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Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur'an in Indonesia. Anna M. Gade. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. 348 pp.
Anthropologies of ritual and emotion rarely overlap with anthropology of education, but Anna Gade's book on Qur'anic recitation in Indonesia does just that. For the past 30 years, Indonesia has been experiencing an Islamic resurgence, one effect of which has been the increased popularity of Qur'anic recitation. During the 1990s, adults, schoolchildren, and university students were drawn to studying, reading, and vocalization of the Qur'an under the tutelage of renowned teachers, in Islamic boarding schools, voluntary clubs, and through cassette tapes, radio call-in shows, and regional and national recitation competitions. Gade, a religious studies scholar, conducted research on this topic in the late 1990s in Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi, and in the national capital, Jakarta. Gade argues that comprehension, memorization, and recitation of the Qur'an is appealing for Indonesian Muslims not simply as accomplishment but, rather, as affective experience.
Gade's informants repeatedly pointed out that the Qur'an itself requires Muslims to master correct and...