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Mohammed was said by his wife Aisha to be a “walking Qur’an”. This saying is taken both as a statement of his exemplary character as well as an image for the fact that he embodied the words of the Qur’an. Memorization and recitation from memory is conceived of as embodying the holy text and it is also the primary aim of Qur’anic education. In West Africa, drinking the ink of the writing boards is the closing ritual of a lesson at Qur’anic school, the text being thus embodied both mentally and physically. Drinking the Qur’an, literally incorporating its words infused in water, is also widely considered to be an effective medicine, in which materiality and sonality of the sacred words contribute to its efficacy. In my paper, I will take up the notion of embodying and sounding the Qur’an as an aesthetic ideology governing its ritual uses.

Written texts, especially sacred texts, can be handled in different ways. They can be read for semantic content; or they can be materially experienced, touched, or even be inhaled or drunk. I argue that literacy ideologies regulate social acceptability of specific semantic and somatic text practices. Drinking or fumigating the Qur'an as a medical procedure is a highly contested literacy event in which two different ideologies are drawn upon simultaneously. I employ the linguistic model of codeswitching to highlight central aspects of this event: a more somatic ideology of literacy enables the link to medicine, while a more semantic ideology connects the practice to theological discourses on the sacredness of the Qur'an as well as to the tradition of Prophetic medicine. Opposition to and ridicule of the practice, however, comes from representatives of an ideology of semantic purity, including some Islamic theologians and most Western scholars of Islam. Qur'anic potions thus constitute an ideal point of entry for analyzing different types of literacy ideologies being followed in religious traditions.