contributed by Faizah Zakaria, 12 June 2020

This post tracks images of Ramadan and Eid rituals transplanted from mosque to home during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Using an online mini mosque campaign, and its coda, the home-delivered khutbah (sermon) on the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr as entry points, I analyse these pictures as event and archive that are yet unbounded by an unfolding historical narrative, raising several questions about how the medium influences the message.

On the first day of Ramadan, a post about the #minimosque challenge popped up in my Facebook feed. Mosques in Singapore had been closed for more than three weeks. Rather than mourning a space we couldn’t access, why not create one at home? The post was accompanied with a picture of a cosy corner, padded with prayer mats against a backdrop of minaret constructed from cardboard, above which Arabic calligraphy hung. Share the images of your mini-mosque, the post indirectly urged, by tagging #minimasjid.

Screenshot from Instagram. Image posted by Bradford Muslim College on April 20, 2020

The coronavirus and its quarantine days have often been described as history in the making. They also generate archives-in-the-making; some of which have been organized through projects such as Historians Cooking the Past. But most digital artefacts, like #minimasjid pictures, are floating on the Internet, some protected behind private accounts and others circulating in a public setting. Hashtags connect the public and private as well as anchor an image to this space and time. The anchor is a loose one; a picture can slip out of its moorings, and recirculate, attached to a different narrative and different security settings.

How do we read these images? How will we read these images? Cohen (1998) cautions us that history operates in three keys, unfolding simultaneously as event, experience and myth. So too do historical images. A public image is not just an epiphenomenal artefact, as Strassler’s (2020) recent work cogently argues, it sets (political) processes in motion and contributes to ongoing contestations in the public sphere – an image is itself a happening. Even pictures in more private domains are not detached from relations of power. Wexler (2020) regards family photographs collected in times of violence and crisis as a “chrysalis archive,” awaiting a restructuring of power before the private could safely become public.

These attentions to power are key as I muse on images of Cov-Eid (Cov-Eid is a term coined by the Malay-language journal Sekata for an upcoming special issue on the pandemic, to which I will be contributing). Ramadan and Eid rituals got transplanted from mosque to home during the pandemic.  I track the mini masjid, and its coda the home-delivered khutbah (sermon) on the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr as event and archive that are yet unbounded by narrative. How they are and will be read, depends on contexts of power. That context coalesces here as much through the algorithmic determination of the medium as they do with the actual events in the physical world.

Home Mosque with a Hashtag

The #minimosque challenge is professionally orchestrated, yet it is unclear precisely who were the progenitors of the effort. The campaign’s official website has nothing about the initiative’s founders, centralizing instead it’s mission to “encourage parents to bring joy and happiness to their children by crafting mini-prayer spaces.” The campaign was amplified through partner organizations, mostly Islamic educational enterprises with a global reach. One such partner is the Imam Ghazali Institute which offers single day or weekend “travelling programs” led by English-speaking religious teachers and claims to have served students places as diverse as the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Guyana and Colombia. Sout Illahi, another partner, is a Singapore-based enterprise that connected the local Muslim community with international speakers “well versed in Islamic sciences and contemporary social issues.”

The middle-class, Anglophone bent of these partner organizations is reflected in the exemplar images of the mini-mosque in the campaign website. Arranged as a collage, one row depicts a man and woman working side by side in a spacious room lined with bookshelves to shift a comfortable brown sofa and create the desired corner. The end nook was bounded by cardboard masjid walls and festooned with chasing lights. Wooden stands were laid on the floor, ready for a child to place his Quran and recite. The mini-masjid, as pictured, was simultaneously constructive and constructed.

Screenshot of home mosque exemplars from Mini Masjid Campaign Website

As event, the #minimasjid appeared to reclaim the story of Islam in the pandemic from its more vexatious iterations in news cycles. Far from home-based rituals, Islam’s public face during the pandemic has been news of massive infection clusters stemming from annual mass gatherings (ijtima’) of Tabligh mass prayer events in Malaysia, Indonesia and India. In my social media feed, the #minimasjid challenge is sandwiched between news posts about such clusters and opinion posts from friends either decrying or defending Tabligh groups. In this context – curated by Facebook based on my personal reading – images of domesticated mosques reflect my own image back to me as part of a Muslim collective relatively invisible in the public sphere: feminine, economically comfortable and constructively private.

How would a generation not born yet or a researcher of the future encounter these images as archive? Many family photographs of the home mosque are locked behind privacy settings, awaiting the security of time and distance before they could be shared and studied. When they eventually emerge, they would be shorn of the algorithmic promptings that placed an image in situ to create diverse narratives. The #minimasjid might then present itself as a picture of domestic construction, as a self-contained story of middle-class resilience and creativity in a pandemic. Gestating in the chrysalis between event and archive, narratives transfigure.

‘Asa on Whatsapp

On the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, the mufti of Singapore gave a sermon to an empty mosque. In his right hand, he clutched a staff known as the ‘asa. The practice stemmed from a tradition of the Prophet who reportedly used to lean on a bow, staff or sword while delivering a sermon during Friday congregational prayers. In the age of coronavirus, the ‘asa gestured toward an invisible congregation watching a simulcast on YouTube channel SalamSG TV. The staff was a symbol of authority that distinguished sermon from soliloquy when the mosque is empty.

Eid Sermon in Singapore – Screenshots from Salam SG TV

At home, families that observed Eid prayers were led by a male member of the family. Being physically shut out from the mosque generated thousands of insta-imams each with their own ‘asa. As the day wore on, pictures emerged on private sharing platform Whatsapp documenting the dislocated ritual. Where the image of Mufti’s ‘asa conferred authoritative solemnity, the ‘asa images of family imams provoked hilarity. A collection of such pictures that came my way as a group, arranged by Whatsapp as an unintentional collage. In them, the family imam clutched, among other things, a neon fishing rod, a rifle, a microphone stand and an IKEA hat stand.

The ‘asa in the family – group of pictures circulating on Whatsapp and received by author

Are these images spoofs, testaments to creative adaptation or personal enactments whose meanings were inverted through Whatsapp sharing? By itself, a picture of man in traditional garb leading prayers while leaning on a rifle might evoke alarm and the spectral geopolitics of terror. Juxtaposed next to a similar man holding a hat stand, the images might instead generate laughs. How such poses are read depends on what other pictures they come through with as they are shared and reshared. Put differently, the depiction of family Eid prayers as coronavirus event may be read as addressed to a global politics with a diffuse constituency and undefined power nodes. The collage, unmoored from place, counters wispy suspicions about Islam without directly addressing political debates about terrorism; a semi-private laugh at the stereotypes of Muslims out in an amorphous there.

The genealogy and transfiguration of such images are even harder to track on Whatsapp than Facebook. This chrysalis archive is impossible to preserve. The ease in attaching, detaching and reattaching component images, coupled with the difficulty in tracing an image’s course through Whatsapp, raises the question of how a collection of pictures come to cohere in the course of sharing. And consequently, once they have cohered, what would it take for the collection to disintegrate? Would these images likely retain their collocations? The narrative they create seems subject to the vagaries of the share button, the power to click an arrow and send a story based on data whose origins are uniquely difficult to retrace.

Pandemic Stories and the Digital Image

These digital images of Cov-Eid thus float, get shared, are linked and hash-tagged into multiple narratives. They attest not only to power relations that govern the actors of an event and the agency of individual Muslims quarantined without access to sacred prayer spaces. They are also shaped by the invisible power of the share button and computing algorithms that sort out what we are likely to see in a social media feed, when and where. These considerations will be crucial as we struggle to make sense of religion moving online in a pandemic.

References:

Paul Cohen (1998), History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth, New York: Columbia University Press.

Karen Strassler (2020), Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation and the Image-Event in Indonesia, Durham: Duke University Press.

Laura Wexler (2020), “Wuhan’s Family Photographs,” Trans-Asia Photography Review, 10:2. Online: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0010.201

 

Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), specializing in religion and ecology in modern Southeast Asia. She holds a PhD in history from Yale University. Her first monograph Spiritual Anthropocene: Ecology of Conversion in Maritime Southeast Asian Uplands is under contract with University of Washington Press (anticipated publication, 2021). She is presently working on a book-length project on the historical construction of charisma in mega-fauna such as elephants, rhinoceros and crocodiles in maritime Southeast Asia, with the support of an MOE Tier 1 grant. She is also a podcast host for the Environmental Studies channel and the Southeast Asian Studies channel at the New Books Network.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the blog editorial team or the Asia Research Institute.

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