In 1932, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered that the call to prayer be given in Turkish. Every word was translated faithfully. Every theological claim preserved. Every invocation rendered into the vernacular of the people who were supposed to receive it. By any account of what language is for — communication, meaning, the transmission of content from one mind to another — nothing was lost. And yet the response, across Turkey and across the Muslim world, was not that something had been diminished. The response was that something had been destroyed. The Turkish azan was reversed in 1950, under pressure that had nothing to do with electoral politics and everything to do with what it felt like when the sounds were wrong.
This interests me more than most of what I’ve read about religious practice. The assumption embedded in most thinking about religious speech — and I include careful academic thinking, the kind that builds frameworks and cites everything — is that voice is a vehicle. Something is placed inside it: a message, a meaning, a theological claim. The voice travels. The meaning arrives. What the voice is made of — the particular shape of the sounds, the specific phonemes of Arabic rather than Turkish — this is the container, not the contents. You keep the contents and swap the container, and you have performed an act of translation. The Turkish azan was exactly this operation. It failed in a way that the vehicle model cannot explain, and the failure is the thing I keep returning to.
Charles Hirschkind, an anthropologist who spent time in Cairo in the 1990s, was interested in something adjacent: why men who already knew the content of popular religious cassette sermons were listening to the same recordings again and again, on buses, in taxis, walking home. When he went back to the classical Islamic scholarly literature to understand this, he found a developed science of listening — not rhetoric, not the art of speaking, but a detailed practice of receiving sound correctly. How to hold the body while hearing quran. What physical responses — tears, a tightening in the chest, the breath changing — were understood as signs of the heart beginning to turn in the right direction. The tradition’s claim, as Hirschkind reconstructs it, is not that the voice transmits something to you. It is that repeated encounter with the voice makes you into something. The sounds are not a vehicle. They are a technology of the self, which is a phrase Hirschkind borrows from Michel Foucault and which does something strange when placed inside a premodern tradition that arrived at the same idea without Foucault’s help.
This reframe makes the Turkish azan’s failure coherent: the sounds were the practice, not the delivery mechanism for the practice. Replace the sounds and you have not translated the azan; you have ended it. But the reframe also opens something else: If the voice forms the person who hears it — training the body’s responses, making certain interior states available to it over time — then the question of who hears becomes a different kind of question. Pooyan Tamimi Arab, in his study of legal and political fights over the azan in the Netherlands, found that opposition to broadcasting the call to prayer was never actually about volume. The secular city tolerates enormous amounts of noise, think about it: traffic, church bells, concerts, people talking. What it resists is religious sound that crosses the boundary between inside and outside without asking permission. You can choose not to enter a mosque. You cannot choose not to hear the azan if you are in its range. And if the tradition is right about what the sounds do — if the voice does work on the body that receives it, forming and not merely informing — then something is crossing the threshold of the non-Muslim neighbour’s skin without consent. The discomfort is not paranoia. It is, in some sense, theologically accurate.
I find this genuinely difficult to think with, in the way I trust. It is not a difficulty that resolves into tolerance on one side and intolerance on the other, or into religious rights and secular sensibilities trading places across a legal framework. It is a difficulty about what the body is and what crosses its threshold and whether consent is even the right framework for something that happens before the body has had time to decide. The tradition that insists the sounds cannot be replaced is also the tradition that insists the sounds do something to whoever hears them. These two insistences sit together without embarrassment inside Islamic thought, and I’m not sure the secular frameworks we have for adjudicating religious sound in public space have ever really reckoned with the second one.
Which turns out to be the question at the centre of disgust, too — what crosses the threshold of the body uninvited, what the body knows before the mind has been consulted, where exactly you think you end and the world begins.
For next session: Find one thing you find genuinely disgusting. Not hypothetically, not as a thought experiment — something that produces the bodily response, the recoil, the sensation before the thought arrives to name it. Sit with it long enough to ask: what is this disgust protecting? What does it think the boundary of your body is? If you want, write one paragraph, but specific.
Reading that matters here:
Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia UP, 2006). The argument about formation versus transmission is in Chapter 2; the bodywork of listening is Chapter 4. One of those books that changes what you notice.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape (Edinburgh UP, 2017). The azan in the Netherlands as a case study for what happens when a practice designed to cross thresholds meets a secularism that believes religion should stay inside. Directly useful if you live in Europe and have ever had a thought about church bells.
Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford UP, 2005). A philosopher asking what is irreducibly particular about a voice — what is lost when voice is reduced to the content it carries. Counterpoint to everything the standardisation of Quranic recitation demands, and worth holding against Hirschkind.
Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar
. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (11. Juni 2026). what the voice was carrying. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 15. Oktober 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/16du8