Traces of the Shaykh’s Ear: Islamic Teaching Certificates as Premodern “Sound Media”

Sometime in the late eighteenth century, the Sultan of Morocco Mulay Sulayman received an ijaza, or tradition teaching certificate in the study of the qira’at, the seven phonetic variant “readings” of the Qur’an that apply to its recitation. Written by the most famous Qur’an reciter of the era, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Salam al-Fasi (d. 1799), the ijaza materializes a notable, if not entirely exceptional, convergence of scholarly and kingly authority through the recitational disciplines. All that appears to remain of the ijaza today, however, is the written documentation of the Sultan’s scholarly genealogy, or sanad, through al-Fasi. A small circle at the center of the page identifies the document as “The sanad of the Commander of the Faithful in the seven riwayat,” with al-Fasi and his scholarly lineage spiraling outward from this centerpiece and leading back to the Prophet Muhammad himself at the outer edge of the spiral (see image at the end). At first glance, the document seems to radiate the Sultan’s power outward, a striking visual effect for a leader often maligned in the historiography as a poor political leader.

As a textual object that authorizes the Sultan in a discipline of vocal performance, however, the materiality of the sanad also bears a striking, perhaps even uncanny, likeness to the shape of modern sound technologies like phonograph records and tape spools, whose spiral shapes at once facilitate efficient storage and circulation of information but also acquire certain aesthetic resonances. In that spirit, I offer the provocation that we might actually approach ijazas, sanaddocuments, and other handwritten texts relevant to Qur’an recitation pedagogy as sound media. Sound, listening, and sound reproduction technologies have become major focuses of study in Islamic societies in recent years (Hirschkind 2006; Jouili and Moors 2014; Eisenlohr 2018). By accepting the “modern” forms and material affordances of sound media as given, however, this scholarship glosses over more nuanced continuities and ruptures in the transition from vocal pedagogy and its earlier textual forms to the present.

As part of a larger project that builds on the history of Qur’an recitation pedagogy in Morocco to theorize “sound media” from an Islamic perspective, this paper roams widely across a number of biographies or tarajim of Moroccan reciters from the generations leading up to al-Fasi, investigating, first, how they practiced their recitational discipline, and, further, how they inscribed the sonic dimensions of that discipline into textual form. I highlight in particular the ijazaas one such form of “sound writing,” which in the case of the qira’at included a basic description—a recording, if you will—of the student’s recitational performance that would in turn serve as a model for later generations.

In the recitational sciences such as tajwid and the qira’at, the fundamental requirement for the granting of an ijazawas the student’s vocal recitation in the presence of the Shaykh, a performance known as the khatma, or “seal” of the student’s educational process that is mentioned frequently in Morocco’s rich biographical traditions of Qur’an reciters and other Islamic scholars. Comparison of one early example of such a performance, by a student of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Maknasi (d. 1352), mentioned by the famous biography al-Kattani in his Salwat al-Anfas, to a performance recorded inMuhammad al-Sharqi al-Dala’i’s (d. 1669) ijaza from his teacher Muhammad al-Bu‘nani (d. 1653), highlights the central importance of the khatma across generations, but also the detail with which the performance was “recorded” in later ijazas.

Looking at these descriptions in detail gives some sense of how these documents functioned as forms of sonic inscription, what the ethnomusicologist Ana Maria Ochoa-Gautier glosses as “the act of recording a listening into a particular technology of dissemination and transmission (in this case writing)” (2014: 7). By stating in each recitationalijaza that the student recited “for me,” and including additional details down to the exact passages recited, the Shaykh not only inscribes the sonic “event” of the student’s performance into the ijaza, but also a record of his aural evaluation of that performance. Though the logocentrism of Islamic pedagogy often regarded texts suspiciously, the veracity of both the sonic “event” and the Shaykh’s listening act are attested to in the ijaza by its inscription in the Shaykh’s “voice,” marked by his signature and occasionally accompanied by other formulaic statements about other recitation scholars “bearing witness to” (shahadu ‘ala) the occasion.

Moreover, there is an important corporate dimension to the way ijazas function as “sound media.” As seems to have been standard practice, the author of the Bu‘nani-Dala’i ijaza includes, first, a report of his own khatma recitation for his teacher, thus underscoring a sense of continuity in the transmission of knowledge, where the student’s ijaza-earning recitation is validated in part through comparison to his teacher’s performance. Bu‘nani then upends his own sanadstretching back generations, all the way to the fourteenth century, at which point he inserts a detailed description of the khatma performance of one fourteenth-century student, al-Lakhmi, for his own teacher, known as al-Qurtubi—a “record” that, significantly, is present in other ijaza documents by author’s claiming the same sanad. The document thus enacts the transmission of knowledge through sound, with Bu‘nani and Lakhmi both underscoring their own authority by “listening back” to the recitations of their teachers and inscribing those performances within an entire history of recitation study.

With all of this in mind, we can approach Sultan Sulayman’s sanad from a different perspective, in which its resemblance to modern sound technologies becomes a little less uncanny. Though this inscription does not include records of actual performances, the inscribing of these performances in other documents featuring the same chain of reciters helps augment the Sultan’s sanad as comprising a series of sonic connections, where the listing of names might carry “traces of the ear.” As such, Sulayman’s sanad performs its fullest duties as a sound medium, not only storing and preserving recitational sounds for posterity, but also extending those vibrations to forge social connection across time and space.