Silence and Alterity in a Recitation of the Qur'an

Abstract

The Manhattan-based performance art group City Meditation Crew (CMC) staged a sitting meditation on 11 September 2010 on the Syracuse University Quad for which members of the group silently recited the Qur'an. CMC's anonymity -- and invitation to the public to join the recitation -- invites diverse interpretation and seems to advocate for religious pluralism. Prompted by CMC's performance, this article explores the character of silence in the context of reciting the Qur'an, the central religious text of Islam. The article's driving assertion is that Islam is fundamentally open to others, which has to do with its historical origins as well as its ‘live’ oral traditions of recitation. The article discusses Jacques Derrida's writing on the nature of repetition and its relationship to alterity in concert with his later thinking on Islam in Islam and the West, a conversation between Derrida and the Algerian intellectual Mustapha Chérif in 2003 before Derrida's death in 2004. Accordingly, the article explores the idea that, while every repetition of the Qur'an must be always recognizably the same, the Qur'an's ‘live’ oral nature means that it is different at each recitation. Thus, every Qur'anic recitation (like each ‘mark’ of language) calls out beyond any single and conscious self or any particular cultural orientation. Furthermore, silent recitation, like an absence of accountable communication, accentuates how such ‘liveness’ inspires pluralism. Silence lends repetition alterity, understood as a radical openness to the other as a form of faith.