Sounding the Threshold: Public and Private in Islamic Funerary Soundscapes

This article listens closely to Islamic funerary practices in contemporary Turkey to trace how sound—its absence, amplification, and presence—mediates religious experience, spatial relations, and collective mourning. Based on fieldwork in Silivri, it engages three soundscapes. In the private space of the washhouse, corpse washing carries a communal obligation that renders individual responsibility a public act, with quietness reflecting both ritual purity and moral care embedded in fulfilling shared religious duty. In the mosque and cemetery complex, technologically amplified male religious authority produces a sonic structure where access to ritual sound, and thus public religious presence, is gendered and uneven. Finally, the home emerges as a simultaneously intimate and communal space where women’s mourning unfolds through recitation, weeping, and collective prayer—existing alongside normative frameworks and expanding religious expression beyond institutional boundaries while blurring public-private distinctions. By listening, this article argues that sound (re)constitutes the categories of public and private.