A spectacular implication of the granting of multiparty democracy and attendant civil liberties in Mali in 1992 has been the political strengthening of Muslim activists who understand themselves as supporters of Islamic moral renewal.Footnote ¹ The marked presence of these activists in Mali's public arenas and their views on social and personal moral reform parallel revivalist trends in other Muslim-majority countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Also similar to developments elsewhere in the Muslim world is the vocal and visible role women claim for themselves in the Islamic renewal movement in Mali. Here, the effort of female Muslim activists to invite others to join their “search for greater closeness to God” (k'i surunya ala ma)Footnote ² leads them to place special weight on the public practice of their religiosity.Footnote ³

Most strikingly, a number of older women have recently begun to disseminate their call for personal moral reform on private radio stations and via audio recordings, capitalizing on the widespread use of these technologies and on the newly diversified landscape of private media that emerged after the political liberalization of the early 1990s. These women are often the highly respected leaders of “Muslim women's groups” (singular, silame musow ton), founded at the neighborhood level to offer women instruction in religious matters and Arabic literacy. Their radio lectures, as well as the tape-recorded versions of these lectures, are highly popular among supporters of Islamic renewal, including members of the Muslim women's groups, who address them with the honorific term hadja. The hadjas often stress that they are not Muslim “teachers” (singular, karamògò) and do not voice independent interpretations but merely offer “moral lessons” (ladili), a category of edifying speech in which older women are expected to engage.

Still, the acceptability of their appearance on radio is questioned by religious leaders who belong to the traditional ʿulamaʾ as well as by some male proponents of Islamic renewal. An example is the following excerpt from a sermon delivered in 2006 by a preacher on Radio Dambe, a private Islamic station located in Mali's capital Bamako:

As the sermon illustrates, critics of the radio-mediated interventions of the female group leaders articulate the (contested) Muslim scholarly opinion that women should not be allowed to preach in public because of the seductiveness of their voices. They—somewhat condescendingly—refer to the female leaders as “radio hadjas” and challenge them on two grounds: their lack of modesty and their lack of religious knowledge. But the sermon's repeated references to the mass-mediated nature of women's lectures suggest that more is at stake than a questioning of women's competences and conduct. The quoted passage reveals the speaker's feelings of insecurity about the media-induced dissociation of body and voice and his inability to ascertain the hadja's identity. Yet the followers and other listeners of the female radio preachers hold them in high esteem, stressing their spiritual guidance and often likening their moral advice to the religious instruction offered by male preachers.

My aim in this article is twofold. First, I want to probe whether a closer attention to the voice of the female radio “preachers,” in its function as a medium between them and their listeners, enhances our understanding of the strong resentment their radio-mediated lectures generate in some quarters. My second aim is to understand what role sound reproduction technologies play in the contested, mass-mediated emergence of these women leaders and also in the authority they enjoy among their followers.

In the scholarship on radio broadcasting and its multilayered, sometimes cacophonous soundscape, voice—as a sensuous medium of expression or as a culturally constructed locus of individual autonomy, agency, and authorship—has not received the attention it deserves.Footnote ⁴ Durham Peters points out that “voice” has often been used in a metaphorical rather than material—that is, at once sensuous and physical—sense.Footnote ⁵ Scholars of Islam have pointed to the primary import of speech and recitation as modes of inscribing and transmitting authoritative religious knowledge.Footnote ⁶ In contrast, specific cultural constructions of the voice as a medium of religious authority in different Muslim societies have rarely been studied. A metaphorical use of “voice” similar to that critiqued by Durham Peters is evident in the literature on women's involvement in Islamic revival movements. Here, too, analyses of women's new opportunities to gain a public “voice” often limit themselves to the socio-institutional spaces women claim rather than exploring the role that the female voice itself may play, as a means of expression or as the focal point on which debates over authoritative public speech may center.

The lack of attention to the sensuous, aesthetic, and expressive qualities of voice, and also to its cultural construction as a knowledge medium, is all the more surprising in scholarship on radio as it constitutes the primary means of communication and connection between a radio speaker and his or her listeners. Explorations of the appeal of mass-mediated religion have paid insufficient attention to the social resonances of voice, even though the voice serves as a principal point of reconnaissance between a religious leader or teacher and his audiences. Centering our attention on the voice of female Muslim leaders in Mali who lecture on local radio is of central import if we want to understand how their followers become attuned to and validate their moral lessons as valuable religious instruction.

Scholars have made important contributions to our understanding of the subjective meanings and broader social implications of women's participation in Islamic renewal movements. These authors seem to agree that media technologies are conducive to female activism and to the reconfiguration of the gender-specific domains of religious expertise and practice on which they reflect.Footnote ⁷ They take for granted the workings of media technologies in rendering Islam “public” and refrain from examining how the very process of mediating “religion” transforms what is transmitted. I would argue instead that the specifics of these dynamics, and the ways in which particular media technologies facilitate, complicate, and set limits to these processes, deserve further attention.Footnote ⁸ A good illustration is Lara Deeb's important account of the key role played by pious Shiʿi women in Lebanon in reformulating the normative framework for individual and collective action.Footnote ⁹ Women articulate a new model of public piety through publicized acts of devotion that simultaneously hold deeply personal, and often diverse, meanings. Here, too, closer attention to the means and technologies of publicizing piety, and how these media affect—and possibly delimit—what is publicized, could yield important additional insights. Such an endeavor might benefit from the analytical inroads made by authors exploring media objects and practices among Muslim men.Footnote ¹⁰ The challenge is to understand how the introduction of sound technologies inflects what were previously considered authoritative, standardized, and gender-specific forms of religious leadership and how these changes affect in turn the (gendered) subjects of media practice.Footnote ¹¹ Yet rather than simply stress the changes introduced by new media technologies, and the disruptions in the foundations of religious authority they engender, my concern is also to account for important continuities in the ways authority is claimed and assigned and the religious significance of media engagements is generated.Footnote ¹²

THE FEMALE FACE OF ISLAMIC RENEWAL IN MALI

The controversial reception of the “radio hadjas” reveals some of the rifts that have structured the Muslim religious field in Mali for several decades and that have continued after the introduction of multiparty democracy.Footnote ¹³ Invigorated by the ambivalent treatment of Muslim interest groups under presidents Alpha Konaré (1992–2002) and Amadou Touré (since 2002), the activism of supporters of Islamic renewal has spawned new controversies among themselves over what it means to be a proper Muslim and who may legitimately speak in the name of Islam. These controversies come to the fore in public debates on legal reform and other governmental policy and offer a platform for female Muslim activists.Footnote ¹⁴

Female supporters of Islamic renewal refer to themselves as “Muslim women” (silame musow), thereby marking their difference from “other women” (muso tow) who, in their eyes, are not true believers because of their lax attitude toward the Islamic duties of worship. Muslim women, in their efforts to convince “other women” of the necessity to partake in the renewal of society and the self, engage in a range of activities, among them offering assistance and advice to needy neighbors, counseling peers on proper child education, and engaging in joint learning activities aimed at acquiring Arabic literacy and knowledge of proper ritual conduct. Also part of these missionary activities are the moral lessons that female leaders offer to their followers and that, whether delivered during group meetings or on local radio, draw on long-standing conventions of religious moralizing.

Muslim women's learning activities can be seen as the culmination of several interconnected historical transformations. Until the 1970s, religious learning among women was a matter of privileged family background and advanced age status. Prior to and during the colonial period, some older women of elite Muslim background, owing their religious erudition to their fathers’ and husbands’ support, offered religious instruction and moral advice to other women. Their piety and knowledge, and sometimes also their organizational skills, garnered much respect among their female disciples and among broader segments of the local population. The economically privileged position of these women allowed them to lead a life withdrawn from mundane matters and devoted to religious study.Footnote ¹⁵ The majority of Muslim women, in contrast, had a limited knowledge of ritual and doctrinal matters. The written traditions of Islam, whether passed down in Arabic or regional vernaculars, played a limited role in shaping their understandings of correct Muslim practice.Footnote ¹⁶

This distribution of religious knowledge changed with the educational activities initiated by Muslim activists who, after their return from years-long studies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the 1940s, sought to replace the traditional system of Islamic schooling.Footnote ¹⁷ They facilitated access to religious learning for young people and for women, a development that became notable prior to independence (in 1960) and grew even more in the 1980s, when financial support from the Arab Muslim world triggered an unprecedented mushrooming of Muslim educational institutions and an increase in the enrollment of female pupils. This process mirrored developments in other areas of the Muslim world where opportunities to learn about religious and ritual matters were extended to new segments of society, triggering changes in notions of religious authority and proper practice.Footnote ¹⁸ The political liberalization of the early 1990s further reinforced this trend in Mali by providing Muslim activist networks with new spaces for mobilization and for offering religious instruction to adult women. Most current participants in Muslim women's groups are married women between twenty-five and forty-five years of age from the urban middle and lower-middle classes. Their participation is usually based on individual decision, sometimes against the will of parents and in-laws.

The leaders of these groups are women whose advanced age and wealthy family background give them the time and means to engage in moralizing activities. Many of them took private lessons with a male teacher before setting up a Muslim women's group. Their level of erudition and their teachings vary, reflecting the kind of education their teachers received at local schools or at institutions of higher religious learning in North African or other Arab-speaking countries. Lectures broadcast regularly on a commercial radio station in Bamako since 2004 by one group leader, whom I call Hadja Amina, exemplify the kind of the “moral advice” typical of these female educators:

Hadja Amina insists that for a Muslim woman to gain divine salvation, it is enough to follow the Islamic prescripts, whose timeless and unchanging relevance she stresses. Her repeated references to domestic conflicts show that her preoccupation with proper female comportment is also prompted by concerns related to a changing economy of gender relations in urban households and attendant struggles over decision making and control.Footnote ¹⁹

The emphasis Hadja Amina and other female educators place on the collective relevance of personal propriety is in line with the type of moral guidance historically expected of elite Muslim women. Relatively novel, however, is their insistence on the individual responsibility any believer bears for her salvation and on her duty to become a public example of moral excellence. The self-conscious adoption by women of a public persona departs from the historical relegation of female religiosity to an intimate, secluded space within the domestic realm. In contrast to earlier decades, when a woman's search for pious self-perfection led her away from the arena of worldly matters and mundane daily activities, nowadays Muslim women seek public visibility for their ritual activities and thereby posit a close connection between personal piety and its public practice.Footnote ²⁰

Offering moral lessons on local radio programs is only one among several options that female leaders of the renewal movement may pursue in order to extend their moral call to broader constituencies. Another option is simply to set up a Muslim women's learning group at the neighborhood level and to limit their moral lessons to this small circle of female disciples. In fact, the career of a woman who successfully lectures on local radio typically starts with mobilizing devoted followers, or “disciples,” as they refer to themselves. Once a group leader has gained a certain reputation as a “compelling speaker,” she is often solicited by her followers, or by an employee of a local commercial radio station, to extend her moral advice to female radio audiences.

In the following section, and in view of the popularity of these women among their listeners, I explore why their radio-mediated lectures generate such resentment among certain Muslim activists and among those in charge of religious programming on national radio. To do so, I compare reactions to Muslim women's radio-mediated appearances to the ways in which broad segments of the radio audience judge other women who work as program presenters on Mali's numerous local radio stations.

A HETEROGENEOUS TOPOGRAPHY OF RADIO BROADCASTING

The new debates over radio-mediated sermonizing, and, notably, over questions of authoritative “teaching” about Islam, have been fostered by a radical restructuring of the Malian media landscape over the last two decades. Of the more than 150 local radio stations established after the end of President Moussa Traoré's single-party rule in 1991, about 65 percent are commercial stations; the others are (nonprofit) community stations or local relay stations of national radio.Footnote ²¹ The leaders of Muslims women's groups and other proponents of Islamic moral renewal rely mainly on private radio stations and on audio- and videotaped sermons to publicly articulate their views of proper Muslim conduct and practice. The two existing Islamic radio stations, Radio Dambe and Radio Islamique, are commercial stations.Footnote ²² They are run by individuals and organizations representing specific doctrinal and political positions within the highly heterogeneous landscape of Muslim debate. Other Muslim activists often prefer to broadcast their views on “regular” commercial radio stations. The absence of the “radio hadjas” from the programs of Radio Islamique and Radio Dambe is due to the fact that both stations are run by intellectuals who are critical of women's radio-mediated interventions even if they stress that women should play a central role in Islamic renewal.

All local radio stations in Mali broadcast at least one call-in or music program that is run by a female program presenter (in French, animatrice). These animatrices are usually very popular because of their rhetorical gifts, yet many of them confided to me that their path to fame had been hampered by obstacles. Among them was Nantènè Keita, a well-respected animatrice whom I met in 1998, the year she was hired by a leading private radio station in Bamako. Nantène, in her own words, “paid a high price” for her work as the principal presenter of a morning show on the station. As she put it to me in August 2006:

Nantènè's accounts of the allegations she faces, and of her family's pressure to give up her occupation, echo the charges leveled against Muslim women who lecture on local radio.Footnote ²³ In both cases, women's authority to address wider audiences is denigrated because of their suspected indecency and lack of skills. Other parallels between the evaluation of the animatrices and the criticism leveled against the “radio hadjas” are the repeated references to the speaker's voice and to the personal qualities that her voice allegedly reflects. In both cases, the voice is attributed a particular force and capacity to “flatter” and disorient. Listeners seem to fear that the separation of physical presence, body, and voice enabled by radio broadcasting exacerbates the potential for delusion. The widespread criticism female Muslim leaders face whenever they decide to offer their moral lessons on radio cannot be understood independently of the denigration to which female radio presenters are generally exposed.

THE AMBIGUOUS POWERS OF VOICE

To understand the allegations of impropriety and incompetence leveled against female radio speakers, I now take a closer look at the allegation of the supposedly seductive effects of the female voice and examine why metaphors of disembodiment are recurrent in these negative assessments. In the case of the female Muslim leaders who lecture on radio, greater attention to voice is also essential if we want to understand how listeners, through their engagements with individual speakers, become attuned to, and in turn validate, authentic listening experiences. As I often witnessed, listeners who encounter a radio speaker whom they have never met in person recognize the speaker by his or her voice—and elaborate in great detail on its particular characteristics, such as its timbre and its “warmth” or “cutting” nature. Voice not only serves as a major means of personal recognition but is also taken by many listeners as an indicator of a radio speaker's personal qualities, such as trustworthiness and truthfulness. The tendency to detect in a radio speaker's voice traces of these qualities needs to be understood against the background of local appreciations of voice.

In the societies of Sahelian West Africa, speech and voice are taken to have a special potential for mobilizing people's agentive and affective faculties. Voice and speech are considered to “touch” listeners in a physically experienced sense and thereby to move individuals from an attitude of passivity, even reticence, to action and the accomplishment of extraordinary deeds (kewale). In Mali, I often overheard radio listeners, as well as those who followed a “live” speech or song performance, assess the quality of speech by reference to the sensuous and emotional effects it triggered. Speech, and the voice that carried it, was considered successful and “good” when it reached its potential to mobilize a person's sensual, cognitive, and ethical capabilities and to literally push her from stillness to action.Footnote ²⁴ What many listeners consider an innate capacity of speech and voice to drive listeners to action, even against their proper will, has in their eyes a deeply social dimension. At public speech and song performances, I often witnessed people spontaneously applauding a speaker's capacity to inspire in listeners a sense of commonality and sharing. Speech is regarded as effective and good if it “unites” (bèn) people.

Proverbs and idiomatic expressions in Bamanakan highlight the value attributed to the ear and heart as the perceptual organs that enable “hearing” and “heeding” and thus render speech effective.Footnote ²⁵ Whether people are listening to the recitation of genealogy, a song, or a moral lesson, speaking and hearing are crucial in authenticating a good (nyuman) vocal performance. Feeling touched by a voice is regarded as a sign that the speech is effective.Footnote ²⁶ This culturally and socially grounded understanding of the importance of both hearing and speaking hints at the specific resonances of voice in processes of social interaction and, as we will see, of political representation. Yet the strong appreciation of voice and speech is undercut by the suspicion with which many people in Mali and other societies of Sahelian West Africa treat—and speak about—the spoken word. As numerous proverbs illustrate, speech, while seen as constitutive of sociality and human being, is also deeply distrusted because it releases the dangerous forces of delusion and betrayal. In recognition of the enormous potential of the spoken word to affect the human senses and move people to action, proverbs advise people to treat speech with care and to favor silence to speech.Footnote ²⁷

In Malian society, an elaborate social organization of authorized speech (and silence) mirrors the cultural conceptualization of the powerful, potentially disruptive effects of the voice and the spoken word. This mapping of authorized speech involves a distinction between different occasions and social settings for “proper speech” and also a division of society into different social actors: people of free-born or noble origin, the horonw (singular horon), whose social position prevents them from speaking publicly on their own behalf and who therefore need to rely on professional speakers; and people from an endogamous group of artisanal specialists, the nyamakalaw, who are allowed, even expected, to speak up in public. Among the latter is a group of speakers, the so-called jeliw (singular jeli), who make public speech and praise their special occupation.Footnote ²⁸ Nowhere is the ambivalent attitude toward voice and speech in the Mande-speaking cultural realm more evident than in the simultaneous attitude of respect and disdain with which the jeliw, the professional speakers and singers, are talked about and treated.

Historical sources such as reports by travelers and employees of the French colonial administration confirm that already in the 19th century people of free-born origin relied on the speech interventions of jeli speakers as much as they feared them. At that time, the jeliw and other nyamakala families lived next door to powerful and rich families for whom they performed various tasks of social and political mediation.Footnote ²⁹ Throughout the colonial period (and until today), jeli men and women with outstanding musical and rhetorical skills spoke for their patron families at public events and thereby played a crucial role in sustaining and enhancing the latter's honorable reputation. They also assumed important functions in political negotiations. Because loud and self-appreciative speech was (and is) considered unworthy of a person of aristocratic rank, a jeli repeated and elaborated at high volume on what his or her patron uttered at a low voice, thereby assuming the role of “ventriloquator.”Footnote ³⁰

This distribution of political leadership and of authorized and “proper” public speech formed part of the performative construction of political authority in the Mande-speaking cultural realm. In their public speech interventions on behalf of their powerful patrons, the jeliw effected a separation of voice and authorship that was pivotal to the assertion and reaffirmation of political authority. The public speech of a skillful orator was considered (and expected to be) loud and “shameless,” but listeners simultaneously agreed that “good speech” was so compelling that it affected their hearts and minds even against their will. Patrons and audiences felt highly ambivalent about the interventions of jeli speakers whose public speech and knowledge of intimate details of the patron family they both feared and depended upon. Jeli oratory thus stood for the ambiguous nature of speech and its potential for aggrandizement and betrayal. Even today, the jeliw's alleged lack of “sense of shame,” a condition for their public speech interventions, is attributed to them as an innate characteristic. The “shamelessness” is also purposefully manipulated by male and female jeliw who, in public praise interactions with their patrons, exhort the latter to show gratitude through lavish donations.Footnote ³¹ These long-standing ambivalences toward the spoken word shed new light on people's responses to the radio-mediated interventions of female Muslim leaders and other program presenters.

MEDIATIONS AND SEPARATIONS: FEMALE RADIO VOICES

The reminiscences of Nantènè Keita, the female radio presenter whom I quoted previously, suggest that the conventional classification of authorized public speech is still operative. Men and women of nyanamakala origin may legitimately speak up in public and on broadcast media. But when free-born people such as Nantènè—whose family name Keita clearly identifies her as a person of free birthFootnote ³²—work as radio speakers, there is a tendency to judge their mass-mediated intervention differently. Several other radio animatrices from families of free-born descent testified that they were shunned by their parents and social entourage because of their work as radio speakers. In a few cases, fathers even broke with them (at least initially) because of their professional choices. Free-born men, too, occasionally reported public criticism, or pressure from their families, because of their choice of a profession traditionally associated with an inferior social status. Yet the vehemence and venom of commentary on the appearance of new female radio speakers suggest that women are more vulnerable to criticism and defamation. Free-born women face a greater risk than their male counterparts of being charged with a lack of shame and propriety, partly because the realm of public communication generated through radio tends to be associated with the domain of formal politics and thus of male responsibility and power.

There thus exists a dual status- and gender-inflected organization of the legitimate, “proper” public speech of both “regular” program presenters and Muslim preachers and educators. Female radio announcers not of nyamakala origin—whose number has grown with the multiplication of private radio stations since the early 1990s—find themselves in a particularly vulnerable position. But the charges made against female Muslim leaders in particular, and the dismay with which their critics speak of their alleged lack of modesty, suggest that here, too, equivocal feelings about public speech interventions of women are at play. Before examining them further, it is worth considering how, in the past, people's ambivalences about voice and public speech informed their judgment of the moralizing activities of elite Muslim women and whether different standards of evaluation were applied to female and male Muslim “preaching.”

Oral historical testimonies I collected on the changing political significance of jeli praise and on the educational activities of Muslim elite women suggest that in the 1940s and 1950s, the general ambivalence toward the transformative potential of speech prompted contradictory reactions to Muslim women who lectured in semi-public settings.Footnote ³³ Elite Muslim women who were respected for their pious comportment and erudition were often praised by their disciples for their capacity to “move” hearts by their “warm” and “piercing” voice.Footnote ³⁴ These female “educators” did not circulate their moral lessons beyond the confines of strictly female educational settings. Then and today, the “moving” effects of speech, generated by a pious woman, contrasted with the “loud” and “shameless” nature of jeli praise geared toward material recompense.Footnote ³⁵ Sermons by male preachers, who circulated in various public settings and addressed male and female listeners in separate listening contexts, were more commonly assessed with reference to their argument and rhetorical form.

These discrepancies in assessing the lectures of female educators and male preachers are highlighted in the following excerpt from an interview conducted in August 2004 with a granddaughter of Djedo Haidara, whose educational activities in the colonial period are vividly remembered by her disciples today.

This testimony suggests that conventional understandings of the lessons offered by female educators and by male preachers derived from, and reproduced, a gender-specific regime of validating “truthful” and proper speech. This regime was defined both in terms of its (public or domestic) site of performance and in terms of the weight attributed to the voice as compared to content and presentational style. It was deemed proper for elite women to conduct their lectures in a particular speech mode and within a demarcated, semipublic setting, while male preachers were free to move and lecture in a variety of public settings and were less bound by an etiquette of modest speech.

If we compare the reception of female Muslim “educators” to that of the animatrices, it is evident that both categories of radio speakers move on slippery terrain. In some ways, Muslim women who lecture on local radio seem to be operating in a more protected normative sphere than that of the animatrices. They belong to the age-status group of “older” and respectable women, and their lectures can be easily classified (by themselves, their followers, and their critics) as conforming to moral lessons older women are expected to offer. Nevertheless, the criticism leveled against the female Muslim leaders by various opponents illustrates that in their case, too, a gender-specific conceptualization of proper public speech applies, impeding their efforts to promulgate calls for moral renewal.Footnote ³⁶ One could even argue that the implicit charge of seductiveness sometimes leveled against the female leaders constitutes a more serious threat to their credibility than to that of the animatrices, precisely because the former present themselves (and are expected to act) as examples of moral excellence.

So far, I have argued that the ambivalent reactions to the appearances of female Muslim leaders and other women on radio are related to the potential and the dangers that human speech has historically been associated with in Malian society. What remains unexplored is how new technologies of mediation feed into the ambivalences toward female public speech. The particular workings of audio recording technologies have been taken for granted rather than examined. I now show that more is at stake in the strong resentment of radio lectures by Muslim women than a reticence toward the speech of women in public. I argue that the denigration of female educators’ mass-mediated interventions by some male supporters of the renewal movement, and also by those who are in charge of religious programming at the national broadcast station, reflects on the deep ambivalences generated by the separation of the voice from the body and from authorship that audio recording technologies engender. This ambivalence is projected onto the assessment of female preaching activities and feeds into disagreements over who has the authority to speak in public and on behalf of Islam, exemplifying how debates over religious authority and practice may be generated by the integration of new technologies of mediation into established forms of producing and distributing religious knowledge.Footnote ³⁷

The Radio Dambe preacher whom I quoted in the introduction denounces Muslim women's preaching on the grounds that women are not authorized to engage in this activity. Refraining from providing textual support for his claims, he questions the competences of the female educators in ways that reveal a different kind of unease, namely, about the radio-mediated dissociation of voice, physical presence, and authorship, which, in his mind, casts doubt on the authority of the speaker. His dismissal of Muslim women's mass media lectures reveals the ambivalence generated by the disembodiment of voice effected through audio recording technologies, an ambivalence that translates into deep feelings of insecurity about the dissemination of the disembodied female voice.

Such feelings of insecurity reflect on social and technical transformations in the landscape of Muslim debate. In seeking to understand these transformations, I draw inspiration from scholars who examine the specific ways in which media technologies intervene into processes of dis/embodying voice. Thomas Macho retraces how different sound reproduction technologies helped construct a particular relationship between body, voice, and sound in late 19th-century Europe. He illustrates the sustained efforts aiming at re-embodying “voice” whose separation from the body had been effected by technologies of storing and amplifying sound.Footnote ³⁸ John Durham Peters similarly posits a historically contingent relationship between voice and body. Taking the microphone as an example, he argues that it did not generate a disembodiment of voice in any simple sense. Rather, by enabling an auditory “close up,” the microphone helped transport an “uncanny” sense of intimacy and bodily closeness.Footnote ³⁹ Both authors highlight the tension-ridden relationship between voice, recording, and mediation technologies on the one hand and processes of disembodiment on the other. Following their analytical lead, I trace how the relationship between voice, physical presence, authorship, and authority has been historically organized in this area of West Africa and how new technologies of mediation intervene into these constructions.

As I mentioned earlier, the performative construction of political authority in the Mande-speaking cultural realm of southern Mali historically hinged on a division of labor between families of free birth and professional praise speakers and singers. In the colonial period, and until today, jeli men and women performed important tasks of political mediation. By elaborating at high volume on what their patrons had to say, they effected a separation of voice and authorship considered essential to the performance of political authority. A jeli speaker's physical presence served as both a prerequisite for and a guarantee of the reliability of his or her assertions. For a jeli and a patron to share the same time-space signaled their involvement in a long-lasting patron–client relation. The physical presence of the jeli speaker-as-ventriloquator, his embodiment of the patron's voice, was a sign of the veracity of both jeli speech and the patron's claim to political leadership. Whereas a jeli's speech involved a separation of voice from political authority, its effectiveness depended upon the inseparability of (his) voice and body and thus on his embodied—and embodiment of—voice.Footnote ⁴⁰

Jeli clients and the social hierarchy for which they stood were in competition with the moral and social universe represented by Muslim scholars and traders. The “jeli principle” of ventriloquation—that is, the separation of voice from authorship on which the performative construction of political authority rested—was conceptually opposed to Muslim religious authority, which was based on the union of voice and authorship in the person of the (male) preacher. Religious preaching and jeli speech also followed contrasting speech etiquettes. While loud and “shameless” speech was considered a characteristic feature of jeli oratory, male preachers were expected to display self-restraint through controlled, low-pitched speech. Elite Muslim women and their lecturing activities similarly contrasted to those of jeli women: Muslim women's teaching activities were relegated to same-sex, domestic, and semi-public settings, and Muslim women's low-pitched, “dignified” speech contrasted with the loud and “shameless” oratory style of jeli women.

The adoption of radio broadcasting technologies, and the reliance of the first two governments of independent Mali on jeli praise as a mode of promoting government policy, reinforced people's ambivalences toward jeli speech as a medium of political power. Radio-mediated jeli praise gradually came to represent the empty rhetoric of Mali's different political regimes. Disembodied praise (on behalf of patrons who had a similarly evanescent presence in radio broadcasts) increasingly shed doubt on the veracity of jeli speech. Jeli women, more than men, became icons of this “corrupted music” (donkili karabalen), as listeners often described it, because much of the jeli praise broadcast on national radio was sung by women. Several interrelated processes contributed to this shift: the radio-mediated dissociation of voice and embodiment; the uprooting of jeli praise from its original context of long-term patronage relations along with its concomitant integration into the institutional context of state politics and its commodification; and a greater prominence of female praise singers on national media. For the purpose of the following discussion, I will focus on the first process to argue that the radio-mediated disembodiment of voice reinforced listeners’ insecurities about the powers and dangers of public speech.Footnote ⁴¹

Present-day debates about whether Muslim women are allowed to “preach” on local radio should be considered in the light of broader ambivalences about speech that have been heightened by the radio-mediated separation of body from voice. These ambivalences are presently expressed in the form of gender-specific evaluations of the acceptability of preaching on radio that lend more validity to male preaching than to the lectures of women. Radio sermons by male preachers are widely accepted. Controversies around certain male radio preachers suggest that their disembodied, mass-mediated interventions, too, generate anxieties about the uncontrollable effects of voice. Yet male preachers are questioned primarily by reference to the validity of their textual interpretations and doctrinal argument.Footnote ⁴² The female Muslim leaders who appear on local radio prompt similar insecurities, but these are articulated in a different way. Their credibility is questioned not only on the grounds of interpretive authority but also through a moralizing attack on their alleged lack of modesty.

MEDIATING SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE

Based on my argument that sound recording technologies may strengthen insecurities about the female voice, I will now illustrate that they simultaneously play a role in enhancing the authority that female Muslim leaders hold in the eyes of their followers. One way to approach this matter is to examine how followers relate to the mass-mediated moral advice of their female leaders and what significance they attribute to their own practices of listening. But such an analysis of the ethics of mass-mediated listening, as pioneered by Hirschkind, does not shed light on how the physical qualities (and limitations) of specific media technologies intervene in conventional regimes of validating a truthful moral lesson and, ultimately, affect the interactive making of authority. Therefore, attention will be centered on how the physical properties of individual media products generate and mold the experience of devotional listening and how they thereby partake in the making of the pious disciple.

Most Muslim women whose biweekly learning groups I attended consider the regular listening to sermons, whether delivered live or disseminated on tape or in radio broadcasts,Footnote ⁴³ an integral part of their daily efforts to, as they often put it, “become a better Muslim.” They employ the terms “listening” and “hearing” in ways that establish a correlation between the cognitive, sensual, emotional, and ethical dimensions of these practices. They often contrast “listening” to “just hearing,” conceiving the latter activity as a morally neutral act because it is not conducive to a believer's efforts to create a pious self. It also does not involve a believer's emotions, which is considered essential in rendering moralizing speech effective, compelling the listener to perform deeds (kewale) rather than being “just entertained” (k'i nyanaje) by pleasing sound or speech. Several Muslim women with whom I regularly listened to sermon tape recordings pointed out, time and again, that a teacher's speech may be compelling, but this in itself is not sufficient to move a listener to action. Rather, these women maintained, it was a believer's own responsibility to “open herself up” to the lesson and “take it in” so as to render a teaching's edifying potential effective.Footnote ⁴⁴

The tendency among these believers to correlate the moral and the sensual does not emanate from specific Islamic textual sources and discursive traditions, as in the case of the male supporters of Islamic revival in Cairo discussed by Hirschkind. The views formulated by members of Muslim women's groups in Mali are grounded not in specifically religious understandings but rather in broader cultural conceptions of speaking, listening, and heeding as belonging to an array of morally relevant acts. Thus, although there are striking parallels in the ethical significance attached to the practice of sermon listening highlighted by Hirschkind and by my informants, it would be misleading to interpret the views of Muslim women in Mali primarily as a result of their appropriation of written religious traditions.Footnote ⁴⁵

An observation I made in May 2006, during a visit to the home of Oumou, a long-standing member of a Muslim women's group in Bamako whom I had known since 1994, helps to illustrate how the speech interventions of female Muslim leaders in Mali are validated as authoritative teachings. When I entered the courtyard, I found Oumou in deep conversation with two fellow Muslim women about a radio lecture of their group leader Hadja Salimata that had been lately released on audio cassette. The subject of the women's discussion was not their hadja's moral lesson per se but the question of whether and how her followers would heed her advice. The discussion shifted back and forth between considerations of the daily challenges posed to a woman's patient and lenient behavior and of the advantages and drawbacks this behavior yielded for a woman. Finally, Oumou wrapped up the discussion, to everyone's agreement, with the following words:

Oumou's assessment of the affective and sensuous qualities of her leader's speech and voice offers important clues about the ways Muslim women validate their leader's authority in the very process of listening to her lectures. Muslim women judge their leader's “truthful” advice according to its capacity to affect them. What matters about a moral lesson is its potential to move listeners to action and to mold their emotional dispositional apparatus in ways conducive to their moral transformation. Women such as Oumou take the aural and moral impression a group leader leaves on them as the measurement by which to assess and confirm her claim to excellence. The authority that these listeners assign to their group leaders is predicated on their understanding of the “moving” effects of voice and of voice as an essential medium for facilitating and generating spiritual experience and moral subjectivity.Footnote ⁴⁶ They thereby grant their leaders a role of spiritual guidance that is not exclusively, or even primarily, based on exegetical knowledge.

Audio recording technologies do not introduce a radical break with existing forms of authenticating religious authority in Mali. Muslim women's perception of a leader's voice as a tactile sensation is enhanced, but not generated, by radio broadcasts and audio recordings. The technologies sustain women's sense of shared experience and of emotional identification. Because listeners often find an opportunity to meet the female leader whose radio lectures they follow in person, the remediation of her voice via recording technologies and the attendant disembodiment of her voice do not cause much concern for them. The technologies of mediation allow group leaders to reaffirm a form of leadership that is based as much on informed textual interpretation as it is on sensually mediated feelings of trust, empathy, and shared experience. Whether “new,” “mass,” or “small” media intervene in this process or not, the leader's voice plays an essential role in the mediation of spiritual experience.

RE-COGNIZING AUTHORITY

As we have seen, voice, by encouraging certain perceptive faculties, is a key medium for the interactive generation of the authority of female group leaders. Yet an exclusive focus on Muslim women's appreciation of the moving effects of voice would limit our understanding of how the concrete materiality of different media affects the process of validating spiritual authority. By taking account of the material properties of audio recordings, we might understand what processes of mediation these media objects allow for and what dynamics they foreclose.Footnote ⁴⁷

In thinking about the material and social practices that accompany and experientially ground the use of particular media objects (such as, in the case of Muslim women and their leaders, radio broadcasts and audio recordings), I draw on Jonathan Sterne's distinction between media and technologies.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his discussion of the cultural perceptions and social sensibilities surrounding the emergence of sound reproduction technologies in the long 19th century, Sterne highlights the often arbitrary relationship between certain technologies, their domains of employment, and the cultural values associated with their use. Only with the institutionalization of certain cultural and social practices do individual technologies merge into a set of institutions and conventions henceforth recognized as “media.”

Following Sterne, I want to trace the institutions and values of religious sociality that emerge from Muslim women's practices of circulating and engaging with their leaders’ audiorecorded teachings. The following episode should illustrate my perspective. One day during my research in San, I happened to overhear a conversation between Aminata, one of the founding members of a Muslim women's neighborhood group in the town, and some Muslim women who had come to pay her a visit. As we were all gathering in the “women-only” informal sitting area where Aminata received the many guests that stopped by to solicit her help, Aminata proudly presented a recent acquisition. It was a gift from her younger brother working in far-away Bouaké, Ivory Coast: a huge wooden case, carefully ornamented with flashy bumper stickers featuring a potpourri of sacred verses and iconic representations of the sacred centers of Muslim veneration. The purpose of the case, Aminata explained, was to provide a “dignified” storage place for her group leader's audiorecorded teachings, which deserved to be treated with care and respect. After all, she added, to the murmuring approval of her visitors, these cassettes were palpable proof of their leader's special calling by God. Hence it was her own and her fellow Muslim women's duty to “unite and pay respect to their leader” by treating “her teachings” with due reverence.

Aminata's remark illustrates that she and other followers treat audio recordings as material evidence of their leader's intermediary position between themselves and God. The episode also suggests that the lectures of group leaders, once they are reproduced on tapes and circulate as material objects among Muslim women, materialize, foster, and give symbolic form to the relations of empathy and mutual support among disciples. The audio recordings become tokens of a leader's moral advice; they are the material and symbolic materials that allow disciples to inhabit an experiential space of commensality and of identification with a common cause. Revealing in this respect is the respect and care with which, as I mentioned earlier, Muslim women treat their leader's “sermon” recordings and also the radio recorder on which they follow religious programs. Their deferential treatment of these audio cassettes is also reflected when they reprimand children or visitors for handling a tape without “due respect.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Many Muslim women engage with their leader's audiotaped sermons in ways that extend beyond the immediate listening endeavor and involve diverse modes of attentiveness. Their engagements suggest that they think of the recordings not just as technical vehicles of a message but also as material tokens of the leader's pious disposition and of the sheer possibility of achieving her level of ethical accomplishment. Women's treatment of these media products as materializations of their spiritual quest thus forms an integral part of their daily effort to live up to their leader's example of spiritual excellence. These media forms allow female listeners emotionally to identify with their leader and her moral quest.Footnote ⁵⁰

Muslim women's handling of their leaders’ audiorecorded teachings are representative of how numerous supporters of Islamic moral reform, men and women, relate to these and other material tokens of their leaders’ spiritual guidance. In all these cases, consuming, storing, and circulating audiotapes, in addition to listening to the radio-mediated lectures of their leaders, allows acolytes to perform a range of media engagements, from personal edification to relaxation and debate.Footnote ⁵¹ Radio sermons, and their recirculation via audio recordings, thereby become instrumental in addressing, indexing, and facilitating partly novel forms of religious sociability, some of which challenge established circuits and communities of religious interpretation. Sound recording technologies do not introduce a rupture with earlier experiences of intimacy and sharing but rather sustain and mold them to partly new social effects. Among these effects are, as we have seen, the hotly contested positions of the “radio hadjas” as articulators of Islamic renewal.