ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the sonic aspects of dhikr, the ritual of “remembrance” of Allah, as performed by a Sufi brotherhood inside a Roma camp in Florence, Italy. The collective act of remembrance involves specific bodily techniques pertaining to different sensory registers (including the sonic, breathing, visual, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, and imaginative spheres), weaving a net of correspondences able to generate an all-embracing aesthetic/synaesthetic coherence, and generating a heightened sensitive experience, or hyperaesthesia. The sonic gestures, simultaneously enacted and perceived, are means to, and instantiations of, the experience of embodied remembrance, which is found at the meeting point of corresponding dichotomies: unity and multiplicity, self and other, eternal and contingent, steadiness and movement, repetition and variation, soloist singing and collective chanting.
