¹ Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Kapchan, Deborah, “Learning to Listen: the Sound of Sufism in France,” World of Music, 51, no. 2 (2009): 65–89Google Scholar.

² Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Occasional paper series (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986).

³ The meaning of “Maghribi” here is complicated. Although this particular recitational practice refers to a historical tradition of textual production and exchange spanning much of North and West Africa, my interlocutors’ discussion of this method of combining variants often seemed to cast this tradition as a manifestation of national Moroccan heritage.

⁴ Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur'an (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, [1985] 2002); Anna Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur'an in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004); Anne K. Rasmussen, Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). For a study of the early history and codification of the qirā’āt, see Shady Hekmat Nasser, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qur'an (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

⁵ Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape. See also Patrick Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

⁶ For ethnographies of studio recording, see Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello, eds., Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005); and Eliot Bates, Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul's Recording Studio Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

⁷ On this crisis of authority thesis, see Anderson, Jon, “New Media, New Publics: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere of Islam,” Social Research 70, no. 3 (2003): 887–906Google Scholar; and Turner, Brian, “Religious Authority and the New Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007): 117–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Emilio Spadola, The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 15.

⁹ Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).

¹⁰ See VanderMeulen, Ian, “Electrosonic Statecraft: Technology, Authority, and Latency on Moroccan Qur'anic Radio.” American Ethnologist, 48, no. 1 (2021): 80–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ The complete name of this variant is riwāyat Warsh ‘an Nāfi‘. For a complete chart of all seven eponymous qirā’āt and each of their two corresponding riwāyat, see Nasser, Shady Hekmat, “Revisiting Ibn Mujahid's Position on the Seven Canonical Readings: Ibn ‘Amir's Problematic Reading of kun fa-yakuna,” Journal of Qur'anic Studies 17, no. 1 (2015): 85–113Google Scholar.

¹² A reciter might plausibly choose to recite using riwāyat Warsh but employ one (or more) of the Eastern maqāmāt rather than the Andalusian modes often preferred in Morocco.

¹³ Shaykh al-Sahabi and the aforementioned Shaykh al-Madghari are publicly known figures and therefore referred to by their real names. For all others I use pseudonyms.

¹⁴ Although wasā’il may take other translations, most notably “means,” my choice of “media” is inspired not only by al-Madghari's linking of sound recording and traditional forms of writing, but also recent scholarship in sound studies that traces the genealogy of mechanical recording to earlier forms of sonic inscription. See, for example, Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Ana Maria Ochoa-Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

¹⁵ The full title was Ja'izat al-Kuwayt al-Dawli li-Hifdh al-Qur'an al-Karim wa Qira'at wa Tajwid wa Tilawa. The specific mention of the qirā’āt alongside related terms like tajwīd and tilāwa speaks to the global resurgence of qirā’āt study.

¹⁶ Eisenlohr, Patrick, “Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20, no. 2 (2010): 314–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schulz, Dorothea, “Dis/embodying Authority: Female Radio ‘Preachers’ and the Ambivalences of Mass-Mediated Speech in Mali,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 1 (2012): 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Eisenlohr, Sounding Islam, 31–37.

¹⁸ Spadola, Calls of Islam, 64–80.

¹⁹ Yasmin Moll offers a similar intervention, arguing that the effort of a cohort of new preachers (al-du‘ā al-judud) to reconstruct Muslim religiosity in contemporary Egypt “involves the very forms of its mediation. The discursive and aesthetic possibilities afforded by televisual broadcast technologies prove key to this project.” See “Television Is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2018): 233–265, 235.

²⁰ See, for example, Kristina Nelson (Art) and Anna Gade (Perfection Makes Practice). Even Michael Frishkopf's important chapter on Qur'anic recordings is primarily interested in the impact of Saudi recordings on Egyptian performance styles rather than the circumstances of their production. See Michael Frishkopf, “Mediated Qur'anic Recitation and the Contestation of Islam in Contemporary Egypt,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, ed. Laudan Nooshin (Farnham, MA: Ashgate, 2009), 75–114.

²¹ Anne K. Rasmussen, Women, 44–53.

²² Meintjes, Sound of Africa, 33, original emphasis.

²³ See Frishkopf, “Mediated Qur'anic Recitation,” for a discussion of the mujawwad style and its opposite, tartīl.

²⁴ Thomas Porcello, for example, shows how the aesthetic of liveness that distinguishes the Austin, Texas, music scene from its country music rival Nashville is carefully curated through studio production. See “Music Mediated as Live in Austin: Sound, Technology, and Recording Practice,” in Greene and Porcello, Wired for Sound, 103–17. My own ethnography was conducted over numerous visits spanning early 2018 to early 2019. During that time, participants finished the latter portions of Surat al-Baqara, the second and longest chapter of the Qur'an, and worked most of the way through the third chapter Ahl al-‘Imran, a testament to the time-consuming nature of the project.

²⁵ The term al-lajna al-‘ilmiyya also is used as a gloss for the review process governing production of state-funded, publicly circulated recordings of riwāyat Warsh. See, for example, the article “al-Tasjilat al-Sawtiyya li-l-Muqri'in,” posted 7 November 2013 on the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs website, http://www.habous.gov.ma/-الصوتية-للمقرئين حمل-القرآن/3895-التسجيلات.html.

²⁶ Meintjes (Sound of Africa) points out the politically charged (although different) connotations that the titles of engineer and producer take on in the context of Johannesburg, South Africa.

²⁷ For a more extended discussion of the importance of the tarjama to traditional Islamic scholarship in Morocco, see Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a similar historical-anthropological discussion of the ijāza in the context of Islamic jurisprudence, see Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 93–94.

²⁸ ‘Abd al-Hadi Hamitu, Qira'at al-Imam Nafi‘ ‘and al-Maghariba min Riwayat Abu Sa‘id Warsh: Muqawamatiha al-Bana'iyya wa Madarisuha al-Ada'iyya ila Nihayat al-Qarn al-‘Ashir al-Hijrī, 7 vols. (Rabat: Wizarat al-Awqaf wa-l-Shu'un al-Islamiyya, 2003).

²⁹ Ibid., vol. 4, 336.

³⁰ Muhammad bin Ahmed Huhuwar al-Timsimani, Tarajim Qurra’ al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, Khilal al-Qarnayn al-Thani ‘Ashar wa-l-Thalith ‘Ashar al-Hijjriyin (Tangier: Dar al-Kattani, 2013), 123–24.

³¹ Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape.

³² On the notion of aural literacy, see Kapchan, “Learning to Listen.”

³³ John Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994).

³⁴ Messick, Calligraphic State.

³⁵ Bates, Digital Tradition.

³⁶ Théberge, Paul, “The Network Studio: Historical and Technological Paths to a New Ideal in Music Making,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 759–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 10.

³⁸ Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 23.

³⁹ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 32.

⁴⁰ Karl Neuenfeldt, “Nigel Pegrum, ‘Didjeridu-Friendly Sections,’ and What Constitutes an ‘Indigenous’ CD,” in Greene and Porcello, Wired for Sound, 84–102.

⁴¹ See Nelson (Art, 21–22) for a discussion of nasalization within tajwīd, and for broader elaboration on the aesthetic of ḥuzn (91–98).

⁴² Bates, Digital Tradition, 155.

⁴³ See Eisenlohr, “Materialities,” as an example of such a theology-focused analysis.

⁴⁴ On mnemonic possession, see Eickelman, Knowledge and Power, 57.

⁴⁵ Bates, Digital Tradition, 157, original emphasis.

⁴⁶ Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 115, emphasis added.

⁴⁷ Jeremy Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

⁴⁸ Spadola, Calls of Islam, 64–80.