A blog must have a clever title. Perhaps I am over-reaching.
A title shouldn't require explanation. Too late. Why reciter? This sort
of made-up word creates a point of contact between the languages I work with, primarily
French, English, and Arabic.
Réciter is the French verb meaning “to recite.” I
like to imagine two fictional etymologies of this word: récit-er, from
the noun récit, narrative, story, or tale, and ré-citer,
to cite again. In this juxtaposition, reciter is the tension between
creation and repetition. It takes inscription, citation and recitation alike as
active elements of reading and writing.
Reading and writing are themselves intertwined, not as
abstract activities, but as specific, historical practices. reciter will
reflect on the tangled knots they form, situated in a particular time and place,
and think through how such bonds are loosened or remade, forgotten or
preserved, in the circulation of readers, writers, and texts.
I recently re-read one of my favorite books, Abdelfattah
Kilito’s The Author and His Doubles.[1]
Its eleven short essays on classical Arabic literature and culture are at once insightful
and accessible, beautiful and playful, all in just over a hundred pages. The
second chapter, “Verses and Reverses,” takes up the pre-Islamic poetic
tradition, which, religious texts excepted, is considered the foundation of Arabic
grammar and literary style. If this is the degree zero of Arabic literature,
Kilito argues that it is marked by the memory of its own tradition. The poet ‘Antara,
author of one of the hyper-canonical mu‘llaqāt or “Hanging Odes” that
are held as the epitome of pre-Islamic poetry,[2] begins by asking whether his predecessors have left anything unsaid. He likens
himself (following a conventional image) to one who has come upon the traces of
the abandoned camp in the desert. In Kilito’s reading, at “the beginning of the
poem—or rather, at the very beginning of poetry itself—we find a concern for
repetition and imitation” (10). Repetition, however, reveals itself to be
essential rather than redundant. Kilito continues, wondering “what would a
verse that bore no link to ancient verse even look like?” (11). This question
animates my investigations here.
By way of a beginning, let’s take a beginning that isn’t
quite one: the first five lines of Sūrat al-‘Alaq in the Qur’ān, which
are traditionally held to be the first verses revealed to Muḥammad, even though
they are compiled toward the end of the book itself. They begin with the
injunction to read, iqra’: “read in the name of your Lord”. The word,
however, is often translated as “recite”. This translation indicates that the
imperative iqra’ is not just a command to read and understand a certain
text. It enjoins the reader to practice a certain kind of reading that is as
much a linguistic practice as an interpretative one, if not more so. Correct
reading in the exegetical sense comes to depend on correct reading in the
literal sense of pronunciation. Reading and recitation are not separable
practices here.
Recite in the name of your Lord who created -
Created man from a clinging substance.
Recite, and your Lord is the most Generous -Who taught by the pen -
Taught man that which he knew not.[3]
This specialized kind of reading has its own special
science: tajwīd is the practice of Qur’ānic recitation, comprising a set
of rules of vocalization and intonation that delimit the interpretive possibilities
within the text. Accurate pronunciation is necessary to establishing the text’s
meaning, even as tajwīd is nothing more than reading what is already on
the page.
The nature of this circular process, based on the link
between a word’s pronunciation and its meaning, may not be immediately obvious
to an English speaker. The reason is that the Arabic script, like other Semitic
scripts, began as an abjad, an alphabet whose letters only represent
consonants. Readers can understand which vowels go where based on morphology and
syntax and pronounce such texts with ease. In modern Arabic writing practice, consonants
and long vowels are always explicit. Short vowels and other phonetic markers
are optionally rendered as diacritic-like elements called tashkīl, marks
that “give shape” to words. Tashkīl are unnecessary to most reading and
are only included for aesthetic effect or in the more-or-less uncommon case of
an otherwise-irresolvable ambiguity.
The primary exception to this pattern the Qur’ān,
where tashkīl have been written out in full since the ninth century or
so. Ambiguity is, at least in theory, written out of the text in the form of tashkīl,
which give shape and, therefore, clarity to the words they adorn. Tajwīd
is the realization of this clarity through a reading that gives voice to a
vocalized text: right understanding through correct pronunciation. The text
both prescribes and inscribes a particular kind of reading that can only be
actualized in its recitation. Tafsīr, or exegesis, can only occur in the
transparent textual and vocal space guaranteed by tajwīd and tashkīl.
The injunction iqra’, or even the word al-Qur’ān[4] itself, which is sometimes used to mean “the recitation”,[5] is the point of entanglement of particular practices of reading and writing. The
demand for recitation refers back to and affirms the text’s claims to divine
utterance. This form of reading is the only conduit through which the book’s
meaning or truth becomes accessible. This is why the Qur’ān is considered
untranslatable: it is not that adequate words cannot be found in other
languages, but that they cannot be read in the same way.
This practice of recitation also refers back to ‘Antara and
the Hanging Odes. From its birth in the seventh century on, Islam turned to its
inherited poetic tradition as a reference for the standardization of Arabic
style and grammar, a project that itself aimed at the clarification of the
meaning of the Qur’ān. The significance of pre-Islamic poetry is wound
into the knot of the imperative iqra’, even as it becomes the deserted
trace of a time past.
[1] Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic
Culture. 1985. Trans. Michael Cooperson. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001.
[2] Supposedly, the seven finest examples of pre-Islamic poetry were embroidered in gold and hung in Mecca. As Kilito discusses in Chapter Five, “Poetry and Coin”, the authenticity of this legend is dubious, as is the pre-Islamic corpus itself, which was almost certainly compiled after the advent of Islam (45-7).
[3] The Holy Qur’ān, ‘Al-Alaq 96:1-5. Trans. Sahih International. http://quran.com/96
[4] There is some debate as to whether the word al-Qur’ān is derived from the Arabic root qara’a, “to read”, or borrowed from Syriac, where its equivalent is qeryānā, a scripture lesson or reading. Either way, it is held to have been current in Arabic at the time of Muḥammad.
[5] See The Holy Qur’ān, al-Qiyāmah 75:17-18. Trans. Sahih International. http://quran.com/75
[2] Supposedly, the seven finest examples of pre-Islamic poetry were embroidered in gold and hung in Mecca. As Kilito discusses in Chapter Five, “Poetry and Coin”, the authenticity of this legend is dubious, as is the pre-Islamic corpus itself, which was almost certainly compiled after the advent of Islam (45-7).
[3] The Holy Qur’ān, ‘Al-Alaq 96:1-5. Trans. Sahih International. http://quran.com/96
[4] There is some debate as to whether the word al-Qur’ān is derived from the Arabic root qara’a, “to read”, or borrowed from Syriac, where its equivalent is qeryānā, a scripture lesson or reading. Either way, it is held to have been current in Arabic at the time of Muḥammad.
[5] See The Holy Qur’ān, al-Qiyāmah 75:17-18. Trans. Sahih International. http://quran.com/75
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