ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of human-produced sound in defining and demarcating public space as the space of a Muslim community, focusing on the case of Mombasa Old Town on the Kenyan coast. Using ethnographic data, I describe how Mombasa Old Town’s quotidian Islamic soundscape – a polyphony of Quranic recitations emanating from boom boxes and computer speakers, and distorted voices crackling from rooftop loudspeakers of mosques – structures an “acousteme” (Feld 1996), a way of knowing place through sound, that is key to fostering a sense of the neighbourhood as a discrete space of a Muslim community within the heterogeneous city of Mombasa and largely Christian Kenyan nation-state.
