An Intro to Islam

The performance-lecture looks at the relationships between the different voices in Islam: the prophet, the reciter and myself, as someone who has grown up in Iran during the development of the country’s educational and religious transformation to an islamic doctrinaire after a revolution. By speaking like an Imam and electronically enhanced singing, the performer acquires the tools of the prophet to examine how he sounded to his listeners at his time and after fourteen centuries. By drawing a story of voice and a personal picture of the history of Islam and in doing so reflecting on the life experience of growing up in its realms, the lecture brings up the meaning of being a child in a classroom in that certain society with it’s adaptation of Islamic scholarship, ideology and traditions. On the other hand, the performance is an elaboration on the issue of memory, as something that is real but not actual. Memory is the space where art and love can be called into being and —in a Deleuzian term —belongs to the virtual domain. The recalling of the past in the vortex of written or spoken propositions of Islamic textualities also entails its forgetting. A talking conciseness that tries to catch up to a contemporary image of science and art but fails to reach a therapeutic whole is witnessed in the performance.