jauss, ‘Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience’, trans. Benjamin and Helga Bennett, New Literary History 5/2 (1974): 283–317, here 287. 93 For this categorization taken over from Aristotelian character relations, cf. ibid., 297. 94 For a larger overview and the slogan of West Bengal’s prime minister mā māṭi mānuṣ, ‘mother, mud (soil) and men’, see the first chapter in Hans-Martin Kunz, Schaubühnen der Öffentlichkeit: Das Jatra-Wandertheater in Westbengalen (Indien), new edn (Heidelberg, Neckar: Draupadi, 2014). 95 Poems to the mother are ubiquitous, see, for example, Khāled Hosāin, Kabir brata ache, tāke bibrata karo nā (Anindya Prakash, 2013). 96 I consciously exclude speculations about possible parallels to Rāmprasād Sen’s Kālī devotion. For a wider history of the commonplace, see Thibaut d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan; Max Stille, ‘Between the Numinous and the Melodramatic: Poetics of Heightened Feelings in Bengali Islamic Sermons’, in Religion and Aesthetic Experience: Drama – Sermons – Literature, ed. Sabine Dorpmüller et al. (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018). 97 See Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, 1056. 98 ‘Allāhu arḥamu bi-ʿibādihi min hādhihi bi-waladihā.’ 99 Antoun, Muslim Preacher, 106–25. 100 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 101 Ibid.: ‘mā kā̃ dteche, āmār kalijār ṭukˡro bāccāṭāre māiro nā. o āmāre bhāt khāite nā dik, o āmāre māruk, ore tumi māiro nā.’

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102 For an account of a child infected by tuberculosis, see Hosen, ‘The Mother’s Strains’. 103 This commonplace is at times denied, for example, in Olipuri, ‘Sura Joseph’, when the brothers pretend their love by taking Joseph on their lap – from which, however, they let him fall as soon as the father looks away. 104 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 105 Mascha Schulz, ‘Migrating Men – Mobile Women? How Women Cope with Male Seasonal Migration in Bangladesh’, Südasien-Chronik/South Asian Chronicle 3 (2013): 183–213, available at https​://ed​oc.hu​-berl​in.de​/hand​le/18​452/9​116 (accessed 23 November 2018). 106 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 107 For an interesting interpretation of the temporality of such narratives, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–38. 108 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 109 Ibid. 110 See Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 162. 111 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 234. 112 See Barthes, Le Bruissement. 113 See Angelika Hartmann, ‘Les ambivalences d’un sermonnaire ḥanbalite: Ibn al-Ǧ awzī (m. en 597/1201), sa carrière et son ouvrage autographe, le Kitāb al-Ḫ awātīm (avec 10 planches)’, Annales Islamologiques 22 (1986): 51–116, here 106. To grasp how widespread such climaxes are, see, for example, Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6, 1, 52; Regula B. Qureshi, ‘Islamic Music in an Indian Environment: The Shi’a Majlis’, Ethnomusicology 25/1 (1981): 41–71, here 44. 114 See C. E. Bosworth, ‘Munād̲ j̲ āt’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam: Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1983–2007); and Tahera Qutbuddin, Al-Muʾayyad Al-Shīrāzī and Fatimid Daʿwa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Boston: Brill, 2005), 220. 115 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 116 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 117 See Huq, ‘Politics of Belief ’, 175. 118 During my fieldwork in 2010, Mumin, my friend at the TJ, explained to me that people from the villages take part in the Biśva Ijtemā’s final prayer via mobile phones, and indeed, it was a common practice at that time to call the relatives from far away to participate. That people hastened to attend the final prayer also reproduces the situation of the Friday sermon followed by the Friday prayer. 119 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 120 Ibid. 121 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 122 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. On the topic compare Antoun, Muslim Preacher, 225. 123 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 124 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 125 See Katz, Birth, 128–39. 126 See Ibid., 141. 127 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 128 Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’. 129 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’.

 Notes 247 130 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 131 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 132 Ibid. Here, the parallels in the imagery of the ‘bird of life’ famous in Baul songs in general and by Lālan Phakir in particular are very strong. 133 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 134 This seems to build upon collections of letters, which still continue to be a popular genre in Bangladesh. Thanks to Hans Harder for this hint. 135 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid. 139 See Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 85. 140 See Ibid. 141 See Ibid.

Chapter 4 1 See Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield, ‘Introduction’, in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 4. 2 See Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Politische Sinnlichkeit und mancherlei Künste’, in Politische Inszenierung im 20. Jahrhundert: Zur Sinnlichkeit der Macht, ed. Sabine Arnold, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Dietmar Schiller (Vienna: Böhlau, 1998). See also Zumthor, Mündliche Dichtung, 13; Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, ‘Rhetorik der Stimme (Actio II: Pronuntiatio)’, in Rhetoric and Stylistics: An International Handbook of Historical and Systematic Research, Vol. 1, ed. Ulla Fix, Andreas Gardt, and Joachim Knape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008); Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer, eds, Stimme: Annäherung an ein Phänomen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). 3 Navid Kermani, Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran, 2nd edn (Munich: Beck, 2003); Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, Sound and Communication: An Aesthetic Cultural History of Sanskrit Hinduism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). 4 Birgit Meyer, ‘Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms’, South Atlantic Quarterly 109/4 (2010): 741–63. 5 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 6 Webb Keane, ‘The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14/s1 (2008): S110–127. 7 See Tahera Qutbuddin, ‘The Sermons of ʿAlī Ibn Abi Ṭālib: At the Confluence of the Core Islamic Teachings of the Qur’an and the Oral, Nature-based Cultural Ethos of Seventh Century Arabia’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales 42/1 (2012): 201–28. 8 See Jones, ‘Boundaries of Sin’, 160. 9 See Jan Scholz, ‘Ästhetik und Rhetorik der modernen arabisch-islamischen Predigt: Untersuchungen zu Theorie und Praxis am Beispiel Ägyptens’ (PhD diss., Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, forthcoming), chapter 3.1.2. 10 See Dietrich Harth, ‘Rituale, Texte, Diskurse: Eine formtheoretische Betrachtung’, in Text und Ritual: Kulturwissenschaftliche Essays und Analysen von Sesostris bis Dada, ed. Burckhard Dücker and Hubert Roeder (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2005).

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11 See Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 82 for references to the importance of aesthetic bodily dimensions. 12 See Ibid., 25. 13 See Ibid., 126. 14 Scholz focuses on the ‘timbre’ of the voice, thereby somewhat similar to the approach taken in Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam. 15 Cf. Zumthor, Mündliche Dichtung, 54 and Sybille Krämer, ‘Die Rehabilitierung der Stimmen: Über die Oralität hinaus’, in Stimme: Annäherung an ein Phänomen, ed. Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). 16 H. Geißner, ‘Mündlichkeit’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Vol. 5: L–Musi, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 1504. 17 Cf. Anna M. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qurʼān in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Kermani, Gott ist schön. 18 Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, 54. 19 See a description in Jones, ‘Boundaries of Sin’, 223–4. Cf. Ibn-Jubair, Riḥlat al-kātib al-adīb al-bāriʿ, 219. 20 Ibid., 219–22. 21 See Michael Frishkopf, ‘Mediated Qur’anic Recitation and the Contestation of Islam in Contemporary Egypt’, in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, ed. Laundan Nooshin (London: Ashgate, 2009), 113. 22 See Ibn-Jubair, Riḥlat al-kātib al-adīb al-bāriʿ, 222 and the descriptions in Hartmann, ‘Les ambivalences’. 23 See James E. Montgomery, ‘Convention as Cognition: On the Cultivation of Emotion’, in Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. Geert J. van Gelder and Marlé Hammond (Warminster: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2008), 157. 24 See Frishkopf, ‘Mediated Qur’anic Recitation’, 112–13. 25 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 26 Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 136. 27 Contrast with figure 11 in Regula B. Qureshi, ‘Transcending Space: Recitation and Community among South Asian Muslims in Canada’, in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Regula B. Qureshi, ‘Sounding the Word: Music in the Life of Islam’, in Enchanting Powers: Music in the World’s Religions, ed. Lawrence E. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1997), 275 for the durūd. 28 For an overview of the variables that make up a style of Quranic recitation, see Frishkopf, ‘Mediated Qur’anic Recitation’, 78–80. 29 See Anna M. Gade, ‘Recitation of the Qurʾān’, in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, Vol. 4: P–Sh, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 374. 30 Nuri, sermon on 24 March 2014. 31 The performance took place at the Jāmiẏā Kārīmiẏā Ārābiẏā Rāmpurā Mādrāsā, waiting for Niamat. 32 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 33 See, for example, Muhāmmad Yāinul Ābidīn, Baktr̥ tār klās, 9th edn (Dhaka: Māktābātul ākhˡtār, 2011).

 Notes 249 34 Jāmān, interview by Max Stille, 15 March 2014. Parallel learning processes are described by Ines Weinrich in her project titled ‘The Dimensions of Sound in Islam – Travelling Aesthetics’ and by Richard K. Wolf, ‘The Nightingale’s Despair: Music and Moral Being in Greater Central Asia’ (presentation, Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg, 10 June 2015). 35 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 36 Rah’mān, interview by Max Stille, Dhaka, 30 March 2014. 37 See Syed J. Ahmed, ‘Hegemony, Resistance, and Subaltern Silence: Lessons from Indigenous Performances of Bangladesh’, TDR (The Drama Review) 50/2 (2006): 70–86, here 73. 38 Tanbhīr Sarkār, ‘Rasikatā’, interview by Sāimana Jākāriẏā, 30 October 2014. 39 Wilke and Moebus, Sound and Communication. 40 See Bimal K. Matilal and Jogesh C. Panda, ‘Sign Conceptions in India’, in Semiotik / Semiotics: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, vol. 2, ed. Roland Posner, Klaus Robering and Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 1844. 41 See Francesca Orsini, ‘Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 355. 42 See Qureshi, ‘Islamic Music’, 44–7. 43 See Sharar, Guẕashta Lakhnaʾū, 212. 44 See Qureshi, ‘Islamic Music’, 51; Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nauṭaṅkī Theatre of North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 218, 243. 45 See Qureshi, ‘Sounding the Word’, 277. 46 See Ibid., 278. 47 David Michael Kane, Puthi-Pora: ‘Melodic Reading’ and Its Use in the Islamisation of Bengal (London: BLURB, 2017). 48 See David Michael Kane, ‘Puthi-Poṛa: “Melodic Reading” and Its Use in the Islamisation of Bengal’ (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2008), 225. 49 See Ibid., 273. 50 See Ibid., 173. 51 See Rubayet Faisal, ‘Comment to Video Death [A Bengali Bayan By: Maulana Tofojjol Hussain]’, 2015. (2012), available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=9NT​vQcs5​ GIo (accessed 16 December 2016). 52 See Spiritual Link, ‘Comment to Video Death [A Bengali Bayan By: Maulana Tofojjol Hussain] in reply to Rubayet Faisal’, 2012, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​ atch?​v=9NT​vQcs5​GIo (accessed 16 December 2016). 53 See Nelson, Art of Reciting, 182. 54 See Gade, ‘Recitation of the Qurʾān’, 373. 55 Cf. in contrast Felix Hoerburger, ‘Gebetsruf und Qor’ān-Rezitation in Kathmandu (Nepal)’, Baessler Archiv: Beiträge zur Völkerkunde, N.F. 23 (1975): 121–37, here 122. The dynamics of the standardization have, for example, been described in relation to Indonesia by Gade, Perfection Makes Practice. 56 See Gade, ‘Recitation of the Qurʾān’, 383. 57 For the description of a ‘tonarion’ to guide the orator’s pitch in antique oratory, see Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, I.11.27. 58 Thanks to Ines Weinrich for enlightening me about this point.

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See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 154. See Nelson, Art of Reciting, 128. See Ibid., 129. See Orsini and Schofield, ‘Introduction’, 26. Cf. Ahmed, ‘Hegemony’, 74. Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 65 Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 66 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 67 See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 167. 68 For this summary of Randall Collins, see Mikko Salmela, ‘Shared Emotions’, Philosophical Explorations 15/1 (2012): 33–46, here 41. 69 See Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 140. 70 See Pasha Khan, ‘A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre’, in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 203. 71 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 72 Cf., for a similar thesis about the mars̱ iyya, Naim, Urdu Texts, 5. 73 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 74 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 75 See Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, ‘Sympathielenkung’, in Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie, ed. Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), 269. 76 Siddiqi, sermon in 2009. 77 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 78 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 79 Ibid. 80 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 81 A catchy example is ‘recorded’ in the movie Māṭir Maẏnā, at around 1:17:00. 82 See Harder, Sufism, 194. 83 See Ibid., 194–5. 84 See Petievich and Stille, ‘Emotions in Performance’. 85 I am immensely influenced by the perspective opened up in Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Jauss, Aesthetic Experience; and Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader’. 86 See Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader’, 124–5. 87 See Jauss, ‘Identification’, 287. 88 See Ibid. 89 See Iser, Act of Reading, 97. 90 See Ibid., 99. 91 Cf. Rosenberg, These Bones, 12. 92 At the mahfil of the Shekhbari madrasa, my companion Abdul Qayyum immediately recognized one of the preachers (Mazhari) by his specific style of recitation, which he imitated beforehand. Junayd in London immediately recognized the sermon I had recorded from Khan by the latter’s voice. 93 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999 at 04:15. 94 Khalilur, sermon on 11 January 2013. 95 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 59 60 61 62 63 64

 Notes 251 96 Cf. Qureshi, ‘Sounding the Word’, 276. 97 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 98 Cf., for India, Manuel, Cassette Culture, 131. For a completely different and much more ‘liberal’ configuration in Indonesia, cf. Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, 53, 40. 99 See an article Saymon Zakaria wrote after we listened to songs by Hosen: Sāiman Jākāriẏā, ‘Ujjvalita kabikul karile kabi najˡrul’, Dainik Ittephāk, 27 February 2015. 100 See Hans Harder, ‘The Majibhandaris of Chittagong: Sufism, Saint Veneration and Bengali Islam’ (Habilitation, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), 2005), 160n45. 101 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 102 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 103 Ibid. 104 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 105 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 106 Hosen, ‘Tears of the Wretched Mother’. 107 Ibid. 108 Hosen, ‘The Parents’ Pain and Worries’. 109 On zikr in Qawwālī, see Richard K. Wolf, The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language, and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 17. 110 See Harder, Sufism, 179–83 on the discussion in Bengal, and on the general discourse of music and Islam relevant to the context here, see Qureshi, Sufi Music; Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 67–104; and Nelson, Art of Reciting, 32–51. 111 See Frishkopf, ‘Mediated Qur’anic Recitation’, 81 including the references given. 112 See Qureshi, ‘Sounding the Word’, 265. 113 See Harder, Sufism, 179. 114 Anonymous, sermon on 29 January 2013. 115 Ibid. 116 Such as Daẏāl bābā kalā khābā, ‘Merciful Father, You’ll Eat a Banana’, https​://ww​ w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=xxG​kQjiX​8Tw (accessed 15 August 2019), 28,176,050 views until 15 August 2019. 117 Ansari, sermon on 29 January 2013. 118 Ibid. 119 See Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 120 Ibid. 121 Cf. Rosenberg, These Bones, 13. 122 See Hartmann, ‘Islamisches Predigtwesen’, 171. 123 See Ibn al Jawzī, Ṣayd al-khāṭir (Riyāḍ: Dār Ibn Khazīma, 1997), 186. 124 Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 125 Franz-Hubert Robling, ‘Redner, Rednerideal’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Vol. 7: Pos–Rhet, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 863. 126 Pernau and Stille, ‘Obedient Passion’. 127 Isˡlām, interview by Max Stille, Sylhet, 12 March 2014. 128 Ibid. 129 See Nurul Islam Olipuri, ‘Jākir Nāẏek Ālem Bale Āmi Kono Promāṇ Pāini: Olipurī’, interview by Kālkaṇṭha, 15 October 2010. 130 Ibid. 131 Jāmān, interview by Max Stille, 15 March 2014. 132 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014.

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133 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 134 Jāmān, interview by Max Stille, 15 March 2014. 135 Ibid. 136 See particularly Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 147–9. 137 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 138 Nūrī, interview by Max Stille, Chittagong, 27 March 2014. 139 See Rüdiger Campe and Markus Wilczek, ‘Stimme, Stimmkunde’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Vol. 9: St–Z, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009). 140 See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI, 2, 26–9; Horace, Ars Poetica, II, 101–2; Cicero, De oratore. 141 For the historical roots of this concept at the border of rhetoric and poetics (drama) and ethos and pathos, as well as for the decisive option into reformist homiletics, see Roman B. Kremer, ‘Selbstaffektion’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Vol. 10: Nachträge A–Z, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2012). 142 About the adoption of classical rhetoric to Middle Eastern homiletic handbooks, see Scholz, ‘Ästhetik und Rhetorik’. 143 See Ābidīn, Baktr̥ tār klās, 34. 144 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6.2.26. The translation is taken from ibid. 145 See Jan Scholz, ‘Modern Arabic Rhetorical Manuals: A Transcultural Phenomenon’, in Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, ed. Laila Abu-Er-Rub et al. (London: Routledge, 2019). 146 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 147 Øivind Andersen, ‘Rhetoric and Stylistics in Ancient Rome’, in Rhetoric and Stylistics: An International Handbook of Historical and Systematic Research, Vol. 1, ed. Ulla Fix, Andreas Gardt, and Joachim Knape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 47. 148 See Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 7. 149 See Olaf Kramer, ‘Affekt und Figur’, in ‘Und es trieb die Rede mich an …’: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Gert Ueding, ed. Joachim Knape, Olaf Kramer, and Peter Weit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), 320–6. 150 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 151 See Gautam Bhadra, ‘The Performer and the Listener: Kathakatā in Modern Bengal’, Studies in History 10/2 (1994): 243–54, here 251. 152 See Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity, 7. 153 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 154 Rah'mān, interview by Max Stille, Dhaka, 30 March 2014. 155 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 156 See Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 129. 157 See Muneer, ‘Poetics of Piety’, 19. 158 See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: Framework for a History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–111. 159 For a contrast cf. Paul Ekman, ‘Basic Emotions’, in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. Tim Dalgleish and Mick J. Power (Chichester: Wiley, 1999). 160 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 161 d’Hubert, ‘Histoire culturelle et poétique’, 151. 162 Karl-Heinz Göttert, Geschichte der Stimme (Munich: Fink, 1998), 169. 163 Geißner, ‘Mündlichkeit’. 164 Thilo Tröger, ‘Klangrede’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, Vol. 4: Hu–K, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 965.

 Notes 253 165 Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader’. 166 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 167. 167 Nelson, Art of Reciting, 117. 168 Ānoẏār Caudhurī, interview by Max Stille, Dhaka, 2 February 2015. 169 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 170 Hosen, interview by Max Stille, Bhairab, Bangladesh, 26 March 2014. 171 See Stille, ‘Numinous’. 172 The song is called ‘Nabī nāmete jāri’. The score was given to me by Saymon Zakaria. 173 See Kramer, ‘Affekt und Figur’, 318. 174 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. The entire passage analysed here starts at 47:00 of the video on YouTube. 175 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 176 See Ottmar Fuchs, ‘Die Funktion des Gegensatzes in der Sprache der Predigt: Strukturale Semantik als homiletisches Analyseverfahren’ (PhD diss., Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, 1977), 142. 177 For the quotation of a poem by Mīr Taqī Mīr, see Annemarie Schimmel, ‘S̲h̲afāʿa: 2. In Popular Piety’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam: Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1983–2007). 178 On ethos as connotation, see Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994b), 74. 179 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987.

Chapter 5 1 A point stressed differently by Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A Kennedy, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.11.6, available at http:​//www​.loc.​gov/c​atdir​/enha​nceme​nts/f​y0636​/2005​05548​7-d.h​tml; and Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement: Translated with Introduction and Notes by J. H. Bernard, D.D., D.C.L., 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co, 1914), 223. 2 See A. Hügli, ‘Lachen, das Lächerliche’, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992–2015), 5. 3 There are numerous Hadith that report on the Prophet laughing out loud until his cuspids can be seen. One particularly interesting account is about Muhammad laughingly accepting the Chuzbe of a sinning Muslim in Al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-ṣawm, 43; Abū Dāwud, Kitāb al-ṣawm, 78. 4 Ulrich Marzolph, Arabia Ridens: Die humoristische Kurzprosa der adab-Literatur im internationalen Traditionsgeflecht, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992); Ludwig Ammann, Vorbild und Vemunft: Die Regelung von Lachen und Scherzen im mittelalterlichen Islam (Hildesheim: Olms, 1993); Franz Rosenthal, Humour in Early Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1956). 5 Ahmed, What Is Islam? 322, italics in original. 6 For the similar case of the juxtaposition of blasphemy and free speech obscuring the moral claims of religious hurt, cf. Saba Mahmood, ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’ Critical Inquiry 35/4 (2009): 836–62. 7 Selva J. Raj, ‘Serious Levity at the Shrine of St. Anne in South India’, in Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, ed. Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 22.

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8 Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey, eds, Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 9 Tony K. Stewart, Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25. 10 Frances W. Pritchett, ed., The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 16. 11 Amy C. Bard, ‘Turning Karbala Inside Out: Humor and Ritual Critique in South Asian Muharram Rites’, in Sacred Play: Ritual Levity and Humor in South Asian Religions, ed. Selva J. Raj and Corinne G. Dempsey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 166. 12 Millie, Hearing Allah’s Call, 135. 13 Ibid. 14 For Indonesia, compare Ibid., 40. 15 See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, vol. 2, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160. 16 Affect theory is interesting here because it focuses on processes of bodily and subconscious transmission between individuals, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 17 See Gert Ueding, ‘Rhetorik des Lächerlichen’, in Semiotik, Rhetorik und Soziologie des Lachens: Vergleichende Studien zum Funktionswandel des Lachens vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart, ed. Lothar Fietz, Jörg O. Fichter, and Hans-Werner Ludwig (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1996), 25. 18 Oskar Verkaaik, ‘Fun and Violence: Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression’, Social Anthropology 11/1 (2003): 3–22, here 15. 19 As classically formulated in Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Hogarth, 1960). 20 For hasya as rasa, see Matilal and Panda, ‘Sign Conceptions’, 1844 and Bhaṭṭācārya, Sāhitya-Mīmāṃsā, 33. 21 See Lee Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 34–5. 22 See Ueding, ‘Rhetorik des Lächerlichen’, 32. 23 All translations from Manomohan Ghosh, The Natyasastra: A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics Ascribed to Bharata-Muxi, vol. 1: Chapters I–XXVII (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950), 110. 24 Sayeedi, sermon in 2006. 25 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 26 Qaderi, ‘Hāsarer Bicār’. 27 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 28 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 29 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 30 On the aspect of being controlled by someone else, see Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Komik der Handlung, Komik der Sprachhandlung, Komik der Komödie’, in Das Komische, ed. Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1976), 238. 31 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 32 Ibid. 33 Hosen, ‘In Memory of the Martyrs of Kerbela’. 34 Ibid. 35 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 36 Stille, ‘Being Mediated’.

 Notes 255 37 Max Stille, ‘Metrik und Poetik der Josephsgeschichte Muhammad Sagirs’ (MA diss., Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, 2011), 77–9. 38 Ansari, ‘Sura Joseph’. 39 Sayeedi, sermon in 1999. 40 See Karim, ‘Congregation at Carmonai’. 41 On the concept, see Rochona Majumdar, ‘From Civilizational Heroism to an Ethic of Universal Humanity’, in Civilizing Emotions, ed. Margrit Pernau et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 42 Olipuri, ‘Sura Joseph’. 43 Mazhari, sermon on 8 January 2013. 44 In the nineteenth century, Jean Paul, in his Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, nebst einigen Vorlesungen in Leipzig über die Parteien der Zeit (Hamburg: Perthes, 1804), theorized about the ‘upside-down sublime’ (‘umgekehrt Erhabenes’) that results from such an application of the finite to the infinite. 45 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Komische: Ein Kippphänomen’, in Das Komische, ed. Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1976). 46 In Arabic, this is encapsulated in the phrase baʿīd ʿanka, which points away from persons present so that they do not become offended. 47 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 48 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 49 Sayeedi, sermon in 1987. 50 Nazrul, ‘Discussion of Eight Deeds’. 51 This can take the form of an oratio figurata, which hides criticism from the audience, so that its inversion here has the effect of heightening the criticism. 52 Nesari, sermon on 14 January 2013. 53 Munawar, ‘NY’. 54 Mizanur, sermon on 24 January 2013. 55 See Ueding, ‘Rhetorik des Lächerlichen’, 29–30. 56 See Alfred Liede, Dichtung als Spiel: Studien zur Unsinnspoesie an den Grenzen der Sprache, 2nd edn (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992). 57 For this conception of the comical, cf. Jean Paul’s theory of humour (Das Lächerliche) as the opposite of the sublime. 58 Nazrul, ‘Discussion of Eight Deeds’. 59 Siraji, sermon on 13 March 2014. 60 This position was already taken by Kierkegaard. 61 Hosen, ‘Excerpt Abu Jahl’. 62 Ibid. 63 Marsden, Living Islam, 143–50. 64 But this does not mean that it is a singular phenomenon. Other examples are https://youtu.be/sxwLqjenKMg or https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=8gK​mBwhz​ P08 (accessed 26 November 2018). 65 Nazrul, ‘Discussion of Eight Deeds’. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 This is from Juktibadi, ‘The Incident of Joseph and Zulaikha’, recorded on a cassette by Sāmiẏā Islāmī Proḍākṭs. However, the cassette inside did not at all deal with this topic, so I do not know whether it was misplaced by the producers. 69 The English name is actually derived from the Bengali word. 70 The translation is made up to keep the sense of toponyms. Here, Nazrul says Boẏāl.

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71 Both terms taken from Freud, Jokes. 72 Nazrul, ‘Discussion of Eight Deeds’. 73 See Zee Bangla, Sarkār, Tanbhīr: Bāṃlādeśer 64 Jelā_ashādhāran kautuk_mirakkel_ tānbh̄ r sarkār, Mirakkel Akkel Challenger, 7th Season (Zee Bangla, 2013), 2013, available at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=Tm_​ffqJA​FZQ (accessed 19 August 2019). 74 Of course famously treated in chapter 7 of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), who recognizes jokes, but not music as part of āḍḍā. 75 See Ānoẏār Caudhurī, Āḍḍā (Ḍhākā: 5 May 2015). 76 See Ibid.

Outlook 1 Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam. 2 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, new edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 14. 3 K. Hansen, ‘Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7/1 (2016): 1–30, here 24. 4 Stille, ‘Numinous’. 5 Kunz, Schaubühnen. 6 Denis Diderot, ‘Die damatische Pantomime oder Versuch über eine neue Schauspielgattung in Florenz’, in Ästhetische Schriften, trans. Friedrich Bassenge (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). 7 Hansen, ‘Mapping Melodrama’, 24. 8 Stille, ‘Numinous’; Stille, ‘Metrik und Poetik’. 9 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). 10 Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela, eds, Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Margrit Pernau, ‘Feeling Communities: Introduction’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 14/Special Issue: Feeling Communities (2017): 1–20. 11 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy 14/1 (2006): 1–25, here 10. 12 Foundational on this topic are Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and van der Veer, Religious Nationalism; for further literature, see Ahmed, What Is Islam? 176. 13 See Dietrich Reetz, ‘God’s Kingdom on Earth: The Contestation of the Public Sphere by Ten Islamic Groups and Traditions in Colonial India 1900–47’ (Habilitationsschrift, Freie Universität, Berlin, 2001). 14 David Justin Lewis, Bangladesh: Politics, Economics, and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 134. 15 Dieter Rucht, ‘Civil Society and Civility in Twentieth-century Theorising’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 18/3 (2011): 387–407. 16 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 101. 17 Dey, Prophet, 83.

 Notes 257 18 Rafiuddin Ahmed, ‘Muslim-Christian Polemics and Religious Reform in Nineteenthcentury Bengal: Munshi Meheru’llah of Jessore’, in Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, ed. Kenneth W. Jones (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 111. 19 Ghose, ‘Politics for Faith’, 160. 20 Bate, Tamil Oratory. 21 Layli Uddin, ‘In the Land of Eternal Eid: Maulana Bhashani and the Political Mobilisation of Peasants and Lower-Class Urban Workers in East Pakistan, c. 1930s– 1971’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, London, 2016). 22 Sufia M. Uddin, Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 182. 23 Lotte Hoek, ‘Mofussil Metropolis: Civil Sites, Uncivil Cinema and Provinciality in Dhaka City’, Ethnography 13/1 (2012): 28–42; Lotte Hoek, Cut-pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), chapter 2. 24 Cf., for example, William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, 2004), chapter 2. 25 Gautam Bhadra, ‘The Mentality of Subalternity: Kantanama or Rajdharma’, in Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 61. 26 See Ibid., 62. 27 See Baṅkimcandra’s racanābali under the headline ‘Lokśikṣā’. 28 See Dinesh Chandra Sen, History of Bengali Language and Literature: A Series of Lectures Delivered as Reader to the Calcutta University (Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1911), 589–90. 29 See Bhadra, ‘Performer and Listener’, 249. 30 For a catalogue, see Syed Jamil Ahmed, Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2000). For in-depth studies on Jarigan, see Mary Frances Dunham, Jarigan: Muslim Epic Songs of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press, 1997); Sāiman Jākāriẏā and Nājˡmīn Martujā, Phokˡlor o likhita sāhitya: Jārigāner āsare ‘Biṣād-Sindhu’ āttīkaraṇ o paribeśan-paddhati (Ḍhākā: Bāṃlā Ekāḍemī, 2012). On Muharram in a wider perspective, see Epsita Halder, ‘Of Blood and Tears: Tracing Self and Community in Karbala Narratives of Bengal (Late 19th– Early 20th Century)’ (PhD diss., Jadavpur University, West Bengal); and for research on kabi gān, see Priyanka Basu, ‘Bengali Kabigan: Performers, Histories and the Cultural Politics of “Folk”’ (PhD diss., SOAS, University of London, London, 2016). On the literary and religious history, see Stewart, Fabulous Females and Stewart, Witness to Marvels. 31 For a collection that tries to address this lacuna, but of course excludes sermons, see Brian Shoesmith and Jude William R. Genilo, eds, Bangladesh’s Changing Mediascape: From State Control to Market Forces (Bristol: Intellect, 2013). 32 Maimuna Huq, ‘From Piety to Romance: Islam-oriented Texts in Bangladesh’, in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 33 Ali Riaz, ‘The New Islamist Public Sphere in Bangladesh’, Global Change, Peace & Security 25/3 (2013): 299–312, here 312.

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Index Abu Jahl  52, 89, 162–3, 196, 204 aesthetics  3, 5, 50, 75–111, 154, 184–6, 189, 214 affect theory  17–18 Ahmed Sofa  13 Aisha  111, 134–7, 162 animals  140, 195–8, 207 Arabic  1–4, 22–4, 28–30, 60–1, 76, 79, 96–7, 99–100, 104, 133, 156, 163–6, 175–6, 195–6, 212 argumentation  99–103, 184–8 atheists  1, 11, 94, 124 authenticity  7, 20, 35, 66, 92, 94, 166, 172–3, 178–80, 197, 203, 210, 214 Awami League  6–9, 42, 67, 218 Bangladesh Jamaat-e Islami  2, 6–9, 32, 42, 61–3, 70, 95, 117–20, 123, 148, 188 bayān  28, 33, 159 Biśva Ijtemā  27–8, 33, 66, 108 blasphemy  12–13, 124–7, 215 blessing  48, 97, 123, 207 bloggers  11–12, 219 blood  55, 85, 108–10, 123–7, 145–6, 175, 197 BNP  6–12, 77, 95 body  3, 17–18, 38–42, 61–2, 71, 121–4, 136, 145, 153–7, 165, 174–5, 187–90, 214 call to prayer  79, 90–3, 172 caricature  7 catharsis  152, 210, 212 Christian  24, 56, 60, 135, 170, 191 civility  198, 217 community  2–3, 31, 41, 47, 53, 59, 63–6, 72, 84, 89–92, 102, 107, 109, 132–5, 141–2, 148, 192–2, 204, 207, 216–19 compassion  109, 131–4, 140, 144, 149, 212 consensus  3, 14–17, 56, 63–7, 211 corruption  57, 63, 95, 199–210

Day of Judgement  4, 64, 86–7, 121, 132–8, 140 deixis  137, 162 democracy  8–12, 61, 123–4, 214, 220 Deoband  11, 28–35, 42, 48, 60, 86 dialect  22, 41, 43, 72–3, 76, 201, 205 diaspora  32, 40–1, 72, 148 didactic questions  51, 56, 161 Dobhāshī  77, 139 donations  64–9, 103 dowry  62–3, 65, 110 durūd  31, 52, 81, 109–10, 147–51, 164 East London Mosque  32 emotion  16–19, 55–60, 104–5, 113–52, 155, 161–89, 191–209 entertainment  19–24, 113–14, 155, 172, 192, 210, 214, 215, 218 entourage  1–2, 40, 51–4, 114, 157 Ershad  8, 95 etiquette  48–53, 62, 105, 201 exegesis  95–102, 153–90 fatwa  28, 94 feedback loop  50–1, 56–60, 71, 148, 174, 211 fiction/reality  56, 91–2, 139–43, 178, 202–3, 216, 219–20 Flag of Islam  121–35 food  65–6, 163 football  198–9, 217 formulas  31–2, 56–60, 80–3, 88–9 frames  27, 51–4, 66, 75–7, 80–2, 87–8, 90, 109, 188, 194, 204, 211 Friday ritual  28–33, 38, 80, 104 fundamentalism  3, 94–6, 169–72, 217 genre  1–25, 211–21 government  2, 9–14, 34, 42, 61, 95 greeting  80–4, 149 guerilla  54

 Index 281 Hadith  2, 4, 29, 73, 81, 88, 121, 125, 132–5, 137, 156–7, 166, 196, 206, 212 Hefazat-e Islam  11–12, 37, 54–5, 62, 117, 125–6, 156–7, 213 hermeneutics  3–6, 54, 102–3, 115–17, 125, 154, 167, 171, 220. See also exegesis Hindu  7, 16, 66, 77, 84, 93, 158, 177, 194, 218–20 homiletics  28, 93, 154, 175–7, 194, 215, 218–19 Humayun Azad  10 humility  35, 105, 151, 205

mimesis  17, 31, 69, 137, 141–2, 162, 171, 181, 202, 214 mobilization  3, 9–12, 16–17, 45, 54–5, 59, 62, 64, 115–19, 126, 173, 192, 195, 204, 218 moon  10, 138–9, 189 Moses  105, 107, 115, 132, 195–6, 199 mother  57, 70, 73, 83, 93, 116, 138–47, 161, 168–9, 213 Muhammad Iqbāl  106–10 Mujibur Rahman  6, 14, 123 mushāʿira  58, 104 music. See song and melody

identification  5, 16, 90, 113–15, 131, 141, 143, 149, 152, 164–7, 212 imagination  14–17, 48, 83, 90–1, 140, 154, 164, 174–9, 210, 215–16 International Crimes Tribunal  9–12, 184–7

namāz. See prayer narration  21, 50, 56, 59, 62, 72, 81, 90, 91, 102, 106, 117, 133, 137, 146, 147, 153, 160, 162, 166, 191, 214, 216, 218 narratology  3, 16–17, 105–6, 113–51, 162–3, 197–8, 213, 219–20 nation  6–14, 21–4, 78, 91–5, 123, 188, 203, 218 naʿt  38, 40, 43, 52, 54–5, 103–12 newspapers  2–3, 7, 12, 14–15, 27, 172 NGOs  21, 64–5, 78, 94, 194

Jahanara Imam  9 jihad  39, 50, 54, 86, 95, 119, 123, 163, 204 Joseph  161, 167, 197, 206 justice  8–12, 54, 184–9 Kāsem Bin Ābubākār  219–20 Kathak  177, 179, 218–21 khuṭba. See Friday Ritual longing  41, 47, 49, 54, 111, 119–20, 138–42, 150–1, 169, 218 loudspeaker  20, 44, 52–3, 88, 171 madrasa  2, 7–8, 11, 28–46, 53–6, 60, 70, 78–9, 84–8, 98, 119, 122–5, 156–7, 175, 199, 205 martyrdom  1, 7, 11, 108, 117–27 masculinity  5, 61–2, 118–47, 213 media  3, 20–1, 67–73, 96, 127, 156–9, 206, 211, 219 melodrama  6, 20, 113–52, 182, 213, 216 melody  3, 54–5, 71, 88, 108–12, 145–8, 153–90, 209, 213 mercy  4, 48, 59, 81, 85, 109–10, 128–42, 144, 180, 184–9 metonymy  80, 124–7, 195, 198 migration  6, 25, 41, 65, 78, 144, 148, 150

orthodoxy  40, 96 Othering  5, 11, 13, 15, 78, 193–6, 215 pain  16, 54, 128, 133–46, 177–8, 183 paradigmatic relations  101–2, 187 parody  22, 149, 158, 170–1, 197–204 participation  15, 22, 55–64, 85, 89, 102–3, 145, 213, 217–18 persuasion  15, 64, 78, 87, 97, 109–10, 114, 155, 161, 173–5, 183, 200, 206, 211 pilgrimage  34, 66, 150, 170 poetics  3, 14, 24, 75, 114, 131, 151–3, 158, 193, 214–15 poetry  29, 68, 71, 80–2, 100–12, 154–7, 164, 180, 212 political  2–3, 6–18, 55–63, 92–5, 179–89, 193–9, 217–18 popular culture  6, 19–22, 68, 151, 170, 211, 213–14, 218 populism  93, 193–9 posters  9, 44–45, 59, 127 praise  29, 35–6, 58–62, 64–5, 80–7, 109–10, 129–30, 169–70, 195–6

282 prayer  28–31, 41, 50, 53, 55, 62–5, 79, 81, 84–6, 90–1, 107, 118–21, 129, 133–4, 136, 144, 147–52, 167, 175, 197, 203 prose chanting  18, 153–90, 214 publics  3–7, 15, 20, 43, 78, 126, 193, 216 purity  30, 40, 85, 94, 194–5, 199, 203 pũthi  159–60, 165, 203 Quran  2, 22, 32, 38, 48–9, 63, 73, 79, 89, 95–104, 129, 154–7, 165–8, 170–2, 214 reform  28, 34, 37, 41, 66, 77, 192, 217 rhythm  1, 33, 39, 57–8, 108–9, 128–9, 148, 156, 161, 180, 207 ritual  19, 22, 28–33, 62, 79–82, 87–92, 98, 147, 151, 170, 191, 210 role shifts  10, 31, 34–7, 49–50, 59–60, 63–4, 66–7, 75, 88–90, 128, 135, 147, 188, 193, 200–5 romantic love  120, 220 Salafism  116 sects  18, 22, 44–5, 52, 73, 81, 88–9, 111, 126, 129, 163, 189, 218 secular  7–9, 12–13, 37, 61, 79, 96, 116, 122, 154, 191, 194, 200, 205, 210, 214–15, 219–20

Index self-affection  174–9, 214 Shahbag Movement  10–11, 15 Shah Garibullah  77 shrine  22, 28, 30, 40, 45, 66, 94, 170–1, 194–5 sin  48, 65, 69, 82, 87, 90, 98–100, 128–32, 136, 149, 166, 169 slogans  1–2, 10–11, 45, 52, 59–62, 95, 164, 204 song  2, 13, 16, 18, 38, 41–2, 53–5, 95, 107, 109, 156, 168–72, 213 sovereignty  60–1, 85 Sufism  22, 33, 37, 40–1, 54–5, 60–3, 66, 82, 94, 118, 126–7, 170–1, 194, 203 Tablighi Jamaat  14–15, 33, 36–7, 81–2, 94, 117, 119, 125, 194, 203, 217 tears  1, 55, 82–3, 89, 127, 130–47, 168–9, 175, 177–9 technology of the self  174 temporality  4, 58, 71, 92, 133 translation  25, 28–33, 89–90, 96–102, 105–8, 118–19, 123, 128–9, 156–7, 165–8, 194, 205, 212, 216–17 Urdu  2, 4, 28–9, 31–3, 75–111, 128, 156, 159, 164–7, 184–5, 192, 199

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