Sonic Relations: Devotion and Community in Turkey’s Eastern Borderlands

Sonic Relations explores how sound shapes religious life and community among Twelver Shi’i Muslims in eastern Turkey and beyond, examining the powerful role of devotional recitation in cultivating relationships not only among people, but also with the unseen. These sonic practices are central to Muslim devotional life, and through media and public ritual performance, they also shape how identity is expressed in broader social and political spheres.

Attending to a range of sonic forms and events, such as public processions, ritual lamentations, and the circulation of audiovisual recordings, Stefan Williamson Fa offers a new relational perspective on Islam, foregrounding affiliations with more-than-human figures and civic life. Whether communal, devotional, or transnational, Twelvers’ relationships with their communities and with the unseen enable them to cultivate the self through sounding and listening. Grounded in detailed ethnographic material collected in Turkey’s eastern borderlands and via transnational networks in Iran, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Germany, Williamson Fa tells a compelling story about the human and more-than-human relations Twelver Shias seek to cultivate amid the Republic of Turkey’s changing society and politics.

Through vivid ethnographic vignettes, analysis, and audiovisual examples, Sonic Relations offers an intimate look at how Twelver Shii Muslims forge bonds of love, faith, and community within Turkey and across borders. It invites readers to rethink religion, not as belief alone, but as a sensory, relational, and deeply embodied experience.

Stefan Williamson Fa is a cultural anthropologist and Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.