UCLA

This dissertation is a historical study of global interactions between Islamic law and early media industry, exploring the broader social and political context of fatwas written about the phonograph throughout the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter examines fatwas on the phonograph that were issued in what are now the modern states of Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In doing so, the dissertation broadly explores how early European and American phonograph firms targeted Muslim consumers worldwide by producing recordings of Quran recitations, Islamic hymnals, and sung poetry, while Muslim jurists debated the faults and merits of this novel form of capitalist production and consumption in an equally global arena of Islamic jurisprudence. Additionally, the dissertation highlights how fatwas on the phonograph were written at a time when the practice of Islamic law was changing globally, becoming increasingly intertwined with the enlightenment philosophies and ideologies underpinning the legal mechanisms and practices of modern civil law in British and Dutch colonial contexts as well as in Ottoman imperial contexts. Such entanglements saw Islamic law become increasingly employed as a tool of social control in attempts to regulate public life and patterns of behavior derived from custom and new forms of consumption, especially social gatherings revolving around musical entertainment and spectacles of religious vocal recitation. Furthermore, while early Islamic legal debate about the phonograph became embedded within existing legal and philosophical deliberation over issues of sound, vocal recitation, divine revelation, and vernacular amusement, this dissertation suggests that the global phonograph industry ultimately helped galvanize a worldwide discursive shift in Islamic jurisprudence with the adoption of “music” or al-musiqa as a substantive legal category. This process was coeval and intertwined with the modern development of the field of ethnomusicology, which itself was born within a Dutch colonial administration that derived its legal definition of “custom” and “tradition”–including “musical tradition”–from the Islamic legal definition of “custom” or ‘adat.