Sermons on Tape

June 27, 2009

Walking around al-Azhar mosque I came across a small store that sold tapes and CDs of sermons or readings from the Qur'an. In the video clip above I try to give a sense of the store and its stacks of sermon tapes. In the background you can see the stone wall that is the back of al-Azhar. I had struck up a conversation with the young guy manning the store, and he allowed me to take some pictures. He also put in a sermon by a popular preacher, Shaykh Abd al-Hamid Kishk. This is a sermon on the hijab, but somehow it manages to mention the Jews (yahud) a couple of times in this brief selection.

In understanding the contemporary Islamic world it is important to see a shadow globalization at work. The globalization that we know is connected to McDonalds and the Internet, but at the same time there is a spread of a homogenized and popualar version of fundamentalist Islam. This shadow globalization is spread by technology, but often not the technology that is most current. The presence in this video of a wall of tapes is an example of this. I don't even have a tape player any more! I wil need to talk to the tech people at Lawrence to borrow a tape player if I am going to listen to the two tapes I bought here.

Lots has been made of the ability of Islamic terrorists to make use of the Internet.. and for networking and communication that is undoubtedly important. But less is made of the ability of religious values and ideas to travel in our world by non-Internet means.. and the audio cassette is a great example of how this works.

A work I am hoping to go through this summer is The Ethical Soundscape.. which I believe will cover some of this phenomenon of popular sermons on tape.