29. Juni |  19:00   |  Brian Larkin (New York)

»The Secular Machine: Radio and the Materiality of Qur’anic Recitation«

This paper examines the encoding of Qur’anic broadcast into the new media of radio in 1940s and 1950s. This moment brought together three disciplines: the governmentality of colonial rule, the technical operations of a new medium and the inherited disciplines of Islamic law. I wish to bring theories of religion and political order together with technical media theory to examine the unfolding of technologies such as the radio as broadly organized socio-technical systems. In doing so I examine the relation between theories of religion and media theory.