Music in Arabia

Perspectives on Heritage, Mobility, and Nation

Issa Boulos, Virginia Danielson, Anne K. Rasmussen, Issa Boulos, Virginia Danielson, Anne K. Rasmussen

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253057518
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Music in Arabia extends and challenges existing narratives of the region's distinctive but understudied music to reveal diverse and dynamic music cultures rooted in centuries-old heritage.

Contributors to Music in Arabia bring a critical eye and ear to the contemporary soundscape, musical life, and expressive culture in the Gulf region. Including work by leading scholars and local authorities, this collection presents fresh perspectives and new research addressing why musical expression is fundamental to the area's diverse, transnational communities. The volume also examines music circulation as a commodity, such as with the production of early recordings, the transnational music industry, the context of the Arab Spring, and the region's popular music markets. As a bonus, readers can access a linked website containing audiovisual examples of the music, dance, and expressive culture introduced throughout the book.

With the work of resident scholars and heritage practitioners in conversation with that of researchers from the United States and Europe, Music in Arabia offers both context and content to clarify how music articulates identity and nation among multiethnic, multiracial, and multinational populations.

Figure 1.1. Map of the region. Designed by Issa Boulos

1

Introduction

Virginia Danielson

THIS BOOK DRAWS ITS READERS INTO THE RICH and diverse worlds of music in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf and their larger setting within the Gulf and Indian Ocean community.¹ Musical life in the Gulf and Peninsula flies in the face of common stereotypes: the musics and peoples have histories extending well before the modern buildings and the new nation-states that now characterize much of the region, and the integrated worlds of fishing, trade, and nomadism have yielded a multiplicity of cultural expressions, creating a diverse social and musical environment. Today, the domain—comprising the countries Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait—is vast, differentiated, and rich in transnational associations and extra-Arab connections, extending historically into present-day India, Pakistan, the countries of East Africa, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond.

The traditional music of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf is not well known outside its region. With a handful of exceptions—Lisa Urkevich’s book on music in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (2015); Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco and Dieter Christensen’s book on music in Sohar, Oman (2009); and a volume of the journal World of Music edited by Anne K. Rasmussen (2012)—the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (2002) has been the primary source of information in English about musical practices in the region in the past twenty years. Much earlier, accounts of music in the region by European Orientalist scholars and travelers began as early as the mid-nineteenth century—for instance, in the work of Joseph Osgood (1854; see also al-Harthy 2010 and this volume). The Dutch Arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) described aspects of musical life of the Hijaz (in western Arabia) in the late 1800s (1888; also Oostrum 2012 and this volume), and he recorded examples of vocal genres performed exclusively by men or by women. After that time, a variety of European, Arabian, and Levantine Arab scholars worked in various parts of the region. Several Israeli scholars studied bedouin music and the music of the urban Yemenite Jewish community, which largely moved to Israel after 1948 (for instance, Bahat and Bahat 1980; Sharvit 1982; Shiloah 1978). In recent decades, Yemen and Oman have been the sites of the greatest research activity, yielding accounts of music, sung poetry, and dance, while the diverse musical styles of Saudi Arabia are the least known (examples include Adra 1993; Caton 1991; Christensen 1991; Jargy 1989; Lambert 1997; El-Mallah 1997; Schuyler 1990, 1990–1991). As a result of ethnographic fieldwork and recordings, notably by Poul Rovsing Olsen (1968, 2002), pearl divers’ songs, a widespread regional musical practice, have captured the attention of audiences worldwide, more than perhaps any other local music (see also Touma 1977; Feld and Kirkegaard, n.d.; Al-Taee 2005). As independent countries in the late twentieth century, Gulf nations established their own cultural institutions that published journals and monographs devoted to heritage that included music.²

The Region

The Peninsula is home to several ecological lifestyles. Historically these have comprised interdependent communities of desert nomads, villagers, inland urbanites, fishermen, and urban-based seafaring merchants and including populations of both fairly endogamous Arabic speakers and groups of diverse African, South and Southeast Asian, and Iranian origins. While a quantity of literature on the history and the political and social life of the region exists, the region has not attracted the depth of scholarship on music and expressive culture that may be found for the Levant and North Africa, for a variety of reasons. As Jean Lambert has written, during the twentieth century, much of the region was closed to research. Available information is scattered and fragmentary and rarely, if ever, approached as a whole (Lambert 2002). Especially when viewed by outsiders, the region has not been regarded as a site of rich cultural expression.

Historian Nile Green points out that “historians follow sources and that sources follow states,” leading to situations where political centers—usually larger, politically influential cities—“become textually dense” (2016, 746). Although there are several important commercial hubs in the Gulf region, these coastal cities, and indeed most of the Arabian Peninsula, have not been considered as among the Middle East’s historic political centers, and they have thus received less attention from the scholarly world than the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Iraq.

Yet, following Green, attention to these liminal commercial hubs “has radical potential. It calls us from the Levantine Middle East that has always dominated [the field of Middle Eastern Studies] to Arabia, the Red Sea, the Gulf,” away from “cultural hegemony to maritime frontiers that are porous and creole” (ibid., 747). A close look at the societies of the Gulf and Peninsula draws attention to “the old circuits of the ocean, where many Indians and Africans also lay claim to be Persians and Arabs” (ibid., 747). One example of the Indian Ocean cultural flows to which Green refers is the Sultanate of Oman, for which the island of Zanzibar, located off the coast of present-day Tanzania, was the seat of power in the nineteenth century. Omani families to this day retain strong ties not just to Zanzibar but to Tanzania itself. Overland and sea travel by Muslim pilgrims to Mecca and Medina (now in the nation of Saudi Arabia) brought streams of people from all directions to the region for centuries. Dutch scholar Snouck Hurgronje’s work documents this late nineteenth-century multicultural Muslim crossroads in Mecca through ethnographic description, exquisite photographs, and “about 300 wax cylinders [recordings] of music and speech of the Hejaz” (Oostrum 2012, 128 and this volume; also Snouck Hurgronje 1888, 1888–1889). The travelogues of pilgrims from the East join those of figures such as writer Ameen al-Rihani (1876–1940), a Lebanese American, who crossed the Najd seeking a meeting with Ibn Saud late during World War I (al-Rihani 1928).

Recent work testifies to the still wider world of the Gulf and Peninsula. In her useful introduction to the Arabian Peninsula, Sheila Carapico particularly decries focus on “The Gulf” (and its cooperative association, the Gulf Cooperation Council, which excludes Yemen) as a new and misleading characterization of a larger and complex subcontinent, drawing our attention southward (Carapico 2004, 11). Working from an archive of personal and business letters written in the seventeenth century by bankers, scribes, teachers, and traders seldom “from the ranks of the recognized cultural elites,” Gagan D. S. Sood articulates what he calls an Islamicate Eurasia. He offers as an example an Iraqi trader seeking to reach his son by mail. The trader’s letters indicate that customary places where the son might be found included Cairo, Basra, several ports along the Malabar coast of India, and Cochin. His work describes lives of men and women “enmeshed in the region’s arena of circulation and exchange” (Sood 2012, 153, 154). Offering another perspective in his ethnography of Hadramawt, Engseng Ho “tells a story of a society of persons dispersed (strewn, disseminated, scattered, settled, lost, found, drowned) around the Indian Ocean. The story is one of travel and mobility” (Ho 2006, xix). “What matters,” he writes, “is that the dispersed understand themselves to be linked by bonds, usually those of kinship. Such bonds exist and endure, rather than atrophy, only so long as people continue to speak, sing, recite, read, write, narrate, and otherwise represent them” (ibid., xxxii). The essays included in this book address exactly that speaking, singing, and reciting.

While readers may associate Gulf cities with soaring skyscrapers, remarkable architecture, and wildly conspicuous consumption and may even be persuaded that the region has no history (or “culture”) to speak of, in fact people have been resident in the Gulf and Peninsula for millennia. Much is made in popular contexts of the Gulf countries as new countries and new societies, and, indeed, much of what one sees in the Gulf and Peninsula is brand new. But people have lived in this region for five thousand years. The trading cities of Dubai and Sharjah are hundreds of years old, with Ras al-Khaimah, Bahrain, and Muscat’s port city, Matrah, older still. The island of Sir Bani Yas off the coast of Abu Dhabi features a sixth-century Christian monastery, and pre-Islamic ruins in Oman have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Archaeological projects in virtually every country of the region indicate that trading relationships are very old, dating to antiquity. According to archaeologist Robert Carter, “The inhabitants of the Arabian Gulf were among the world’s earliest maritime traders. Their ships sailed regularly between the Bronze Age civilizations of Mesopotamia, Bahrain and the Indus Valley, and they reached China by sea in the eighth century AD” (Carter 2002, 44). Of historic Julfar (now Ras al-Khaimah), Joseph Elders writes, “The combined sites of Kush and al-Mataf (early and late Julfar) provide an unbroken sequence from the first to the seventeenth century, during which the port of Julfar was evidently a major centre of international trade. This trade is most impressively documented by the pottery assemblage from these sites. Wares manufactured in East Africa, Yemen, Persia, Iraq, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and China have been identified” (Elders 1998, 78). Other excavations have yielded similar results throughout the region, and the historic engagement with international trade is well known, at least within the region itself (Lienhardt 2001, 25, for instance). Sources make clear the mobility of the Gulf’s and Peninsula’s populations and the diversity of their port cities historically.³

As seafarers and traders, populations of the Gulf and eastern Saudi Arabia have tended to orient east and south into the Indian Ocean. While local populations now love traveling in Europe and some maintain houses there, the view of Europe as a dominant power, or idealizations of France and England as model civilizations, common in other parts of the Middle East, is not so strong in the Peninsula. An excerpt from Abdelrahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt offers a good illustration. In this excerpt, family members have told an aging grandfather that his great-grandson has gone to the United States for a training course: “People travel east, my boy—from the east you get wheat and cloth and every other good thing. Whatever made our Hammad go west? Didn’t anyone offer him directions? Didn’t he ask anyone?”⁴ The historic gaze from much of the region tends to be toward the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, to India, Asia, and East Africa, into the Red Sea, and only then to the Mediterranean and Europe.

As a result of centuries of trade, travel, and pilgrimage, the Gulf and Peninsula are full of descendants of immigrants who, generations ago, married into local families and who have become “local” themselves, alongside “native” communities. A substantial percentage originated in Africa, coming to the region first as traders and sailors over centuries. Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya reminds us that Somali, Eritreans, and Ethiopians settled centuries ago in the Yemeni city of Aden (De Silva Jayasuriya 2008, 142, 136). Recently, ethnographer Daniel Varisco described in exasperation a conversation about a dark-skinned Yemeni: “He’s NOT African!” Varisco exclaimed. “Tihama has had relationships with East Africa for centuries. He didn’t just come over on some boat!” (Varisco, November 5, 2015).⁵

Especially during the nineteenth century, Africans in great numbers came to the region as enslaved people. Matthew Hopper’s book argues that, driven by Western demand for luxury items such as pearls and dates, hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved and sold, largely in Oman for work on its vast date plantations, and in the southern Gulf (present-day UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain) for pearl diving, constituting up to half of nineteenth-century divers (Hopper 2015, 16). Others worked in present-day Saudi Arabia in agriculture and throughout the region as domestic servants. Many were enslaved as children; some spent time working in the coastal cities of Balochistan or Persia before coming to the Peninsula. As a result, as Hopper points out, this part of the African global diaspora is difficult to track. Currently, some descendants self-identify as African, while others have become completely integrated into Peninsula societies through long-ago migration, settlement, concubinage, and second marriages (Hopper 2015, 129; 2018, especially 148–153; see also Limbert 2006; Bilkhair Khalifa 2006, 2009). Some who may appear to be African descendants identify as Arab or Baloch. De Silva Jayasuriya writes of the Indian Ocean region that “descendants of Africans show no qualms that they are now indeed Asians, though they are conscious of their ancestral links with Africa” (De Silva Jayasuriya 2008, 136; also Hopper 2015, 12). Hopper also suggests that the shared experience of poverty engendered by the collapse of the pearl industry and the economy generally in the 1930s that persisted until the discovery of oil “might have reduced the significance of differences between African and Arab identities,” as almost everyone was poor. Slavery often could not be sustained for economic reasons, and a sense of shared existence may have developed (Hopper 2018, 153; 2015, 220). Then, as nation-states established themselves, most, if not all, of the permanent residents at the time became full-fledged citizens.

The long time span and conditions of African displacement and migration to the Gulf leave many descendants without a specific idea of their family’s place of origin in Africa (for instance, Hopper 2015, 114). Some families were Swahili speaking, which is one indicator; others understand themselves to be Abyssinian, Nubian, Sudani, or, certainly in Oman, Zanzibari. Ideas of origin, where these are explicitly acknowledged, are often vague. For these reasons, authors in this book use the general word African to designate populations where usually one woul...