Of Fatwas and Phonographs: Remapping Technological Modernity across the Indian Ocean World, c. 1899-1932

Abstract

Bridging methods of historical ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean history, this article weaves a global history of the phonograph by foregrounding cultural and legal circulations within Muslim Indian Ocean networks at the dawn of the twentieth century. Firstly, the article demonstrates how Muslim consumers and producers of musical entertainments and recitational practices operated within long-standing pilgrimage, trade, and literary networks between the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia and, furthermore, how these networks facilitated the early global spread of the phonograph: a technology that gave rise to popular music industry and global media capitalism. Secondly, and in addition to referencing archival phonograph recordings, the article explores how the circulation of phonograph technologies, vocal recitational practices, and musical “instruments of amusement” were debated by Islamic jurists whose legal traditions occupied the same Indian Ocean cultural geography between Arabia and Southeast Asia. By focusing on fatwas published in Java by an Arab Hadhrami jurist named Sayyid ‘Uthman b. Yahya (1822-1914), the article complicates previous scholarly framings of fatwas on the phonograph as a clash between “Islam” and “Modernity” or “the West,” instead framing his fatwas as a response to the early phonograph industry’s success in catering to preexisting vernacular entertainment markets on Muslim networks of the IOW. Additionally, the article suggests that global media capitalism’s spread depended on and became intertwined with what Rajat Kanta Ray (1994) defined as “intermediate spheres” of capital outside the West, in this case long-standing markets for recitation and musical performance within maritime networks. Thus, the article contributes to scholarship that challenges Western exceptionalism in historical narratives of modernity pertaining to media, law, and economy, and to scholarship that understands the modern IOW as a global space shaped by many historical layers of technological globalization and cultural circulation.