What makes a particular sound art "Islamic." I have to say that any comments I make on this are indebted to the late scholar of music, Lois Lamya al-Faruqi, who really helped to define an Islamic epistemology of music. Rather than using Western categories of analysis, she developed categories that were descriptive of the sound arts based on Islamic principles and proceeding from the Quran. I would say for a detailed exposition of this, you should consult her articles, most of which were published in the 1980s. But let me make a few general comments. One key feature of Islamic sound arts, and other arts in general, is its abstract quality. This stems from the principle of Tawhid, that Allah is utterly separate from the creation and that he cannot be represented in any way, figure or form. While music is less prone to figural representation than the visual arts, the abstract qualities of Islamic arts are evident in music in the lack of interest Muslims have shown toward music that is descriptive of people, places, things, and how Muslim music tends to be improvisatory and informal. Linked to this abstract quality is the technique of infinite patterning that Muslim sound arts tend to work with short patterns that are repeated over and over, but with slight variations. With respect to form, one could find commonalities in many Muslim musics in that the form tends to be modular, that the idea of a composition in the Western sense is alien, and that pieces of music are assembled from distinctly separable units or modules. These modules are combined and recombined, repeated and varied in myriad ways, which leads to another feature of Muslim musics, the centrality of improvisation. Quranic recitation is improvised, not the words of course, but the way the reciter weaves the words with different melodic phrases. This is never pre-planned, does not really follow a set theory (except in the case of some Western trained reciters), will differ for each recitation of the same Surah. Islamic music, owning to these features, tends to have a never-ending quality to it, and one does not find the linear build up to a climax that one finds in Western music. It ends when it ends, and there is no dynamic build up and psychological manipulation. Muslim musics tend to be monophonic, which means that they follow one melody line, the model being the lone voice reciting the Quran, but the musical cognate would have instruments and voices all following basically the same line, in contradistinction to Western music, which is polyphonic and in which different instruments play different parts that fit together like a puzzle. Vocal music is primary in Islamic culture, from things like Inshad and Madih to devotional songs, but even instrumental music, at its best, takes on qualities of vocal music. These features create what one could say is the unity of Islamic musics, and they proceed from in form from the supreme sound art, Quranic recitation. There are also what one could term regional variations, where the sound arts of cultures prior to Islam are slowly modified and integrated into the Islamic culture. This would create diversity in things like the internals and preferences for melodic fragments, the rhythms and the instruments used, not to mention languages and themes for songs. There is more to say on this, but the above provides a sketch of what could be seen as some distinctive features of Islamic sound arts.
(Yusef Progler (yusefustad@hotmail.com) teaches and writes about cultural history, education, and political ecology. He is co-creator of the MultiWorld Network (www.multiworld.org), dedicated to generate and support, in place of the present educational systems, better, diverse, and more effective learning opportunities that would respect freedom and ensure lives of individual dignity. He also manages the Multiversity Group (groups.msn.com/multiversity), which aims to question how people in the Third World have unthinkingly continued to follow - long after the imperial powers were expelled - knowledge systems imposed upon them by the West, and he is editor of the Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series, striving to introduce young learners to maverick works of constructive socio-cultural criticism from a variety of perspectives. Progler holds the Ph.D. in American Studies and is a native of New York City, where he taught at Columbia University and the City University of New York. He currently lives in Dubai.)
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