The Sonorous, Audible Mosque: A New Perspective on Islamic Architecture

We perceive the world through multiple senses. Unlike the gustatory, tactile, and olfactory, visual and auditory senses enable perception at a distance, representing the wider physical and social spaces in which we live. While the mind’s eye appears to represent three-dimensional reality better than its ear, hearing is more deeply enmeshed in social life. Western cultures privilege light and seeing for understanding (insight over hearsay), as does academia, where material things are studied as visual culture. Yet we also hear architecture. Furthermore, sound and audition are profoundly social compared to light and vision. Those deprived of hearing are far more isolated than those deprived of sight. Muslim devotions center on remembering God through sounded words. Mosque design is perforce sonic, its structures—minaret, dome or carpet—designed to enhance collective soundings and hearings:  the call (adhan) to prayer (salah), the sermon (khutba), the supplication (duʿaʾ), Qur’anic recitation (tilawa). Sonorous and audible mosques resonate, shaping one another dynamically, facilitating harmonization with local social life.  Yet most studies of Islamic architecture reduce the mosque to visual, asocial representations, idealized as a static image, devoid of people or sound, reduced further to a sketch or axonometric projection. Such silent, asocial representations may suffice to write cultural histories, but they fail to convey the richness of spiritual experience. I therefore reframe the mosque as sonorous and audible, its soundscapes as flexible architectural features shaping and shaped by spiritual meaning, towards a more holistic understanding of mosques, and of Muslim life and faith.