Medium: paper

This week, my artwork is a response to Kristina Nelson’s piece, “Reciter and Listener: Some factors shaping the Mujawwad style of Qur’anic reading.” Nelson describes several aspects of this style of Qur’anic reading and briefly discusses the influences that developed the style. At the end of the article, she focuses on a major criticism of some Qur’anic recitation: that it is too musical. We spoke considerably in both lecture and section about the limitations of viewing non-western art—particularly Islamic art, and particularly Qur’anic recitation—only within the likely familiar categories and constraints we use to evaluate western art. Nelson touches on this concept, but goes further to address criticisms that Qur’anic reciters are performers with celebrity similar in magnitude and quality to that of popular musical artists. She describes aspects of the lifestyle of an acclaimed Qur’anic reciter that yield these criticisms (e.g. appearing in magazines or being interviewed on talk shows), but she does not discuss them extensively, saying only that they “…blur the line between reciter and singer in terms of the reciter’s professional identity and the listeners’ expectations.” (46) Ultimately, she writes that the “personal attitude of the reciter towards these shaping forces [determines] the extent of musicality in his personal style.” (46)

I would like to suggest the possibility that critics are attempting to conflate the fame of two very different artists in a way that does not quite work. Just as thoughtless categorization of Qur’anic recitation as vocal performance in the western sense is neglecting to understand the nuances of music in a different context, I think that categorization of a professional Qur’anic reciter as a vocal performer is equally neglectful. The nuances of the two things Nelson mentions, “reciters’ professional identity” and “listeners’ expectations” are exactly what might separate the two types of fame. I don’t know that every reader of every magazine article about a Qur’anic reciter or every viewer of every interview with a Qur’anic reciter differentiates their interest in those publications from stories about actors or musicians. However, I do think that attempts to suppress musicality of recitation in effort to avoid celebrity for Qur’anic reciters may be, in some part, derived from an incomplete understanding of how people perceive notable reciters and how they experience recitation.

In my artwork, I decided to explore similarities between a Qur’anic reciter and a western pop star. The focus of the piece is the word hafiz, someone who has memorized the entire Qur’an, which I chose to appear in a print of stars that I created. The stars are meant to represent the fame of a western star or starlet. I drafted a list of similarities between the two personas and chose images to represent these concepts, which I used for the border. The list is as follows, with the image I chose to represent the concept in parentheses following the similarity: performance is better live (concert venue), person uses a microphone (microphone), famous (stars), person is adored (hearts), person has fans (cheerleaders), person uses pauses for dramatic effect (pause and play buttons), person is talked about (newspapers and magazines), person’s work is on the radio (radio), person is interviewed in the media (television), person must audition (director’s chair), person must adhere to a strict practice regimen and performance schedule (sunrise), person is an artist (canvas).

K. Nelson, Reciter and Listener, Ethnomusicology (1982)