RT Article
T1 Authority with Textual Materials – Power of the Written Qur’an
JF Material religion
VO 20
IS 1
SP 51
OP 72
A1 Nieber, Hanna
LA English
PB Taylor & Francis
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1886418691
AB The article studies the performance of Islamic authority through texts. It combines this with a close investigation of the textuality of these texts—that is, their letterforms as well as shapes of words and sentences—and their material affordances. Given that Muslims understand the Qur’an to be powerful, this article argues that it is the concrete possibilities that textuality provides which feed into Islamic authority. This article takes an ethnographic encounter in Zanzibar Town in which I was repeatedly prompted to visually follow the textual aids of my interlocutor, Hakimu Saleh, in order to gain access to that which is “hidden between the words” as starting point. I investigate how Hakimu Saleh used these occasions to perform his authority as a knowledgeable Islamic healer through “material citations.” I then explore the singularity of the Qur’an to examine the textuality of kombe, a practice in which the Qur’an is used as a decidedly textual artifact to be washed off for patients to ingest. In doing so, I show how practices tapping into the power of the materially textual Qur’an feed into other practices with material text, including those that support the performance of authority in an Islamic context.
K1 Zanzibar Town
K1 Materiality
K1 Qur’an
K1 Islam
K1 Authority
K1 Text
DO 10.1080/17432200.2024.2303905