Islamic Non-Friday Sermons in Bangladesh

Abstract

Scholarship on ‘Islamic sermons’ has in recent years increasingly emphasised the importance of various kinds of sermons, held not only in mosques but at religious gatherings outside the mosque, or transmitted by cassettes, television, or other, newer media (Howarth 2005, Hirschkind 2006, Scholz et al. 2010, Saetren 2010). Nevertheless, many forms of Islamic sermons have not yet been included in the literature, and many aspects remain unexplored. This is true particularly for Islamic sermons in South Asia, and even more so for Islamic sermons in Bangladesh. The genre in question here, denominated most often as sermon congregation (wa’z mahfil), has so far been mentioned only in passing in some historical studies of the region as well as in an article focusing on more recent shifts in gender dynamics (Shehabuddin 2008). The discussion here aims to expand these inquiries by considering the sermons as an example of a universal human phenomenon – of rhetoric and poetics influencing convictions and evoking pleasure for the listeners – which can, however, only be studied in its specificity; in its embeddedness in expectations, references and social realities of a specific time and place. While Islamic sermons have long since developed a mixture of education, exhortation, salvation and drama (Hartmann 1987: 339), the workings and composition of this mixture certainly vary over the course of time and space, as well as between different kinds of sermons. How do we, then, encounter the sermon congregations in contemporary Bangladesh? It is difficult to overlook them, particularly during their main season in ‘winter’, or more broadly during the time of the year in which moving and finding space for outside events is not hampered by the monsoon or wet-cropping. This does not mean that there are no such events at other times, as they peak according to the liturgical calendar. 'Winter', nevertheless, is the time when there will be at least one sermon congregation every evening in most towns and many villages in Bangladesh. It is impossible to estimate the total number, but when I tried to collect the events in and around the district town of Sylhet in