The unheard theory: What the female voice in Sufi rituals reveals about modern life

It always felt like modernity flatters itself with a simple story: history moves from darkness to light, from superstition to reason, from inherited authority to critique. Freedom, in this case, arrives through publicity—speaking openly, arguing publicly, trusting rational debate. If something is wrong, we make it visible, name it, and the public sphere will do the rest.

But modern life feels oddly disappointing. We have more platforms than ever to speak and act from, yet politics remains stuck. Critique circulates constantly, while domination adjusts its settings and survives. Perhaps the problem is not a lack of speech. Perhaps it is a failure of listening—an “acoustics” that recognises only certain tones as knowledge.

To see that, place three thinkers in the same frame: Jürgen Habermas on public reason, Zygmunt Bauman on “liquid” modernity, and Shemeem Burney Abbas on women’s devotional performance in Sufi rituals. The point is not to fuse them. It is to question modernity’s deepest reassurance: that public reason is neutral, and that whatever matters will naturally appear within its authorised formats. Some truths are not merely excluded from the public sphere; they are disqualified from counting as “public” in the first place.

Bauman argues that late modern societies can host critical speech while remaining immune to its consequences. This is not censorship. It is critique turned into a consumer experience: you are permitted—encouraged—to be outraged, provided the outrage arrives as content that can be absorbed and moved on from. You post, denounce, perform, boycott; then the feed refreshes. Resistance becomes a lifestyle choice rather than a collective project.

In Bauman’s wider picture, modern life “liquefies.” The institutions that once linked private lives to durable solidarities weaken. In their place comes a moral demand to be flexible, self-inventing, endlessly adaptable. Structural problems are pushed onto individuals as personal failure. Anxiety becomes a defect of character; precarity becomes poor planning. Life resembles a continuous audition.

Habermas worried—at a more philosophical pitch—that critique could degrade into mere unmasking: the clever exposure of hypocrisy without the capacity to build shared norms. Bauman describes the social world in which that worry becomes routine. Critique is everywhere, but consequence is scarce. We can explain endlessly; we struggle to organise. If we treat this only as a European story, we miss how “immunity” is produced elsewhere: by deciding in advance which voices can count as knowledge. Abbas’s work on Sufi rituals exposes one such decision.

A common Western habit is to understand Islam through a Christian template: mosque as church, public congregation as the centre, scripture as the primary storehouse of meaning. Once this model is accepted, “religion” becomes what is visible in officially recognised spaces and what can be cited in texts—domains historically dominated by men. What disappears is the possibility that religious life is also constituted in homes, courtyards, shrines, oral transmission—in sound.

Abbas shows that women’s voices in Sufi traditions are not decorative margins. They can be central carriers of devotion: women singing devotional poetry in shrine networks and domestic gatherings; repertoires preserved through embodied practice; even male performers adopting feminine narrative voices in certain qawwali traditions. This world is often treated as “unknown” in scholarship not because it is hidden, but because it does not match what academic listening has been trained to treat as evidence.

Here modernity’s self-image cracks. It imagines truth arriving through exposure—visible, recordable, debatable. Yet women’s devotional life has frequently been made invisible through a double justification: women are either “too insignificant” to document or “too sacred” to drag into the public glare. Either way, the archive stays clean, and the clean archive becomes proof that nothing was ever there.

The crucial point is methodological. Abbas notes how many male researchers lacked access to women’s ritual spaces and often lacked the linguistic and cultural competence to grasp oral metaphor and performative nuance. Their inability to hear became their authority to describe. A scholar who cannot enter women’s domains concludes that women have no domains; a scholar who cannot interpret sung metaphor concludes that the metaphor is not theory.

This forces a hard question back onto Habermas’s ideal of public reason: which publics? Whose arguments? If “public” is defined by institutional visibility—print, formal debate, official discourse—then the female voice in Sufi rituals is excluded before it speaks. Not because it is irrational, but because it is embodied and contextual, because it lives in performance rather than proposition.

This is an excerpt. Read the full essay on The Daily Star and Star Books and Literature’s websites.

Rimel Sarker is a North Indian classical vocalist, author, and independent researcher based in Dhaka.