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

This paper mobilizes premodern textual artifacts relevant to the tradition Islamic sciences of Qur’an recitation (tajwid and the qira’at) as a means to theorize “sound media” from an Islamic perspective. It begins by noting the foreshadowing of modern recording technologies in the spiral shape of the late premodern Moroccan Sultan Sulayman’s sanad, or scholarly genealogy, in the recitational sciences. But it focuses, analytically, on the traditional teaching certificates, or ijazas, or Moroccan reciters in the generations leading up to Sulayman’s era. Such documents include increasingly detailed descriptions by the ijaza author of his student’s ijaza-earning recitational performance, known as a khatma, linked, textually, to a longer genealogy of practice represented by the sanad. I argue that such ijazas thus functioned as “sound media” that are both similar to, and more expansive than, modern technologies, preserving not just a “record” of a single performance but an entire history of practice.