Sonic In-Betweenness. Acts of Devotion in Public Spaces, Egypt

al-hobb sana' al-'agab

we khally al-mayya teb'i hadid

Love created the marvel

and let the water become iron

— shaykh Mohsen

Hadra in Sayyida Zaynab. Photo: Dina Ali.

These recordings are all related to acts of devotion and their manifestation in public spaces in Egypt. Over the years 2020–2025, I researched dhikr, a Sufi practice that consists of chanting, accompanied by clapping hands and heavy breathing, with or without musical instruments. Dhikr literally means “remembrance” and refers to the remembrance of God. The dhikr I have been focusing on was performed in public spaces during the celebration of mawlids—religious festivities in honour of the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-Bayt) and pious personalities to whom shrines across Egypt are dedicated. A dizzying, sonic tour of Egyptian devotional practices recorded over 5 years.

Recording with a pair of binaural microphones. Photo: Dina Ali.

The recordings took place in very crowded areas, with people constantly moving, often in a hectic state (ḥal), as in track #5; during the ḥadra, a man goes into a highly emotional state, collapsing over the microphone in the middle of the small circle around the shaykh. Thus, some of the selected recordings contain handling and fabric noises, contributing to giving an idea of the environment we are listening to. The dhikr nowadays is mostly amplified, resulting in a blasting, crackling, distorted sound, which is its aesthetic signature. The choice about where to position the microphones during a dhikr was also influenced by the distribution of the loudspeakers in the space; being too close to them would have masked all the other sonic elements that were not amplified, other than resulting in continuous clipping in the recordings. These recordings were carried out with different microphone setups — from binaural stereo to cardioid, and omnidirectional microphones. They are like lenses focusing on some of the details of the dhikr: the percussions, the voice, the breathing, the screams, the noises around. Some reveal grains and smudges, while others are clearer and intimate, feeling the breathing of the surrounding people just next to you.

Living, recording, and listening to the Dhikr led to a sense of kind of “sonic in-betweenness”. The idea points at the specific relation between listening/sounding entities that unfolds in two directions: it makes individuals experience something other than themselves, may we call it non-human or divine. At the same time, in the feedback between the diverse sounding / listening entities, sound becomes something more than a mere physical phenomenon, as it has the power to create a juxtaposition of temporalities affecting individuals.

Shaykh Mohsen. Photo: Dina Ali.

Hadra in Sayyida Nafisa. Photo: Dina Ali.