Focus: Music and Religion of Morocco

Christopher Witulski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138094581
• eBook ISBN: 9781351602877
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Focus: Music and Religion of Morocco introduces the region and its history, highlighting how the pressures of religious life, post-colonial economic struggle, and global media come together within Moroccan musical life. Musical practices contextualize and clarify global historical and contemporary movements—many of which remain poorly understood—while articulating the daily realities of the region's populations in ways that rarely show through current news accounts of religious extremism, poverty and inequality, and forced migration.

As with other volumes in the series, Focus: Music and Religion of Morocco addresses large, conceptual issues though interwoven case studies, in three parts:

• Part I – Memories and Medias: Who We Are highlights how issues of religion, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization transcend boundaries through music to create a sense of personal and national identity, whether hundreds of years ago or on today's satellite television stations.
• Part II – Contesting Mainstreams: Where We're Going explores Morocco's sacred and secular music practices as they relate to the country's diversity and its contemporary politics.
• Part III – Focusing In: Faith and Fun in Fez highlights Fez's sacred music industry by introducing musicians who navigate musical and religious expectations to appeal to both their own devotional ethics and their audiences' wants.

Links to music examples referenced in the text can be accessed on the eResource site www.routledge.com/9781138094581

Part I

Memories and Medias: Who We Are

Like so many others, when I first visited the Middle East as a study abroad student in Egypt in 2004, I didn’t know much about what to expect. I had been studying Arabic for a semester in the United States, which is really only enough time to learn the alphabet, how to ask for directions, and how to order food. Cairo was a surprise, but a big part of that surprise was how familiar it was. Just like any other big city I had spent time in, like New York, it was noisy and full of traffic. Signs were everywhere, advertisements sold cellphone plans, and the Pizza Hut delivered.

While Morocco is not Egypt and cities like Fez, Marrakech, and Tangier, where I spent most of my time, are not as big as Cairo, these major urban centers are global cities of roughly one million residents. Almost seven million people live in and around Morocco’s largest city and economic center, Casablanca. Its urban population of about three and a half million puts it between Chicago and Los Angeles in terms of size. Morocco’s cities look outward, making connections abroad, while also looking inward, creating their own identities. Fez, Marrakech, Tangier, and others have long histories of global cosmopolitanism, though it can manifest in different ways, both economic and cultural.

Global connections are not exclusive to cities, though. Especially today, when even the smallest rural homes have satellite dishes to pick up broadcasts from Morocco’s news stations and from more far-reaching media outlets in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Qatar. Mass media plays an outsized role in Moroccan music and, despite the wealth of local styles that appear throughout this book, many stations’ airwaves are dominated by the latest pop music from regional and global corporations. Their music videos play from television sets in cafés and restaurants, not to mention the cellphones of young people huddled around the latest hit.

These experiences came to define my understanding of music in Morocco, as well as how I started to see religion working. Just as Cairo felt familiar, I saw people working to live their lives in a familiarly confusing contemporary world. As we sat at cafés drinking coffee or waited for a gig to start, musicians and music fans frequently explained to me how they navigated their faith within a changing society. While it was important for me to remember the dramatic differences between my own experiences and theirs, these discussions showed me how similar today’s concerns are for people trying to make a living while doing the right thing. Maybe it seems like a stretch, but talking about music—both sacred and popular—gave depth to these interactions. People have strong opinions about the newest pop trends, or how their fellow Muslims (or Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and so on) use music to bring their communities closer to or further from “the right path.”

Music has a long history as a foundational part of the experience of religion. Around the world, religious activities have featured different kinds of musical performance to instigate or support worship. Ecstatic singing and dancing can enhance how humans understand the divine and supernatural, whether in prayer, ritual worship, spirit possession, meditation, or in any number of other spiritual encounters. Music can reinforce faith and help someone to live according to their morals, bringing believers closer to whatever the aims of that faith might be. This power has not gone unnoticed, however, as music also has a fraught history with religion. According to some, certain types of music like rock and roll in the 1950s or heavy metal in the 1980s might get connected with moral failure or even evil itself.

In most cases, the links between music and religion go beyond any explicit connection: they come out of social norms, or, more often, they come out of those moments when listeners don’t follow those social norms. When they break the rules. But the aesthetics of music can play many roles within the spiritual or moral lives of listeners. As tastes change and the edgy loses its edge, musicians and listeners adapt. What was holy becomes bland or what was profane becomes sacred. Music-as-entertainment comes into contact with morality and, in some cases, like Evangelical churches fronted by rock bands, once-problematic tastes in music coincide with or even animate worship. It can become music with a mission. Religion and entertainment can inform one another to help someone navigate a difficult and confusing world. Or not.

Morocco, a country that sits on the northwest corner of the African continent, just a few miles south of Spain, has a diversity of both musical and religious practices that exemplify the wide range of connections between tastes, entertainment, and piety. While a similar book to this one could be written about any nation, region, or community (and many have), Morocco’s history and prominence within the world’s imagination make it particularly demonstrative of how music and religion work with and against each other. 99% majority of the country is Muslim (Central Intelligence Agency 2019), though there used to be a sizable Jewish minority. There are dramatic distinctions between urban and rural areas, between those who identify as Arab and those who are Amazight (Berber), and between an educated, often urban, elite and the poor. Gender dynamics are both significant and consequential throughout these discussions, but the nature of the male-dominated music industry and my own position as a man doing research largely with men forces me to omit far too much on the topic. A dramatic need for research on women’s practices remains: I am all-too-aware that this book does not help to bring sufficient attention to the many women who are active as important performers, nor to those who are such a significant part of the listening audience. This book follows some of these lines—but not all—straddling them to explore how they came to be and how they hold up or fall apart when scrutinized by the debates surrounding music and religion. Sometimes the music is pop: they are products of the mass media industry appearing on the radio, burned CD mixes, or YouTube that are celebrated or derided for reasons of morality. In other instances, the music is part of religious practice that, itself, is either contested or held up as “authentic” by the community. In most situations, the line between these two is blurry, absent, or simply irrelevant.

About This Book

The aim of this book is to probe the intersection of music and religion. While this may lead to a better understanding of each, it also moves the focus onto how people incorporate their tastes and values into their morality. In the process, these pages may reflect concerns or conflicts that feel familiar. Questions about the appropriateness of incorporating the newest pop style into a worship service or engaging new followers through musical performance bring home the fact that music and religion are linked everywhere, not just abroad or within rituals that seem so far removed from my own experience as an American growing up in suburbia during the 1980s and 1990s. To this end, I often draw upon American or European public debates or musical styles that struggled with these same questions early in their own history to make points about Moroccan practice.

Similarly, the scope of these chapters is not meant to be exhaustive. To the contrary, they introduce the relevant history or political context that is necessary to understand the musical or religious questions that follow. We will move quickly through a host of styles, social movements, and religious practices to show a breadth of musical and religious identities. The focus moves from a national perspective—looking outward to make global connections and inward to create a national identity—to a regional one, where the country’s diversity comes to the fore. The final section, Part III, goes deeper, reflecting my own experience doing ethnographic fieldwork over roughly two years in Fez. Here, the breadth is replaced by depth as a singular community of ritual musicians demonstrate some of the very questions that peppered the first two-thirds of the book, and their efforts toward finding answers.

This book is divided into three parts. Part I takes a wide view of Moroccan history and explores musical styles that look outward, reflecting national or global trends. Chapter 1 explores the relationship between Andalusian music, a celebrated “classical” genre, and Morocco’s own Andalusian history. Firmly planted within today’s world, the chapter explores how artists, listeners, and governments look outward and backward toward versions of music and religion from the past to build up a sense of tradition and culture today. In Chapter 2, musical tastes reflect similar issues of globalization in the contemporary world, as popular music looks outward for both influence and inspiration. Tastes from across the region and world come into conflict within the everyday lives of listeners who are left to think about how what they like relates to what they feel they should like.

Instead of looking outward, Part II refocuses on various regional communities across the country. Morocco is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and geographically diverse, so it stands to reason that these distinctions extend to music and the arts. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the country’s political history before, during, and following French colonialism during the 20th century. This perspective illuminates the important role that activist musicians play within national politics and as leaders of social movements, establishing the structures of power that inform musical and religious activity within the country. Chapter 4 introduces gnawa music as an example of a case in which musical and religious practices coming from the periphery instigate claims of moral decay or questions of proper Islamic practice. Social life, politics, arts, and entertainment are all tied into various perspectives on ethical behavior.

Part III focuses in on one city and the variety of religious musical performers who navigate its music scene. Fez was the country’s capital for most of its history (before the arrival of the French) and it lays a special claim as a site of knowledge and piety. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce forms of ritual practice that are both celebrated and derided, depending on who you talk to. These mystical traditions have, in turn, become intertwined with popular music styles, wedding performances, major festivals, and the city’s religious identity. They are ritual entertainment. The section closes with Chapter 7, a look at a form of semi-classical music related to Chapter 1’s Andalusian styles and follows one performer who adopts these religious trends into his own music to demonstrate his piety, his city pride, and attract new audiences. Religion is celebrated and operationalized.

Each chapter in this book includes suggested listening and reading. The issues that come up throughout these chapters only touch the surface of the necessary larger questions, sacrificing depth for breadth. The resource listings will point toward accessible further scholarship on some of the main topics for interested readers. Furthermore, reading about music without listening to it is something of a farcical project. These chapters include lengthy discussions of individual artists and songs. The listing of resources following the final chapter includes recommended readings and links to playlists of recordings that are discussed within the text. In many cases, these artists—­especially the older ones—did not work in an industry that focuses on preparing and selling complete albums. In these cases, I strive to provide links or suggestions for specific songs. They are worth a listen, both to firm up an understanding of the arguments in the text and as good music in their own right. Finally, a note about the structure of these chapters: I begin each with a short story, a narrative from my own experience living in Morocco. In these vignettes, I try to be honest, at the risk of sounding naïve or surprised (which, in many cases, I certainly was). These serve to make the discussions that follow more real, to give a picture of specific musical contexts, and to help flesh out a more three-dimensional image of the country and of those who were so generous in sharing their time and knowledge with me.

“Hips Don’t Lie”

These pages present a broad outline of history, religion, and musical practice in a diverse North African country. The boundaries between communities and cultural practices are never as well-defined or concrete as they appear in a book like this. Religious groups influence each other, just as listeners listen widely. Tastes bleed from person to person, trends pick up and die away. The sound of Amazigh communities in rural areas appear in urban taxis while the latest international craze blasts through rural wedding celebrations. I remember my surprise at the ubiquity of Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” during one of my visits to Morocco a few years ago. There is wisdom in those words: how people bridge what they believe, what they say that they want to do, what they say that they do, and what they do can bring important depth to understanding the practice of religion in the world today, whether in Morocco or elsewhere.

People are drawn to new sounds just as they are drawn to compelling and inspiring religious practices. For many, the line between entertainment and worship is not a clear one: listeners like what they like, and they want to hear more of it. The influence of aesthetic tastes on ritual practices show up early and often through these chapters, but they are especially present in the spirit possession ceremonies of the gnawa—a community that went from extreme marginalization to pop stardom—and the adaptations that Fez’s Sufi musicians make in the three chapters that comprise Part III. Just as believers use music to orient their religious values and practices, musicians recognize the power of religion to bring them closer to their audiences. Faith-filled singers (and, likely, many opportunistic performers) present their works as moral, as righteous. The ethics of the music industry can take on a sacred hue, just as Christian rock can bridge seemingly insurmountable contradictions between the value systems core to many rock musicians (rebellion, anarchy, “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” mentalities) and those of pious listeners. That this is usually more than a veneer, but a way for young and old alike to operate within the contemporary world while adhering to a right path, may be unsurprising: it is not unique to Europe or the United States, nor is it unique to Christianity.

Yet, just as the relationship between music and religion in Morocco can be mutually reinforcing, it can also be a marker of difference. Religious perspectives hold powerful authority when criticizing musical trends or elements of popular culture. Within a conservative worldview (again, not unlike that seen in Christianity), the latest fads have substantial problems for the pious. Whether the drug-use common in EDM festivals in England or Morocco (Agadir hosts a major one), the occult references that pepper heavy metal, or the fun-focused lyrics of so much popular music, influences from the secular world can be hard to ignore. Even the most attentive moral reimagination of popular genres must tackle the question: what is innate to a musical genre? How can an artist or listener toy with these carriers of questionable lifestyles, of habits or contemporary norms that might pull the believer from the narrow path? Is the potential to reach more listeners, to satisfy a craving, or to engage an exciting new trend worth the temptation?

Chapter 1

Andalusian Memories

One afternoon in 2013, I went with a friend who was visiting me to see one of my ­teachers, a ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Map, Figures and Examples
• Series Foreword
• Notes on Transcription and Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Memories and Medias: Who We Are
• PART II Contesting Mainstreams: Where We’re Going
• PART III Focusing In: Faith and Fun in Fez
• Conclusion: Who We Are and Where We’re Going
• Resources
• Glossary
• References
• Index