In the context of the vivid activity of Muslim individuals and groups on the In ternet and the recent technological developments in the field of computer mediated communication, podcasts offering a wide range of religious information and/or advice to Muslim (and non-Muslim) listeners play an increasingly important role. Being an integral part of the Web 2.0's online landscape and presenting, at the same time, many characteristics of more "traditional" audio media such as cassette recordings, podcasts cannot only be located at the intersection between virtual space and "real world", but represent, as a medium, also a direct continuation of older forms of Muslim media usage for daʿwa-1) This article is an intermediate report on the research activities of the "Islamic Podcast Project", launched in the context of a facultative course on "forms of Muslim expression on the Internet" at the Seminar für Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients (Heidelberg University) during winter term 2005/2006. It is furthermore the collaborative work of four authors, three of whom are presently studying at the mentioned institute (for further information on the project, cf. http: //www.islamwissenschaft.uni-hd.de/forschung.html). This article cannot be more than a preliminary attempt to systematize the vast amount of data collected and categorized during the last three years and does not want to put forward final conclusions. The authors are highly indebted to Dr. Robert Langer and Dr. Udo Simon (both Heidelberg) who granted them the possibility to present their preliminary research results in the context of their Panel "Die Dynamik von Orthodoxie und Heterodoxie im Islam" during the 30 th Deutscher Orientalistentag (24-28 September 2007, Freiburg i. Br.). J. Scholz, T. Selge, M. Stille, J. Zimmermann / Die Welt des Islams 48 (2008) 457-509purposes and propagandistic aims. This article attempts to analyze in how far the use of podcasts (and to a smaller extent of videocasts) by Muslim groups and individuals contributes to the emergence of a Muslim online "counter public" sometimes challenging, sometimes reinforcing existing authority structures. Special attention is paid to the question which means and features specific to this new medium Muslim podcasters use to legitimize their religious authority, and to the question in how far established symbol systems commonly relied upon in the Muslim community are used as instruments for the construction of religious online authority and the redistribution of Definitionsmacht. Furthermore, it discusses to what extent questions of "right belief " and "correct religious practice" play a role in these processes. For this purpose, style and content of four selected podcasts (Zaytuna Institute Knowledge Resource Podcast, MeccaOne Media Podcast, Ahmadiyya Podcast, Alt.muslim Review) are analyzed in order to illustrate different ways in which this new medium is used by Muslim groups today. It is shown that podcasts-as part of the overall media spectrum-are used by Muslim groups for internal and ...
Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as 'mushāʿira' in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as 'waʿz mahfil ' in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners' experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers' narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across 'religious', 'political', and 'poetic' realms-and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.Keywords: Emotion, performance, Islam, South Asia, music, public, musha 'ira, wa'z mahfil / Carla PetieviCh and Max StilleThe Indian Economic and Social History Review, 54, 1 (2017): 67-102 Introduction 1Sympathy, compassion, hamdardī, sahānubhūti-all these words testify to a basic interpersonal process in which one person feels with another person. This interpersonal nature of emotions, inextricably intertwined with communication, has long been part of theoretical discussion in poetics and rhetoric. The dramatic arts have proved to be particularly fruitful for developing models that seek to describe how emotions are transmitted from one party (say, a performer) to another (an audience). The Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the formulation of rasa theory-commonly traced back to Bharata's Nātyashāstra-have been fundamental to discussions of aesthetics in Europe and South Asia for the past two millennia. Considerations of emotional response in antiquity differentiated the field of rhetoric from philosophy and created overlaps between rhetoric and stylistics (how emotions are evoked) as well as psychology (how emotions can be classified). 2Recent research into the evocation of emotions has confirmed and extended many ancient assumptions, for instance, that emotions constitute expressive communication and are not just interior states; that both the imagination and the body are of central importance in e...
This article argues that conceptual change can be brought about and shaped by communication practice by approaching emotional experience in a particular strand of Islamic sermons from contemporary Bangladesh. It utilizes an extended rhetorical analysis, pertaining to the intertwining of concepts to be communicated, concepts of communication, and performance patterns of the sermons. It argues that by the juncture of narrative techniques of immediacy and momentarization with a bodily grounding of the voice, the listeners and preacher jointly reach the self-affection of the bodily and salvific emotions of (com)passion. From this perspective, the role of rhetorical practice is not limited to an ex post facto translation of conceptual change into practice; instead, the rhetorical goal of self-affection turns out to be an active factor in shaping concepts decisive for contemporary Islamic religiosity.
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