Faithful Listening: On Sound, Survival, and Becoming in Muslim Toronto

In this dissertation, I follow the trajectories of several contiguous, heterodox Muslim groups in the city of Toronto, and unravel the ways in which they use sound and listening to at once cultivate personal, inward-looking spiritual practices, and a more outward-feeling sense of belonging to a variegated local network of Muslim spaces and institutions, and to the city-at-large in which they reside. In the vast majority of these spaces, conversations about faith, service, justice, advocacy, local politics, global current events, and everyday life are woven into the discursive and affective fabric at hand. Across this faith-based network, fricative, disjunctive encounters are common, but do not rule out the possibility of profound moments of camaraderie and understanding across difference; such is the nature of the ummah—that is, a theoretical or imagined global community that encompasses all Muslims. I listened alongside a handful of groups affiliated with a Sufi halqa (prayer circle) located in the former municipality Scarborough (now a part of the Greater Toronto Area), including a meshk (hymn rehearsal) group and a prayer group called Masjid al-Wali that operates as a place of worship for LGBT2SIQ+ Muslims. These groups’ spiritual journeys were often, but not always, concerned with the internal and inward. Or, in terms derived from the Qur’an and Sunnah, which my interlocutors often use as guidebooks of sorts, the individuals that I encountered during fieldwork were attuned to al-batin (the inner or hidden dimension of reality). Thus, I put forward a batini ethnography—an ethnography of (shared) inner experiences. Importantly, this dissertation homes in on the roles that sounding and listening play in this realm of interiority. I discuss the ways in which the careful cultivation of modes of “faithful listening” is made possible through the development of safe-feeling spaces. In such domains of refuge, my interlocutors are able to move more freely along the maqamat (stations or stages) of being a student of Sufism, passing through difficult times—both personal and political—with hope (raja’), expansiveness (bast), contentment (qana’a), and even humour, but also, at times, with sadness (huzn), and contraction (qabd).

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