Smells and Bells

 The Power of a Pause Dr. Maria Ulfah & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By Ava Barry When I first heard Dr. Maria Ulfah I was spell bound. Sitting in my dorm room, listening to a video that was posted as homework for one of my classes. I was planning on only watching a mere one to two minutes of this 28 minute video, yet I found myself sitting there in awe as the minutes quickly flowed by. This video was of a Quran recitation. The audience in the video was full, yet we [the viewers] didn't hear a sound other than her voice echoing through us.  "Indonesian audiences are not known for silence, even in the context of formal events. In this case, however, although the women enjoyed the snacks provided and some of them whispered to one another, there was relative silence for the duration of the presentation and recitation. At this event and the many others I attended where she was a featured (and paid) reciter, Maria Ulfah commanded an attentive audience." (Rasmussen, 205) For ...

It seems to me that one of the most "visible" aspects of a religion is that faith's music. The popular views, regardless of their correctness, held by the larger Western public imagination informs many people's knowledge of different religions, and may constitute the limit of somebody's knowledge of a faith, depending on exposure. Much of Anne Rasmussen's book deals with how Muslim men and women interact with devotional music and one another in the context of music. One of the most visible and stereotyped Islamic musical practices comes in the form of the Sufi whirling dance, performed by both men and women in the Sema ceremony. The dance involves spinning around for extended periods of time. Practitioners whirl and listen to sacred music in order to lose their ego or sense of self. While Sufis constitute a relatively small proportion of the Islamic ummah , their dramatic dance and distinctive clothing captured the Western imagination. This whirling ritual h...