An imaginary medical device that derives its rhythmicalities from the Qur’an. It offers an experiential extension of the Quranic medium from a linguistic realm, into a kinetic motion structured by the rhythmic forms of the verse: (Al-Isra 17:82)* according to one of its preserved durational articulations (Hafs 'an Asim). The verse which hints to what is "part of/from" the Qur’an as "cure and mercy", is being interpreted through a specific technical composition. The device, thus, embodies a verse-specific hermeneutic enquiry that experiments with possible relationships between the Quranic message, its non-semantic semantics, its material and technical forms and carriers as well as its indicated curative qualities.

This work speculatively constructs a technoscientific epistemology of care that is neither dependent on pure materialism, nor pure theology but holds a bipolary-united therapeutic reason. The holding mechanism occupies the hands with a prayer posture and fosters a dual but united action; that is both directed towards the biological matter, and spontaneously oriented beyond space-time. This, along with the ontologically-situated extension of the sensory rhythmic forms contrives a process of counter-mapping the body. Unlike standardised medical technologies which concieve it as terra nullius, the body here is approached with an acknowledgement of cultural and social influences on its actions.

The epistemic configuration provided through this work provides a reconstruction of both; a modernist medical technology and an Islamicate contemporary discourse. The first incorporates a secular ideology of healing, a universalised conception of the human body, and thus, a standardised technical apparatus. The later is divorced from its onto-epistemology, and reproduced through westernised conditions of knowing. Due to the irreversibility of our technological world, the device remains modernist in the sense that it is still produced through - and thus becomes itself, a - modern technological condition. Nevertheless, new relationships emerge through the embedded resistance of modernist defaults. For example, despite the reductiveness in abstracting the Quranic to a digital translation of its articulative rhythmic form, a new complexity emerges from the aura associated with the exalted status of the Quran to its believers being materially transposed to other sensory and contextual dimensions.

This specific transpositional process also makes reference to some historical disjoints between Islamicate pre-industrial knowledges and western modernity. For example, it echos Islamicate occult knowledges where numeralisations of Quranic letters are sought to have spiritual powers. Those practices were prevalent throughout Islamicate civilisations, but it is only in nineteenth century - when Islamicate reformists started to reshape aspects of Islamicate jurisprudence to suit the modern scientific paradigm - that it started to background and decline. Another point of disjuncture is a prospective one. Since the work deals with the nature of the Quran and its materiality, it inevitably reopens a critical historical debate in Islamicate Kalām, that is the one-millennium-old quest on the createdness of the Qur'an. This work, however, engages with Kalām through other means of knowing, and takes its very own trajectory. The technical hermeneutics emerging through this work offers an engagement with the ontology of the Qur’an through different kinds of conceptual, material, and physical epistemic conditions, suggesting other possible epistemological forms Kalām could take beyond analytical philosophy.

This work provides an attempt to enquire into the not yet perceived forms of the Qur’an. By detaching it from its modernist mundane book form (the mus'haf), and conceiving the rhythmicalities of the Qur’an as an inseparable part of the message, Cur'an foregrounds questions on what is and isn't "from the Quran", what is and isn't "cure and mercy", on relationships between the verse, its material and practical conveyors, and on possible knowledges between the Qur'an and digital matters.

* The verse translates as: “We are sending from the Qur'an, that which is a cure and a mercy to the believers; and it increases the unjust in nothing except in greater loss” (Al-Isra 17:82).