The reason, for
me, why the divine is divine, is because God is the answer to the
unexplainables and transcendants that are present in my daily life. So there is
value in that God rules the world that I cannot touch, and even acknowledging
that there is a domain that goes beyond mine is a huge practice of my personal
faith. However, how I experience God in my daily life is often sensory,
touchable. Although my experiences are much romantic and poetic than those
described in the text, I do resonate deeply with how the believers are attached
to the auditory experience as their medium of faith.
“As I will argue, the contribution of
this aural media to shaping the contemporary moral and political landscape of
the Middle East lies not simply in its capacity to disseminate ideas or instill
religious ideologies but in its effect on the human sensorium, on the
affects, sensibilities, and perceptual habits of its vast audience.
The soundscape produced through the
circulation of this medium animates and sustains the substrate of sensory
knowledge and embodied aptitudes undergirding a broad revival movement within
contemporary Islam.” (2)
“these tapes are not part of a program if
radical mobilization but, instead, part of a complex ethical and political
project whose scope and importance cannot be contained within the neat figure
of militant or terrorist.” (4)
“reconfiguring urban spaces acoustically.”
(6)
Continually,
concepts of morality, the auditory/sensory experience, and the blurriness of
the boundary or zone of how these cassette tapes might be impacting stood out
to be.
“a particular sensibility around issues
of death and the hereafter that infuses the story, a sensibility that is also central to ethical practices of
sermon audition. For those who cultivate this sensibility, death is recognized –and
must be continually remembered –as the fundamental condition of human life.”
(175)
“”tasting,” a concept indicating a kind
of knowledge gained through personal experience rather than rational
intellection and embodied as a permanent disposition of the heart, the limbs,
and the tongue.” (175)
Here in the
chapter so enticingly titled, “the acoustics of death,” again the experience is
underlined. I love how gaining knowledge through experience is called “tasting”
(although it is only a translation…).
Here is a slam
poetry piece by a Middlebury student, that resembled the sentiment and power
attached to sound in The Ethical Soundscape. To quote her “There is something about the voice that echoes from the
mosque at 5am that can make even an atheist feel god in their eardrums,
heart-drums.”
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