ABSTRACT
This chapter shows, through empirical description, that the theolinguistics of the mosque remain only one kind of religious communication. In pious Muslim tradition, prayer in the mosque cleans the soul, as if it were a mirror, allowing it to reflect the divinity of Allah. The sociological form of the congregational prayer of the umma implies that Allah assists the regeneration of society, guaranteeing theodicy, the justice of the deity. However, when one learns to invoke the spirits or Allah, one often adopts ‘artificial’ intonation and a coded saturation of the message which precludes interpretation of the media as anything other than a certain kind of prayer. The supposition here is that in the sociolinguistic spectrum of speech events and oral rites, men will be able to situate any ‘art of the voice’ used for invocations in a slot of ‘prayer’. The social production of prayer has a multitude of purposes.
