 Good afternoon everyone, I think we're getting ready to get started now. And I just, I'm, I leave the door shut though, I'm the chair of the university committee. And I just had a few details, I don't know if you've been here not before. But just so you know, bathroom facilities are across the elevator lobby and to your left. And the emergency exit is in this lobby here, so you turn right leaving this room. And it will be just before you go into the back of the house. Hopefully we don't need to know where the emergency exit is, but it's always this safe. And I want to invite Tim Smith up, he is our subject librarian for World of Classics and World of Religion. He's going to introduce himself for the 5th minus 10th. I am the subject librarian for Classics and World of Religion, so I just want to say a few words about Dr. Leibartner. I've known him, first met him about 7 years ago when he started here. Dr. Leibartner, the department of Classics and World of Religion. Didn't know until a few minutes ago I asked him what I thought was a simple question for the introduction. Where are you from? And he said, not such a simple answer, but he said, born in Pakistan, but Cleveland, maybe some other places too, so it's kind of from a variety of places. Anyway, he's been teaching Islam and Sufism and World of Religion in general here for the last 77 years now. He's particularly interested in Palestinians and Palestinians in the nationalism, Islam and nationalism. This is the Islamist movement and so forth. He's published a number of articles and book reviews over the years. And in 2007, French University Press published his book Identity and Religion in Palestine, The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories. And just from reading a review of that, I found out that he, that could live and work among Palestinian villagers in refugee camps and have his part of research for that book. And more recently, he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do research of how city and refugees in Chicago, in fact, he'll be in Chicago then next year doing fieldwork for that study. And lastly, to slide down the topic for his presentation today, is hearing the Koran, sound the meaning of Islam's Holy Book. Give you Dr. Lauren Leibart. Thank you. What you're hearing right now is a recitation from Sodath Maria, a chapter of Mary, in which the story of Mary and Jesus is one of the places in the Koran where the story of Mary and Jesus is recounted. And I'll have more to say about Maria as I encountered her fully on in my time living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, particularly in a town just adjacent to Bethlehem. But I wanted to play this for you to give some sense of the kind of ambience that is created when the Koran intervenes into the soundscapes of our daily lives. And I'll talk about this notion of soundscape as well. While my talk is hearing the Koran, literally hearing it, listening to it, the way in which Muslims encounter the Koran, one of the ways, one of the primary ways in which Muslims encounter the Koran, is precisely in its recited form. The Koran literally means that which is recited. Okay, I'm just going to walk you over to the mic. So to get sort of good things going here, I thought that I would pose a very basic question. What is the Koran? I've already sort of given you one possible definition, sort of the literal one, right? That which is recited. Another way to think about the Koran, if you were to ask a Muslim perhaps, you might get this answer, right? The Koran is Islam's holy book of revelation purporting to be the very words of God, addressed to humanity, not necessarily purporting, but so where Muslims, the answer would be the Koran is the very word of God. It's addressed to humanity through the Prophet Muhammad, as conveyed through the angel Gabriel. So by tradition, the story is that the angel Gabriel brings the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad and commands him to do what? Ikrah, to recite. Okay, from Ikrah, we get the Ikrah on that same route. In Arabic, we get the word Koran. So the Koran, Ikrah, recites that which is recited. The Koran then comes into being primarily from the very beginning as a recited kanan. Muslims have a variety of names for the Koran, and these names derive from the way the Koran itself refers to itself. Al Kitab, the book, for example. So the Koran is thought of as a book, as a physical object of the book, and here's an example of one, a Muslim copy of the Koran. This one has a particular meaning for me, given to me by a very good friend after she got back from pilgrimage, Hajj, in Saudi Arabia. Mushaf, the copy, Huda, the guidance. So the Koran is not just any book, but a book that provides guidance for life or how to live. Atanzil, that which is sent down. Al-Furqan, one of my favorites in terms of nature of the Koran, Al-Furqan, the criterion of truth and error. So the coming down of the Koran imposes a criterion and confronts the listener, confronts the human being with a kind of decision. Will you be on the side of truth or will you be on the side of those who have gone astray? So it is a text that demands a response. The Koran is a book, it's not a typical book in the way that we think of, say, a Harry Potter book, right? We wouldn't necessarily think of Harry Potter books in the way that we might think of the Koran, at least in terms of how Muslims engage the chronic types. But it is a book, right? I mean it has a cover, yeah, and pages. And these days you can search this book electronically, so it exists in virtual form as well. It is studied, commented on, debated, has been for centuries, almost from the very beginning. Contains narrative, codes, exhortations, polemical, variety of rhetorical forms, similar to what you might encounter in other written texts. And it seeks to communicate and to teach, again, in a way that books do. Books are mediums through which authors attempt to communicate with an audience, right? And as an audience, you enter readership, you enter into communication, conversation with the author. Sometimes you might take it upon yourself to write to the author directly. I've received an email from somebody I had no idea who this person is, responding to my book on Palestinians. She addressed it to me as Lauren and signed it with her first name, and I had no idea who she is. And don't plan to respond to her. She was very critical of me. So, delete. Well, what joys of email. Yet the Koran is also not like any other book we might think of at all. But rather something that is not only read, but also heard. I've already indicated how the Koran, in a sense, is an oral text right from the start. On the screen here, let's see if this works. Mahirah, seen here in the top photograph, is where the prophet Muhammad was said to have received his revelation. Now, he had been in the habit. This would have been, you know, around about 610 of the common era. He was often in the habit of going up onto this mountain. He was a very sort of meditative, mystical kind of person, if you will, somebody who was seeking the divine as various permits and monks did in the Near East for centuries before him and after him. And during one of these moments on Mahirah, he has this incredible experience. And you see here a close up of the cave on Nampirah where he is believed to have received his revelation. So, Muhammad was on Nampirah in the year 610. He was about 40 years old, just right for a midlife crisis. And it was called to recite. The angel appears, the angel Gabriel appears to him. And according to tradition, to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was commanded to say these words by the angel. Recite in the name of your Lord who creates, who created the human being from a drop of fluidity, perhaps Sina. And these words said to be the very first word. And what is revealing for me, what is revealing for me is that this moment of prophecy, this inbreaking of the divine into the human realm is very much in the meaning of the text associated with the act of creation. Recite in the name of your Lord who created. I'll come back to this linkage between prophecy and creation in a few minutes. Muhammad was terrified at this prospect. He didn't quite take to this immediately. And so as tradition has it, well later he describes, according to tradition, of this sensation of being squeezed almost to the point of collapse. The angel, in a sense, is this very powerful presence, suffocating presence almost. And he's commanded to speak and to recite or to read if you will. And he says, I can't, I don't know how, I cannot. And the angel is persistent. You shall recite, recite, recite in the name of your Lord who created. Muhammad flees the mountain and seeks comfort in the arms of his wife, Tadija, who then has a need with her cousin a Christian who says, Gil Muhammad, this is for real. You're not going nuts. You're not going crazy. But this is from God. And in other words, just sort of chill and let this thing happen. And for the next 22 years, this thing happened. He received revelations for the next 22 years until it's done. The Quran, as I just said, that which is read or that which is recited, Muhammad is called the Quran to recite. The Quran, I would argue, exists then if we want to say the Quran exists in multiple forms, at least three. According to the Muslim Islamic tradition, the Quran is said to exist in a heavenly form. And what is brought down and made manifest in and fixed within human language is in a sense a copy of this heavenly divine speech. And this led to a huge debate among Muslims about whether the actual physical Quran was created or uncreated. I'm not going to go into this, but it was a version of the debate that Christians had about Jesus. Is he divine? Is he human? Is he both? What gives? And Muslims have a similar debate about the Quran. Is it divine? Is it not? Is it both? What is it exactly? Ultimately, Muslims decide that indeed the text is divine. It is the divine word of God. And there are a whole host of issues that are associated with this. I don't have time to get into it, but I wanted to just let you in on this debate. It's a debate that was very important in the history of Islam. And as I said, it's a question that arises, I think, whenever a religious tradition is grappling with a notion of the divine other that nevertheless relates to and breaks into the realm of the human. How, in what sense, is the human capable of the divine, the divine capable of the human? It is fundamentally contradictory. How is that relationship understood, imagined? And in the hearing and reciting the Quran, that problem is worked out by Muslims in certain ways that I'm going to start to get into a little bit more here. The Quran is also, of course, in a written form. So from the very beginning, the Quran was written down by people who were listening to the Prophet, part of his growing entourage of early followers. They wrote this Quran down, these recitations down on whatever materials might have been available at hand, palm leaves, papyri, other materials. It also existed almost from the very beginning as well in an oral, well obviously from the very beginning in an oral form. And to this day, the Quran is preserved in oral form. People memorize the Quran, the entirety of it. And to become a hafiz, to become one who is remembered in a sense holds the Quran, right, and guards the Quran in memory, is to achieve something quite great. And one is honored quite a bit by Muslims among Muslims, once one has achieved this. Is there anybody in this room who is hafiz of Quran? So we have somebody in the room who has actually memorized the Quran. If I should ever render something in this talk from the Quran incorrectly, please by all means stop me and correct me, because I know that that is actually quite important, that the Quranic speech be rendered correctly is of great importance, right? Of course it would be if it is the Divine Word of God, according to Muslims. One other point about the oral Quran, traditionally the oral is said to correct the written. In fact the oral Quran is held to be traditionally of greater authority. So I want to talk about the Quran. I mentioned this whole notion of soundscape, right, and I've been playing this soundtrack of the recitation from sort of money in the background, in a sense in the attempt of my own to create a kind of Quranic atmosphere. As you're listening to this, I'm tempted to turn off the lights and end the lecture here just having you listen to the text and let it speak for itself. No, seriously, I mean I won't do that, but the Quranic sense, how do you come to the Quran and understand it? Well, in a way there was really no other way but to sort of immerse yourself in it and allow yourself to be taken up into it. The Quran, as recited speech, very much creates what I will call a soundscape. A soundscape is something if you think of a landscape, right, a landscape that is intentionally formed and created by human beings. You know, you think of a built environment, right, and architects are very tuned in to the importance of a built environment and how it can shape our thought patterns, the way we orient ourselves, and the way that we feel, the kind of emotions that we experience, can be very powerfully affected by the built environment or the landscape around us. A soundscape does something very similar. It can orient you, cause you to have thought connections and to experience emotions in certain ways. And the Quran is very much concerned, interested in shaping a soundscape that becomes very important in the conveyance of the message that it seeks to convey to human beings. So, how many of you understand what's being said right now? So, we have two The rest of you don't know what's being heard, but in a sense, as you listen to it, most Muslims will probably tell you that they do not understand what is being recited when they hear the Quran. The vast majority of Muslims do not understand Arabic at all. But, they might memorize certain passages from the Quran as they grow up and go through school, probably do, especially if they come from pious families. And they hear it all the time, in their day-to-day lives. If you live in a Muslim-majority society, the Quran is a part of the daily sound that you encounter as you go through your day. But, you may not understand a word of it. In a sense, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter, but to not know what you're hearing doesn't necessarily mean that you don't understand what is being said, that there is something being communicated nonetheless through the recitation. Quranic recitation is ubiquitous. It is your weed sonically with profane sound, car horns, conversation, pop music. I'm going to take a break here for a second. So, I found this on YouTube. I thought it was quite interesting. And it sort of gives you some sense in the way of which the Quran can sort of intervene in daily life. A rule. It's reciting. It's reciting Quran. The bustle of the cars in the background sometimes passes by what come by and offer. The Quran can intervene in the sounds of daily life through the agency of an individual who might just simply sit down and decide to recite. And you see passersby sort of being caught, oh, wait a minute, put it on. Somebody gives, or maybe somebody will stop and listen. I think of, I live in Chicago. I consider Chicago my second home. How many times have I been on the L in the L station? I heard a musician or a rapper and people gathering around, right? And, you know, the music of this performer intervening and stopping my day, right? Causing me to sort of enter into a different kind of space and time. Making me sort of reflect and think, perhaps, about something that's going through in the music, even if I don't understand exactly what a rapper is saying. So, the sounds of the Quran can intervene in our lives, in the lives of people in their daily lives. At times, the Quran can become the dominant sound in early morning recitations before sort of before Fajr prayer or the dawn prayer. During Ramadan in the evenings, you will hear recitations of the Quran. The Quran in the sense begins to take over the public space. Formal Quran recitation competitions, recitation competitions are a big deal. They occur throughout societies in which Muslims form a dominant presence. Indonesia, for instance, does a lot of this. I happen to be familiar with that. A lot of Quran recitation competitions. Really important premium, but really good reciters are rock stars. I mean, you go to their YouTube sites and you can see the ones like Al-Fassi, for instance, is a reciter that gets a lot of viewings on YouTube and deservedly so. Beautiful voice. So, it matters. The rendering of the Quran and how it is rendered vocally, it matters. The aesthetics of Quranic recitation really matter. It needs to be rendered beautifully. Okay. The recitation of the Quran creates a collective meditative mood. It's kind of what I was hoping, aiming for in the planning of the recitation of Sura-e-Madi and initially in the beginning of the lecture. I remember experiencing taking a taxi. I lived in the Gaza Strip for many years, or for a couple of years, and taking taxis between Gaza. This was before the big wall and the checkpoints and all the other stuff happened where it was still relatively easy to travel between Gaza and Jerusalem and get into a Gaza taxi. But there was always a whole lot of tension, especially as we approached the military checkpoint, and oftentimes the driver would put a tape, this was back in the days of analog, would put a tape, a cassette tape into the tape player of recitation or turn on the radio with recitation on it and the mood in the taxi, the tension would begin to dissipate. So, the Quranic recitation had this kind of calming effect. Part of the meaning, right, of what can be communicated even if you don't understand the words. The Quran then functions sonically to draw listeners into an alternate time-space with a kind of parallel narrative and memory, a kind of mythic memory, reminding listeners of a different kind of timescale, drawing them into a kind of biblical, Quranic soundscape. Let's see here. Oh, I wanted to play this. This was interesting. Well, I'll skip that. I think you're kind of getting a point here. So, the Quran intervenes in our profane time and Muslims talk about the beauty of the Quranic recitation in terms of the level of the core, the Ajaza of the Quran, the miracle of the Quran, and that the very speech of the Quran, the sound of the Quran, can have a kind of effect or impact on people. I mentioned, you know, being in the Gaza taxi and sort of the calming effect that had in the ways in which it draws listeners into sort of a parallel reality, one different from the hardships of their daily lives. But what if you're not Muslim? What if you're living in a community in which Muslims live alongside non-Muslims? There's a clip here from YouTube that I was going to play of, and I don't have time, but I might come back to it, where they have these Muslims standing on a street corner in London, right, from British Muslims and with some immigrant Muslims. And there's this one guy, beautiful voice, right, that he's reciting the Quran. But the text that he's reciting, it's all about how the unbelievers will, will perish in the fires of hell. And it's sort of ironic because there's such beauty of the recitation, and yet this recitation is being directed, that people are walking by not even paying attention to him. But there's a sense in which, right, I mean, okay, so one has to wonder what's he trying to do here? The listeners don't understand there, but they're not really paying attention to him. But there's a sense in which, you know, his rendering of the speech of the Quran as a kind of witness to the world, calling on non-believers to hear and obey, even if they don't understand what is being said, that the very recitation of the text itself will be efficacious, in the sense that this is divine speech, and the very rendering of that speech will have an effect, an impact, on reciting, even if people don't understand the words themselves. But coming back to this question, what if you're not a Muslim? What if you live in a place like Bethlehem, which is predominately a Christian town with a very significant proportion of Muslims as well? I want to tell you a little story about how I first encountered the Quran in a really serious and in-depth way. And this occurred when I was living in the West Bank, in the town of Big Jala, which is about 70% Christian, just outside of Bethlehem, which is about today 60% Christian, historically Christian towns in Palestine, with important Muslim populations as well. And I was, I played classical guitar, and I was invited to come and play guitar for a Christmas Eve service at the Lutheran Church, the Arabian, the Palestinian, the Third Church of Bethlehem. So I agreed, and I brought my guitar along, and I played at the church that evening. Afterward, I decided, well, I'm going to spend some time walking through Bethlehem, and Christmas Eve is a big deal in Bethlehem, at the time I'm not even aware of how it would have been. Yes, it's a big deal. It's a big city, and it's a big deal, and it's a huge tourist bonanza, tourist business bonanza, where the Israelis and the Palestinian business people sort of, you know, have found ways at different times to collaborate with one another. So the Israelis would come in with a heavy military presence, a set of checkpoints and all of this, and then all these tourists would be in Boston, on these big huge buses from Jerusalem, from the hotel to Jerusalem, into Bethlehem for the Christmas Eve festivities, and it was just, you know, a real sort of party atmosphere. And, you know, you would have these American and European tourists, you know, walking around with gin bottles and vodka bottles, getting drunk off their ass, intermingling with, you know, pilgrims, religious pilgrims, who were coming to the Church of Nativity, the Basilica of Nativity Church, and then midst all of all of that, I'm walking around with my guitar, and I hear, London, you're London! And I turned and there's my friend, Yusuf, who I just met maybe two months ago. He was student teaching in the school in which I was teaching. And Yusuf calls me over, and he had been sitting in front of a store shop, of a shop that was owned by a friend of his, and he had a small charcoal fire going, and he was making coffee, or a cup of coffee. And he invited me to sit down. He said, you know, come sit down, have a cup of coffee with me. It was about 9, 10 o'clock at night, and I sat down, and for the next five hours, until about three o'clock in the morning, we talked. And we talked about Maryam, the Mother of Jesus, and about Jesus, primarily Yusuf telling me the story, the story that I knew really, really well, or at least I thought I did. One of the things that I learned from Yusuf was that, well, Maryam found herself underneath a date tree, and the pangs of childbirth called out, oh, that I had been, how does it go? Oh, had I been forsaken and spared this pain. It's not exactly, but that's kind of what she says. And a voice calls out to her and says, calm down. And water appeared beneath her, a real little water appeared beneath her, and dates began to fall down upon her. That's not part of the story, but he couldn't. It's not in the New Testament, not my book. Full of disclosure, at that time, I was a fairly practicing Christian long story. I'm not a Muslim, and I've gone on quite a journey. But at the time, I was a very devout Christian. So I knew my Bible, a Protestant Christian, and those Protestants know our Bibles. So I knew the Bible, and I said, that's not in our story. Later, I realized that in a sense, that little detail is part of the story. It's not in the canonical New Testament, but it is in books, Christian literature that never made it into the Bible. And the court on it picked up on these details. And I'm not making any suggestions here necessarily about how that happened or what the process was. Only to say that these details that are told in the court on are details that exist in other literatures that Christians have forgotten about. Anyway, Yusuf and I got into this long discussion about Mary. And as I began to think about this, I thought, you know, so what's going on here? And I ended up writing an article on the figure of Mary for an academic journal. So I gave it a lot of thought to this. And I think I'm going to think about the court on it as a kind of literature that calls. You can think of chronic callings. So for instance, throughout the court on, you see these kinds of exclamations or appeals to the people of the book. Here's a good example of it here. So, all people of the scripture, all people of the scripture, all Christians and Jews, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah, accept the truth, the Messiah, Jesus, the Son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah and his word, which he directed to Mary and a soul created out of command. So Jesus being a soul from God. So believe in Allah and his messenger and do not say three. Don't say, don't talk about the trinity. It is better for you if you did not do this. Indeed, Allah is but one God exalted as He above having a son. The court on is intervening in a debate here is engaging Christians and Muslims and saying, yo, you've got it wrong. Wake up. Here's the real deal. Here's what really happened. And you guys, you Christians and Jews, you're fighting about this and you're not even fighting about the right version of the story, right? So here's the court on entering into this debate. And what I find really interesting and significant about this is how, in a sense, understanding here is that the court on is a part of this biblical, if you will, tradition. The Quran is a biblical text in this sense and that it tells the same stories and it enters into this discussion. And the term that I want to use for this is, yeah, matrashic in the sense of the Jewish rabbinic idea of telling stories about stories as a way to explain stories. The Quran is a midrashic text. It intervenes in the Jewish Christian conversation about Jesus, for example, by offering its own version of the Jesus story by telling the Jesus story in a different way. It's also a didactic text that tells the Jesus story as a way to teach us something, to teach us about prophets, about how to live properly. Jesus is a model, right? But he's a Quranic model, a model that models for us an understanding of what a prophet is. And lo and behold, Jesus, as a Quranic prophet, looks a lot like Muhammad as a prophet. So a kind of Quranic prophet model is developed through the storytelling of Jesus. The point that I want to make here, though, is that in debating Jesus with use of, I was hearing the Quranic call. It was, in a sense, another way in which the Quran enters into shapes. The sort of soundscape that we are a part of, in this case, discursively, right? A discourse that is uttered and in conversation, the midrashic practice of the Quran is extended. Use of an eye ringation, a kind of midrashic conversation, carrying on our own interpretive work that was Quranically shaped, biblically shaped as well. The text then is midrashic, but it also spurs debate that itself and acts and extends the midrashic impulse. In Bethlehem, that moment that I was describing to you, such a moment was occasioned dialectically by Christian remembrance of Jesus' birth going on around us. Jesus then exists in an intertextual chamber, echo chamber. The implications of the story, whether in recitations or conversations, sound in multiple registers across Muslim and Christian texts. In Jewish texts, to recite Jesus' story then is to invoke the appeal to the people of the book. The Quran is calling to the people of the book, demanding an answer and engaging them. It shapes through that story telling conversations that occur among people. All of this got me thinking for today's presentation about sound in memory. How does sound memory and meaning interact with one another? Obviously, I've talked about it in two ways. Recitations that create an ambience and conversation, the way in which the Quran intervenes in the spoken word between people. These applications, these callings and the consequent meanings that they bring into consciousness occur not only linguistically but sonically. So how does sound relate to meaning? And here I want to introduce this notion of the sound figure. So I thought this was pretty good. Hey, do you know what the French word for scat is? No, gal. That doesn't sound that bad of a meaning. No, it makes me puke and barf. So when we hear words, we often associate those words with feelings and remembered experiences. Think of the word puss. What comes to mind for you? Resist losing. I mean, but come on, the word pee you puss. It's just a sound, right? Puss. We think if you've grown up in an English speaking linguistic cultural setting, American linguistic cultural setting, you're going to associate that word with something that we have culturally and socially agreed upon is yaki. Revolting. You have to lose it. Impure. Stay away from it. If you really want to gross your sister out, then you go. Something like puss. Gross you out. Puss, right? So we hear the word, we associate with an image. Sound figure. Sound figures, though, aren't so simple straight forward. They can be quite in class. So let's do this. It's one of the best rock songs. called not enjoying the rolling stones and start me up without thinking about a paper song. Right? Madison Avenue is really good at this. Here's something you associate it with something else, an image. Sound figures, no way to think about them are asonic metaphors. What is a metaphor? A metaphor links abstract concepts to concrete figures that are rendering abstraction understandable. Good example of this. Time is money. Abstract concept of time figured concretely as money. We talk about this all the time. Living on borrowed time, a waste of time. Wonderfully capitalistic, right? Argument is war. She demolished my argument. You disagree? Okay, shoot. Metaphors also link concepts to experiences and associated emotions. Conducts a feeling or memory that endows the abstract meaning with an emotional force. Living on borrowed time might trigger anxiety, right? We connect that with death. Or at the end of the world. Planet Earth is living on borrowed time with all this carbon being sent into our atmosphere. So start me up, links two texts together. The songs, the lyrics, and the Microsoft commercial. Third text, the listener, is involved in this as well, bringing his or her subjective encounter with these things. So start me up. For me, conjures a personal memory linked with static unfiltered self and banning during my adolescence. Riding around with Tommy Brabola in his Chevy Nova with a six-pack of beer between us. Don't tell me about that. It's crazy when I have battles. And then Microsoft, right? How does that work? So this return to matters sacred. How do the chronic sound figures work? They sonically link together similar phrases that occur in different narrative contexts. When a listener hears such a phrase and she or he may discern an echo, or similar phrasing occurs elsewhere in the quote on it. She or he also connects the sound figure with personal experiences and the feelings associated with it. So an example that I want to get into here, and this will be the last kind of work I do with you here, is the sound figure that involves the spirit. You see here a rendering of Bismillah, Rahman, Raheem. We're going to come back and we're going to work on this a little more. Ru'ah is often the Ru'ah in the sense of spirit. And Ru'ah as the same sort of meaning as in kibble. Ru'ah, the idea of a wind, of something that carries and brings with it. It's a breeze. It's a wind. And in the quote on, often associated with what Michael Sells, who I'm drawing from here, calls boundary marks, links to events in which the divine comes into proximity with the human plus causing suspension of the structures and tend to a daily life. So in Surat Al Qadr, I think I'm going to all come back to this maybe. I've sort of already kind of decided to through with you. Let me welcome back to this. In Surat Al Qadr, we encounter Ru'ah in multiple different phrasings. And when somebody hears, for instance, that Ru'ah is heard elsewhere. So you hear that, you also bring to mind other places in the court on where that phrasing occurs. Now, those of you who know the court on really well, maybe can attest to that. I don't know. When Surat Al Qadr is recited and you come to that really important passage in the middle, right, where the angels come down and the spirit is in her or on or in it or how there is not clear. The ambiguous scholars have debated what it refers to. That Ru'ah, the spirit in her occurs elsewhere. And in a sense, you hear that, you also hear and the image associated with those other passages comes to mind. So, it occurs in multiple places in the court on which human and divine come into close proximity. And particularly with the themes of prophecy creation and the final judgment. The phrase that echoes across the court on creating a polyphonic figure. The polyphony generates a multiplicity of associations and meanings for the listener who is well versed in the court on. It's sort of like being well versed in American pop culture. You hear start me up when you think of, oh, I've heard that before over by Microsoft over here. But you sort of connect those things together, right? Same thing with a text like the court on Ru'ah, oh, yeah, I've heard that over here, right? And those two associations then merge into a very complex whole in terms of, and the meaning of that phrase then becomes deeper and richer as a consequence. So here's some passages in which we have that phrase appearing. So, they're descend the angels in the spirit upon it or the spirit upon her. Elsewhere, the Holy Spirit or Holy Inspiration is said to come down upon Muhammad. Passages concerning the day of reckoning include this, there rise the angels in the spirit it upon him to the day of judgment. So suddenly, the descent of the spirit on the day in which the Quran is revealed to Muhammad, right? This is what this refers to there, to send the angels in the spirit upon her in this passage of the Surah of the Quran, Surah Al-Qadr, the Surah Al-Qadr, that I've recited earlier to you is all about the descent of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. So it's a traditionally understood, but that very descent of the spirit associated with the descent of the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad is also associated with the day of reckoning. The spirit will rise up on the day of reckoning animating that day, the very same spirit. We also find it in passages concerning Mary, We breathe into her our spirit and as a result, she becomes impregnated in the absence of the man and gives birth to Jesus, who is a spirit from God. And we send to her our spirit which appeared before her as a human shape. Elsewhere, Jesus is described as God's spirit. So we have the spirit descending on the night of power, the night in which the revelation is given to the Prophet, we have the spirit rising up on the final day animating that day. We have the spirit being breathed into Mary and as a consequence, she becomes impregnated in the absence of the man with Jesus. And we find the spirit as well in accounts of Adam's creation, the very first human being. And when I formed him and breathed into him of my spirit, the hymn refers to here the Vashara Minthim, the human form made of mud that is Adam, but that human form only becomes animated when what? When the spirit is breathed into him, much in the way that the spirit was breathed into Mary. Let's think about all of this a little bit more. If you think about this a little bit, you begin to understand how what emerges here is a very complex figure that is rendered sonically through the repetition of these phrases. When you hear them, you are in a sense experiencing a multi-layered sonic phenomenon that brings together all of these associations into a single meaning. Or multi-layered meaning. I want to talk about in terms of a dino-centric sound figure that brings together creation, prophecy, and final day. Here on the screen you see a depiction of Mary sitting beneath the palm tree with the baby Jesus. The Rukho Fihah is a dino-centric metaphor, I want to argue, a prophecy in divine creative and destructive action. The night in which the spirit is said to descend on the night in which the prophecy is given to the prophet is associated with the descent of the spirit into the night, as if the night, and the night here is referred to, I would argue, through the pronoun Ha, a feminine pronoun. The night is partially personified as a woman. The giving of prophecy then is associated obliquely with the coming of the spirit to a woman. In the Fahna Fihah in the Rukho Fihah, the object here, in this case, referring to Mary, this is taken from this passage as concerning Mary, we breathe our spirit into her. Here we have another example of the spirit coming to a woman and giving birth to, if you will, a prophet, not a prophecy, but one who will give a prophecy. This gender figure emerges through the polyglocalogy in the Rukho Fihah phrase, the ways in which it occurs in these different contexts. The Ha Phronomial ending in Fihah is gender ambiguous, either he or it, even them. The spirit descends upon her in it, where the her in it refers variously to the night on which the prophecy is given to Muhammad, which becomes, if you will, impregnated with the prophecy. It gives birth to the prophecy, if you will. Mania becomes impregnated with Jesus through the action of the spirit. Adam comes to life when the spirit is blown into him. The spirit brings life, brings knowledge, and brings judgment. So, summing up here, when listeners hear the word of the Rukho, and a time or host of images in Fihah's conversion, the prophet's shattering experience of prophecy, Mary's experience equally shattering of giving birth to Jesus, the creation of the first human, the day of reckoning, all of these things are multi-layered for the listener, as he or she encounters these renderings. Okay, I'm not going to go through all of this, I'll just leave it on the screen. I've used it quite a bit of the time, and I don't believe that I forgot the questions, but we have about five minutes. I'll be happy to take my question to you. How does the sound figure survive a translation? It doesn't, and can't. And that's the problem with translation, right? I think Muslims rightly argued that there is no Koran other than in its Arabic form, and when translated it is a version of the Koran or an interpretation of the Koran. But doesn't that make sense? I mean that a piece of poetry, and I'm not saying to put it on as poetry, but let's take poetry as an example of something that's notoriously hard to translate, that in a sense poetry, that's to be fully understood, has to be heard, and perhaps memorized and internalized, right? As a musician, I understand that it's not good enough simply to play the notes on the page, but I have to memorize those notes, and I have to internalize them, make them my own, and then I have to play them, which is different from, not just play the notes, I have to play music, and playing music is different from playing the notes. And the same, I think the same idea has evolved here with how the Muslims approach the learning of the Koran, and this is placed on memorization from the very beginning. Learn the Koran, memorize it, make it your own, and understanding will come eventually. So,