Sub-Project MC 2.2 Islamic Sermons as Oral Literature: Voice and Emotion in Bengali waʿz mahfils
Project Leader: Max Stille
This sub-project dealt with contemporary Islamic sermons in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh. It documented and reflected upon aesthetic dimensions and the literary-historical situatedness of Islamic sermons in a region with long-standing traditions of a multilingual Islamic literature. It focused on a particular ephemeral genre, mostly known as oẏāj māhfil (waʿẓ maḥfil). These sermons are held predominantly in Bengali, but include Arabic, Urdu and Farsias well. Their non-liturgical character and embeddedness in the region’s life-cycles allows for an inclusion of form elements of other Bengali narrative traditions, one main form feature of which is a melodic rendering of prose narratives. The main method of the study was a rhetoric analysis with particular regard to the interplay between linguistic and aural layers of the sermons.