Azan (Islamic Call to Prayer) – Middle East (Ancient)
A sonic proclamation of divine sovereignty, functioning as an index of sacred time, space, and subjectivity through voice as ritual agent
Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Art and Agency
Introduction
The Azan (or Adhan) is the Islamic call to prayer, traditionally recited five times a day by the muezzin from a minaret or through broadcast technologies. It summons the faithful with melodic vocalization in Arabic, stating: “God is Great. There is no god but God. Come to prayer. Come to success.” Though not considered “music” in Islamic doctrine, the Azan has an undeniable sonic aesthetic, often marked by intricate modal improvisation (maqām), ornamentation, and spiritual gravitas.
From Alfred Gell’s perspective in Art and Agency, the Azan is a paradigmatic case of art as social action, where aesthetics are not ornamental but causal, and where voice becomes a temporal and spatial agent. It is an indexical artwork, not in the sense of representation, but as a real-time agent of social structuring and spiritual coordination.
Art as Index of Divine and Human Agency
Gell defines art objects (or events) as indexes—artefacts that point to the intentionality of agents. In the Azan:
The muezzin’s voice is an index of Islamic intentionality, not personal expression,
The melodic phrasing and recitative tone signify reverence, clarity, and ritual mastery,
The voice does not represent God but points toward divine order.
The agency here is distributed: the muezzin is not the originator but the medium, transmitting God’s temporal sovereignty through sound. The Azan is not performed—it acts.
Distributed Intentionality: God, Muezzin, Mosque, Community
In Gell’s model, the agent is not necessarily a person; it can be a structure. The Azan expresses agency that is:
Divine: the voice enacts God’s will to be worshiped,
Institutional: the mosque, as a sacred architectural form, radiates authority through the call,
Technological: modern loudspeakers extend the voice’s agency, saturating the soundscape,
Communal: every listener is drawn into a shared spatial-temporal contract.
Thus, the Azan is a system of intentionality enacted through vocal ornamentation, spatial echo, and time regulation. The muezzin is merely one point in a distributed agency network that includes God, text, architecture, and urban space.
Sound as Sacred Agent: The Voice Transformed
Gell’s “technology of enchantment” applies keenly here. While Islamic orthodoxy may discourage “music,” the Azan is often rendered with:
Subtle maqam modulation (e.g., Hijaz, Rast, Bayati),
Expressive melismatic phrasing,
Prolonged vowels, controlled vibrato, and silence.
These techniques do not serve aesthetic pleasure, but induce affective stillness, piety, and submission. The Azan thus enchants, not through beauty per se, but through its audible command of presence—a reverberating voice that fills the spiritual air.
Listeners may experience chills, awe, or temporal disorientation—marks of enchantment as Gell would define it.
Indexing Sacred Time and Space
Gell emphasizes how artworks act in and upon time. The Azan:
Divides the day into ritual intervals, shaping daily rhythms,
Anchors Islamic cities with sonic markers of religious geography,
Echoes across rooftops and alleyways, turning secular spaces into sacred topologies.
The Azan is a time-making device, a public clock rooted in divine intentionality. Its effect is not metaphorical—it literally transforms urban and mental space, structuring consciousness around spiritual attention.
Gell might say that Azan “maps divine time onto social space,” embedding the theological within the architectural and the audible.
The Azan in the Age of Broadcast and Amplification
In modern cities, the Azan is increasingly technologically mediated:
Amplified through loudspeakers,
Synchronized by digital timers,
Broadcast across multiple mosques simultaneously.
Gell would interpret this as technologically extended agency. The muezzin’s voice becomes disembodied but increasingly potent, detached from its source but amplified in authority. The loudspeaker becomes an agent in its own right, a prosthetic extension of religious voice.
This does not dilute agency; it intensifies the indexical field, allowing the Azan to saturate both inner consciousness and public noise-space.
Relational Network: The Azan as Agent in Ritual Feedback
According to Gell, art objects (or performances) are nodes in a relational network:
The Azan triggers ritual action—ablution, prayer alignment, group formation,
It elicits emotional, social, and theological responses,
It defines roles—muezzin, imam, congregant—and arranges them hierarchically and affectively.
Thus, the Azan is not a “call” in the communicative sense—it is a perlocutionary act, with agency to rearrange bodies, minds, and social relations.
It initiates ritual time—not as a symbolic gesture, but as an actual mechanism of social causality.
No Audience, Only Participants
Like Vedic Chanting or Guqin solo performance, the Azan is not entertainment—it is existential address:
It does not seek applause, aesthetic approval, or subjective interpretation.
It assumes ontological weight: “you are being called because you are subject to divine order.”
This makes the Azan an ideal case of what Gell means by “art as system of action”, not representation. The voice here does not represent belief—it creates the conditions of belief.
Conclusion
Through Gell’s theory, the Azan is revealed as a ritual technology of agency—a voice that commands time, structures space, and acts upon listeners not as audience, but as ritual participants.
It is not simply “beautiful,” nor does it need to be. It enchants through authority, acts through sound, and indexes a distributed intentionality—a vocalized map of God, space, and society in perfect alignment.