the survival of burdah as a folk-culture within the islamic traditions is one extraordinary example of theosophical oral and textual artifact. Its transformation to and crossing over many textual and oral bounderies indicate that the sanctity of the message of islam had entered the private first before it entered the public domain of dogma and edict. the burdah, or the cloak as it means literally, renewed an older paradigm of rhetorical genre by combining both the poetics and politics of human emotions. religion normally sanctions the performative asepct (e.g. recital, music, incantonation, prayer) that expesses the subaltern (e.g. devotion, love, worship) in a socially acceptable form of meaning-making. what is unique about the burdah is that it was an individual act of devotion that took the form of an already existing and much older form of lyrical genre and presented its islamic equivalent. it became the domain where both the divine and human can negotiate their meaning for what is truly a human entreprise– the purpose of being.
the survival of burdah as a folk-culture within the islamic traditions is one extraordinary example of theosophical oral and textual artifact. Its transformation to and crossing over many textual and oral bounderies indicate that the sanctity of the message of islam had entered the private first before it entered the public domain of dogma and edict. the burdah, or the cloak as it means literally, renewed an older paradigm of rhetorical genre by combining both the poetics and politics of human emotions. religion normally sanctions the performative asepct (e.g. recital, music, incantonation, prayer) that expesses the subaltern (e.g. devotion, love, worship) in a socially acceptable form of meaning-making. what is unique about the burdah is that it was an individual act of devotion that took the form of an already existing and much older form of lyrical genre and presented its islamic equivalent. it became the domain where both the divine and human can negotiate their meaning for what is truly a human entreprise– the purpose of being.