The Ethics of Listening: Cassette‐SermonAudition in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape‐recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self‐discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. in focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self‐improvement, [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam]