Standing stones

I'll begin within another travel souvenir. This time it's a photograph.

These are the menhir, or standing stones, at Monteneuf in Brittany, a megalithic site comprising some 420 carefully-arranged blocks. I had the chance to visit this place several years ago and remain enchanted by those stones. They are such an imposing part of the built environment, of a landscape infused with human work, yet their presence seems anomalous because their construction is so distant. They produce a powerful effect of meaning -- that is, they elicit the feeling that they must mean something, that they must have something to say. Why else would they have stood there for so long? Or, how could they have remained in place all those years without learning a thing or two to pass on to future generations.

Interestingly enough, they haven't actually stood all that time. Most of the stones were toppled in the middle ages and the full extent of the site wasn't known until twenty-five years ago, when a forest fire exposed stones that had been buried beneath brush, moss, and earth. During archaeological excavations, forty or so stones were re-erected.

I visited Monteneuf with a former professor of mine, Anne Harris, who is a medieval art historian. She is particularly interested in when and why the stones were brought down and has written about the site on her blog, Medieval Meets World:

"Paleo-botany revealed that the stones had been put down around the year 1000 - that's the medieval chapter I'd love to uncover. Putting down megaliths is difficult (as difficult?) work - a tremendous effort, it seems in response to a tremendous force or pull of the stones. There may be nothing more than the paleo-botany to tell the tale (though there are plenty of decrees in England and France from the period banning gathering at stones and trees), but I would like to keep going with it, see where it takes me. I bought the archaeological report right before the office closed and felt lucky."

If the stones themselves won't or can't speak, we can turn elsewhere: archaeology, paleo-botany, medieval law, and so forth. The history that could be written would be fascinating, no doubt. But I want to focus on today is that sense of fascination itself. It is, I think, rooted in the effect of meaning I mentioned above: we cannot shake the sensation that these stones have something to say. The fact that they were raised in some distant past, knocked down maybe a thousand years ago, and partially restored recently suggests that they have been able to produce this feeling throughout their history: it was powerful enough to motivate people to do the very difficult work of carving them out, transporting them, and raising them up; it was intimidating enough for people to tear them down, and it remains fascinating enough for archaeologists to dig them up and for tourists to visit them, take pictures, and write about them years later.

What makes this fascination work, I think, what has captured my attention, is a kind of historical break. These stones are ostensibly from a past so distant and remote as to be lost entirely. The menhir testify that some people, at some time -- probably over a good length of time -- thought it was worthwhile to make this big, enigmatic arrangement of giant rocks. It must have had meaning to them, of course, but it is the very loss of this meaning, the fact that we can never know why exactly anybody would bother to do this, that captivates us. The stones themselves persist, commemorating their own loss of meaning, which, in itself, opens space for creating new meanings.

I don't mean to suggest that we can't know anything about the purpose or function of these megalithic arrangements. Archaeology, geology, paleo-botany, and a host of other fields all prove otherwise. I do, however, believe that such studies cannot exhaust the menhir's capacity to enrapture. Even if we knew exactly when and how they were built, how they functioned as spaces in the societies that built them, and what people did at them, they would continue to fascinate because that past seems so utterly broken off from our own.

Their creators and the world they lived in have died, not just an ordinary death, but a historical death, too. In this sense, the menhir are like graveyards or ruined tombs -- not just of human remains, which some of them are (dolmen, or neolithic tombs, are part of the site) -- but of history as a storehouse of knowledge. Perhaps, if I may be allowed to wildly speculate on something I don't actually know about (honesty is a good policy), it was precisely as a graveyard that the stones frightened their medieval neighbors, who saw in them a place threatening to reanimate the pagan past, to bring it back from beyond the grave.

Death, in this case, does not put an end to knowledge; instead, it calls it forth. I discussed Abdelfattah Kilito's book The Author and His Doubles[1] in my first post and I want to return to it briefly again, partially because I like it so much, but also because Kilito shows how the break created by death, literal and historical, becomes productive in Islam. The death of the Prophet Mohamed brings an end to a brief period of direct divine intervention in human affairs, epitomized by the revelation of the Qur’ān. As Kilito writes, "no intermediary was left, and Heaven fell silent once and for all. . . . A breach had opened never to be closed, and struggles for power began that were never to end" (35-6). No human intermediary, that is; the Qur’ān itself remained, of course, and continued to speak divine revelation, as the Prophet himself would have before. As new conflicts emerge or new questions arise, the solution is to be found in this holy text. Yet their is a problem here, too. Kilito writes, "the Divine Book is not always easy to understand: it contains ambiguities", "apparently conflicting assertions", and "eschatological references of a controversial nature" all of which the Prophet might have clarified, if he were still present (36).

Or perhaps he did actually clarify them in his lifetime. He had spoken and adjudicated on many subjects throughout his lifetime; "Nothing could be simpler," Kilito writes, "than to rely upon his words to resolve the difficulties of the Qur’ān and confront the problems that arose in his community after his death" (36). Scholars therefore began to collect oral recollections of the Prophet's words and deeds, now known as Hadith, that might illuminate their understanding of the Qur’ān. This became a massive undertaking that spanned a rapidly-growing empire and occupied many centuries' work. The scale of the task was only further complicated by the problem of false Hadiths, which required the development of a whole theory of transmission and jurisprudence to differentiate between the genuine and the impostors. As a result, the Mohamed's death became an occasion for scholarship and an impetus for the development of entire sciences. 

Algerian writer Assia Dejbar's novel Le blanc de l'Algérie[2] takes up the productivity of death in another, more ambiguous context. The book is a kind of anti-eulogy to the many Algerian authors whose lives were cut short by disease, war, or assassination throughout the twentieth century. I say anti-eulogy because the narrator seeks to remember her dead compatriots as though they were still present. Her impulse is to make memories haunt the present rather than consign them to the past through a ritualized commemoration. Evoking the white linen of burial clothes, the narrator exclaims to the dead, "Oh, mes amis, pas le blanc de l'oubli, je vous en prie, préservez-moi!" [Oh, my friends, not the white of forgetfulness, please, spare me that!] (56).[3] The risk is not simply that, once buried in the ground, they will be forgotten, but that they will be buried again a second time, beneath layers of religious ritual, of media commemoration, of political appropriation. Djebar's narrator pleads instead: "Je ne demande rien: seulement qu'ils nous hantent encore, qu'ils nous habitent" [I don't ask for anything: only that they continue to haunt us, that they live in us" (56).

Djebar tries to bring this haunting about through a careful recounting of her narrator's connection to each author and the circumstances of his or her death. In this way, her novel is sort of like a secularized Hadith. She pieces together details along with the authority on which she presents them: this or that friend who was present for the death, the funeral, or the burial. The aim, however, is not to imagine what life would be like had these people not died. That is, in a way, unthinkable, as tragic as their deaths may have been. For, again, death becomes productive in its own way. For had Camus, for example, not died, "eh bien, Camus l'Algérien aurait terminé son roman Le Premier Homme, et d'autres mystères, pour lui, pour nous, se seraient obscurcis..." [well, Camus the Algerian would have finished his novel The First Man and other mysteries, for him and for us, would have been obscured...] (111). The inevitably unfinished state of works left at death is not so much a missed opportunity in the past, but an invitation for thought in the future. Djebar's narrator exemplifies this as she gives a conference on this unfinished work of Camus amid her recollections of other writers lost.

Always lurking at the edge of Djebar's anti-eulogy, however, is the possibility of forgetting. She cites the journal of Mouloud Feraoun, an author and school administrator assassinated by the the French paramilitary Organisation de l'armée secrète during the political negotiations following the Algerian war of independence, where Feraoun pondered an end to the struggle that "permettra enfin à ceux qui seront encore là de se remettre à vivre, en commençant par oublier" [that will finally allow those who are still there to begin life again, starting by forgetting" (112). Would living on, in some sense, necessitate forgetting?

The very possibility of forgetting and the mechanism by which one could forget the requires more reflection. I would not say, for example, that we have forgotten the meaning of Monteneuf; rather, it is buried in earth and in time. This is not the same burial as that which Djebar is fighting, which is a kind of forgetting through memory. Yet even when something or someone is buried, more often than not the tomb remains.

It is not sure, however, that a tomb can always speak any more than a megalith. Sometimes even a grave that is visited regularly and whose history is known can be forgotten. A few days ago, I walked out to the Marinid tombs, which sit on a hilltop on the northwestern edge of Fes. The Marinids ruled Morocco from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries and built these tombs in the fourteenth century.

Although the structures themselves are modestly interesting in their own right, the place is mostly known today for its panoramic of Fez.

As such, it attracts fewer locals than it does visitors, who walk from the four-star hotel next door or are driven up the hill in rented four-by-four vehicles. Unlike anonymous stones rising up in the forest, these ruined tombs feel very much a part of Fes as they overlook the old city and its aged, red walls. The apparent disjunction of its location next to a fancy hotel is, in fact, rather characteristic of the city, where the old and new, the crumbling and renovated, and the informal and regulated everywhere stand side by side. The Marinids are just another piece of Fez's 1200-plus year old history.

What fascinates me about these standing stones is how they become everyday, banal. As tourists gather in front of the empty, crumbling mausoleum, they turn to gaze at a modern city whose ancient core is an integral part of its texture. As they point their cameras, they aim over and past the more modest, whitewashed stones of the Bab el-Guissa cemetery that occupies much of the hillside.

The gesture of turning one's back to the tomb to look out over the city is significant. Where menhir impose themselves, the Marinids have retreated into the background. They still attract our attention through an architectural accident. If putting their mausoleum on a hilltop kept it in view of the people, the direction of that gaze has been reversed. No one in the old city looks up at the tombs; instead, foreigners, who might well have been forbidden from setting foot near the mausoleum in its day, look down on the city, their backs to the grave.

In Fes itself, new kinds of stones are standing.

The white blocks that jut up out of this empty lot give the impression of a sparsely-populated graveyard. Instead, they are power and water hook-ups for new apartment buildings. The concrete foundations have already been laid, but are not visible behind the brush that has grown up around the perimeter of the site. If the standing stones of ruins, tombs, and megaliths mark the location where the past happened, perhaps where it can still be found, these blocks are signs pointing to the future. It is to these blocks, rather than the broken rocks on the hill, that Fes is oriented.

For Djebar, however, death points as much to the future as it does to the past: the dead "nous signifient avec une ineffable mélancolie que ce sera bientôt notre tour" [the dead notify us, with ineffable melancholy, that  it will soon be our turn] (90-1). Such melancholy seems appropriate to the (literally) overlooked Marinid tombs and the modern buildings going up in the city below: perhaps they mean to say that, one day, those below will be like those on the hill.

But that's to make a jump from the effect of meaning to creating meaning itself. Ruins have been made to mean many different things across history.[4] There are particular conditions that make this slippage possible at all: apartment foundations can appear meaningful to me because they resemble graves, something else that produces an effect of meaning, either by imposing itself on the viewer or by withdrawing from notice. In other words, they produce an effect of meaning by resembling something else that produces an effect of meaning; a visual analogy that creates a relation between them, provided you look at things a certain way, at least for a moment. So, no, the city doesn't have to be melancholic; the ruins on its hillsides don't have to foretell its gloomy fate. There are points of view where, at specific instants, that phenomenon emerges.

Something lays beneath, making this all possible, that I have only addressed indirectly to this point: these objects are material links to the past and actually do have quite a lot to say as material stuff. It is the persistence (and transformation) of the material itself that makes the effect of meaning possible, but the material itself speaks in its own way. Speech is a faulty metaphor here, because it constantly drags us back toward "meaning". (If this weren't a blog, I might give myself a headache for a week trying to sort out how to not make a mess of this distinction. For now, we'll keep things a little loose.)

What I'm trying to get it as importance of the stuff itself and how we can apprehend it. This is the business of archaeology (and many other fields, of course), which can seek understanding through the material conditions of stuff alone. To get there, however, we must ask the right questions: before wondering what menhir or gravestones meant to their builders or to us today, we must be attentive to to what they are in their materiality. What kind of stone or brick? Where is it from? What is it composed of? Is it worked and, if so, how? Where is it relative to other objects at the site, both similar and different? If it had to be dug up, what was above, below, and around it? How was it uncovered? And so on.

Whether such thick description can be done without slipping into some kind of analysis or exegesis is an open question. There is always some kind of selection or choice: we go to this place and not that, we ask some questions and not others. We work via analogy: this place is like that, in this way or another. We always bring something to a tomb; if it is only ourselves, our presence, that is already quite a lot. And I don't think we should want to do away with that: it's in the encounter itself that fascination begins.

---

[1] Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture. 1985. Trans. Michael Cooperson. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001.

[2] Assia Djebar, Le Blanc de l'Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.

[3] These rough translations are my own.
[4] I have in the back of my mind here Roland Mortier's Poétique des ruines en France (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1974), which I will hopefully visit in detail in a future post.

Times of reading: novels, television, comics

A second essay. It had better be good. With two, there can be no accidents. One standing alone becomes part of a series. Patterns begin to emerge.

Or so we hope. At any rate, the conditions for this all-important second essay have been out of the ordinary. I had some ideas sketched out, they will have to wait: I've been traveling lately, to Montréal last week and to Morocco for a few weeks to come. I don’t want this to become a simple travelogue, but most of my writing will reflect what I’m up to at the moment.

I often associate travel with reading: in a general sense, time in transit feels ready-made for reading, which leads me to bring overly-ambitious and unnecessarily-heavy piles of books with me on the road; more specifically, I sometimes recall trips and books together, either because of what I read while traveling or because the a book deals with a place I've been (or the other way around).

Orhan Pamuk's memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City[1] and the city of Istanbul itself form one such pair. The link between them is clear enough from the title alone, but they also share a second bond for me personally because I read the book while in Istanbul with a group from my college. We stayed in the city for nearly three weeks and I left feeling that one could easily spend a year there and still not have plumbed its extreme historical depths. Bits of the past are almost literally stacked, folded, and layered on top of one another in Istanbul. Walking the city’s streets, I was impressed by the different ways that the material stuff of the past, apparently obstinate and stubborn, remained quite malleable: it could be ignored, buried, or destroyed, reworked, uncovered, or rewritten. This highly-visible hyper-historicity put into relief what is really an everyday process of navigating the past that is an essential part of living in the present for people around the world.

Pamuk's memoir shows this constant negotiation of present and past at an intimate scale. In the book, Istanbul’s epic, longue durée historical complexities play out in individual lives in a sort of familial time. Pamuk recalls the sitting rooms created by upper-class and aspiring-bourgeois Turkish families in the twentieth century, which he looks back on as spatial expressions of westernization. The sitting room required a particular decor and strict etiquette to match: “Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could hope to sit comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to a hypothetical visitor that the householders were Westernized” (13). The contents of these little museums of self-identity reflect the perceived interests of western European elites: pianos (that no one played, as Pamuk recalls it), Chinese porcelain and Japanese screens (an interesting displacement of Europe’s orientalist image of Turkey by making east Asia the oriental object of both Europeans and Turks-as-Europeans), silver, crystal, and so forth. The display of these objects, which was their primary function, was a marker of status to the family itself as much as its potential or theoretical guests. Pamuk speculates that a “person who was not fasting during Ramazan[2] would perhaps suffer fewer pangs of conscience amongst these glass cupboards and dead pianos than he might if he were sitting cross-legged in a room full of cushions and divans” (13).

Pamuk’s comment here links the primary spatial purpose of the sitting room-as-museum to the temporal moment defined by the Islamic calendar and its month of fasting. Its function as a mark of westernization is most pertinent during a period when ostensible non-western-ness would otherwise be highly visible. The room distracts its inhabitants from any anxiety they might feel about being in the room itself.

It would take a different kind of western distraction to effect a further change in the social structure of Turkish bourgeois sitting rooms: the television. As Pamuk puts it, “Once people had discovered how pleasurable it was to sit together to watch the evening news, their sitting rooms changed from little museums into little cinemas” (13). But the television did not work the same way as the sitting room-museum; it crossed class and religious lines differently. As a result, the sitting room’s connection to Ramadan and Islam in general would change. Today, for example, gathering at night to watch special TV programs has become an important part of many families’ celebration of Ramadan itself.

If the sitting room-museum was an architectural response to a certain kind of religious time, the introduction of the television turned it into a space that organized time on its own. The key, as Pamuk sees it, is sound. Before television, the sitting room was a place of quiet contemplation of objects on display, epitomized by the unplayed piano. At times, this quiet allowed for unexpected and unpredictable moments of familial calm in the Pamuk household. The young Orhan wanted to become a painter and was inspired in these moments to do family portraits:

“It was when tensions between my parents had softened somewhat—when no one was needling anyone else, and everyone was relaxed, and the radio or maybe a tape was playing in the background, when the maid was bustling in the kitchen as she cooked our supper, or just before we all set out together on an outing or a trip—that I would do these paintings, always in a single of inspiration . . . . It was an arrangement devoid of arresting detail, provoking no discussion, but this was why it attracted my attention. When this tableau made one of its rare appearances, I would whisper, ‘I’m going to do a painting’” (354-5).

In the stillness of this prolonged instant, a fleeting sense of happiness emerges, specifically linked to the quiet: “perhaps my mother and father looked happy because they weren’t speaking. . . . A magical silence would descend over the room as my mother and father stretched out, perfectly still, not saying a word but expressing what seemed a shared anguish” (355-6).If this calm was rare at home in Pamuk’s childhood, it was also historically contingent and its time came quickly: “later, in the seventies, when like everyone else in the country we bought a television set and they [my parents] somewhat sheepishly surrendered to its entertainments, there were no magical silences, and I never again had the desire to paint them” (356).

When I first read Pamuk’s memoir five or six years ago, this seemed like a great loss, an emblem of the aesthetic impoverishment of everyday life at the hands of modern technology. No doubt this had something to do with my own experience of television. Unlike Pamuk growing up in Turkey in the sixties and seventies, there never was a moment when television entered my life. It seems to have always been there, and yet I never really used to watch it. I would have much rather read than anything else (often including having dinner or going to bed). It always seemed more of a distraction than anything else.

It wasn't until I graduated that television had any appeal to me, when a combination of free time and a Netflix subscription opened up a (very digital, very virtual) world of possibilities. What surprised me most was how good much of it was. Television, it turned out, could be a vibrant, compelling means of storytelling (though not all of it is, of course). This discovery was pleasant, but also a little sad: sometimes, watching television at night feels like one of those pessimistically adult gestures that stand for the supposedly-inevitable loss of childhood's wonderment, as if I had given up the imaginative world of reading as Pamuk had stopped painting family portraits.

I think, however, that this is too easy a conclusion, based on nostalgia for time past, whose supposed disappearance is marked by the arrival of at television set. Looking more closely at the Pamuks’ “magical silences”, we see that they weren’t actually particularly silent. The radio was on, or music on the tapedeck, and the maid was busy moving about the kitchen. Stillness, strictly speaking, wasn’t maintained either; Pamuk writes that sometimes his father would put on Brahms and stand up at the most energetic moments to conduct an imaginary orchestra. What television did, in fact, was to channel the activity in the room through its screen. But it can also simply be in the background, present but not commanding, like the radio or the noise from the kitchen.

I don't believe that loss and nostalgia are really the core of the issue. Instead, it is about the structure of time. After a day’s work in French literature, theory, and criticism, reading for pleasure isn’t always that appealing, but that should not mask the fact that I have, in fact, spent my day reading, which is (usually) a rather pleasant thing in and of itself. If I watch TV in the evening, reading hasn’t gone out of my life.I began reading comics relatively recently and am always ready to open a comic book (or a graphic novel, if you like) in the evening. Although turning to an ostensibly-childish medium (although such a conception is quite mistaken) may seem particularly fitting as a response to the threatened disappearance of reading time at the heads of grown-up responsibilities, comics are not actually not a means for me to overcome being a grumpy, jaded, TV-watching adult by returning to a childhood delight in reading. What has made reading comics so exciting is not a return to a past way of life, a familiar kind of time, but the discovery of a new kind of reading, a new possibility of aesthetic experience. It is the discovery that one kind of reading need not override another.

I had wanted to do my second reciter essay about comics. It is precisely because comics don't fit squarely with my main academic work that I find them really intellectually rewarding. In a way, comics are all the more stimulating to my research because of this. As with travel and reading, connections arise on their own just as often as when I seek them out.

To that end, I'm currently working on a piece about Joe Sacco's excellent works of comics journalism, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. Being away from home has made it difficult to finish, however, not only because I am already carrying around other books that I haven't yet read, but because I also took advantage of my time in francophone Canada to pick up Guy Delisle's Chroniques de Jérusalem, which I may want to consider alongside Sacco's books. I’ll leave it for another time, then.

---

[1] Orhan Pamuk. Istanbul: Memories and the City. 2003. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Vintage, 2004.
[2] “Ramazan” is the Turkish spelling of the Arabic word normally transliterated in English as Ramadan.

An introduction: the imperative to read

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