Toward a Theory of Technical Virtue: Skill, Care, and Process in Qur’anic Studio Recording

Abstract Can technical labor be virtuous? This article investigates the production of a Qur’anic sound recording, suggesting that focusing on the process of religious media production rather than its intended product might bring to the fore new ethical engagements that trouble recent oppositions between “ordinary” and “transcendent” ethics or even the classic dialectic of sacred and profane. In particular, the ethnography here foregrounds the sensory and temporal nuances of what I call technical virtue, an ethical orientation comprising three characteristics: technologized modes of listening, an object- rather than subject-oriented disposition of “care” toward the Qur’an, and a teleology that paradoxically requires that subjects defer transcendent engagement with God in favor of the “technical” fulfilment of a given stage of sound reproduction. I argue that religious media production can thus be made virtuous through such technical fulfilment rather than through the linkage of such labor to the subjective cultivation of more recognizably Islamic virtues.