This panel focuses on Muslims' engagement with the arts and aesthetic discourses, specifically literature, devotional music, and comedy. In the first paper, the author argues that modern literary criticism has reduced Urdu and Persian literature that depicts corporeal mannerisms of poets to hagiographical accounts, ignoring the important religious and ethical work that these pieces do in performing an “adab of remembrance” of elders. The second paper uses the concept of devotional interspace to explore how Bangladesh’s bicār gān (“songs of rumination”) can provide insights into Bengali Muslim modernity, arts transmission, and popular piety. The final paper highlights the history Muslim American comedy by focusing on the artistic origins of Preacher Moss, an early pioneer of Muslim clean comedy. Grounded in prophetic tradition Moss also cites the Black protest tradition and jazz musicians the as key influences on his career. Together, these papers challenge scholars to expand their understandings about how debates around devotional acts, ethics, authenticity play out in Muslims' every day lives.
The ‘Poet and Personality’ (shā’ir-u shakhṣiyat) exposition is a widely practiced mode of writing within twentieth century Urdu and Persian literary criticism that narrativizes the corporeal mannerisms of poets. Taking Faiz Ahmed and Khaliliullah Khalili as examples, I pay attention to how corporeal vocabulary like presence (huzūr), service (khidmat), and nearness (qurbat), turn Faiz and Khalili into "hagiographic subjects." Instead of disclaiming these texts for lack of literary rigor, as a number of modern critics have done, I see it more fruitful to highlight their engagement with a particular iteration of adab, a duty to publicly commit acts of remembrance for “one’s elders” (buzurgān). What are the “forms of expression and practice” that animate the ways in which the Islamic adab of remembrance is performed in the twentieth century, and how did newly emergent technologies, like cassettes and audio recordings, get conscripted as technologies of adab?
What does it mean for a stylized and shrine-based debate to be a devotional performance? Echoing recent works on contemporary Sufisms that highlight the intersectionality of communities, repertoires, and narratives, Bangladesh’s *bicār gān* (“songs of rumination”) is an extemporized wellspring for articulating concurrent devotional subjectivities. In this performance, a network of Sufi interlocutors engage in an aggregative musicality that combines versified, saintly, and polemical elements into a staged discourse on loss, alterity, and sometimes absurdism. Drawing attention to interlocking tropes in ritual theory, migration studies, and the anthropology of media, this discursive devotionalism can be understood as a series of interspaces that converge through pilgrimage routes, shrine committees, itinerant programming, stylized listening practices, and a popular folk music revival.
This paper addresses the "roots and routes" of American Muslim comedy by retracing the intentions of its pioneer, Preacher Moss, and considers how his narrative sets the tone for the articulation of so-called American Muslim comedy into the 21st century. This paper expands on the historical development of American Muslim comedy and situates ‘Muslim comedy’ within the traditions of both religious and charged humor, recognizing Islam as a praxis and marker of protest, identity and faith. Despite the centrality of 9/11 and its aftermath in the materials of American Muslim comedians, Preacher Moss’ early career and narrative complicate the systematic focus on 9/11 as the point of departure for the story of American Muslim comedy. Furthermore, the creedal and revolutionary expression of American Muslim comedy as defined by Preacher Moss complicates early conceptualizations of American Muslim comedy as ethnic comedy and expands our understanding of charged humor.