Performing Islam - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2015

Since 2003, UNESCO has officially safeguarded intangible heritage through the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Since 2005, individual, communities and institutions including UNESCO have been uploading videos of intangible heritage on YouTube, transforming this video-hosting service into a colossal user-generated archive of heritage. YouTube is not only an archive but also a living archive of intangible heritage: collections of intangible heritage are being continuously created by users, enabling this video-hosting service to capture and store diverse practices in their lived context. Through the case study of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony of Turkey, this study argues that the participatory nature of YouTube that captures intangible heritage in its lived context has the potential to disseminate heritage narratives that counter the gendered narratives put forward by nations states through UNESCO. The methodology of this research is interdisciplinary, combining performance studies, critical heritage studies, gender studies and social media with historical and contemporary research on the Mevlevi Sema ceremony. Theoretical and historical approaches are interconnected with an ethnography of a Sufi community in Istanbul and analyses of YouTube videos.

Abd al Malik is a French rapper-writer born in 1975 of Congolese parents and raised throughout his childhood in a difficult neighbourhood of Strasbourg, France. While his family started out as Christian, his own spiritual journey took him through several stages of Islam: having, first of all, experienced first-hand the harsh reality of postcolonial France, i.e. living in the banlieue, he initially turned to religious extremism explicitly as a reaction to the postcolonial condition. Abd al Malik’s thinking through of postcoloniality, however, is, in the end, far from simple, as he eventually integrated into his art and discourse the extremely opposed-to-extremism principles of Sufism and, as in fact, even some very traditional principles of the French Republic, making the association between ‘Islam’ and ‘postcolonial’ interestingly complicated indeed. This article scrutinizes in particular two of his books, Qu’Allah bénisse la France (2004) and Le Dernier Français (2012), and examines them under the lens of Jacques Rancière’s ‘politics of aesthetics’ as a theoretical tool to better comprehend how Abd al Malik understands the link between Islam and the postcolonial as lying at the intersection of linguistics and politics.

This article reflects on fieldwork experience of performing ziyarat in Iraq in May 2014. It offers an embodied account of ziyarat rituals and practices, and discusses re/construction. It emphasizes that existing literature on ziyarat practices in Iraq is minimal, as is recent research on the country. This article approaches ziyarat as a sociopolitical performance that may simultaneously function as an individual response to the Karbala experience. It draws on El-Aswad’s exploration of ‘invisible realities’ and the ‘different logic’ of spiritual love in structuring Shia’ah ritual, and rapper Sulaiman’s use of ‘extreme love’ in understanding Islamic history. The approach follows on from Al-Adeeb’s work, and Al-Mohammad and Peluso’s call for attention to how creative and spiritual practices, and everyday experiences, can enhance our understanding of the continuation of life in Iraq. Five months since this research was conducted, the conditions of life in Iraq and potential ziyarat experiences described have been changed by the security situation and ISIS. This article must therefore be read as recent research that may have already become history.