The sonic performance of Islamic congregational prayer: Ṣalāh in mainstream Egyptian practice1

Abstract

Studies of Islamic ritual have focused on the marginal, mystical, sectarian or syncretic. Studies of Islamic ‘music’ have focused on Qurʾanic recitation, the call to prayer and Sufi music. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to sonic aspects of Islam’s basic daily prayer rite, congregational ṣalāh. While ṣalāh’s textual aspects are constrained by discursive specifications, its sound – including timbre, pitch, modality and melody – is relatively free, adapting to the manifold historical, cultural and ritual contexts of the global Muslim community, and enabling prayer to develop greater emotional power. A careful study of the sound of ṣalāh is crucial to understanding the inner meaning and experience of prayer, as well as Islam’s remarkable ability to globalize while remaining deeply affective through an intimate relation to the local soundscape. This article aims to lay the groundwork for the phenomenological and comparative study of ṣalāh, by presenting mainstream Egyptian congregational prayer in detail, demonstrating how it is framed by discursive traditions, while highlighting those ‘unspoken’ sonic aspects which display the greatest contextual variation, and which will underlie future comparative study of meaning and practice.