Sound, Gender and Religious Practices
Anne Rasmussen's book Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia successfully demonstrates how the role of women in Islamic practices extends far beyond stereotypes and challenges western perceptions.
Despite how much social progress we have made, there are still many issues and gaps in knowledge and understanding of other cultures and religious practices that are often perpetuated by a lack of education in this country. I grew up in a very diverse community and yet still, I knew about the stereotypes given to those dedicated to Islam. I remember thinking that it was a religion that sometimes stifled women and did not give them "rights" before I actually learned about it, This reading shows the truth and shares how valuable women are to the practice and points out how Westerners often project their own standards onto people from different parts of the world - which is very problematic; “...progress as construed by Western feminism is not always consonant with or indicative of the lives of women elsewhere in the world” (193).
The oral traditions of this religion carry a lot of meaning, especially when conducted by women,
“The voices of women are one of the distinctive strains in the Islamic soundscape, and as they perform, teach, study together, and practice alone, women contribute to the creation of messages of great beauty, power, and potency. They not only have access to the divine, but they also help to create it both for themselves and for others" (192).
A way of connecting people to the divine is often conducted by women, validating the importance of women in the religious tradition. The voice itself carries so much importance due to the oral traditions of this religion, and the author mentions that even if a language barrier exists - the music itself can invoke feelings, “Letting Arabic ‘live on the lips’ of Muslims allows Indonesians- whether they understand Arabic or not- to both feel the language and let others experience it” (193).
The oral traditions of this religion carry a lot of meaning, especially when conducted by women,
“The voices of women are one of the distinctive strains in the Islamic soundscape, and as they perform, teach, study together, and practice alone, women contribute to the creation of messages of great beauty, power, and potency. They not only have access to the divine, but they also help to create it both for themselves and for others" (192). A way of connecting people to the divine is often conducted by women, validating the importance of women in the religious tradition. The voice itself carries so much importance due to the oral traditions of this religion, and the author mentions that even if a language barrier exists - the music itself can invoke feelings, “Letting Arabic ‘live on the lips’ of Muslims allows Indonesians- whether they understand Arabic or not- to both feel the language and let others experience it” (193).
 |
| Malala Yousafza, an advocate for education and women. She describes herself as a feminist and a Muslim. |
I love the words you chose to quote from Rasmussen's book: “Letting Arabic ‘live on the lips’ of Muslims allows Indonesians- whether they understand Arabic or not- to both feel the language and let others experience it” (193). It underlines that there is a lot more going on when you feel the vibrations in your own throat and hear the sounds and tones in your own ears, even if they're "foreign," when as a Muslim you'd recite or chant the words spoken centuries ago by The Significant Other and first repeated by his Prophet Muhammad, than simply a communication of the content of the words. It could be like remembering the soothing words or lullaby of a grandmother from the "the old country" in a foreign language, when you sing them yourself. I remember singing a lullaby in Yiddish to my daughter Zoya (or Chaveleh, the Hebrew/Yiddish diminutive) when she was a baby, "unter chaveleh's vigele, sheyt a klor vais tsigele..." that I learned from my wife Maia who learned it from her parents and grandparents. Did I know what the words meant? Sort of, but that wasn't the point. It was the soothing sound, the resonance in my voice, the memories it evoked implicit and explicit, and its purpose, to help Zoya fall asleep, and probably more importantly, though less consciously, to communicate affectively my love for her. Focusing on the words, on the sounds and repetition of the words of the Qur'an that Indonesian female (and male) reciters, in order to perform them beautifully and expressively for others to hear and fell them, involves a certain attentiveness, that is in effect, a practice and attitude of devotion. And as you correctly point out, this gives Muslim women Qur'an reciters a certain dignity, status, and power in Indonesian culture that defies Western stereotypes of all Muslim women as second class citizens with no powerful roles as leaders, spiritual, cultural, and political.
ReplyDelete