Tarik and Julia Banzi

While the historical record is rich with mention of women Andalusian musicians of the 9th-13th centuries CE, there is a notable scholarly void documenting the existence and significance of Andalusian women’s ensembles during the seven centuries that followed. What became of these female musicians and their traditions?

The classical Andalusian musical repertoire is thought to have descended directly from the courtly music of Islamic Spain (711-1492 AD). It is considered by many scholars to be one of the longest continuous traditions of art music in the world. With few exceptions scholarly literature on Andalusian music focuses exclusively on the male version of the tradition. And yet, women musicians are connected to the very "origins" of Andalusian music, the search for which has been the central concern of much of the scholarship related to Andalusian music. Did they cease to exist? Were they collectively forgotten or simply deemed unworthy of remembrance?

This presentation explores how both recent and older Iberian memories continue to influence the dynamics of collective assembly; in this case gender-separated women’s Andalusian events involving music. It documents the phenomenon of female ensembles and explores factors that have contributed to their persistence over the centuries. Based on historical and ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco that included interviews with dozens of ensemble musicians, I explore the special status that independent women’ ensembles hold in Moroccan society, the intersections of gender and music tradition, and what the presence of these ensembles suggests about broader socio-political and religious arrangements in Islamic Morocco. The existence of women’s musical traditions, previously undocumented by Arab and Western scholars, can lead us to reconceptualize intersections of history, memory, music, religion, gender and identity.

Music plays a central role in ecstatic religious practices throughout the world. Religious ecstatics are always deeply emotional. I am claiming that music, as a known generator of emotions, is a catalyst for religious ecstasy, and that those worshippers who are propelled into trancing during religious liturgies are particularly susceptible to musical arousal. My talk will involve the brief presentation of a Balinese exorcist ritual (Hindu), a Sri Lankan healing ritual (Buddhist), and a Muslim sama’ (New Delhi).

I will conclude with a summary of my current physiological research involving GSR (galvanic skin response) measurements of US Pentecostal trancers and other groups. My results suggest that religious trancers are more susceptible to musical arousal than the general population, and that this helps to explain the world-wide association of music, worship and religious ecstasy.

Embarking from Southern Arabia, Hadrami Arabs traveled, traded, and spread religion across the Indian Ocean world over the course of several centuries. In Indonesia today, descendants of Hadrami traders can be found living in urban communities commonly known as Arab Quarters (kampung Arab). Although Arab descendants in Indonesia have assimilated into Indonesian society in many ways, members of these ethnic communities preserve and maintain self-ascribed "Arab" traditions, including the performance of a lute and drum ensemble called gambus. In this presentation, I will introduce the story of Arab-Indonesian gambus tradition and show how younger generations of Arab Indonesians use music to reinvent their Arab ethnicity in reaction to both global flows and religious culture.

Malunga Blessing

Salim Sidi,
Basti Mendicant  

The use of music in religious mendicancy enjoys a long tradition throughout South Asia among diverse religious communities, resulting in a vast repertoire of sung poetry composed and performed by mystic saints and their followers. Some Sidi African-Indians of Gujarat, descendants of Indian Ocean voyagers from Africa, have adopted this means of conveying Islamic spiritual teachings. Singing to their own community, to other Muslims, and to outsiders while seeking alms in public spaces, Sidi religious mendicants offer musical presentations of various types of sacred poetry. The Sidis' 21st century mendicancy rounds now extend throughout India as well as transglobally, for their international tours can be seen as an extension of religious mendicancy. This presentation will historicize and problematize the development of Sidi Sufi international tours, in which the Sidi Goma troupe is invited to perform their sacred music, dance and mystic poetry for international audiences.

People in much of the world are struggling to balance the seemingly conflicting developments in technology and globalization with traditional cultural values and religious fundamentalism.Malaysia is a rapidly developing, technologically sophisticated Muslim country that has been at the forefront of many of these issues that affect so much of the world’s population. This paper examines the impact that recent societal changes have had on music in Malaysian society by profiling recent developments in music in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city. One of the results is that Malaysia's two most recent prime ministers have both promoted what they refer to as a form of moderate and progressive Islam. What are the musical implications of this? This paper is based on observations made during several trips in the past years, and compares these findings with the Malaysian music scene of the1970s and 1980s.

The panegyric manuscript al-Burda

How does music move religion? More specifically, how does music move Islam in the Indian Ocean region?

Using a social network paradigm, I explore these questions, interpreting them according to two senses of the transitive verb "to move": to stir affect; 2. to transfer. I argue that the first sense is critical to the second, just as music—in its fusion of the textual and the sonic—is critical to both. These statements apply a fortiori to the affect/transfer "movement" of Islam, for which ritual music assumes distinctive forms better characterized as what I have called "language performance"(1999) due to the uniform centrality of a textual component (alongside ideological rejection of "music" and its cognates). Language performance (LP) models comprise four aspects: syntactic/semantic (linguistic) and sonic/pragmatic (musical-performative). Islamic LP encompasses a broad spectrum of genres, from khutab (sermons) to tilawa (Qur’anic recitation) to inshad (poetic recitation, with or without musical instruments).

In the pre-audio-mediated period when text but not sound could be exactly reproduced and diffused, especially as writing, the global flow of an LP model is characterized by a potent combination of diffusion and localization, supporting global religious coherence (and global recognition of that coherence) through exact textual circulation of syntactic/semantic aspects (along with performative competencies in sonic/pragmatic aspects) encoding ideal spiritual-social relations, while adapting locally (mainly via sonic and pragmatic aspects) to maximize social connectivity and affective power. Group ritual deployment of such LP generates the binding energy (what Durkheim termed "effervescence") required to develop and sustain local religious networks by infusing participatory ritual performance—and hence participants’social relations—with powerful emotions, simultaneously linking participants—cognitively and emotionally—to the global religious community through the more objective, fixed agency of the text, its expressions of belief, and its encoded social network ideals.

These theoretical considerations are grounded by considering the pan-Indian Ocean distribution of a particular LP model, a genre of inshad centered on a written Arabic poem, al-Kawakib ad-Durriya fi Madh Khayr al-Bariya (Celestial Lights in Praise of the Best of Creation)—popularly known as the Qasidat al-Burda (The Mantle Ode)—by an Egyptian, Sharaf al-Din al-Busiri (1212-1294?).

In its ten chapters, the Burda, in essence a madih (loving praise of the Prophet Muhammad) and mawlid (Prophet’s lifestory), expresses the core values, meanings, and sentiments of Islam. Most commonly performed as inshad (musical recitation), especially on the occasion of the Prophet’s birth (12 Rabia al-Awwal), in Sufi or lifecycle rituals, or other devotions, the Burda became the most widely-recited poem in the Muslim world. The Burda is credited with extraordinary spiritual therapeutic and protective power (baraka) stemming from its author’s personal relation to the Prophet (recitation, and miraculous cure), and is believed capable of reproducing such a relation for others who recite it.

The history of the early, rapid spread of Islam, the process of conversion following Arab military conquests from North Africa to Central Asia, is relatively well understood. Rather less so are the means by hic Islam became established many centuries later throughout the coastal Indian Ocean region, especially East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. While the usual arguments, centered on diffusion via mercantile and Sufi networks, are plausible enough as far as they go, they don’t go far enough.

I argue that widely-distributed sacred texts, amenable to participatory group recitation—and the Burda is only one example of this—serve as a portable network model for the central social–spiritual relationships of Islam, especially the Muslim’s personal relationship to God and the Prophet, which it therefore serves everywhere to uniformly reproduce through performance. Syntactic/semantic aspects of its recitation impart religious knowledge, instill faith, trigger religious feeling, and locate individuals within Muslim social networks (locally and globally), while sonic-pragmatic aspects, adapting to local socio-cultural environments to maximize affect by drawing on local musical performance traditions, create the "effervescence" necessary to charge social network links with felt significance.

Circulating via human and textual media throughout sparse, far-flung mercantile networks of the Indian Ocean, the Burda text (together with performance competencies) was implanted in myriad socio-cultural environments, flexibly adapting (sonically and pragmatically) to each, thereby catalyzing formation of strong local Muslim networks, while uniformly aligning and connecting these with the broader Muslim community.
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Christopher Lee, "Globalization Moves the Mushaira "

One of the regular highlights of several years of fieldwork among Muslim poets of Urdu in Varanasi, India in the late 1990s was attending and occasionally performing at poetry gatherings called mushairas. The mushaira, carried to South Asia from the Middle East along with Perso-Arabic poetics, originally referred to a small gathering of a few poets and wealthy patrons. The Urdu mushairas of my 1990s fieldwork were radically different: they were large–scale events where an audience – sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands – assembled to watch a dozen or more poets sing, chant or otherwise perform their poetry late into the night. More recent observations, however, suggest that the mushaira, as well as its social, cultural and religious milieu, continues to travel and transform. One important catalyst of these changes is globalization. In this paper, after a brief discussion of the classical and contemporary mushaira, I focus on two intersections of globalization and the Urdu mushaira, and their cultural and religious consequences: the growing popularity of the mushaira among overseas South Asians (including those living in the Middle East as well as North America and Europe), and the disastrous effects on Indian mushairas caused by the loss of cottage industry jobs due to cheap imported goods.

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Anne Rasmussen, " From Seashore to Department Store: Musics of Indonesian Islam"