than his speech.”^5 Faith, then, lies in accepting a logical contradiction
equivalent to that of the Nicene Creed, a fourth-century Christian eccle-
siastical declaration establishing the consubstantiality of Jesus with God.
Unlike in the Christian tradition, where representation of God was
discussed primarily in visual terms, in Islam the issue of the representation
of God addresses the role of text as the articulation of God–a making
present in sound (and/or letters as representations of sound) rather than in
visual form. Thereby implicated in a logocentric paradigm preferring
speech to writing–God made present through the spoken articulation of
the word and its perpetual re-articulation through text– the Quran
embodies an earthly reflection of God. The Quran becomes a text that,
with God as its omnipresent/absent author, sonically gives presence to the
perpetual divine.^6
The sound of the Quran reenacts the divine utterance that transformed
Muhammad into a prophet. In listening to the Quran, we receive the same
blessing as he did. The reception of revelation is an auditory process,
embodied in the use of the Arabic wordsama(audition)–encompassing
both hearing and understanding.^7 OneHadithclaims that the Prophet said
that the Quran should be recited with the tunes of the Arabs, not with those
of other peoples. The sound of recitation thus conveys both linguistic and
cultural implications.^8 Cantillation is described through two aspects: a
steady even chant withoutflourishes (tertil); and the suggestion of musical
ornamentation that emerges from the text’s intrinsic rhythmic qualities
(tevcid). Traditional Quranic recitation is not accompanied by notation or
instrumentation and is never considered as music. But as Nina Ergin
points out:
Not unlike a musician, a skilled reciter uses such effects as extension of phonemes,
nasalization, pauses, and repetition in a way that will emphasize specific passages,
suggest multiple meanings, and increase dramatic tension. Thus the reciter
enhances the listeners’emotional participation in the text-as-event and involves
them affectively, intellectually, and spiritually. The effects of recitation on the
listeners can be classified into a variety of responses: quiet weeping is even men-
tioned in the Quran itself as an appropriate response.^9(^5) Peters, 1976 : 332; Larkin, 1988 : 44.
(^6) The word‘logocentric’refers here to Jacques Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy, which he
interprets as relying on a deceptive equivalence between binary pairs, initiated in the preference
for presence over absence, and thus speech over writing. The analytic method he develops, called
deconstruction, relies on the articulation and analysis of the otherwise unarticulated gap (called
a supplement or a trace) between these pairs.
(^7) Ergin, 2008 : 212. (^8) al-Faruqi, 1982 : 10. (^9) Ergin, 2008 : 212.
106 Seeing with the Heart