The religious classical

Fishman (Reference Fishman1989) uses the term religious classical to denote the language variety associated with the liturgical and ritual discursive practices of many different faith settings mentioning Qur'anic Arabic, Biblical or prayer book Hebrew, and Ecclesiastical Greek, among others. Ferguson (Reference Ferguson and Cooper1982) uses the term “sacred language” to denote the same variety while Safran (Reference Safran2008), stressing its relation to notions of both sacredness and ancient provenance, and authority and status, suggests “sacerdotal language.” Being a variety almost exclusively tied to a text and reading and recitational practices, “liturgical literacy” has been preferred by some (Rosowsky Reference Rosowsky2008) when describing the educational practices devoted to the acquisition of the religious classical. The practices involving use (and the teaching) of the religious classical include prayer, recital, song, chanting, sacrament, citation, and exclamation, all or some of which are conducted both privately and publicly. It has been recognised by many that the religious classical often has a longevity and protected status in relation to any associated spoken vernaculars or written standard varieties. Ferguson (Reference Ferguson and Cooper1982:101) reminds us that “in voluntary migration… religious affiliation will tend to be language conservative to the greatest extent for the language of sacred texts.” Fishman, likewise, asserts that religious classicals remain “robust features of ethnocultural membership throughout the world” (Reference Fishman1989:229) and are more “resistant to change” (Reference Fishman, Omoniyi and Fishman2006:15). Despite a degree of minimalisation in terms of the acquisition of the religious classical, Safran identifies its acquisition as a key variable in notions of religious identity, stating that “some familiarity with Hebrew has been considered a sine qua non for believers and is studied, albeit often to a minimal extent, by almost all to whom Jewish identity remains important” (Reference Safran2008:186).

It should be borne in mind that in this article I am reporting on and discussing the role of the religious classical exclusively in diaspora and transnational settings where this variety takes its place within the linguistic firmament alongside linguistically unrelated spoken and written vernaculars, majority spoken and written varieties, and other schooled varieties (e.g. the learning of French, German, or Spanish in many English-speaking contexts). The sociolinguistic dynamic in settings where the majority language is related to or is a later (or vernacularised) version of the religious classical (e.g. Classical Arabic alongside modern Standard Arabic in Arabic-speaking settings or Biblical Hebrew in Israel) evinces different resonances and is outside of the remit of this article (but see Haeri Reference Haeri2003).

Practices and linguistic resources

Drawing on Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2010) and his call for an understanding of “language as local practice,” I understand all localisations of the religious classical as being “practices” open to theoretical analysis and not as mere backdrops for the application of underlying or overarching systemic structures. It is through language practice, in this view (Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007), that eventually, through repetition and imitation, “language” becomes “sedimented” and becomes entity-like. I also draw upon anthropological insights around culture, particularly those articulated by Bauman (Reference Bauman1974, Reference Bauman, Silverstein and Urban1996, Reference Bauman2004; Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) concerning binaries such as “text” and “entextualisation” and “context” and “contextualisation”—in turn, part of a broader movement in the social sciences to privilege processes over fixed notions and categories—which reflect the more dynamic processes involved when discursive practices are analysed. In this article I seek to share examples of how performance-oriented religious classical practice “intensifies” (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990:74) the possibility of entextualisation. From such perspectives, languages, varieties, or texts do not exist a priori as systems or structures but are constituted by the discursive and textual practices associated with them (Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007). However, although I suggest that this is a productive way to understand the place of the religious classical vis-à-vis its social setting and its interrelationship with other social practices, including linguistic ones, there are particular characteristics of the religious classical that resist, in part, such an understanding.

A related theoretical consideration impacting on a discussion or definition of the religious classical is Blommaert's insistence (Reference Blommaert2010; Blommaert & Backus Reference Blommaert and Backus2011) that language practice is to be understood not as the mere contextualisation of bounded and fixed entities but as the flow of linguistic resources deployed dynamically and creatively, and inevitably unequally, in social interactions. The linguistic complexity of translocal settings (i.e. urban multilingualism) in the twenty-first century brings into focus the multiplicity of sounds and scripts within and through which human agents negotiate their lived identities. “We are witnessing repertoires here, constructed out of bits and pieces of conventionally defined ‘languages’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010:43).”

Allied to this orientation is the complementary view that multilingual practices are better understood as transidiomatic (Jacquemet Reference Jacquemet2005) or translingual (Garcia Reference Garcia, Makoni and Pennycook2007) processes. This view resists an understanding of multilingualism that implies coexisting but separate monolingual practices. Translanguaging (Garcia Reference Garcia, Makoni and Pennycook2007), or flexible bilingualism (Blackledge & Creese Reference Blackledge and Creese2010, see below), admits the social reality of lived practices deploying linguistic resources rather than human agents operating with and within separate languages. In this way, it becomes more appropriate to include religious classical practices as part of individual and collective linguistic repertoires.

Performance and entextualisation

An important theoretical perspective that appears extremely useful in accounting for religious classical practice is that which draws upon notions of performance and the closely linked cultural processes of entextualisation (Bauman Reference Bauman1974; Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990; Silverstein & Urban Reference Silverstein and Urban1996; Schechner Reference Schechner2002; Carlson Reference Carlson2004). Most religious classical practices, by their nature, are performance-oriented, whether they are aspects of collective ritual, public recitation, or private prayer. Even a solitary individual at prayer assumes a transcendent audience. Religious classical practices, like other performance-oriented practices, often privilege formal and indexical properties of “ritual speech” over referential or propositional meaning (Keane Reference Keane1997:53). There is also perhaps a case for claiming that the religious classical is constituted through these performative practices with little or infrequent referential communicative function, particularly in translocal settings. In other words, the religious classical is “performed rather than pre-formed” and, following Makoni & Pennycook (Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007), one might argue does not exist independent of the practices through which it is constituted. Yet, at the same time, religious classical “texts” are perhaps one of the few examples in discursive practices more generally where one could propose an ontological reality outside of performance and practice. Although we must be wary of conflating “text” with text-artifact (Silverstein & Urban Reference Silverstein and Urban1996:2), it is self-evident in many religious classical settings that a sacred text in a variety of guises appears to “exist” independently of the discursive practices that surround it. It is this characteristic of the religious classical that demands special attention in any analysis of religious classical practice.

Entextualisation—“the process of rendering discourse extractable” (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990:73)—is a key characteristic of performance-oriented communicative practices. First, “the performance forms of a society tend to be among the most markedly entextualised” and, as such, performance forms and genres “tend to be among the most consciously traditionalised in a community's communicative repertoire” (Bauman Reference Bauman2004:8). Furthermore, where ritual speech is concerned, and religious classical practice is invariably a form of ritual speech, entextualisation is characterised by faithful and close adherence to past performances as participants engage in practices that rely heavily on the preserved sacred texts of their traditions. In many instances, religious classical performance can be understood as further entextualisation of an extant entextualisation. Unlike a folk tale that, despite its formal distinctiveness, still shares in the warp and woof of everyday discourse, the original flow of discourse from which the religious classical text has been extracted is often no longer available. Indeed, in emic terms, even the first entextualisation (e.g. the Qur'an at the time of revelation) is but an entextualisation of a transcendental entextualisation (for example, this is the ‘Mother of the Book’ or Um-al-Kitab, in Islamic tradition), which exists in the heavens.

Unlike Austin (Reference Austin1962:22), who considers artful language practice as “parasitic” on “normal use,” Bauman, with a view to unifying “marked, segregated Kantian aesthetic genres” (Reference Bauman1974:291) with other naturally occurring spheres of verbal behaviour, interprets such language practice more positively as performance-oriented and argues that the performance element in such activity draws attention, from an audience, to the act of expression itself, beyond its referential function. He draws attention to two crucial features of performance. First, performance is accountable and subject to the evaluation of an audience: “Performance involves on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content…” (Bauman Reference Bauman1974:293). There are notions here of striving for authenticity and accuracy, of the performer “getting it right.” Second, performance makes available to an audience the “enhancement of experience”: “it is marked as available for the enhancement of experience, through the present enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression itself (ibid.).”

Schechner (Reference Schechner1988) ascribes even greater salience to those acts of repetition that, according to Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin1981), are the normal state of affairs in language utterance: “[W]hat is of interest here isn't the matter of myth but the power of repetition and naming… and the belief that language (i.e. poetry) can make-things-present by naming them” (Rothenburg Reference Rothenberg1968, cited in Schechner Reference Schechner1988:60).

This “naming,” a minimal form of entextualisation, is reminiscent of Baker's (Reference Baker and Boyarin1993) work with the Tidorese and their religious classical practice (Qur'anic) where he draws a distinction between the act of “comprehending” and the act of “apprehending,” where apprehending, he suggests, means “coming to grips with what there is to know without necessarily knowing how to subject it to predications, that is, to adequately comprehend it” (Baker Reference Baker and Boyarin1993:108). He also suggests that this apprehension has a lot to do with the repetition of substantive nouns. Although Baker asserts the “invariance” of the recitations, he notes that “many of the verses that are regularly uttered aloud are learned from hearing others recite” (Baker Reference Baker and Boyarin1993:103) and, as such, again following Bakhtin's notion (Reference Bakhtin1981:293) of the dialogic nature of language (“we are always using others' words”), are, at one and the same time, invariant and created anew. Baker allows this perspective to direct the greater part of his commentary on the Kalaodi literacy practices and singles out names as playing an important part in the apprehension of the foreignness of the Arabic. In what might be interpreted as an infinite regress of entextualisation, and an example of how performance intensifies entextualisation (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990:74), he writes: “Not understanding Arabic myself, I can attest from listening to recitations that proper names flash out as recognisable entities in a stream of pleasingly lyrical but uncomprehended utterances” (Baker Reference Baker and Boyarin1993:110).

Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2010) also problematises certain dichotomies such as “sameness and difference,” “creativity and repetition,” arguing that, on the one hand, the linguistic norm is more likely to be difference rather than sameness, and, on the other, that all creativity involves repetition with the important caveat that authentic repetition is impossible, because there is always (re)localisation determined by temporal or spatial considerations and circumstances. This links to Schechner's definition of performance as meaning “never for the first time” (Reference Schechner1985:36).

What is useful for our discussion of religious classical practices is how foregrounded and characteristic the notion of “repetition” becomes: “Language repetitions, imitations and re-localisations as creative acts may be at least as significant for language learning as acts of creative construction or individual difference” (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2010:139). Furthermore, Bauman (Reference Bauman1974:303) describes a continuum in verbal art that has at one pole performances with “word-for-word fidelity” to a fixed text and at the other novel, or “generated anew,” performances that allow for more negotiated elements. Bauman (Reference Bauman2004) reminds us also that in terms of “source” utterances (the “original”) and “target” utterances (the “copy”), the more faithful the latter is to the former, the more authoritative it appears, and, conversely, where intertextual gaps appear between them, the more scope there is for more negotiated and novel performances.

Religious classical performances, as outlined below, tend in the main to minimise these “intertextual gaps” and demonstrate much more regular verbatim fidelity to the “source” utterance. Where intertextual gaps appear, invariably other linguistic resources are involved (see extract (9)).

This reworking, or entextualisation, of the already existing words of others, echoes Schechner's (Reference Schechner2002:28) notion of restored behaviour as a feature of performance, and is the very stuff of religious classical practices.

Naturally, in the light of the above, the role of the audience becomes key in any discussion or description of performance-oriented social practice. A function of the audience is knowledge of “what the performer is trying to do” and performance theorists (Schechner & Schumann Reference Schechner and Schuman1976; Schechner Reference Schechner1988, Reference Schechner2002; Carlson Reference Carlson2004) make the distinction between “efficacy” and “entertainment” and suggest that all performance-oriented practice occupies a place along a continuum stretching between these two poles. Here, efficacious performance is generally more associated with ritual and is about getting “results,” often otherworldly. At this end of what he calls “the efficacy-entertainment braid,” the “audience participates,” “believes,” and is “discouraged” from criticism, and there is often a “link to an absent Other” (Schechner Reference Schechner1988:120).

Religious classical practices are, by their nature as understood by their participants, about “results” and about “transformation.”

However, religious classical practice problematises the notion of both agency and audience. On the one hand, when performance in this sense sits quite squarely at the pole of the continuum which foregrounds word-for-word and faithful replication of sacred script, the relationship between the performer and the text recited is one of “copier” as distinct from the “originator,” which is distant temporally, often geographically, and nearly always linguistically. This has the effect of increasing the “boundedness and autonomous character of certain stretches of discourse” and encouraging “the perception that the words come from some source beyond the present context” (Keane Reference Keane1997:53). There is also a particular closed circle of entextualisation taking place here for, as Keane observes: “When scripture is believed to report the actual words of divine revelation, the act of reading aloud effectively closes the circuit from utterance in context to written text and back to utterance again” (Keane Reference Keane1997:63).

This dialectical relationship between entextualisation and contextualisation stresses the boundary between text and context. For example, when ritual language remains incomprehensible to listeners, it maintains a separation between the otherworldly and the mundane, or between authority and compliance. “Because language use moves between the poles of entextualization and contextualization, speech events can also stress the boundary between text and context—as when ritual language remains incomprehensible to listeners—maintaining the separation between worlds” (Keane Reference Keane1997:64).

On the other hand, audience, while more conventional in role at congregational prayer and public recitation, becomes less straightforward when an individual recites in prayer alone, where his audience is the transcendent divine. In prayer, recitation, and citation there is always a transcendent agenda. Indeed, when such practices move along the continuum too far towards “entertainment,” participants can be the target of criticism and accusations of inappropriacy, secularisation, or even sacrilege.

Bauman & Briggs (Reference Bauman and Briggs1990:76) remind us that any analysis of performance should include how that performance reflects, shapes, or constitutes broader social processes and functions. Religious classical performance is obviously enmeshed within broader social, cultural, and religious practices both collectively and individually. However, there are moments when it breaks out of such delineating parameters to take on broader, more dramatic functions. An illustration of this is the 2011 Arab Spring Uprising, which was publicly and globally shared through the transmodal (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2007:49) affordances of the informational age (Castells Reference Castells2000). The entire period of the uprising was punctuated weekly by calls for nonviolent protest at and after Friday prayers. This reliance on the moment of prayer, and therefore a reliance on religious classical practice, underpinned the attempt to galvanise, inspire, and sustain momentum for the protest movement. These rallying calls were punctuated by the call to prayer in Classical Arabic of the muezzin, the orchestrated and collective bodily enactments of thousands listening, responding, and moving to the performative utterances of the ritual prayer, played out simultaneously before an audience of millions on satellite television and on YouTube. Individually and collectively, the religious classical is physically embedded in much wider social, and here, political practice.

Finally, another linguistic resource invoking religious classical practice is the phatic utterance. Here, performers and audience members signal performance-oriented practice by uttering words and phrases in a phatic strategy that often initiates a religious classical performance (prayer or recital or citation) and constructs audience behaviour. During a public recitation of the Qur'an, for example, audience members, at key pauses such as at the end of crescendos, will utter the phatic exclamation subhanallah ‘glory to God!’ in order to express approval (see below). Beyond the referential content of the phrase, this linguistic resource forms part of the communicative repertoires of both audience and performer, who would think there was something awry with the recitation if no subhanallah!'s were forthcoming from audience members (Schechner Reference Schechner1988). This public recitation, often to an integral audience of noncomprehending believers, is an instance of what Carlson might argue (2004:79) as “communication carried out above and beyond its referential content.”

Religious classical practices

The widespread discursive practices involving the religious classical demand an account that is more nuanced than it being just another “variety.” The latter term suggests a pregiven and preformed entity that the foregoing discussion appears to complicate. It is even more appropriate in translocal settings, where linguistic repertoires appear “truncated” and “fragmented” (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010:23) and “messy” (Heller Reference Heller and Heller2007:12), to further account for the place of religious classical practice given that it features prominently in these multilingual or multivarietal settings. It would be unwise to marginalise its importance in a similar way to the way Austin (Reference Austin1962) consigned “artful” communication to an analytical backwater.

Though sharing in the vicissitudes and fluidity of other linguistic resources in these settings, the bounded and script-like characteristics of the religious classical are perhaps more akin to scripted theatrical performance than they are to communicative realisations of underlying competence in the religious classical itself. Of course, there are important differences too. In theatrical performance the audience is invited to infer and to construct meaning around plot, character, and relationships lying under the dialogue, whereas in religious classical practices this is not the case. Moreover, in the paradigm outlined above where language practices come to constitute competence, which is not underlying but is sedimented through repeated usage, religious classical practices, by their nature dependent on sacred texts, are perhaps more usefully interpreted through the lens of entextualisation (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990). There is no question of these practices being quintessentially rehearsed and repeated and as social practices must be laying down sedimented traces. Linguistically, one might suggest religious classical practices lead to a grasp of phoneme-grapheme correspondences—a sense of prosody, metre, rhyme, or rhythm, a potential for “apprehending the word” (Baker Reference Baker and Boyarin1993). However, they still fall short of constituting communicatively referential practice and remain characterised often by a high degree of “semantic poverty” (Keane Reference Keane1997:52). Bauman & Briggs (Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) argue for the saliency of performance-oriented speech acts within theories of linguistics. Yet, here also, the religious classical appears to resist neat categorization, for its definition as a speech act, however defined, is inadequate. It is clear that the analytical tools of “practices,” “resources,” and “repertoires” appear to be only partially useful in accounting for the religious classical sociolinguistically. It is perhaps the interpretive frame of performance, and the accompanying notions of entextualisation, that can best deal with religious classical practice, and it is this that forms the content of the rest of this article.

To exemplify religious classical practices as enacted and performed in translocal and translingual settings, I draw upon data gathered over a period of ten years from Muslim participants in a study examining liturgical literacy practices in two northern towns in the UK. Participant observations, semistructured and unstructured interviews, and questionnaires sought to shed light on marginalised and often misrepresented literacy practices in these settings. The religious classical practices examined involved Qur'anic literacy and prayer and ritualised practices derived therefrom. The settings involved family homes, community settings such as the mosque, and their accompanying complementary schools.

Faith-based complementary schooling

Complementary schools in general are ideal sites for exploring transidiomatic (Jacquemet Reference Jacquemet2005:265) or translingual (Williams Reference Williams, Williams, Lewis and Baker1996, cited in Baker Reference Baker2001:281; Garcia Reference Garcia, Makoni and Pennycook2007:xiii) language practices. Blackledge & Creese (Reference Blackledge and Creese2010) reveal the shifting and fluid patterns of language use in a number of UK complementary schools that confirm the need to go beyond unitary concepts of language, code, and nation-state (Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007) when explaining the use of linguistic resources within complex and sometimes contradictory trajectories of teaching and learning language and culture. Developing the notion of “translanguaging” as an analytical tool, they advocate “flexible bilingualism” as a way to describe and account for the ways their young subjects (and some of their teachers) conceptualise their language use in contradistinction to notions of separate bilingualism (or dual or multiple monolingualism), which presuppose quite distinct development and use of two or more codes distinguished by function and domain.

In faith-based complementary schools—the studies of Creese and Blackledge and others are set in mainly secular, “national heritage”-based institutions—“religious texts” and “traces of past times” have more salience and are foregrounded. Nevertheless, the complex presence of multivarietal repertoires, not necessarily “proficiencies” or “competence” persists.

The participants in the study have a variety of Punjabi as their home or community language (known variously as Mirpuri-Punjabi, Pahari, or Pothwari—see Lothers & Lothers Reference Lothers and Lothers2010), but this variety, as the preferred language for interpeer and intergenerational communication, is undergoing shift to English. Urdu, an accompanying prestigious and co-sanctified (Fishman Reference Fishman, Omoniyi and Fishman2006:21) variety in those families with an Urdu tradition, is experiencing a similar shift (Rosowsky Reference Rosowsky2008, Reference Rosowsky2010). For these Muslim participants, language practices are simultaneously rich, resourceful, and “messy” (Heller Reference Heller and Heller2007:12). Their religious classical resources interlace other social and language practices to a lesser or greater degree dependent on time and place considerations. The religious classical regularly punctuates everyday discourse in the form of entextualised exclamations and interjections. Classical Arabic phrases such as insh'allah ‘if God wills it,’ al-hamdulillah ‘God be praised,’ and subhanallah ‘glory to God’ permeate much conversation. In Urdu sermons religious classical examples are cited and explained. Classical Arabic citation is a major part of environmental print (Gorter Reference Gorter2006) as it appears on artifacts such as plaques, posters, and other wall hangings in homes and in mosques and their complementary schools. In ritual, the religious classical is used almost exclusively, both privately and publicly. In the Friday sermon, the vernacular is clearly and sequentially demarcated from the formalised ritual of the Classical Arabic khutbah ‘sermon,’ and in private prayer, vernacular supplication occurs only after the exclusively religious classical rites have been completed. There is, therefore, a continuum of performance-oriented practice involving the religious classical that has at one pole spontaneous but stylised (Rampton Reference Rampton2006) interjections and exclamations and at the other exclusively religious classical ritual and recitation. Moreover, the religious classical is both uttered (recited, declaimed, rehearsed, reiterated, repeated) and is apprehended (Baker Reference Baker and Boyarin1993) by an audience, even when this audience is a “transcendent Other” (Schechner Reference Schechner1988:142), as in prayer and other ritualised practices. These performance-oriented practices come to constitute the religious classical rather than their being the recontextualisation of a preexisting competence or system. In the case of religious classical practices, it would be troublesome to think of them in any other way.

Performance-oriented religious classical practices

In what follows, I hope to account for religious classical practices through the frame of performance. This framework draws substantially upon Bauman's understanding that verbal art is about generating words “anew in performance” (Reference Bauman1974:303). “Performance sets up, or represents, an interpretative frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood, and that this frame contrasts with at least one other frame, the literal” (1974:292). Insights from anthropology are useful here and, in particular, the notion of “keying in” of performance frames (Goffman Reference Goffman1974). Framing is achieved through a set of culturally agreed metacommunicative, or paralinguistic, conventions that sets up a frame within which performance-oriented practice takes place and can be understood. Bauman suggests a number of such conventions, some of which are listed below (quoted from Bauman Reference Bauman1974:295).

• • special codes, e.g., archaic or esoteric language, reserved for and diagnostic of performance

• • special formulae that signal performance, such as conventional openings and closings, or explicit statements announcing or asserting performance

• • formal stylistic devices, such as rhyme, vowel harmony

• • special prosodic patterns of tempo, stress, pitch

• • special paralinguistic patterns of voice quality and vocalization

He stresses that such lists are inevitably culturally contingent and what frames performance in one context will not in another, or will invoke another frame entirely. For example, the recitation of the English Bible in an Anglican context has very different keys to performance than the recitation of Ecclesiastical Greek in an orthodox service. The performance of Russian poetry by its authors is very different to a recital of modern English poetry (flamboyance versus deadpan), though each is a performance in its own context.

This “communication about communication” adds up to a range of implicit and explicit messages that communicate how to interpret performance-oriented practices. It should be possible, therefore, understanding religious classical practice through performance, to use such a frame to account for religious classical practices as they appear in early twenty-first-century translocal settings. For the purposes of the following analysis, I draw upon these conventions in turn.

Furthermore, one of the distinguishing features of the religious classical is its intimate connection to text. Perhaps more than in any other language practice, the centrality of a bounded and autonomous text or group of texts determining all ritual utterances appears to resist theories of fluid linguistic resources. The contextualisation of religious classical practices inevitably entails the regular and unrelenting entextualisation of the relevant sacred texts. This process, too, is drawn upon to account in the analysis that follows.

In what follows, I present examples of religious classical practices gathered in a number of settings that draw on those constituitive linguistic resources and repertoires that participants deploy in the negotiation of their translingual identities. These take the form of quotations from transcribed semistructured interviews with the author and extracts from field notes. On one occasion I also draw on the data gathered in a survey conducted among young British Muslims designed to gather views on religious and language practices.

Special codes, e.g., archaic or esoteric language, reserved for and diagnostic of performance (Bauman Reference Bauman1974:295)

First, it is perhaps self-evident that archaic language is an invariable feature of the religious classical practice.

The first philologists and the first linguists were always and everywhere priests. History knows no nation whose sacred writings or oral tradition were not to some degree in a language foreign and incomprehensible to the profane… [O]rientation [toward the alien, foreign word] is the expression of the enormous historical role that the alien word has played in the formation of all the historical cultures. (Voloshinov Reference Vološinov1986, cited in Haeri Reference Haeri2003:1)

In the first extract below, we witness a young participant (Latif) in religious classical practices commenting on his emotional response as a member of an audience to a Qur'anic recitation.

1. (1) I never understood but I liked the tone or the expressions of the person reciting or the reaction of the audience. What is this person saying that is getting so many people smiling? (Latif)

Here we are reminded of the philosopher George Berkeley's comments when he stated: “I think an Humble Implicit Faith becomes us just (where we cannot comprehend & understand the proposition) such as a popish peasant gives to propositions he hears at Mass in Latin” (Berkeley Reference Berkeley and Ayres1871/1989).

This “performance in a perfunctory key” Bauman (Reference Bauman1974:298) interprets as a “means of preserving performance forms for later invigoration and restoration to the level of full performance.” In this relocalisation, or recontextualisation, of religious classical practice, “the level of full performance” is attainable only after serious and long periods of study and would not necessarily be an aspiration for all erstwhile performers, as all practicing Muslims are when engaging in religious classical practices. The following exchange is between the author and a young and very competent hafiz Footnote ¹ of the Qur'an.

(2) A: Author, L: Latif

The limitations on understanding imposed by such “alien” words lead to a reliance on discrete “words” rather than longer units of meaning. In extract (3), a student at the complementary school is asked about what he understands in prayer and in recitation.

(3) A: Author, W: Wajid

This is the “apprehension of the name” that Baker (Reference Baker and Boyarin1993, see above) observed with adherents of the same religion on the other side of the globe to these South Yorkshire worshippers. This entextualisation within entextualisation (or “intensified entextualisation,” Bauman Reference Bauman2004) is a very concrete example of how the latter process abstracts text for performance.

1. (4) We understand the names… (Khaleel)

2. (5) They stand out because you recognise them… (Rashida)

Performance is at the heart of much religious classical practice with prayer and recitation acknowledged emically as performance-oriented practices rather than more conventionally communicative ones.

1. (6) but because when they have to read the salah,Footnote ⁴ the salah is going to be performed in Arabic. (Munir)

2. (7) the durood Footnote ⁵ is going to be performed in Arabic, you can read the meaning in English if you want to read it, but the actual pronunciation for you to ask to send durood, to send salaam, to read your prayers, you know, salah, it would be observed better in Arabic. (Munir)

Here there is recognition that the “archaic and esoteric” language is reserved (and thus preserved) for the performance of religious classical practice to an extent that such practice would be considered inferior or even sacrilegious if carried out in the vernacular. Even in practices involving co-sanctified varieties (see below), “outsider” languages, such as English, are considered inappropriate (see Rosowsky Reference Rosowsky2011). The original language (the “source utterance”) of the sacred text and its word-for-word fidelity here (“performed in Arabic”) heightens authority and formality and also suppresses referential or propositional meaning (Keane Reference Keane1997). “The entextualisation of the source utterance and its replication in the target utterance in such a way that the intertextual gap is minimised is a potent means of infusing the discourse with authority” (Bauman Reference Bauman2004:157).

Special formulae that signal performance, such as conventional openings and closings, or explicit statements announcing or asserting performance (Bauman Reference Bauman1974:295)

In what Fabb calls “certain kinds of beginning” and “certain kinds of ending” (Reference Fabb1997:224), the start of a performance is keyed in by conventions that alert an audience to what is to come. In this religious classical practice a number of phrases and metalinguistic acts communicate, for example, the beginning of the performance of prayer, of recitation, or of citation. In private and in public, hands raised to the ears and the utterance of the Arabic words allahu akbar ‘God is great,’ accompanied by a physical orientation towards Mecca, signal a performative transition from the everyday to the transcendent. This is reminiscent of those liminal acts identified by Turner (Reference Turner1969) that signal a transitional movement from one state—the mundane—to another—the transcendent. The audible clearing of the throat (and nowadays the scratching and bumping of a microphone) followed by the Arabic words audhu billahi min-ashaytan ar-rajim ‘I seek refuge in the accursed Satan’ announces to an audience the beginning, and the phrase sadaq allah al adheem ‘what God Almighty says is true’ the end, of a publicly performed recitation of the Qur'an. This power of naming is perhaps what Rothenberg refers to when he writes, “language (i.e. poetry) can make-things-present by naming them” (Rothenberg Reference Rothenberg1968, cited in Schechner Reference Schechner1988:60).

On a Friday, the imam mounts the steps of his pulpit (mimbar), deliberately and carefully, in a liminal performance designed to signal the movement from preliminary individual prayers to congregational attention. The latter, too, keys performance as the words of the recited/performed sermon are in Classical Arabic and the audience is not expected to comprehend (again, as I have stressed before, this is not the case in the Arabic-speaking world). In some settings (mainly South Asian ones), moreover, a certain way of sitting on the floor will accompany this performance of attention. This sitting itself is performative. When the imam makes the traditional pause between the two halves of the Friday sermon, the congregation, as one, shift in their posture, and adopt a different sitting position for the second half of the sermon. Schechner (Reference Schechner1988) would place such performance as towards the efficacy pole of the efficacy-entertainment continuum where the audience is as much a participant as the overt performer on the pulpit. Performative movement also takes place on a larger scale with the pilgrim participating in a vast range of religious classical practices while journeying to and staying at the place of pilgrimage (Schechner Reference Schechner2002) and emphasises Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu1990) insistence on “the body as a site for the rituals of performativity” (Carlson Reference Carlson2004:79).

1. (8) Before I went on Hajj Footnote ⁶ I wrote a few naat down and thought that whilst I was there I would present them. (Akhtar)

(9) A: Author, M: Mahmood

Much of the ritual performance of the Hajj involves religious classical utterances, though when Mahmood wants to be sincere he will speak in English. This is that “widening of the intertextual gap” (Bauman Reference Bauman2004:158) which allows for the infiltration of the source utterance by the target utterance (here understood as the spoken vernacular of the participant) and “becomes a means of sharing or diffusing authority” (ibid.) for now the plaintiff can address the divine through their own words rather than the authoritative word of the religious classical. For Mahmood there is something inauthentic about a supplication in a language he struggles to comprehend.

Formal stylistic devices, such as rhyme, vowel harmony, other forms of parallelism (Bauman Reference Bauman1974:295)

Religious classical resources include an awareness of sensitivity to matters of rhyme and assonance, which, though not linked to referential meaning, provide reciters with familiar patterns of sound collocation that, in the first place, aid memorisation, and, in the second place, acquaint the reciters with the sound system of the classical language. There is also an ever-increasing mastery of phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

1. (10) and I used to read it [a Qur'anic verse] as rabbi-jaalni-muqima-salati-wa-min-thuriyaati.Footnote ⁸ It was because it was transliterated, the punctuation, the sounding of words, seemed concrete, seemed precise… but there were certain points where you were supposed to raise your voice and extend it and whatever, you know. (Mahmood)

The key to such mastery is the quintessential repetition of recitation. The daily recitation of religious classical practices not only leads to ever-confident or ever-automatic performance, but also to that grasp of an entity-like language practice that emerges from these constant, sedimented repetitions.

1. (11) it is a principle to teach the child bismillahi rahmani rahim Footnote ⁹ so at least the parents, they have all their sins forgiven… so that's verbally. That will be repeated every single day until it sinks into the child's mind. (Shabbir)

The sedimented result of such repetition in the case of religious classical practices is very much tied into the memorisation and repetition of a text, the Qur'an. This is perhaps where such practices have more associative resonance with other scripted performances such as those in other aesthetic genres such as plays and films. It might be argued that just such a performative-oriented theorisation of the religious classical has more validity than one that posits the religious classical as merely a language variety, which, by implication, suggests at least a modicum of communicative and referential function.

(12) A: Author, AL: Ali

It should be borne in mind that for many the religious classical repertoire can remain quite minimal, covering material suffice for performing private prayer whereas for others religious classical practice can include extensive daily and weekly recitation of the Qur'an, performance in leading public prayer and opportunities for public citation (more akin to the “full performance” mentioned by Bauman (Reference Bauman1974)). In either case Pennycook's (Reference Pennycook2010) and Hopper's (Reference Hopper and Tomasello1998) notions of sedimented or emergent practice apply. This sedimented practice, or entextualisation, is an admixture of linguistic and performative acts that resists any definition of a discrete language system or structural foundation. Indeed, when asked about “knowledge” of the classical language, respondents often deny any such knowledge.

(13) A: Author, W: Walid

In a related study, from a sample of sixty-six young Muslims in a neighbouring town, all of whom had a similar ethnolinguistic profile and performed religious classical practices at least weekly, only 11% interpreted their use of religious classical as incorporating “knowledge” of Arabic even when the question used the fairly inclusive phrasing “…have any knowledge of Arabic?.”