2. Music, Culture and Identity in the
Muslim World
In contrast to many books on Islam that focus on political rhetoric and activism,
this book explores Islam’s extraordinarily rich cultural and artistic diversity,
showing how sound, music and bodily performance offer a window onto the
subtleties and humanity of Islamic religious experience. Through a wide range of
case studies from West Asia, South Asia and North Africa and their diasporas –
including studies of Sufi chanting in Egypt and Morocco, dance in Afghanistan,
and ‘Muslim punk’ online – the book demonstrates how Islam should not be
conceived of as being monolithic or monocultural, how there is a large dis-
agreement within Islam as to how music and performance should be approached,
such disagreements being closely related to debates about orthodoxy, secu-
larism, and moderate and fundamental Islam, and how important cultural
activities have been, and continue to be, for the formation of Muslim identity.
Kamal Salhi is Reader in Francophone, Postcolonial and North African Studies
at the University of Leeds and Deputy Director of the Leeds Centre for African
Studies, UK. He is the founder and editor of two academic journals, Performing
Islam and the International Journal of Francophone Studies. He is the founding
director of the Leeds Centre for Francophone Studies (1997–2003) which has
developed into the Centre for French and Francophone Cultural Studies. Dr Salhi
has recently completed with Distinction an AHRC/ESRC funded research
project, ‘Performance, Politics and Piety: Music as Debate in the Muslim
World’.
3. Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies
1 Iraqi Kurdistan
Political development and
emergent democracy
Gareth R. V. Stansfield
2 Egypt in the Twenty-First
Century
Challenges for development
Edited by M. Riad El-Ghonemy
3 The Christian–Muslim Frontier
A zone of contact, conflict
or cooperation
Mario Apostolov
4 The Islamic World-System
A study in polity–market
interaction
Masudul Alam Choudhury
5 Regional Security in the Middle East
A critical perspective
Pinar Bilgin
6 Political Thought in Islam
A study in intellectual boundaries
Nelly Lahoud
7 Turkey’s Kurds
A theoretical analysis of the PKK
and Abdullah Ocalan
Ali Kemal Özcan
8 Beyond the Arab Disease
New perspectives in politics and
culture
Riad Nourallah
9 The Arab Diaspora
Voices of an anguished
scream
Zahia Smail Salhi and
Ian Richard Netton
10 Gender and Self in Islam
Etin Anwar
11 Nietzsche and Islam
Roy Jackson
12 The Baha’is of Iran
Socio-historical studies
Dominic Parvis Brookshaw and
Seena B. Fazel
13 Egypt’s Culture Wars
Politics and practice
Samia Mehrez
14 Islam and Human Rights in
Practice
Perspectives across the
Ummah
Edited by Shahram Akbarzadeh
and Benjamin MacQueen
15 Family in the Middle East
Ideational change in Egypt,
Iran and Tunisia
Edited by Kathryn M. Yount and
Hoda Rashad
16 Syria’s Kurds
History, politics and society
Jordi Tejel
4. 17 Trajectories of Education in the
Arab World
Legacies and challenges
Edited by Osama Abi-Mershed
18 The Myth of the Clash
of Civilizations
Chiara Bottici and
Benoit Challand
19 Chaos in Yemen
Societal collapse and the new
authoritarianism
Isa Blumi
20 Rethinking Israeli Space
Periphery and identity
Haim Yacobi and Erez Tzfadia
21 Navigating Contemporary Iran
Challenging economic, social and
political perspectives
Edited by Eric Hooglund and
Leif Stenberg
22 Music, Culture and Identity
in the Muslim World
Performance, politics and piety
Edited by Kamal Salhi
6. Music, Culture and Identity in
the Muslim World
Performance, politics and piety
Edited by
Kamal Salhi
Routledge
Taylor Francis Group
ROUTL
EDGE
LONDON AND NEW YORK
8. Contents
List of illustrations ix
Contributors x
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: the paradigm of performing Islam beyond the
political rhetoric 1
KAMAL SALHI
1 New Islamist popular culture in Turkey 15
MARTIN STOKES
2 Social forces shaping the heterodoxy of Sufi performance in
contemporary Egypt 35
MICHAEL FRISHKOPF
3 Singing dissent: Sufi chant as a vehicle for alternative perspectives 57
EARLE WAUGH
4 Debating piety and performing arts in the public sphere: the
‘caravan’ of veiled actresses in Egypt 80
KARIN VAN NIEUWKERK
5 Wah wah! Meida meida! The changing roles of dance in
Afghan society 103
JOHN BAILY
6 The manifest and the hidden: agency and loss in Muslim
performance traditions of South and West Asia 122
RICHARD K. WOLF
7 ‘Muslim punk’ music online: piety and protest in the
digital age 160
DHIRAJ MURTHY
9. 8 Devotion or pleasure? Music and meaning in the celluloid
performances of qawwali in South Asia and the diaspora 178
NATALIE SARRAZIN
9 Multicultural harmony? Pakistani Muslims and music
in Bradford 200
THOMAS E. HODGSON
10 Hip-hop bismillah: subcultural worship of Allah in
Western Europe 230
MARUTA HERDING
11 Lil Maaz’s Mange du kebab: challenging clichés or serving
up an immigrant stereotype for mass consumption online? 261
JONATHAN ERVINE
Index 281
viii Contents
10. List of illustrations
Figures
2.1 al-tariqa al-Ja`fariyya. Yearly mawlid hadra, performed at the
central mosque of the tariqa al-Ja`fariyya; Darrasa, Cairo,
Thursday, 14 November 1996 40
2.2 al-tariqa al-Jazuliyya al-Husayniyya al-Shadhiliyya. Weekly
Thursday hadra, central mosque of the tariqa al-Jazuliyya; Qayt
Bay, Cairo, 11 May 1998 41
2.3 al-tariqa al-Bayyumiyya: central group. Weekly Friday hadra,
central mosque of the tariqa al-Bayyumiyya; al-Husayniyya,
Cairo, 8 May 1998 43
2.4 al-tariqa al-Bayyuumiyya: local group. Weekly hadra, Madinat
al-Nur, Zawiya al-Hamra’, Cairo, 27 April 1998 44
2.5 Sheikh Yasin al-Tuhami. Public hadra, Badari, Assiut (middle
Egypt), 8 February 1996 45
2.6 Sufi order in Phase 1 48
2.7 Sufi order in Phase 2 49
2.8 Sufi order in Phase 3 50
7.1 From iMuslims: rewiring the house of Islam by Gary R. Bunt 167
7.2 ‘Taqwacore’ tagged posts on twitter.com: a selection of tweets
with the hashtag or keyword #taqwacore 172
9.1 Map of 2009 Bradford Mela 212
Tables
2.1 Distribution of heterodox elements in tariqa hadras 52
11. Contributors
Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College, London.
He is also Honorary Professor of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University
of Copenhagen. His research interests lie in Europe and the Middle East,
particularly in Turkey and Egypt. His The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy
in Turkish Popular Music was published in 2010, and won the Merriam
Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He was elected a Fellow of
the British Academy in 2012.
Michael Frishkopf is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Alberta,
an ethnomusicologist and composer. His research interests reflected in
his numerous publications include Sufi music; the Arab music industry;
sound in Islamic ritual performance; music and religion; comparative music
theory; the sociology of musical taste; social network analysis; (virtual [world)
music], digital music repositories; music in West Africa; music of refugees;
participatory action research; psychoacoustics and music cognition; and
music therapy as memory therapy. He is a lifetime member of both the
Society for Ethnomusicology and the Middle East Studies Association of
North America. He has received numerous fellowships, including grants
from Fulbright, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Social Science
Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation,
the Killam Foundation (Canada), the National Endowment for the Huma-
nities, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Recent edited volumes include Music and Media in the Arab World (2010)
and Music and Architecture (2012).
Earle Waugh is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of
Arts and currently Adjunct Professor and Director of the Centre for the
Cross-Cultural Study of Health and Healing in the Department of Family
Medicine at the University of Alberta. His work includes key studies on
Music in Muslim countries, and Islam in the West. He has written or edited
over a dozen of books, dictionaries and studies, and has received several
awards for his writings. His The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and
Their Song (1989) and Memory, Music, Religion: Morocco’s Mystical
Chanters (2005) have both been critically acclaimed for the new direction
12. they provide in Islamic studies. His long commitment to education about
minority groups in Canada and his promotion of understanding of Muslim
and indigenous cultures was recognized in 2005 by the awarding of the
prestigious Salvos Prelorentzos Award for Peace Education by Project
Ploughshares.
Karin van Nieuwkerk is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the
Department of Religious Studies at Radboud University, the Netherlands.
She is the author of A Trade Like any Other: Female Singers and Dancers
in Egypt (1995). She edited Creating an Islamic Cultural Sphere: Contested
Notions of Art, Leisure and Entertainment, a special issue of Contemporary
Islam (2008). She has also edited Women Embracing Islam: Gender and
Conversion in the West (2006), and Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revo-
lutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (2012). Her
other key publications are ‘Piety, Penitence and Gender: the case of
repentant artists in Egypt’, in Journal for Islamic Studies (Vol. 28, 2008);
‘Time and Migration: Changes in Religious Celebrations among Moroccan
Immigrant Women in the Netherlands’, in Journal of Muslim Minority
Affairs (Vol. 25, 2005); ‘Veils and Wooden Clogs don’t go Together’, in
Ethnos Journal of Anthropology (Vol. 69, 2004); ‘Religion, Gender, and
Performing: Female Performers and Repentance in Egypt’, in Music and
Gender. Perspectives from the Mediterranean, Tullia Magrini (ed.) (2003).
Karin van Nieuwkerk has led several, funded research projects of great
importance and supervises doctoral research in the field of anthropological
Islam and the performing arts.
John Baily is Emeritus Professor of Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. He came into ethnomusicology from experimental
psychology, with a doctorate on human spatial coordination and motor
control from the University of Sussex. In 1973 he became a Post-Doctoral
Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen’s Uni-
versity of Belfast, and in collaboration with John Blacking conducted two
years of ethnomusicological fieldwork in Afghanistan. In 1978 he was
appointed Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Queen’s. From 1984–6 he
trained in anthropological film making at the National Film and Television
School, and directed the award-winning film Amir: An Afghan refugee
musician’s life in Peshawar, Pakistan. From 1988–90 he was Associate
Professor in the Centre for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University, New
York. He joined Goldsmiths in 1990, then became Professor of Ethnomusi-
cology and Head of the Afghanistan Music Unit. As a musician John has
been playing the Afghan lutes, the dutâr and the rubâb, for many years
and is acclaimed by Afghans as a performer of their traditional music. He
has published widely on the music of Afghanistan, including several CDs
of field and studio recordings of Afghan music. His other main research inter-
ests are musical cognition, music and the human body, ethnomusicological
film making, and music in the South Asian communities in the UK.
Notes on contributors xi
13. Richard K. Wolf is Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard
University. He has written about classical, folk and tribal musical traditions,
and on music in Islamic practices in India and Pakistan. Based on eight
years’ fieldwork, his published work addresses issues of language, emotion,
poetics, and rhythm. He has been the recipient of grants and fellowships
from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, ACLS, NEH, AIIS, AIPS
and Fulbright. He is editor of Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and
Experience in South Asia and Beyond (2009) and forthcoming volumes on
indigeneity in India and the cross cultural study of rhythm. Wolf’s first
book, The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of
the Kotas of South India (2005, republished 2006), received the Edward
Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Humanities. Wolf also performs on the
South Indian vina and is currently completing an ethnomusicological
monograph in the form of a novel.
Dhiraj Murthy is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, Uni-
versity of London. His research interests include social media, virtual orga-
nizations, online communities, online diasporas, and digital ethnography. He
has recently published his work in Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the
European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Media, Culture, and Society.
He also recently wrote a book, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter
Age (2012).
Natalie Sarrazin is Associate Professor of Music at The College at Brockport,
State University of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from
the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Masters degree from
Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Natalie has written
and spoken extensively on the topics of Hindi film music and the role of
Indian music in education. She is the author of numerous publications
including, ‘Celluloid Love Songs: Musical Modus Operandi and the
Dramatic Aesthetics of Romantic Hindi Film’, in Popular Music (2008),
‘Children’s Urban and Musical Worlds in North India’, in Oxford Hand-
book of Children’s Musical Cultures (2012), ‘Global Masala: Digital Iden-
tities and Aesthetic Trajectories in Post-Liberalized Indian Film Music’, in
Gregory Booth and Bradley Shope (eds), Popular Music in India: Dancing
with the Elephant (2013), and a pedagogical book, Indian Music for the
Classroom (2008).
Thomas E. Hodgson was Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College,
Oxford. He was the Lamb and Flag Scholar at St John’s College,
Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. in Music. He is currently British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London. An ethnomusi-
cologist, his current research focuses on Pakistani Mirpuris and music in
the UK and Kashmir, where he has also conducted extensive fieldwork.
Outside academia, he writes occasional articles for the New Statesman and
The Times, and has recently produced a series for BBC Radio 2.
xii Notes on contributors
14. Maruta Herding received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of
Cambridge in 2012. Her Ph.D. thesis was on Islamic youth culture in
Western Europe, looking at a recent phenomenon that has shaped both
European Islam and the subcultural landscape of France, Germany and
the UK. Her research was funded by the British Economic and Social
Research Council and by Girton College. Her Master’s dissertation in
Sociology at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg was on ‘Segregation and
Urban Conflict: The Riots in French Suburbs’. During her graduate stu-
dies, Maruta also studied at the Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne, and
The American University in Cairo. Since 2011, Maruta has been a
researcher at the German Youth Institute. Her research interests include
Islamic youth culture, Islam in Europe, urban arts, subculture, cultural
globalization and migration.
Jonathan Ervine is Head of French at Bangor University in Wales where he
lectures on French language, film, politics and history. His research focuses
predominantly on cultural and media representations of immigrants and
young people from suburban housing estates in France known as banlieues.
This work concentrates on domains such as contemporary cinema, music
and new media and also sport and national identity. He is the author of
the monograph entitled Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins
in Contemporary France (2013). During a period of research leave in 2012,
he worked on a new project about multiculturalism and humour in France
in which he analyzes the ways that humour can both provoke controversy
and also provide a means of promoting tolerance in contemporary French
society.
Kamal Salhi is Reader in Francophone, Postcolonial and African Studies in
the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds.
He has a research background in theatre and performance of North and
Sub-Saharan Africa, and he has published widely in the field of politics
and aesthetics of performance with special emphasis on cultures influenced
by Islam, colonialism and secular traditions. He has successfully led the
research network project, ‘Performance, politics, piety: music as debate in
Muslim societies of North Africa, South Asia, West Asia and their dia-
sporas’ (2008–11), funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research
Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, which received
AHRC Distinction on its completion. He is the founder and editor of the
interdisciplinary journal, Performing Islam. Some of Kamal’s publications
include, The Politics and Aesthetics of Kateb Yacine: From Francophone
Literature to Popular Theatre (1999); African Theatre for Development: An
Art for Self-determination (1998); ‘The Pragmatics and Aesthetics of Kateb
Yacine Theatre Practice’, in Biodun Jeyifo (ed.), Modern African Drama, A
Norton Critical Edition (2002); ‘Theatre of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia’
in Martin Banham (ed.), A History of Theatre in Africa (CUP, 2004);
‘Theatre, Politics and National Identity: the Ambiguous Compromise’, in
Notes on contributors xiii
15. Journal of Algerian Studies (2000); ‘Slimane Benaïssa from Exile in the
Theatre to Theatre in Exile: Ambiguous Traumas and Conflicts in the
Algerian Diasporic Drama’, in Journal of North African Studies (2006);
‘Religion in the Francophone Postcolonial Word’, in the Historical Companion
to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (2008).
xiv Notes on contributors
16. Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the funding of
my research network project (2008–11), based in the School of Modern Lan-
guages and Cultures at the University of Leeds, from which this book has
resulted. The project, successfully completed with Distinction, was part of the
large AHRC/ESRC research programme, Religion and Society, directed by
Linda Woodhead (Lancaster University).
I am very grateful to the following colleagues for their invaluable input: Martin
Clayton, Alexandra Richardson, Alyssa Moxley, Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Anne
K. Rasmussen, Dhiraj Murthy, Crona Condron, Daniela Merolla, Earle
Waugh, Gita Mohan, Hae-kyung Um, Jane Lewisohn, Jasjit Singh, James
Chopyak, Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mohammed Ali Rizvi, Nicola Dach, Qasim
Riza Shaheen, Razia Sultanova, Tony Langlois, Katherine Brown, Kristen
Scheid, Deborah Kapchan, Nina ter Laan, Richard Wolf, John Baily, Maruta
Herding, Thomas Hodgson, Jonathan Ervine, Natalie Sarrazin, Michael
Frishkopf, Martin Stokes, Ananya Kabir, Joseph Alagha, Laudan Nooshin
and Jeanne Openshaw.
This book is in memory of Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010) who gave the
inaugural lecture of the project.
18. Introduction
The paradigm of performing Islam beyond the
political rhetoric
Kamal Salhi
This book addresses the importance of music, culture and identity in the
Muslim world through the study of performance, politics and piety, and in a
timely fashion, offers a theoretical basis for the understanding of the pleasures
and politics of Muslims worldwide. Today, within stereotyped characteriza-
tions of Islam, pleasure, debate and performing creativity find little place.
Rather, mainstream discourses’ strongest signifiers of Islam are violence, fun-
damentalism, repression and joylessness. Such simplifications are misleading.
Across the world, diverse communities of Muslims live their collective identities
in dialogic interaction with various social forces: the legacies of colonialism,
the imperatives of globalization, the pressures of diaspora, the demands of
modernity, the pull of sacred pan-Islamic radicalism, and the perceived
injustices of the ‘war on terror’. The criss-crossing axes of the global, the local
and the transnational impel them to consolidate collective identities, confirm
their historical legacies and look forward to the future. Like all human beings
in all societies, they also engage in enjoyable and pleasurable expressive acts
while doing so, in particular, by making, listening to and being emotionally
sustained by music.
Music and performance have been an important issue in Islamic thought
from the start of Islam. For some time in the history of Islam there was a
controversy surrounding the role of music within the religion. This was fol-
lowed by a general consensus about two possible theories of music, one initi-
ated by al-Farabi and ibn Sina and the other by the Brethren of Purity
(Ikhwan al-Safa’) and al-Kindi. One approach is about what music reflects,
the other concerns what it does for us, though they are complementary. This
theoretical genesis situates the Pythagorean approach becoming the reasoning
behind Sufi and other Muslim-influenced music, which sees itself as doing
more than just producing pleasure in its addressees. The movements in
Muslim-influenced dance and music are designed to reproduce the basis of
reality and to worship God by using the body in ways that are not customarily
parts of prayer. Our interest in the studies gathered together in this book, as
the result of a research network project funded by the British Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Coun-
cil, is not primarily musicology but rather the aesthetics of performance and
19. the culture and identity subsequently engendered. As reflected in the chapters
of this book, the contexts of Islam and performance encompass a wide range
of events, manifestations and behaviour patterns which display local concep-
tions and articulations of aesthetics. Although the term aesthetics remains
vague at best, its appropriation and redefinition in the light of non-Western
cultures show that performative or ritual contexts assume varying awareness
of the aesthetic.
In one way or another, the contributors to this volume make aesthetic
evaluations of performance which flow well with the combination and inte-
gration of various performative elements of sound, movement, interaction
and meaning. The politics of sound is approached as an integral complex
involving the visual or iconic, gestural, verbal, vocal, corporal and instrumental.
In the case of the visual, the mediums of sound (i.e. musical instrumentals)
are crafted with specific materials, symbols and designs to conform to aes-
thetic and performance expectations. In fact, in some contexts showcased in
the various chapters, they are formed and manipulated according to musical,
symbolic decorative or abstract considerations. I would therefore argue that
aesthetic forms of structured music, dance and other performative elements
link the inner experience of the subject with the objective structure of the
performance, which satisfies the fundamental condition of piety. However, it
is important to distinguish that Muslims do not always use the generic term
‘music’ in the same way it is employed in the English language or in other
Western/European languages. The Arabic term for music, musiqa, for example,
does not apply to all types of artistic vocal and instrumental arrangements of
sounds, tones and rhythms. In more specific contexts Arab Muslims might use
the idiom handasat al sawt, the art of sound. Musiqa, or music, applies more
to particular genres of sound art, and for the most part it has been designated
only for those that have a somewhat questionable or even disreputable status
in Islamic culture (al Faruqi 1986). Handasat al sawt is a recently invented
term used by Arab Muslims to separate their Muslim conception of ‘music’
from that held in the Western and non-Muslim world, which often contrast in
quite critical ways. It is therefore the aim of this volume to look at the influ-
ence of Islamic religious beliefs on the role and realization of the art of sound
and its manifestation in the Muslim world and its diaspora. Without engaging
in a comparative study, it is worth highlighting here that many similarities
exist between handasat al sawt and various examples from contemporary
Western art music, and also certain forms of jazz. Such comparisons might make
the art of sound of the Muslim world more accessible and understandable, not
only to specialists but also to those more familiar with developments in the
musical world of the West and Europe.
For clarity and simplicity the terms ‘music’ and ‘performance’ are used
throughout this book, and in reference to Muslim culture the term music is
used precisely to mean handasat al sawt rather than the Arabic musiqa. What
should be noted here is the polyvalent and multi-generic nature of the former,
which leaves room for artistic and theoretical creativity, particularly in light of
2 Kamal Salhi
20. the examples from North Africa and Asia covered in this volume. This also
justifies the inclusion of music, culture, identity, performance, politics and
piety in the title of this volume and other related terms and concepts in the
titles of the essays presented here. No matter what research perspectives we
bring to it, the subject of performative Islam remains an important area of
challenges and fresh discoveries. Some of these challenges have been addressed.
Martin Stokes’ chapter, ‘New Islamist popular culture in Turkey’, is explicitly
concerned with music as a vehicle for debate about public culture in Muslim
Turkey. He shows how music, in itself and in performance, is a form of con-
test and he locates the various kinds of debate that revolve around this issue,
and their political stakes, within the broader concept of public formation. New
considerations have emerged in relation to the contemporary understanding of
religion, especially after the events of 11 September 2001. These can appear
minor in relation to the bigger picture, but could have a significant impact on
approaches to the study of religion and the performing arts, and indeed to wider
academic and public concerns. Recent cultural productions have been reveal-
ing in the forms of Islamic expression that have been emphasized; there may
be little attention paid to cultural and artistic diversity under the umbrella of
Islam, with a focus instead on political rhetoric and activism at the expense of
quietist mystically oriented beliefs. Sound, music and bodily performance
offer a window onto the subtleties and humanity of Islamic religious experi-
ence. This is in contrast to much of the media coverage about Islam since the
aforementioned events.
The performative aspect of contemporary Muslim life is the focus of this
book. It explores how, through modes of performance, piety and protest,
music, dance and chanting have become a vehicle for problematic debate
within societies where Islam exerts a significant cultural influence. Paying
attention to these intra-communal debates, alongside the differences between
‘the Muslim world’ and its perceived antagonists, offers fresh insights into the
relationship between Islamic, secularist and nationalist orthodoxies and social
repositioning within Muslim communities. Moreover, this approach can shed
crucial light on how radicalization, fundamentalism and violence might them-
selves be countered. This book therefore opens up space for interdisciplinary
inter-regional perspectives, and encourages comparative understanding of
how, within the wider context of ‘Islam’, sound and bodily performance
practice enables disagreement as well as cross-cutting solidarities. It also facil-
itates a comparative examination of the relationship between practices and
the emergence of Muslim collective identities in different geographic locations
with cohesive geo-cultural space, namely North Africa, South and West
Asia, and their diasporas. It shares the experience of pre-modern Islamic
empires – Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal – which, as historians are increasingly
demonstrating, were in constant mutual contact, and which remain culturally
significant to their modern-day inhabitants. It shares too the experiences of
European colonialism that made them layered sites for the negotiation of
modernity. Such negotiations have been further complicated by postcolonial
The paradigm of performing Islam 3
21. governments at various levels of Islamic adherence, engagement and antag-
onism. The substantial Muslim diaspora within Europe, originating from this
geo-cultural arc, presents a transnational extension of these processes.
Through case studies, the respective chapters endeavour to uncover the
ongoing dialogic relationships between local and vernacular cultural forces
and the cultural legacy of Islam.
Related religious performance in the Muslim world lies on the intersection
between myth and history, sacred time and secular time. Religious and cultural
historians draw on these intersections for the tropes with which they calibrate
the different histories that together represent the Muslim world. The tensions
between the various forms of performance inside and outside that world have
often turned on the distinction between myth and history. Prior to the advent
of the written traditions of Islam there were only the sacred oral traditions of
the native in most of the Muslim world. Literacy began with the reading and
reciting of the Holy Book, whose capacity for symbolism and mysticism
remains undiminished, even today. The temporal dimensions of performance,
particularly music, constantly allow for new beginnings. The contact with or
embracing of Islam within the various indigenous cultures and traditions of
the Muslim world brings new rhythms, tones and performance structures that
are themselves – more often than not in Muslim cultural historiography –
sustained the longest in religious contexts. The very possibility of multicultural
performance and music in that world depends on the capacity of ethnic sections
of the population to return to their beginnings when repertoires are in need of
revitalization and authenticity. The renewal of beginnings is not only an act
of authentication. It also expresses a profound unremitting uncertainty about
music’s position in the Muslim experience. It asks whether the music within this
experience is, theologically, music at all, whether the sacred and the aesthetic
are mutually exclusive. Many are subject to this uncertainty, raising their voices
in the daily practice of Muslim religious experience. In his chapter, ‘Social
forces shaping the heterodoxy of Sufi performance in contemporary Egypt’,
Michael Frishkopf explains how Muslim mystics, Sufis, have became notorious
within conservative Islamic circles for heterodox poetic expressions employing
metaphors of intoxication and sensual love, or expressing mystical union.
Likewise, his study stresses how conservatives have criticized Sufis’ elaborate
musical practices for being heretical. They base both critiques on shari`a, the
Divine Law, embodying the essence of Islam. However, in contemporary
Egypt, where religious fundamentalism is strong, independent professional
religious singers, the munshids, publicly perform such poetry, accompanied by
musical ensembles. In the more private rituals of Sufi orders, tariqas, texts
are generally limited to conventional Islamic sentiments, emotion being
more restrained and musical instruments infrequent. Frishkopf analyzes this
contrast via models of strategic decision-making, which are employed to
define and perform a poetic repertoire, models shaped by the objectives of their
users, and their constraints and positions within the dynamic field of Islam
in Egypt.
4 Kamal Salhi
22. This dynamic addresses the challenges posed to the contemporary world by
various political movements that enlist the theological support of Islam. It
is a framework for understanding counter-radical movements within con-
temporary Islam that use musical performance and practice to express and
initiate debate, discussion and pleasure. For example, the professional munshid
lacks status within the Sufi establishment, and so is freer to maximize emotion
via texts which are felt to provide glimpses of Divine reality, the haqiqa. As
Frishkopf argues, logical discord with shari`a is muted by the affective frame
of aesthetic performance, and by strategies of textual delivery which dis-
courage rational comprehension of assertions, while promoting an affective
perception of concepts and language sounds. For him, the tariqas, as official
religious organizations, are vulnerable to the critiques of conservatives. Through
ritual they reinforce connections to shari`a, thus defending reputation and
increasing membership. They also use poetic performance as a tool for spiritual
education and group solidarity, not merely to create an ecstatic moment. Both
factors lead to restrictions on poetic content and performance. In fact, the
cognitive dimensions of this kind of ritual lead to multidimensionality. Richard
Schechner explains that ‘people are more than susceptible to rituals of all kinds –
religious, political, sportive, aesthetic; they manifest a need demanding the
kind of satisfaction only rituals can provide’ (Schechner 1993: 302).
If religious experience accrues to historical and political zones of uncertainty,
music and performance – the multifarious sacred practices that the con-
tributors in this book examine – mark and intensify that experience. Although
music, or the art of sound, in the Muslim world may mollify uncertainty, it
could also necessitate new beginnings and arrest the path of change, stretch-
ing beyond the horizons of authenticity. Whatever its eventual impact, music
is omnipresent in Muslim experience, and its capacity in the transformation
of religion can be immediate. ‘The attitude toward music [in the Muslim world]
has always been ambivalent, as expressed in a series of contradictory feelings
and concepts: predilection and mistrust; divine-devilish; exalting-disruptive;
admissible-prohibited’ (Shiloah nd). Views about the admissibility of music,
or the art of sound, in the Muslim world, range from complete negation to
complete acceptance, even of dance and other bodily expressions. Many
Muslims fear the paranormal intoxicating power of music and prohibit it as a
tool of the devil. Other Muslims, however, find music inspiring and entirely
spiritual. Some Muslims fall somewhere between these poles, restricting the
practice of music to some degree but allowing it in various controlled forms
to achieve a harmonious contemporary identity based on tolerance and piety.
Regardless of the admissibility or not of music, Muslim-influenced perfor-
mance usually strives to realize and express as much as possible the ideas and
beliefs of Islam as set down in the Qur’an. Qur’anic chant, for example, can
be seen as the prototype of all Islamic music and the most pervasive genre of
Islamic sound art.
The point of much music in the Muslim world is, therefore, to express and
encapsulate the most important concept of the Qur’an: tawhid or unity with
The paradigm of performing Islam 5
23. God. In his chapter, ‘Singing dissent: Sufi chant as a vehicle for alternative
perspectives’, Earle Waugh, drawing on fieldwork in Egypt and Morocco, argues
that the social and cultural contexts of Morocco have interacted with several
key tendencies in Moroccan Sufism to produce a quite idiosyncratic Sufi
environment for the chanter. His study demonstrates how the musical traditions
within certain Sufi groups have played an important role in articulating dis-
tinctive identities. It examines elements of difference, dissent and alterity as
features of the chanting tradition in each and shows how these Sufi groups
encourage variance as part of their response to the divine. The chanter
amalgamates many of these influences in his chant, becoming a vehicle for the
integration of disparate elements and peoples, but also providing a connection
with an Islam that is perceived to be universal. The chant then takes on another
purpose: it motivates initiates to stand firm for Sufi principles and preserve
Sufi values. From this perspective, the chant is a vehicle of empowerment that
may reach beyond the confines of the zawiya/ribat complex to inspire the larger
Moroccan community as it has in the past. The characteristic of this music or
handasat al sawt is that it can be seen as liberating within Islamic culture.
Through and in the moment of musical performance, spiritual regenera-
tion, shared narratives and communitas are constantly consolidated. In South
and West Asia as well as in North Africa, strong correlations exist between
music as art form and Islamic manifestations of performance. From pre-
modern times onwards, musical traditions in these regions have also been in
dialogic relationship with the interdictions and disapproval of Islamic ortho-
doxy. Exemplary here is the generation of bodily liberating joyfulness through
music, as spectacularly demonstrated by women devotees at Sufi shrines.
Dogmatically forbidden but collectively desired, its near-transgressive joy-
fulness enables such music, arising from within Islamic contexts, to challenge
several orthodoxies – national, secular, patriarchal, and Islamist. In both
diasporic and homeland contexts, musical performance becomes a vehicle to
express historical and social tensions, as well as to debate the contradictory
legacies of British and French colonialism, and postcolonial nationalism and
fundamentalism of various shades. In her chapter, ‘Debating piety and per-
forming arts in the public sphere: the “caravan” of veiled actresses in Egypt’,
Karin van Nieuwkerk looks at Egyptian artists who abandoned their art and
turned away from the spotlight, leaving wealth and fame behind to devote
themselves to God. These now former performers started to influence others and
led a ‘caravan’ of stepped down artists. Following ‘repentance’ and as role
models they turned to preaching veiling and piety among higher-class women
and enabled the extension of the piety movement into the higher echelons of
Egyptian society. They were perceived as a threat by the secularists and the
state. The veiled artists became, accordingly, objects of intense public debate,
constituting an example of the emergent public sphere in Egypt. Many voices
contributed to this debate encompassing art, gender and religion. This ‘pious turn’
of female artists became an issue challenging the notions of the ‘common
good’ and the ‘good Muslim’.
6 Kamal Salhi
24. Like music, dance is also a highly contentious issue in Muslim culture. It
reflects the diversity of people, cultures and languages that have all, in some
way, been changed and enriched by interactions with Islam. Dance styles
range from religiously centred spiritualistic Sufi movements aimed at decou-
pling mind and body in an effort to connect with God to elaborate stylized
rituals. Group line or circle dances are also popular during family or com-
munity gatherings. Many dance forms have developed in conversation with
Muslim and non-Muslim cultures alike, drawing on a wide range of influences
at the formal as well as the popular levels. John Baily’s chapter, ‘Wah wah!
Meida meida! The changing roles of dance in Afghan society’, looks at
changes in the place of dance in Afghanistani society over the last 30 years,
from the ‘pre-war’ period of 1970s Afghanistan, to the performance of dance
in the Afghan diaspora today. It is worth recalling here that there have been
contradictory statements about the performing arts, providing justification for
people on either side of the dispute over the prohibition of some forms. These
ambiguities have led to divisions within Islam over the status of music and
dancing. One split is sectarian in nature: radical Salafists and Wahhabis gen-
erally view music and dancing as haram, forbidden, while moderate believers
accept them as halal, permissible. Mystical Sufis are the most dedicated dancers
in the Muslim world, embracing whirling and other trancelike movements as a
way to draw closer to Allah. Another division is based on class. Urban elites
have historically refrained from dancing, viewing it as frivolous and beneath
their dignity. The rural Muslims who account for the majority of the faithful,
however, have developed rich dance traditions. Until about 30 years ago,
dancing was almost a norm at rural Muslim weddings around the world. In
Afghanistan, for example, Pashtun men have traditionally formed a circle to
perform an ancient ritual dance, the attan, which is a group dance performed
by men and by women, though in separate spaces, and this is regarded as a
‘national dance’, expressing a certain measure of Afghan-ness. Anti-dance
sentiment surged in the 1980s, as Saudi Arabian elites began aggressively to
export Wahhabism. Saudi investors bought the contracts of well-known Egyptian
belly dancers, paying them to recite Quranic verses rather than swivel their
hips on television, though belly-dancing appears to be a pre-Islamic art form
that has survived in more secular countries such as Egypt and Turkey. Taliban
militants have banned dancing at wedding parties, although some observers
believe this move is meant to stamp out tribal traditions.
Based on fieldwork in music and dance sustained by long research experi-
ence in the Afghan region, Europe, North America and Australia, John Baily
engaged with the various genres of dance encountered in Herat city and Pro-
vince in the 1970s, and has analyzed dance in the Afghan diaspora since
2000. While his historical background seeks to resituate dance in the courts of
the Amirs of Kabul since the eighteenth century, it opens a curious window
for the interested reader on a comparative perspective for the understanding
of religion and the performing arts today. We know about, for example, the
generation of pamphleteers who railed against dance in the early twentieth
The paradigm of performing Islam 7
25. century, such as The Christian and Amusements (1909) by Presbyterian evangelist
William Edward Biederwolf. Just as today’s Saudi fundamentalists blame
pre-Islamic cultures for belly-dancing, Biederwolf claimed that ‘the mingling
of the sexes in dancing originated in Greece among men of contaminated
morals and women of loose, questionable character’. While solo dance in the
Muslim context of Herat, performed at private family parties by cross-dressed
dancing boys and girls, might involve eroticism and negative perceptions,
mixed dancing, with men and women dancing together, or ‘massed dancing’,
as Baily describes it, is regarded by Afghans as threatening and undesirable.
In fact it is general knowledge that ‘moderate’ Muslims generally do not
object to music and dancing per se. But some hardliners view sexually sug-
gestive movement, racy lyrics and unmarried couples dancing together as
haram. This standpoint bears a resemblance to the anti-dance feeling common
among American Christians, for example, at various times in American his-
tory. As is known, Minister Cotton Mather wrote in the seventeenth century
that dancing was a creation of the devil, and warned that a ‘Christian ought
not to be at a ball’ (quoted in Van Winkle Keller 2007: 310). Dance has
therefore been an evolutionary ambiguous performance within the prism of
pleasure, piety and identity. Afghans living in Western society, where dancing
is today a completely accepted activity, have discovered the pleasures of social
dancing. Piety may be reflected in the activities of dancing boys and dancing
girls, but unlike social dance, they have been constrained in the diaspora
where they create a direct personal experience of identity, as Baily shows in
his examination of children dancing in California at New Year, when they can
be seen as learning to perform their Afghan-ness, or a similar but more
interesting situation in London.
Where differences come into the study of rhythmic importance in the music
of Islam-influenced societies is how Muslims themselves perceive and use that
all-important element. The ability to apply multiple interpretations of what
rhythm means to Muslims is substantially based on the fact that rhythms are
brought into play differently in that kind of music compared to Western
music. In Western culture the idea of drumming, for example, is nearly always
associated with entertainment or just to add to the musical quality of a song.
In Muslim societies, drums carry deeper symbolic, ethnographic, social and
historical meanings. This multi-pronged approach is precisely what is enacted
in this volume in Richard Wolf’s article, ‘The manifest and the hidden:
agency and loss in Muslim performance traditions of South and West Asia’.
His essay’s point of departure is the study of cases from Delhi, Karachi, and
Hyderabad, revealing the broader political context in which actors negotiate
what should be manifest, visible, or external and what could be, concealed,
invisible or internal. Knowledge of the statements of performers, the contexts
in which particular utterances are made and representative details of the local
‘musical’ systems become a condition of his examination. Critical attention is
also paid to aspects of the structure and naming of repertoires and what per-
formers say about their repertoires, which support claims for how their social
8 Kamal Salhi
26. groups gain prominence in complex urban settings. The suggestion is that an
orientation towards understanding the rhythm, or more specifically drumming,
is critical, and indeed, this has a cultural significance that explains the broad
differentiation between how Muslims approach rhythm and how Westerners
approach drumming. The difference here clearly lies in the perception, but this
perception may not be as explicit as it seems. Westerners tend to regard rhythm
solely from an aural point of view, but that does not mean that Muslims
necessarily regard rhythm as an extension of motion. Rather, what might be
closer to the point is that Muslim practitioners feel and undergo rhythm as well
as hear it. Wolf elicits a ritual context for his investigation, recalling the annual
commemoration of the battle of Karbala in 680 CE in which the grandson of
the Prophet, Muhammad, and his followers were slaughtered by the henchmen
of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In fact, the emotionally powerful narratives
and visually and aurally elaborate rituals associated with this commemoration
draw spectators and participants from many communities in South Asia.
Drumming figures prominently in some of these rituals through its commonplace
battle associations. It is not meant to be taken as mere musical accompaniment, it
is literally a method of communicating.
Drummers can therefore pound out a rhythm that replicates not only
speech rhythm, but also speech pitch. This is indicative of a perception that
the use has a meaning that is very specific. In order to facilitate this meaning,
a drummer must have a natural sense of pitch or arena (as is for example
often delimited for the commemoration activity) that is extraordinarily well
developed. In my view this highly developed pitch may explain why ethno-
musicologists such as Richard Wolf insist on Muslim-influenced rhythm being
so highly distinctive in itself as well as distinctive from Western drumming. He
construes that different meanings arise not only from differences in perspective,
but also from differing motivations of participants to present their actions as
meaningful in one or the other context. As he explains, some perpetuate per-
formances whose meanings are accessible at one level and veiled at another;
others strategically resist commonplace forms of meaning; and some aspects
of meaning are not so much hidden as lost, owing to social changes that have
impeded the transmission of knowledge. The case of hidden texts, as his study
presents, precipitates a discussion of the ‘manifest’ and ‘hidden’ as named
categories in the Muslim world and, more broadly, as phenomenal categories
of human experience.
Important historical reasons make music a fruitful means of hearing dis-
senting voices. Orthodox Islam’s antagonism towards music has long co-existed
in dynamic tension with the chanting and rhythmic iteration characteristic of
non-orthodox Islamic movements, often grouped together as ‘Sufism’, parti-
cularly in South Asia. As Islam spread across Asia and North Africa, non-
orthodox cults cross-pollinated with regional and local music, dance and
bodily practices to create diverse musical traditions. Such cross-pollination
conveyed correctives to Islamic orthodoxy, and alternative interpretations of
piety and ethics. Today, these inherited musical traditions interact with other
The paradigm of performing Islam 9
27. youth protest music globally available through MTV culture. Not only diasporic
movements but evolving technologies foster such continuing cross-pollination.
Since colonial modernity, music has travelled via technology, gramophone
recordings, radio broadcasting and cassettes, and now CDs, DVDs, MP3 and
the Internet. Its dissemination in modernity is itself another reason for
music’s importance within the ongoing struggle between modernity and Isla-
mic (neo-)traditionalism. Music has always stimulated communitas. The sense
of oneness with others that it creates fosters community identity, and under
the right circumstances has the power to bring disparate groups together to
emphasise that music in Islam cannot be conceived monolithically or mono-
culturally. The contemporary relevance of the studies presented in this book is
a catalyst and displays the possibilities for dialogue between research and
practice and offers perspectives for policymakers. Of course, there remains
immense scope for the incorporation of ethnomusicological research into an
interdisciplinary framework that investigates the intervention of musical
practice and performance within contemporary debates about secularism,
fundamentalism and religiosity in Muslim societies.
Dhiraj Murthy, in his chapter ‘“Muslim punk” music online: piety and
protest in the digital age’, looks at the presence of young diasporic Muslim
musicians in new media, using the pages on MySpace and Facebook of dia-
sporic Muslim bands as examples. The argument here is that young Muslim
males continue to be, as he says, ‘othered’ or ‘exoticized’ and so marginalized
both online and offline. The online presence of ‘Taqwacores’, a transnational
diasporic punk music scene, serves as a space where this marginal essentialism
is contested. Even in the Islamophobia wake of post-9/11 and 7/7, Taqwacores’
cyberspace continued to be viewed as a ‘safe’ outlet for progressive activist
Muslims. The Internet’s role in providing growing room for Muslim musical
youth subcultures is important, and these virtual spaces are indeed the dom-
icile of young male Muslims, particularly ostracised ones, who can express
themselves freely yet creatively. Murthy explores the continuing circulation of
the pejorative essentialism of diasporic Muslim males (especially as ‘terrorist’/
demonic ‘other’) and underlines the possibility of cyberspace to function as a
meaningful and progressive Muslim social space which challenges this essen-
tialism both online and offline, and thus the study of the anti-Islamophobic
leanings of the Taqwacores. Both historically and in the contemporary con-
text, there are strong links between music and a sense of place and identity, of
both people and places. ‘Places’ can be thought of as complex entities,
ensembles of material objects, people and systems of social relationships
embodying distinct cultures and multiple meanings, identities and practices.
As such, cyberspace is continually in the process of becoming, rather than
essentialized or fixed; it is open and porous to a variety of flows in and out,
rather than being closed and hermetically sealed. Not only is there little
consideration of the geography of music but such work tends to be descriptive
and conceptually limited. Cyberspace should nevertheless be pertinent to
cultural geographers because music influences virtually all aspects of culture
10 Kamal Salhi
28. and manifests itself in numerous spatial ways. They could seek a more
sophisticated engagement between virtual geography and music. In fact there
should be mature accomplishment in exploring the geographic dimensions
and implications of the unique and mysteriously indefinable phenomenon
we call music. Clearly there is a vacuum waiting to be filled, and in recent
years interest has grown in issues of music, place and identity in a range of
empirical settings, theoretical frameworks and policy contexts. At the same
time, other scholars of music and social scientists have also recognized the
importance of space and place in relation to making music and issues of
identity.
In her essay ‘Devotion or pleasure? Music and meaning in the celluloid
performances of qawwali in South Asia and the diaspora’, Natalie Sarrazin
conceptualizes another form of place as ‘much of what might seem to be
absent must be supplied by the picturization itself’. In a pertinent example,
she explains that ‘the audience’s judgements of and affective responses to the
qawwali authenticity are influenced by all of the off and on-screen production
factors. The contribution of the mise-en-scène enhances the appearance of
authenticity through costumes, lighting, set design, choreography and location.’
Whereas a traditional sacred qawwali event may take place at a shrine, it is
now the on-screen representation of a shrine which must suffice. Audiences
also assess the general authenticity of the on-screen actor playing the qawwal
as well as the voice of the playback singer. The screen becomes a place where
the behaviour of the back-up group is significant. Any non-qawwali dancers
and their costumes and movements, any narrative elements that might be
spliced into the number, and of course the film and music directors’ inter-
pretation of the place of the qawwali are in the narrative. The most important
factor, however, will be the genre of film itself and the director’s approach
regarding Muslim representation in the rest of the film narrative. The musical
popularity of qawwali, as she describes it, takes its form in the hybridity of
qawwali with Indian popular music to create space for an acceptable place for
Muslims in society.
The ways in which the character of music events and places can change in
unintended rather than intended ways is also explored by Thomas Hodgson
in the context of the annual Bradford Mela festival in Britain. Since its inau-
guration in 1998, it has become dominated by audiences of various social
groups, which has made it a highly desirable social event. As a result of the
enhanced demand for participation in the festival, it transformed from an
artistic celebration into a cultural commodity. This challenged the overall
purpose of the festival and resulted in changes in artistic direction, as pro-
grammes with a wider popular appeal were introduced in search of new
audiences. I see the Mela festival as exemplifying the way in which social
trends in Britain produce new contested arenas, as place – in this case the
diasporic city of Bradford – became a metaphor for these wider trends,
emphasizing the ways in which music in place is both affected by and con-
stitutive of broader social processes. In fact, wider national and global
The paradigm of performing Islam 11
29. influences can find expression in more local musical cultures, and I would
stress the links between embodiment and mobility, fixity and fluidity in the
contemporary world. The event of the Bradford Mela, which has a music and
arts remit, has changed its geographic focus, moving from being South Asian
to, putting it in a nutshell, more broadly, Bradford’s various cultures. Hodgson
explains that this shift in the festival’s ethos is tied up with, and informed by,
a variety of discursive, yet connected, political, social and economic develop-
ments in Bradford. In response to the experiences of racism that South Asians
were being subjected to in Bradford, and the negative publicity the city was
attracting, a group of students and youth activists organized a small music and
arts festival on playing fields near the city’s university. As Hodgson argues,
the event had the dual purpose of being both something for the city’s South
Asian population to celebrate and a way of engaging the wider public with
multiculturalism by introducing them to aspects of South Asian culture that
existed beyond newspaper headlines, curry houses and taxi ranks. In fact,
within a few years, the Mela had become the city’s flagship multicultural
event and moved to a much larger venue, Lister Park. Hodgson’s chapter
identifies some of the transformative ways in which politics, culture and music
have collided, conflicted and combined over the course of the festival’s history
and unravels some of the complex power relations therein. The desire for
creativity is explored, emphasizing the ways in which music is part of dia-
sporic culture, a way of life with its own beliefs, conventions, norms and
rituals in Bradford. This challenges postmodernist assertions that the globa-
lization of music and indeed other forms of popular culture results in a loss of
place, a general condition of both placelessness and timelessness. In fact,
music plays a key role in the production of place, literally and metaphorically:
as a concept which is interpreted, as a material setting encompassing
physical and built environments, and as a setting for social practices and the
interactions of everyday life.
Another approach to the formation of place is the contribution of different
and challenging types of migration which reflect critically on the concept of
diaspora. In their respective chapters, ‘Hip-Hop bismillah: subcultural wor-
ship of Allah in Western Europe’ and ‘Lil Maaz’s Mange du kebab: challen-
ging clichés or serving up an immigrant stereotype for mass consumption
online’, Maruta Herding and Jonathan Ervine explore new platforms of
music as debate. The two essays show empirical variation, which means that
the concept of diaspora can help us unravel the processes presented in their
case studies. In both of them, diasporas are sites of multiple identifications
and intersectionalities, sites of consciousness, as well as forms of personal
experience and histories. Indeed, diasporas in their cases provide important
political and economic resources and a basis for redefining people’s identities
and forms of belonging. For some European Muslims they are an enabling
space, a domain in which to remake their self and surmount difficulties or
reserves laid at their door. Ervine’s chapter demonstrates that Mange du
kebab by rapper Lil Maaz is based on challenging combinations of clichés
12 Kamal Salhi
30. about members of Muslim groups in France. By using the means which new
media provide, he uses an alternative route to fame to present a vision of the
Muslim diaspora which seeks to promote tolerance and acceptance, rather
than voice dissent or anger. Herding shows that Islamic hip-hop in the West is
highly political, not only charged with the dominant conflict between ‘the
West’ and ‘Islam’, but also with political debates within Muslim communities.
Hip-hop thus has the agenda of claiming one’s rights, stating one’s identity
and voicing concerns about underprivileged groups in society. A dialectical
relationship develops between the different nodes to which people relate.
Ervine analyzes the extent to which the kebab (here the subject of rap music)
can be considered a modern multicultural equivalent of the steak and chips so
famously written about by Barthes in Mythologies (1959). He considers the
applicability of Gilroy’s notion of conviviality to the way in which Lil Maaz
portrays his kebab shop and its customers. His examination of interviews with
the novelty rapper shows that he is keen to present a consensual view on
many potentially emotive socio-political issues in an attempt to achieve broad
popular appeal. Herding’s chapter, which compares Britain, France and Germany,
showing the transnational similarities, approaches the subject from the per-
spective underlying motivations of Western/European Muslim rappers for
their creative new genre of contemporary Islamic music.
In the preparation of this book, which is the result of a successful research
project, I have become acutely aware that the role of music and the
performing arts in Muslim societies and their diaspora, and in Islamic doc-
trine, is a subject which has not been systematically explored by cultural
analysts, musicologists, social scientists or historians. In leading the research
project, I have tried to encourage thinking on this new but common subject
among scholars, researchers and practitioners concerned with interrelated
areas of musical and bodily performativity, diasporic and homeland negotia-
tions, and the complexities of contemporary Islam. The main aim was
to understand contemporary Muslim identity formations precisely, through
examination of a wide range of music and performance practices that draw
on a broad spectrum of Muslim heritage and culture in South and West Asia,
North Africa and their diaspora. Through this book we build a cumulative
understanding of how such intra-Islamic musical and performance dialogues
intersect with the broader debates about orthodoxy, secularism, moderate
and fundamental Islam. We have interrogated the role of non-orthodox vari-
eties of music and performance in contemporary world politics, reiterating,
through music as debate, the complex and proliferating relationships between
the global and local in communities, both in the homeland and in the
diaspora.
References
Al Faruqi, Ismail (1986), The Cultural Atlas of Islam, New York: Macmillan.
Barthes, Roland (1959), Mythologies, Paris: Seuil.
The paradigm of performing Islam 13
31. Schechner, Richard (1993), The Future of Ritual: Writing on Culture and Performance,
New York: Routledge.
Shiloah, Amnon (nd), ‘On Jewish and Muslim Musicians of the Mediterranean’, in
Ethnomusicology Online. http://www.umbc.edu/eol/3/shiloah (accessed 17 January
2011).
Biederwolf, William Edward (1909), The Christian and Amusements, Chicago, IL: The
Glad Tidings.
Van Winkle Keller, Kate (2007), Dance and its Music in America 1528–1789, New York:
Pendragon Press.
14 Kamal Salhi
32. 1 New Islamist popular culture in Turkey
Martin Stokes
Islamist political gains and media deregulation in Turkey have, since the early
1990s, provided conditions in which a new popular religious culture has flour-
ished. This chapter explores its musical dimensions through one prominent
practitioner, Mehmet Emin Ay.1
This case study raises some broader questions
about the theorization of religious, public and mass media. New kinds of reli-
gious popular music have come into being elsewhere in the Muslim world, and
for similar reasons. They are often known as inshad dini, or nashid, or some
version of these Arabic terms. These terms – connoting song but avoiding the
secular/Christian implications of the term ‘music’ – encompass, as other con-
tributors to this volume will already have indicated, a great diversity of
musical styles.2
So the questions I am raising also have a frame of reference
beyond modern Turkey.
Though popularity is always hard to measure, this music is ubiquitous in
Turkey in the media, on the Web, and at municipality-sponsored ramazan
festivities in large cities.3
Its ubiquity reflects the unassailable position, at the
time of writing, of Turkey’s dominant religious political party, the AK Party
(Adalet ve Kalkınma Parti, or ‘Justice and Development Party’), and its cur-
rent chairman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party succeeded
the Refah Party, which was dominant throughout the 1990s under its flam-
boyant and combative leader, Necmettin Erbakan.4
These parties have done
little, actively, to promote an Islamist musical culture.5
But they have actively
championed the deregulation of the state media system. This has meant the
end of the musical symbols of the secular state (its folk music orchestras and
so forth), and a proliferation of Islamist FM radio and television stations
requiring content.
Mehmet Emin Ay was one of the earliest to exploit these opportunities,
and his inventive and productive energies have had a major impact on the
field. He was born in Van, in the far east of Turkey, in 1963. His father was a
state-appointed Kur’an recitor and mosque functionary in that city. He grew
up with the sounds of Istanbul’s Kur’an recitors reverberating in his ears,
particularly Halis Albayrak, Fatih Çollak and Mustafa Öztürk. But he was
also located close to the Arab and Persian world, and in a predominantly
Kurdish city. He developed an ear for Arab popular and classical music, and
33. a cosmopolitan sense of the region’s various musical cultures. He moved
to Bursa in the west of the country, with his family, after graduating from
Van’s I
:
mam-Hatip high school. He completed his studies in Bursa, writing a
Ph.D. at Bursa’s Uludağ University on Islamic pedagogy. Soon after, he
was appointed professor in the Faculty of Theology. His academic interests
range from pedagogical issues amongst Turkish migrants in Western Europe,
to the institutionalization of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia. His official
university website makes no reference to his musical achievements, mention-
ing only his recitation of passages of the Qur’an to Queen Elizabeth II on her
official visit to Turkey in 2008. Yet, during his period of employment as an
academic at Uludağ University, he has produced major recordings of the
Qur’an, recited the Qur’an for the Turkish Radio and Television corporation,
and produced a large number of popular recordings with his colleague, Mustafa
Demirci, through their production company, Beyza Yapım.6
This conveys
some of the bare facts. It might be useful, though, to begin by describing how
I first came across this musician. Impressionistic though this description may
be, it will communicate something of the milieu and the atmosphere in which
this music initially thrived.
A listener
In 1991 I visited a small city in the south of the country, close to the Syrian
border. My motivations were vague: I mainly wanted a sense of musical and
cultural life away from Istanbul. I had received a warm invitation from some
high-school teachers who I had assisted on an official visit to Belfast, where
I was then working. This southern city had a port and a massive Russian-
built iron and steel works. It was close to major oil pipeline termini and
American air bases. Long-standing ethnic tensions between local Kurds,
Arabs and Turks were running high, fuelled to a large degree by the collapse
of the local economy after the first Gulf War. The area was economically vul-
nerable, being heavily dependent upon the Iraqi building sector and cross-border
haulage.
The small group of teachers that initially looked after me made no secret of
their allegiance to a far-right Turkish nationalist political party. My relations
with this group remained cordial, but quickly cooled. I spent more and more
time with another of the teachers, somewhat marginalized and clearly looking
for company. I will refer to him as Osman. He turned out to be a graceful and
witty conversationalist and I was, at first, puzzled by his marginalization.
But the reasons for this quickly became clear. Osman held Turkey’s secular
order in low esteem, and had little time for petty nationalism. Stuck in this
pestilential backwater (his characterization) for a long summer of tedious
administrative tasks, he badly wanted to be back home in his northern village,
together with his wife and newborn baby. Having tested the waters with a few
sardonic barbs on the subject of secularism, talk quickly turned to religion. A
week or so after I got to know him, he handed me a cassette: Mehmet Emin
16 Martin Stokes
34. Ay’s first recording, Dolunay. Listen to this, he said, and tell me what you
think. As a musician.
The cassette, a copy of which I am listening to now, begins with a spoken
voice. Deep, resonant and solemn, it introduces the song of praise reputedly
sung by the women and children of Medina to welcome the Prophet after his
flight from Mecca – ‘Taleal Bedru Aleyna’. The prophet is likened in these
verses to the beauty of the newly risen full moon. A sustained deep synthesizer
tone adds to the atmosphere of solemnity and spirituality. The song on the
cassette is sung in a cultivated and carefully pronounced Arabic. The intonation
of the musical mode, hüzzam, follows Arabic, rather than Turkish, intonation.7
The voice is powerful, high pitched, and double tracked in the opening verses.
The accompaniment is sparse, comprising only a frame drum and a key-
board, which adds discrete harmonies and end-of-line flourishes. The last two
verses, beginning ‘wa teahidna jamian … ’ (‘we all promised together … ’), are
sung as a kaside, which is to say, without metrical accompaniment and in a
quasi-improvised style. The singer’s voice is single-tracked here. Higher up the
scale, it repeatedly cracks with artful emotion.
The strength and emotionality of the voice made an immediate impact
then, and continue to do so now. But at the time, I found it rather difficult to
respond to Osman’s question. I did not know how to place it. Religious music
had no presence, at that particular moment, in the Turkish media market,
which still operated in the penumbra of the secular state media system. It was
unusual to hear a Turkish voice singing in Arabic outside the relatively cir-
cumscribed world of Qur’an recitation. The intonation was that of Arabesk,
the then dominant popular culture oriented to Turkey’s south-east, and to its
rural–urban migrants (Stokes 1992). And it also resembled Arabesk in its
rather hastily thrown-together style of studio arrangement. But the spiritual
and literary frame of reference was entirely different. I wanted to know more.
How had Osman found this? What did he know about the vocalist? Who else
does this kind of thing?
Osman turned out to be as interested, curious and, in some regards, as
ill-informed as I was. This was something new in Turkey, he said. ‘Everyone’
was listening to it. As for buying my own copy, I’d have to go to Beyazıt,
in Istanbul, and find the cassette shops in the pedestrian walkway near the
main mosque. I said I knew the place. I had, on occasion, bought copies of
cassette sermons from some of the religiously oriented cassette and book ven-
dors there in previous years. I had done so rather cautiously. It is sometimes
hard to remember, at the time of writing, just how much anxiety hovered over
open expressions of religious identity in the shadow of the military coup of 12
September 1980. Whenever I showed up at Osman’s apartment, particularly on
those evenings when he seemed to be making rather a point of not mixing
with his colleagues watching television in the courtyard, he would put on Mehmet
Emin Ay’s cassette and press me for my thoughts. I, in turn, tried to fathom his.
Osman’s underlying intention was, of course, to proselytize. Difficult though
I often found these encounters, there was an affability, an intelligence and a
New Islamist popular culture in Turkey 17
35. curiosity at play in Osman’s conversation that interested me. We ended up
spending many enjoyable evenings that summer chatting about religion,
politics, poetry and music. Before long, he introduced me to the writings of
Said Nursi (1887–1960), pressing a large number of cheap printed pamphlets
into my hand. These were popular editions of writings from Said Nursi’s
magnum opus, the Risale-i Nur, his collected writings, which were finally pub-
lished in 1956. No doubt feeling I could be trusted, he had finally declared
his hand. ‘Bediüzzaman’ Said Nursi was a religious scholar affiliated to the
Nakşibendi-Halidi order, known today for his opposition to the secular state.
His theology was characterized by an engagement with positivism’s critique
of religion and the quest for an Islamic modernity. Like other Nakşibendi, his
followers (known as ‘Nurcu’) were political realists with a commitment to
contemporary mobilizational methods, particularly those involving mass
media (Mardin 1991: 137). In the late 1980s, the left-leaning Turkish press
often asserted that the Nurcu constituted a recognizable clique within gov-
ernment and the military. In the later 1990s, a splinter group following charis-
matic preacher Fethullah Gülen was to become a formidable force in Turkish
politics, media and education.8
This encounter sticks in my mind, since it encapsulates many features of
the Islamization of Turkey’s public sphere at this moment. This was a process
very much driven from the provinces, impacting on big city life in the west of
Turkey through its migrants and the urban poor. Many of the movement’s
local-level activists were to be found in the provincial academic and educa-
tional system, particularly the I
:
mam-Hatip (religious functionary training)
schools that spread across the country after the 12 September 1980 coup (see
Bozan 2007). Its political motivations were complex, and still the subject of
analysis, but certainly involved a growing frustration with the secular order,
its corruption, its inefficiency and its authoritarian reflexes. The emerging
Islamist parties promised not just probity in government and economic liber-
alization, but also cultural vitality and new intellectual horizons. To people
like my companion in this troubled southern city, those representing the
secular state at that moment, by contrast, seemed rigid and dull.
Osman was exaggerating, but not far off the mark when he told me that
‘everybody’ was listening to Dolunay, Mehmet Emin Ay’s first cassette, which
first appeared in 1989. It sold, I later learned, over a million copies. Osman,
the product of an I
:
mam-Hatip school education, with a loose intellectual and
emotional affiliation to the ‘Risale-i Nur cemaati’ (the Risale-i Nur commu-
nity), was in many ways very typical of many of Mehmet Emin Ay’s listeners.
When we met for an interview in Bursa in September 2008, Mehmet Emin
Ay was quick to recognize the support of this broad configuration of commu-
nities and movements, one which, generally speaking, had ‘moderate’ views on
music (‘müziğe ılımlı bakan cemaatler’, as he put it) and encouraged cultural
creativity.
This was a matter of necessity as much as aesthetic preference. Mehmet Emin
Ay had learned the Qur’an from his father, and knew the musical culture of tilavet
18 Martin Stokes
36. (Qur’an recitation) well. But he had no connection with the Halveti-Cerrahi,
the Mevlevi or any of the other groups associated with the musical culture of
the Turkish Sufi tekkes (‘lodges’). He had learned what he refers to as tasavvuf
musikisi (‘mystical music’) in the I
:
mam-Hatip school choir that he himself
attended in Van, and in the Theology Faculty choir in Bursa.9
In Turkish
terms, this would have to be described as an entirely amateur musical forma-
tion. His colleague, Mustafa Demirci, spoke in similarly self-effacing terms
about his own musical background. ‘We just weren’t that intellectual’
(‘o kadar entelektüel değildik’), he told me. There were reasons for this. The
military coup of 12 September 1980 drove tekke musical culture underground.
For a while at least, Islamists were hounded as much as leftists. For the gen-
eration of Islamists coming of age intellectually and culturally in the aftermath
of the coup, tekke musical culture was perceived as remote and ‘intellectual’.
It may have elicited respect, but it no longer pressed on those wanting to
branch out, in musical terms. A fresh start was now possible.
It now strikes me that Osman, for all of his enthusiasm for Mehmet Emin
Ay, was unsure exactly how to listen to him, and often seemed to be looking
to me for guidance or clues. The issue was complicated, or clouded, by the
well-known objections to music in much Islamic thinking. For Osman, the
matter could quickly be resolved by appealing to the ‘niyet’ (i.e. the intentions)
of the musician. As long as it was clear that the musician intended to instruct
and inform in an appropriately well-intentioned way, the matter was settled.
‘Music’, under these clearly defined circumstances, was entirely legitimate.
But in the classical Sufi and hadithic texts dealing with the so-called sema
(‘spiritual audition’) polemic, the locus of moral agency in discussions about
music is usually the listener. The musician, in a sense, simply provides a ser-
vice: sounds that remind the listener of his/her separation from God. So the
question has habitually been conceived in terms of an emphasis on cultivating
appropriately ethical listening, rather than appropriately ethical performance.
Many, following Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), have understood music
as permissible as long as the basic conditions of zaman, makan wa ikhwan, i.e. an
appropriate time (zaman), an appropriate place (makan) and an appropriate
community structure (ikhwan, ‘brotherhood’), can be realized.10
But what was
to constitute zaman, makan wa ikhwan when listening to a cassette on your own
in a tiny apartment, constantly disturbed by the dust and clanging from the iron
and steel works across the road? The broader question of how religious music
might circulate in modern public spaces and media domains, and with what
ethical effects, is a complex one. I will return to this important issue in the
last part of this chapter. Before doing so, I should say a little more about
Mehmet Emin Ay’s music.
From Dolunay to Nûru’l-Hüdâ
Mehmet Emin Ay generally composes for texts selected from classical Sufism,
Islamic devotional formulae and Ottoman Turkish spiritual verse. The music
New Islamist popular culture in Turkey 19
37. is assembled in studios in Istanbul and Bursa. His colleague, Mustafa
Demirci, sees to production, marketing and distribution through their company,
Beyza Yapım. Based in the Fatih district in Istanbul, Beyza Yapım came into
existence in 1998. As well as distributing non-Turkish Islamist musicians
produced elsewhere (such as Sami Yusuf), Beyza Yapım markets over 100 of
its own recordings. A ‘house style’ might be said to have emerged, involving
top producers and session musicians from both the religious and secular
markets (for instance, Taner Demiralp, Hakan Oral, Ceyhun Çelik, Başar
Dikici and Göksel Baktagir). Both Mehmet Emin Ay and Mustafa Demirci
think of this style as ‘somewhere between’ classical Turkish music and tasavvuf
(i.e. both popular and tekke derived religious music culture), and emphatically
reject any connection with previously dominant popular musical styles, nota-
bly Arabesk. From an outside perspective, though, the vocal aesthetics and
studio sound of their music clearly owe something to Arabesk: lively rhythms,
large string choruses, a rich array of Western and Middle Eastern instruments
in the mix, an emotional vocal style.11
Proximity to the music of secular popular entertainment clearly caused
problems in the studio. Perhaps because he was more directly involved in the
nitty-gritty of production, Mustafa Demirci was happy to discuss these with
me explicitly. Musicians associated with the secular market (the piyasa), he
told me, ‘have their own way of doing things’ (‘kendi yaklaşımları var’), and the
results, from his perspective, could be undesirable (‘ … istemediğim şeyler
yapılmış olur bazan … ’). Constant vigilance was necessary. He had a ‘red
line’ (he used the English expression) that he would not allow musicians or
guest producers to cross. Making judgement calls over issues such as osten-
tatious musical flourishes, sounds detracting from texts and spiritual mean-
ings, or overly explicit reference to musical styles associated with secular
entertainment was a matter involving hassassiyet (‘sensitivity’). He was con-
fident, though, that he was capable of striking the right kind of balance, and
was prepared to take risks. Beyza Yapım represented a certain stance of
sophistication in the religious music market. Cemal Kuru, Abdurrahman
Önül and others often came up in conversation, and my sense was that both
Mehmet Emin Ay and Mustafa Demirci regarded their lyrics and music as
folksy, their vocal styles overly reminiscent of Arabesk, and their gestures
towards religious propriety (such as leaving out violins and darbukas in the
mix on the grounds of their ‘secular’ associations) heavy-handed and sim-
plistic. Their own formula seemed to have been commercially successful:
individual Beyza Yapım CD sales figures started at around 100,000, going up
to 300,000 or 400,000 in exceptional cases.12
Mehmet Emin Ay and Mustafa Demirci have, at the time of writing,
released 11 CDs together since 1998. On top of these, Mehmet Emin Ay has
made ten solo CDs, and Mustafa Demirci six. Their compositions are gen-
erally strophic and adhere closely to classical makam (modal) formulae. From
a classical point of view, they use a relatively circumscribed set of makam.
Kürdi is particularly common (characterized by its lower A-B flat-C-D
20 Martin Stokes
38. tetrachord); nihavent, uşşak, hicaz, rast, hüseyni, segah and hüzzam are also
used consistently. This general profile is not dissimilar to that of prominent
Arabesk musicians trained in makam, such as Osman Gencebay, for example
(see Stokes 2010). Ample space is provided for either instrumental improvi-
sation (taksim) or vocal improvisation (generally referred to, in a religious
context, as kaside). Meters are generally duple or triple. The agglutinative or
‘additive’ meters common in Turkish folk and classical music are not to be
found. In this regard, too, the new religious music shares something with
Arabesk and other kinds of Turkish popular music. And as with Arabesk, the
spoken word is prominent. Many of the CDs, like the ‘Taleal Bedru Aleyna’
recording mentioned earlier, have spoken introductions, translating, explaining
or contextualizing the lyrics.
These recordings have a pronounced didactic bent. The lyrics come from
diverse sources, often exploring a particular verse form: for example, nâts (or
nât-ı şerifler, songs praising the Prophet, as in the Nât-ı Şerifler: Gül-i Ruhsâr
and Güle Sevda: Nât-ı Şerifler CDs) or münacaats (a musical prayer or sup-
plication, as in Beyaz Dilekçe). Neglected verse forms are revived, such as the
Ottoman kaside by Sultan Abdülhamit I which is to be found on Nûru’l-Hüdâ.13
Others focus on specific devotional practices, such as tesbîhât (litanies based on
God’s 99 names, the esmâ’ül-hüsna, as in the Namaz Tesbîhâtı and Aşkı
Mevlâ: Esmâ’ül-Hüsna 99 CDs). Yet others thematize the work of a particular
poet, such as Seyyid Osman Hulûsî (1914–90) (as in Hulûs-i Kalb) or Mevlana
Celalettin Rumi (as in Aşkın Kanatları: The Wings of Love).
As well as being explained, translated or contextualized in spoken intro-
ductions, liner notes contain extensive glossaries, allowing listeners to trans-
late obscure religious or Ottoman terms into modern Turkish. One of the
rationales for Mehmet Emin Ay’s Nûru’l-Hüdâ recording was the feeling that
most people in Turkey are ignorant of the rich heritage of Arabic spiritual
poetry. Much, he felt, could be achieved by presenting some well-chosen
selections of it in a popular musical idiom that would be familiar to them. In
a similar vein he spoke about what a pity it was how little people in Turkey
actually knew of Mevlana Celalettin Rumi’s poetry, despite claiming him as a
national treasure. His poetry has, arguably, become the highly rarified pre-
serve of a handful of scholars in Turkey with a Persian-language literary
training. Aşkın Kanatları: The Wings of Love, was an attempt to popularize
his work in a Turkish musical context. Mehmet Emin Ay’s compositions on
this and other CDs popularize, translate and inform a listenership assumed to
be inclined to Islamic mystical culture but badly in need of instruction.
A passion for the Egyptian popular music of the 1950s and 1960s – the
music of Umm Kulthum, Mohamed Abd al-Wahhab and Abd al-Halim
Hafiz – has also guided the development of Mehmet Emin Ay’s musical style.
Like many who grew up in Turkey’s border regions, where Turkish state
broadcasting does not enjoy a monopoly, he has a lively sense of the musical
cultures of Turkey’s southern and eastern neighbours. His knowledge of the
Egyptian music of this period seemed to me to be quite comprehensive,
New Islamist popular culture in Turkey 21
39. though he had never, himself, visited Egypt. But this knowledge informed his
pronunciation of Arabic, his vocal improvisations, his intonation of makams
and his sense of what, musically speaking, stirs, excites and moves. On some CDs,
such as Nûru’l-Hüdâ, this Egyptian frame of reference is quite obvious, prompt-
ing extensive discussion in our interview. For his part, Mustafa Demirci was
drawn to what he referred to as Hint tarzı (Indian style), by which he meant
specifically the qawwali of Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, which could then easily be
found in the ‘world music’ sections of up-market bookstores in Istanbul. The
influence of qawwali was more studied, and more restricted to specific numbers,
than Mehmet Emin Ay’s broad embrace of Egyptian popular music culture.
Though firmly grounded in Turkish classical music, popular hymn (ilahi)
singing and the popular styles that had held sway in Turkey since the 1980s,
this was music that located itself self-consciously in a broader Middle Eastern
and Islamic context.
Who, though, are the addressees of this musical pedagogy and this cosmo-
politanism? This audience is, primarily, Turkish. Both Mehmet Emin Ay and
Mustafa Demirci have a clear conception of a Turkish community of listeners
whose musical memories do not go back much further than the 1980s, who
purchase and listen online, who identify with the Islamist movement, and who
are entirely at home in the world of Islamist consumerism and life-style choi-
ces. But they are clearly thinking of an audience beyond Turkey, as indicated by
a few songs in English, or in multiple languages (like the verse presented in
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, French, German and English in the song
‘Salât ü Selâm’ at the end of Nûru’l-Hüdâ). This could be an audience of
Turkish and Kurdish migrants in Western European cities, whose children are
deemed by many in Turkey today to have lost touch with their language, religion
and culture. And it could, equally, be an audience of spiritually inclined
Westerners, eventually led by a Google search for ‘Turkish Sufi music’ to
Beyza Yapım’s website. This strategy for engaging a transnational listenership is
not uncommon in Turkey. They concentrate on the local market with tried and
trusted formulae, but take a small gamble with elements that might arouse
interest, particularly in Western Europe and America.14
Online
How do people listen to this music? The stakes of this question have already
been mentioned. Islamist media cannot simply justify themselves by reference
to the niyet (intention) of the performers and producers. Listeners and con-
texts of listening must, somehow, be taken into account, as well. And yet the
problems of taking listeners into account are almost insuperable, since mass
media, by definition, are everywhere and nowhere. Who knows how people
might be listening, lost in crowds at live concerts, or in solitude online?
It might be difficult to know how people listen. But we can know some-
thing concrete about the imaginative, discursive and pedagogical constructs
that people deploy when listening, in order to make sense of what they are
22 Martin Stokes
40. hearing, to connect it with other domains of experience, to share and to guide
the experience of others.15
One answer to the question of how the cultural
managers of the Islamist movement fashion habits of ethical listening lies in
the verbal pedagogy that accompanies music in these new contexts. The
question is aggravated where there has been some rupture, cutting people off
from historically embedded religious discourses on sema, and institutions that
have managed such discourses, such as the Sufi lodges. Arguably, this was the
case in Turkey after the 1980 coup. The pedagogy in question needs to be
rather explicit.
Mehmet Emin Ay, for example, often introduces songs on his CDs. These
spoken introductions provide a historical context, explaining and sometimes
translating the words (if they are in Arabic or Persian). These introductions
betray a slight anxiety that one could listen to this music in the wrong way.
This kind of verbal guidance is to be seen elsewhere. By way of an early
example, I attended a number of Islamist weddings in the mid-1990s with one
of my music teacher’s ensembles which provided instrumental music and ilahi
(hymns). The guests, from rural migrant and proletarian backgrounds, clearly
had difficulty with the basic concept of these events – with music and food
but, confusingly, without dancing or alcohol. So a preacher would often be
invited to give a short sermon. These were often, simply, an explanation of
this kind of wedding and its place in the emerging order of things in Turkey.
On many occasions, the question of music would be addressed explicitly, the
presence of musicians legitimized, and applause and other forms of acknowl-
edgement encouraged. Islamist television and radio programmes in these
years also gave much space to documentaries and to interviews with musical
specialists about Turkish Islamic musical culture. This kind of media peda-
gogy has expanded greatly in recent years. So Mehmet Emin Ay’s introductions
on his recordings might be seen in a broader context of a kind of ‘top-down’
instruction in mass-mediated audition.
Such skills are also cultivated more informally through conversation within
communities of listeners. The lengthy conversations attached to YouTube clips
online provide an interesting snapshot of the process. Consider, for example,
the conversation attached to Mehmet Emin Ay’s ‘O Gece Sendin Gelen’ (‘It
Was You Who Came That Night’). This highly popular song has had
approximately half a million views since it was posted on 18 September 2006.
The song is strophic, in kürdi makamı (with a lower tetrachord of A-B flat-C-D),
and in a simple foursquare meter. The instrumental backing is provided by
frame drum, keyboard, strings and fasıl kemençesi (a classical fiddle). The
musical structure comprises an ascending verse, whose opening phrase is
repeated sequentially a tone lower (the words: ‘Arşın kubbelerine adı nurla
yazılan/ _
Ismi, semada “Ahmet”, yerde “Muhammed” olan … ’ or ‘He whose
name is written in light on the domes of the throne of God/He whose name is
“Ahmed” in heaven, and “Muhammed” on earth … ’). It is followed by a
verse that starts in a higher register, comprising a slowly descending sequence
touching on hicaz makamı (with a lower tetrachord of A-B flat-C sharp-D) at
New Islamist popular culture in Turkey 23
41. the end (the words: ‘Sağnak yağmurları inerken yedi kattan/O gece sendin
gelen, ezel kadar uzaktan/Melekler her zerreye, müjde verirken Hak’tan/O gece
sendin gelen, yâ Hazreti Muhammed … ’ or ‘As torrents of light descended
from the seven heavens/it was you who came, from eternity/As the angels
announced the good news from the Truth/it was you who came, O Prophet
Muhammed’). The lyrics express devotional thoughts in simple rhymes,
refering to the Miraç, the Prophet’s mystical journey into the heavens.16
The
visuals show birds, insects, flowers, clouds, trees, waterfalls, historic mosques
and praying hands. It is a well-crafted song with a catchy tune and a warmly
emotional style of vocal delivery. It is not hard to see why it has been so
popular, and has generated a relatively large number of online commentaries.
Apart from its quantity (197 posted comments) the content of this conversation
is rather typical.
This commentary has two important dimensions. One is a matter of estab-
lishing public presence, of constituting a community interacting in the act of
listening. Many comments locate the listener by mentioning place, or name, or
locating oneself through language (‘allah razı olsun çok güzel ilahi _
IBRAH _
IM
BENZER,ÖMER TOKGÖZ? VE LÜTFÜ SÜTSATAN dan kucak dolusu
sevgiler’; ‘my name is emin!!!!! im bosnia’; ‘voll schön ich liebe dieses ilahiii !!!
cok? güzel herkeze slm lar’; ‘Hic unutmam Kerkuk’te Ramazanlari onu dinlerdik’)
(‘May God accept it, a very beautiful ilahi. Love and warm embraces from
Ibrahim Benzer, etc.’; ‘My name is Emin, I’m Bosnian’; ‘(in German) Really
beautiful, I love this ilahi. (in Turkish) Very beautiful, greetings to all’; ‘I’ll
never forget. We used to listen to it in Kerkuk – in Iraq – during ramazan’).17
Listeners register themselves as part of the Turkish world, though not neces-
sarily as Turkish speakers, or necessarily as people living in Turkey. Others
simply respond with a prayer formula, a direct way of affirming moral
presence common in everyday social interaction. These range from short
(‘allah razı olsun? kardeşim’) to more elaborate formulations (‘la ilahe illahe
illalah muhammeden resullulah. binlerce salavat kainatin efendisine … ’; ‘sela-
munaleykum. Bu günlerin feyzi üzerinize, rahmeti geçmişinize, bereketi evinize,
nuru? ahiretimize, sıcaklığı yuvamıza dolsun. Kandiliniz mübarek olsun … ’)
(‘there is no God but God and Muhammed is his prophet, thousands of
prayers for the Lord of creation’; ‘Peace be with you. May the enlightenment
of these days be with you, their mercy on your past, their blessings on your
house, their light on our life in eternity, and their warmth fill your homes.
May your Kandil festival be blessed’).
Occasionally listeners engage in direct conversation with one another, but
often only to censure inappropriate remarks. ‘Scaredyet’ writes ‘dershanede
kalirken gavatin biri hep sabah namazina bu ilahiyle kaldirirdi bangir bangir
calardi? … ’ (‘when I stayed at the dorm there was some idiot (gavat) who
would play this song, bangir bangir, by way of morning prayers … ’).18
‘Umitkirtil’ replies, irritably: ‘kimin gavat oldugu gayet belli deil mi ? … böyle
bi ilahinin altına bunu? yazarak ne oldugunu belli etmene gerek yoktu … Allah
biliyo ne oldugunu bari kuldan saklada adam sansınlar’ (‘isn’t it clear who the
24 Martin Stokes
