"Music moves religion" can be taken in at least three senses. One is the explicit inspiration for this conference, namely that music has acted as an agent, carrying religious practices from one community or region to another over a long period of time. A second is more localized: music undergirds rhythms of physical activities--especially processions. When religious practitioners ambulate through routes of cities and towns, or embark on pilgrimages, some religious practices of one neighborhood or place become audible to people living in another locale; the sounds may or may not stimulate the hearers to act. In a third metaphorical sense, music is emotionally moving to religious participants and possibly to others nearby.

Any account of music's large scale role in transporting religion across routes of migration and trade in the greater Indian Ocean region needs to account for what it means for music to move in at least the three senses outlined above. The third category ought to include not only conventionally formulated "religious" responses such as ecstasy, love, warmth, and feelings of unity, but also aversion, anger, senses of being out of place, and notions of religious difference that can become hardened or crystallized around issues of sound. On local levels, how does the movement of religious practitioners who are making music/sound actually affect those whom those practitioners encounter? Music "moves" religion in the first sense only if "music is moving" in the third sense to various "others"; music wouldn't "move" religion if it merely reinforced the religiosity of those who already shared a faith.

Acknowledging that historical evidence for movement in these three senses is not always going to be available, I consider the implications for history of what is available from contemporary ethnography. Focusing on Iran, Pakistan, North India and South India, I explore several kinds of responses to the sounds of Shii and non-Shii practices associated with Muharram, and what these responses might suggest about the role of music in the movements of religions more generally