Music, Culture and Identity in the Muslim World

Kamal Salhi, Kamal Salhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317963097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi regionali

In contrast to many books on Islam that focus on political rhetoric and activism, this book explores Islam's extraordinarily rich cultural and artistic diversity, showing how sound, music and bodily performance offer a window onto the subtleties and humanity of Islamic religious experience. Through a wide range of case studies from West Asia, South Asia and North Africa and their diasporas - including studies of Sufi chanting in Egypt and Morocco, dance in Afghanistan, and "Muslim punk" on-line - the book demonstrates how Islam should not be conceived of as being monolithic or monocultural, how there is a large disagreement within Islam as to how music and performance should be approached, such disagreements being closely related to debates about orthodoxy, secularism, and moderate and fundamental Islam, and how important cultural activities have been, and continue to be, for the formation of Muslim identity.

1 New Islamist popular culture in Turkey

Martin Stokes

Islamist political gains and media deregulation in Turkey have, since the early 1990s, provided conditions in which a new popular religious culture has flourished. This chapter explores its musical dimensions through one prominent practitioner, Mehmet Emin Ay.¹ This case study raises some broader questions about the theorization of religious, public and mass media. New kinds of religious popular music have come into being elsewhere in the Muslim world, and for similar reasons. They are often known as inshad dini, or nashid, or some version of these Arabic terms. These terms – connoting song but avoiding the secular/Christian implications of the term ‘music’ – encompass, as other contributors to this volume will already have indicated, a great diversity of musical styles.² So the questions I am raising also have a frame of reference beyond modern Turkey.

Though popularity is always hard to measure, this music is ubiquitous in Turkey in the media, on the Web, and at municipality-sponsored ramazan festivities in large cities.³ Its ubiquity reflects the unassailable position, at the time of writing, of Turkey’s dominant religious political party, the AK Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Parti, or ‘Justice and Development Party’), and its current chairman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party succeeded the Refah Party, which was dominant throughout the 1990s under its flamboyant and combative leader, Necmettin Erbakan.⁴ These parties have done little, actively, to promote an Islamist musical culture.⁵ But they have actively championed the deregulation of the state media system. This has meant the end of the musical symbols of the secular state (its folk music orchestras and so forth), and a proliferation of Islamist FM radio and television stations requiring content.

Mehmet Emin Ay was one of the earliest to exploit these opportunities, and his inventive and productive energies have had a major impact on the field. He was born in Van, in the far east of Turkey, in 1963. His father was a state-appointed Kur’an recitor and mosque functionary in that city. He grew up with the sounds of Istanbul’s Kur’an recitors reverberating in his ears, particularly Halis Albayrak, Fatih çollak and Mustafa Öztürk. But he was also located close to the Arab and Persian world, and in a predominantly Kurdish city. He developed an ear for Arab popular and classical music, and a cosmopolitan sense of the region’s various musical cultures. He moved to Bursa in the west of the country, with his family, after graduating from Van’s imam-Hatip high school. He completed his studies in Bursa, writing a Ph.D. at Bursa’s Uludağ University on islamic pedagogy. Soon after, he was appointed professor in the Faculty of Theology. His academic interests range from pedagogical issues amongst Turkish migrants in Western Europe, to the institutionalization of islam in post-Soviet Central Asia. His official university website makes no reference to his musical achievements, mentioning only his recitation of passages of the Qur’an to Queen Elizabeth ii on her official visit to Turkey in 2008. Yet, during his period of employment as an academic at Uludağ University, he has produced major recordings of the Qur’an, recited the Qur’an for the Turkish Radio and Television corporation, and produced a large number of popular recordings with his colleague, Mustafa Demirci, through their production company, Beyza Yapim.⁶ This conveys some of the bare facts. it might be useful, though, to begin by describing how I first came across this musician. impressionistic though this description may be, it will communicate something of the milieu and the atmosphere in which this music initially thrived.

A listener

In 1991 I visited a small city in the south of the country, close to the Syrian border. My motivations were vague: I mainly wanted a sense of musical and cultural life away from istanbul. I had received a warm invitation from some high-school teachers who I had assisted on an official visit to Belfast, where I was then working. This southern city had a port and a massive Russian-built iron and steel works. it was close to major oil pipeline termini and American air bases. Long-standing ethnic tensions between local Kurds, Arabs and Turks were running high, fuelled to a large degree by the collapse of the local economy after the first Gulf War. The area was economically vulnerable, being heavily dependent upon the iraqi building sector and cross-border haulage.

The small group of teachers that initially looked after me made no secret of their allegiance to a far-right Turkish nationalist political party. My relations with this group remained cordial, but quickly cooled. I spent more and more time with another of the teachers, somewhat marginalized and clearly looking for company. I will refer to him as Osman. He turned out to be a graceful and witty conversationalist and I was, at first, puzzled by his marginalization. But the reasons for this quickly became clear. Osman held Turkey’s secular order in low esteem, and had little time for petty nationalism. Stuck in this pestilential backwater (his characterization) for a long summer of tedious administrative tasks, he badly wanted to be back home in his northern village, together with his wife and newborn baby. Having tested the waters with a few sardonic barbs on the subject of secularism, talk quickly turned to religion. A week or so after I got to know him, he handed me a cassette: Mehmet Emin Ay’s first recording, Dolunay. Listen to this, he said, and tell me what you think. As a musician.

The cassette, a copy of which I am listening to now, begins with a spoken voice. Deep, resonant and solemn, it introduces the song of praise reputedly sung by the women and children of Medina to welcome the Prophet after his flight from Mecca - ‘Taleal Bedru Aleyna’. The prophet is likened in these verses to the beauty of the newly risen full moon. A sustained deep synthesizer tone adds to the atmosphere of solemnity and spirituality. The song on the cassette is sung in a cultivated and carefully pronounced Arabic. The intonation of the musical mode, hüzzam, follows Arabic, rather than Turkish, intonation.⁷ The voice is powerful, high pitched, and double tracked in the opening verses. The accompaniment is sparse, comprising only a frame drum and a keyboard, which adds discrete harmonies and end-of-line flourishes. The last two verses, beginning ’wa teahidna jamian … ‘ (’we all promised together … ‘), are sung as a kaside, which is to say, without metrical accompaniment and in a quasi-improvised style. The singer’s voice is single-tracked here. Higher up the scale, it repeatedly cracks with artful emotion.

The strength and emotionality of the voice made an immediate impact then, and continue to do so now. But at the time, I found it rather difficult to respond to Osman’s question. I did not know how to place it. Religious music had no presence, at that particular moment, in the Turkish media market, which still operated in the penumbra of the secular state media system. It was unusual to hear a Turkish voice singing in Arabic outside the relatively circumscribed world of Qur’an recitation. The intonation was that of Arabesk, the then dominant popular culture oriented to Turkey’s south-east, and to its rural-urban migrants (Stokes 1992). And it also resembled Arabesk in its rather hastily thrown-together style of studio arrangement. But the spiritual and literary frame of reference was entirely different. I wanted to know more. How had Osman found this? What did he know about the vocalist? Who else does this kind of thing?

Osman turned out to be as interested, curious and, in some regards, as ill-informed as I was. This was something new in Turkey, he said. ‘Everyone’ was listening to it. As for buying my own copy, I’d have to go to Beyazit, in Istanbul, and find the cassette shops in the pedestrian walkway near the main mosque. I said I knew the place. I had, on occasion, bought copies of cassette sermons from some of the religiously oriented cassette and book vendors there in previous years. I had done so rather cautiously. It is sometimes hard to remember, at the time of writing, just how much anxiety hovered over open expressions of religious identity in the shadow of the military coup of 12 September 1980. Whenever I showed up at Osman’s apartment, particularly on those evenings when he seemed to be making rather a point of not mixing with his colleagues watching television in the courtyard, he would put on Mehmet Emin Ay’s cassette and press me for my thoughts. I, in turn, tried to fathom his.

Osman’s underlying intention was, of course, to proselytize. Difficult though I often found these encounters, there was an affability, an intelligence and a curiosity at play in Osman’s conversation that interested me. We ended up spending many enjoyable evenings that summer chatting about religion, politics, poetry and music. Before long, he introduced me to the writings of Said Nursi (1887–1960), pressing a large number of cheap printed pamphlets into my hand. These were popular editions of writings from Said Nursi’s magnum opus, the Risale-i Nur, his collected writings, which were finally published in 1956. No doubt feeling I could be trusted, he had finally declared his hand. ‘Bediüzzaman’ Said Nursi was a religious scholar affiliated to the Naksibendi-Halidi order, known today for his opposition to the secular state. His theology was characterized by an engagement with positivism’s critique of religion and the quest for an islamic modernity. Like other Naksibendi, his followers (known as ‘Nurcu’) were political realists with a commitment to contemporary mobilizational methods, particularly those involving mass media (Mardin 1991: 137). in the late 1980s, the left-leaning Turkish press often asserted that the Nurcu constituted a recognizable clique within government and the military. in the later 1990s, a splinter group following charismatic preacher Fethullah Gülen was to become a formidable force in Turkish politics, media and education.⁸

This encounter sticks in my mind, since it encapsulates many features of the islamization of Turkey’s public sphere at this moment. This was a process very much driven from the provinces, impacting on big city life in the west of Turkey through its migrants and the urban poor. Many of the movement’s local-level activists were to be found in the provincial academic and educational system, particularly the imam-Hatip (religious functionary training) schools that spread across the country after the 12 September 1980 coup (see Bozan 2007). its political motivations were complex, and still the subject of analysis, but certainly involved a growing frustration with the secular order, its corruption, its inefficiency and its authoritarian reflexes. The emerging islamist parties promised not just probity in government and economic liberalization, but also cultural vitality and new intellectual horizons. To people like my companion in this troubled southern city, those representing the secular state at that moment, by contrast, seemed rigid and dull.

Osman was exaggerating, but not far off the mark when he told me that ‘everybody’ was listening to Dolunay, Mehmet Emin Ay’s first cassette, which first appeared in 1989. it sold, I later learned, over a million copies. Osman, the product of an imam-Hatip school education, with a loose intellectual and emotional affiliation to the ‘Risale-i Nur cemaati’ (the Risale-i Nur community), was in many ways very typical of many of Mehmet Emin Ay’s listeners. When we met for an interview in Bursa in September 2008, Mehmet Emin Ay was quick to recognize the support of this broad configuration of communities and movements, one which, generally speaking, had ‘moderate’ views on music (’müziğe ilimli bakan cemaatler’, as he put it) and encouraged cultural creativity.

This was a matter of necessity as much as aesthetic preference. Mehmet Emin Ay had learned the Qur’an from his father, and knew the musical culture of tilavet (Qur’an recitation) well. But he had no connection with the Halveti-Cerrahi, the Mevlevi or any of the other groups associated with the musical culture of the Turkish Sufi tekkes (’lodges’). Hie had learned what he refers to as tasavvuf musikisi (’mystical music’) in the Imam-Hatip school choir that he himself attended in Van, and in the Theology Faculty choir in Bursa.⁹ In Turkish terms, this would have to be described as an entirely amateur musical formation. His colleague, Mustafa Demirci, spoke in similarly self-effacing terms about his own musical background. ‘We just weren’t that intellectual’ (’o kadar entelektüel değildik’), he told me. There were reasons for this. The military coup of 12 September 1980 drove tekke musical culture underground. For a ...