Public piety and Islamic preaching in Bangladesh

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes ways how to access emotions in Islamic preaching. Conceptually, it brings together the often-juxtaposed spheres of body and mind; nature and culture; aesthetics and religion. Based on extensive research on Islamic sermons in Bangladesh between 2012 and 2015, it stresses the form of public speech as the means to access the emotional potentials of oratory. It argues that a focus on emotions allows us to gain a deeper understanding of Islam as an aesthetic and political formation while at the same time emphasizing processes over static ideas of identity and complicating ideas of political participation. Sermons offer listeners emotionalized roles that are not reducible to state or party narratives and reorient the relationship to nationalism as much as other parts of subjectivities, such as masculinity, sense of justice, or imaginations of the future. The article shows how these debates can be linked to emotions engrained in the vocal qualities of Islamic preaching. To make this argument, it intervenes in debates about the concepts of emotions and affects. It furthermore stresses the role of humour in making emotional potentials transcend a private or literary sphere rather than, as has been done in previous literature, a merely relaxing aspect of oratory. From this perspective, Islamic preaching gatherings evolve as communicative practices that crucially shape configurations of community, extends of the political, and gendered subjectivities.