The Interdiction of Music in Islam

[surria]

The Interdiction of Music in Islam

By: Ian Bedford


There is no authorisation in the Qur'an for the interdiction on music. That interdiction, when it is voiced, is the product of a conviction among some Muslims, supported by hadith (just as it is opposed with hadith) the Islam does not countenance music. In a country such as Pakistan, with a strong tradition of devotional music which (taken with the poetry, with which it is always associated) has become entwined with the identity politics of the provinces or sub-nations' which make up the vaster nation, a comprehensive ban on music would be impossible to enforce, though there are 'ulama and sectarian parties who desire it. This paper focuses on an instance where music is even harder to extricate from an accompanying text: the recitation of the Qur'an. In the eyes of Muslims, Qur'anic recitation is not music. This denial raises further questions about the nature of music and, in particular, its involvement with the 'extra-musical'. Adorno's observations on the relation of music to language, and the anthropologi st Friedson's complaint that ethnographers focus on text, at the expense of music, are examined in the light of the circumstance that the world over, music is associated with texts of one kind or another. Even when, as in the case of the 'curing' ritual described by Friedson, words are unimportant, or missing, music is seldom a phenomenological whole. Music 'leans', or is 'leant on': it lends its unrivalled 'eloquence' to many a cause, from commodity marketing to the structured working out of ritual, or, among lovers, to the remembered quality of experience. All these potentialities of music are relevant to the question of its interdiction and to the Muslim denial that the recitation of the Qur'an is music.

A Pakistan perspective

In the last week of May, 1997, a force 3,000 Taleban entered the shrine city of Mazar-I Sharif in northern Afghanistan, after its garrison had been secured for them by an untrustworthy ally. The new government proclaimed its intentions. It would enforce strict Islamic requirements. Women would be sent home from the workplace, female secondary school would be closed down, and music would be banned in public places. The Shi'I (ethnic Hazara) element in the regional population would be disarmed. Before the occupying force was ejected (though not for good) when its ally again changed sides, new of those manoeuvres had been widely circulated by a world media avid for confirming signs of 'Muslim fundamentalism'. However, interest groups in neighbouring Pakistan-- the 'fundamentalist' political parties warring by proxy in Afghanistan--responded in differing ways. For example, while the Jami'at-i 'Ulama-i Islam was delighted, the Jama'at-i Islami, a tireless political player and former patron of the veteran intriguer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his faction, saw nothing to commend in the attack on the Shi'a and the comprehensive shutdown of female education. And when the Kabul government of Burhenuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud briefly reasserted its control over what it regarded as a home province, it reversed all these measures.


The Taleban, the Jama'at-i Islami and the Rabbani-Massoud government have all been characterised as 'fundamentalist' in the West. But they are three quite different propositions. Except for the last-named, the doctrinal and political attitudes of these (and other) groups have been formed, not primarily in Afghanistan, but in the urban mosques and madrasas of Pakistan, whence they issue forth for battle. To hear the roll-call of militant Islamic factions and to observe the respect they routinely inspire in spokesmen for the democratic parties, who are afraid of their street power, one would suppose their writ ran deep among the Muslim peoples of Pakistan. Yet such is not the case; it is rare indeed for a doctrinally Muslim party to win more than a couple of seats at elections. To explain the phenomenon of the 'political' mullah, his diehard following, and the almost complete absence of 'moderate' or reformist voices in the public discourse of Islam, one's point of reference should be the institutional, rather than popular, history of Pakistan--the dispiriting record of more or less collusive interaction between the administrative bureaucracy, the army, and the thin cadre of local and regional power-brokers and politicians.

These data of contemporary history may appear to have little to do with the interdiction of music. As a polemical issue--among so many others in Pakistan--the question of music rates well down the list. It arises most often in contexts where two normative views of Islam are opposed. The bankrolling of parties, foundations, journals, mosques and think-tanks by sponsors from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries has had the effect of stoutly buttressing that tendency (which is far older in the sub-continent than Pakistan itself) which seeks to restore the perfection of a faith vandalised by 'Indian' accretions. The 'popular' counter-tendency--which is vast, but diffuse--avoids meeting the challenge of the perfectionists head-on. It thrives, not on arguments, but on practice: and at the heart of practice is the rich musicality of devotional religion in Pakistan (as well as in India and Bangla Desh) which is above all the legacy of Sufism. The contest is not simply between mosque and shrine. Nor is it merely a Sou th Asian version of the contest between 'scripturalists' and 'traditionalists' to be witnessed nowadays all over the Muslim world, with qualifying particularities in each case (Bowen 1993; Mardin 1989; Clark 1988). Not only a religious, but a national identity is at stake. Several of the musical genres beloved by worshippers--such as the Kafian of the Siudhi, Seraiki and Punjabi-speaking areas--have texts in the vernacular languages, rooted in regions rather than in the nation. The nation itself (in the representations of some nationalists) suffers from a mistaken location, being too close to India and Iran, and too far from Arabistan.

Is it in fact reasonable, when thinking of music, to postulate an 'Islamic world'? In what follows I suppose that it is; but the question deserves more examination than is accorded to it here. The premise here is that, for all the irreducibility of differences between those parts of the world where Islam is followed, there are norms in common, even where music is concerned; and although certain of these norms are less binding, scripturally and practically, than is sometimes supposed, they are distinctive, and appeal to them is always within reach. A few general observations should make this clear.
There is no Qur'anic authority for the interdiction on music. When music is banned in a building and its precincts, or within a territory, often no justification is given at all, as if the point went without saying; or else hadith are quoted--for example, Muhammad objected to the sound of a certain instrument (Nelson 1985:41-3; Suhrawardy 1975: paragraph 135). These hadith can be countered with other hadith--for example, Muhammad commended the sound of a certain instrument. The point is not the appeal to a fixed understanding--for, if there is a fixed understanding in any region, it is likely to be, not Qur'anic, but traditional, as is the understanding of female inheritance and education among the Pakhtun who make up the Taleban. The point is rather that some authority, most often to be found among the ulama, has found occasion to draw on the belief--always entertained with or without hadith by one group or person or another--that Islam does not countenance music. I will not address the question of the orig in of this belief. Nor will I address the question of when, under what socio-political circumstances, and according to what doctrine, the belief comes to be articulated either by mosque or state.

Instead I will ask, what is at issue in this belief? Is the banning of music a protest against loose morals, for example? Is it an aspect of the war on idolatry (shirk)? Is it the expression of a cultural ideal of asceticism? Is music placed under interdict because it is profoundly admired and feared as, according to some authorities (Malti-Douglas 1991; Mernissi 1975), female sexuality is acknowledged and profoundly feared in Islam? Is the ban on music of this kind? Can one speak of an over-estimation of music, if such a thing is possible, reflected in a kind of demonisation of this irresistible life-force? Or is music banned without being demonised? What parallels exist between the censure of music and the ban on the reproduction of the human form (Halbertal and Margalit 1992)? Is it strictly, or even loosely, possible to ban all music with lasting success? Has this ever been tried? Can one speak of an equivalent of sublimation, or are there some kinds of cultural energies that are invigorated by the hopel ess task of proscribing music? What is music, in any case? Ethnomusicologists have shown that, in this respect, as in others, there is no such thing as a wholly consistent cultural universal (Nattiez 1990). Does Islam get around its predicament in what some would regard as an unsatisfactory way, by proscribing some music while giving out that it is distrustful of all music?

It must be admitted that something like this is the case. Whenever there is talk of barring music in Islam, one practice survives as an exception, and this exception most listeners in the West would certainly call music. The exception is the music of liturgy: the azan, or call to prayer, and, far more elaborate, the 'recitation', or cantillation, of the Qur'anic which is called tajwid Tajwid is the name both for the science of this recitation, and for its practice (Nelson 1985:15), popularly called tilawat (Platts 1960:334. See also Denny 1988:294, on qira 'a).

The exception--as it appears to be--will provide the focus of this paper. The questions I mean to ask stem largely from consideration of this music-which-nobody-calls-music. As has been shown by the anthropologist Kristina Nelson in a marvellous book (Nelson 1985), the questions surrounding the interdiction are not resolved, but are only displaced by the exception made for the category of tajwid, For even with respect to this category, Muslims still ask: what is the recommended practice for tajwid? Few appear to ask, in so many words, whether the practice should be more or less musical. But Nelson's research testifies to the many ways in which an equivalent question has been posed down the centuries. As the Qur'an provides no unequivocal guidance, it has never been a matter to be resolved once and for all by a decisive argument, but a matter of the renewed engagement, over and over, of the same battle, amended for local conditions. Both sides to the argument marshall hadith, the traditions of the Prophet and his companions. One of the forms in which this contest has been represented is in terms of the alternative between reading the Qur'an aloud (b l-jahr) or in a low and inaudible voice (bi l-israr). 'Once the voice is raised, it seems some sort of heightened speech must follow, and jahr is often associated with artistry and a beautiful voice' (Nelson 1985:62). The 14th century commentator al-Qurtubi wrote of some of his predecessors: 'they all disapproved of raising the voice and making music in reading the Qur'an' (1985:62).

We will consider some of the reasons for this disapproval. The point to be noted is that the exception of tajwid from the class 'music' does not lay the ghost of music to rest. The Qur'an is eloquence, and music, in a sense we will discuss later, is one of the ingredients, if not the very soul of eloquence.

Where no authoritative ruling exists, and given the dispersed nature of power and practice among the many regional systems of the Islamic world, renewed instances of the banning of music have an ad hoc quality. Two examples may show this. In the Lebanon, in November 1999, the singer Marcel Khalifa was ordered to stand trial before a civil court, with the likelihood of a gaol sentence, for having performed a song by the famed poet, Mahomoud Darwaish (born 1942), which incorporated a passage from the Qur'an. His offence was blasphemy; a charge catastrophically misrepresented or misunderstood in the West, as was shown in the Rushdie case (Bedford 1994). In the terms stated by the Dar ul-Fatwa in Beirut, the charge was clear: it was one thing to quote the Qur'an, but to set its words to music--even when they were embedded in a poem--and to accompany them with instruments was '"to go beyond the respect due to God on earth"' (Sydney Morning Herald 1 December 1999, quoting the Dar ul-Fatwa of the Grand Mufti in Bei rut). But a deliberated sentence, voiced by the Grand Mufti, as in this case, is unusual. Its logic, if systematically applied, would have grave effect all over the Muslim world, including India and Pakistan, where an 'alim could be put to work weeding the Qur'anic quotations and references out of the endless accumulation of devotional songs performed with instruments in the Punjabi language and in Urdu, Persian, Sindhi and Seraiki, just to begin with. The austere tone of this pronouncement should not be allowed to disguise the fact that it represents no more than a wish, carried to fruition for once in Beirut.

A second example brings out more clearly the incidental nature of most instances of this ban. In the provinces of Pakistan censorious tehrik (movements, parties), representing themselves as orthodox, have flourished and multiplied as the political legacy of the pietistic military dictator General Zia ul-Haq (floruit 1975-88) and his backers in Saudi Arabia (and, it should not be forgotten, in Washington). These tehrik typically target minorities, whether Shi'a, Sunni, Christian or heterodox, suiting their complaint to the identity of their adversary on a given occasion. According to the Karachi Dawn (February 7, 1998), reporting from two Sindhi-language newspapers, Sindh and Jago, mullahs associated with one such tehrik led a mob in storming and killing a Sufi spiritual preceptor (pir) and his nephew for playing music in the home of a disciple while 'eid prayers were in progress. In the Punjab (especially) and in Sindh there have been many such sectarian killings. This one differs from the others in that the provocation was musical.

Devotional music

In Pakistan, the varieties of music seem endless. There will be no space in this article to do more than list them. It should be recalled that the still vital 'classical' music of north India was, unlike that of the south, the preserve of court musicians--right down to Partition (Neuman 1990:12, 20). Certain of the styles popular among a mass audience--the ghazal for one, but even film music in some of its aspects--derive from one genre or another of classical music, and throughout South Asia the leading ghazal performers continue to be sought in Muslim Pakistan.

Too little will be said there, too, about the vast field of popular, 'licentious' and dance music, much of it 'filmi': the 'cassette revoltion' (Manuel 1993). Insofar as this music is licentious, it can seem to pervade every waking moment--there is very little than Muslims, or anybody for that matter, can do about it.

One observation might be made in passing about the contemporary subjection to recorded music 'at every waking moment': this had the character of a texture-of-life comparison between India and Pakistan. The difference is so fragile that it may have passed away even as I write. In India, film-music is ubiquitous. In Pakistan there is, indeed, a great deal of film-music, the bulk of it imported from India, but in public places and on the radio one is just as likely to encounter devotional music from the shrines. This circumstance is important: for it is in the context of shrine-worship that the interdict on music has most typically been wielded (and, just as typically, called into question).
'Shrine'-music itself contains many genres: Kafi, qawalli, and on more specialised occasions formally devotional genres such as nat' songs in praise of the Prophet, all of these located, ideally, in devotional gatherings but liable in Pakistan to be broadcast in buses or in market-places or carried on excursions by picnickers armed with cassette-recorders about the size of a home television set. Pakistanis regard their devotional music as home grown and are proud of it. City intellectuals comparing their country with India (which is popularly, and wrongly, understood to lack such music) are proud of the beauty and panache of good kafian and qawalli, while regional nationalists (Sindhis and Seraikis in particular) celebrate their autochthonous music above that of the other regions of Pakistan. In both descursive fields--that of popular devotion and the of patriotism, or regionalism--language and music are taken as equivalent. Little distinction is made between poetry and song: 'this is Bulle Shah', 'this is A bdul Latif', 'thisis Kjwaja Farid', as if words and melody (or prevailing rag) were of the same birth. Among the many kinds of performers of devotional music, two in particular have a nationwide following:

(i) The best-known qawalli troupes who, besides performing at shrines, are hired on occasion by notables for private parties (and, in this capacity, have an ornamental function, worth exploring in discussions of social class and class mores). Also in this category are professional kafi performers who, in the person of some celebrities, overlap with the ghazal singers.

(ii) The resident, sedentary kfi singers of shrines large and small. In many cases it is the shrine that is famous, rather than the singer. And, in the tradition of the Delhi saint Nizam ud-din 'Awaliya, who spurned the sultan's court, these musicians stay where they are put and admirers will have to travel to hear them. But cheap, available cassettes have made voices, such a that of Pathana Khan's, recognisable all over Pakistan.

The interdict on music so little applies to musicians that, in localities where some form of interdiction may be held to obtain, performances are likely to continue as if nothing had happened. This reflects, in part, the prevailingly local character of the interdiction, pronounced by a mullah or self-imposed by a body of listeners. But beyond this, it testifies to the nature of the concern, which is with listening, rather than with performance (Rouget 1985:255-7). Law manuals, compendia of opinion and other sources of judgment on music (Nelson 1985:32-51; Rouget 1985:255-70) are content in most cases to leave musicians to make their peace with God in their own way. The rakehell appearance and fierce gestures and demeanour of many of the qawalli troupes in India and Pakistan are a sign with many interpretants. On one understanding, at home in the shrines, this style of self-presentation stands for an unconcern with matters of this world, rooted in devotional observance and expressed with rare eloquence in the qawalli anthems. From the standpoint of orthodoxy, it may express a dangerous antinomianism. In class terms, it signifies the marginal standing of musicians in general.

But throughout the Islamic world and not only in India and Pakistan, the controversy has turned, not so much on the performance of music, as on 'listening' (sama')--that is, the effect of music upon the listener. This effect may be accidental. More often, it is solicited, and music in Sufism (in some cases closely associated with the invitation to dance) may have as its goal the attainment of wajd, translated as 'ecstasy', or, by Rouget (1985:258) in his essay in comparative anthropology, as 'trance', distinguished in its turn from the further goal of self-annihilation, the losing of the self in God (fana; see also Hoffmann-Ladd 1992 on the relation between 'trance' and fana).

Sama is defined by Lawrence as the 'hearing' of 'chanted verse (with or without accompanying instruments) in the company of others also seeking to participate in the dynamic dialogue between the human lover and the dearly beloved' (1983:72). To enter on sama,' then, is a course of action; but, sama' is considered as music not through what a performer does but rather 'at the level of its receiver' (Rouget 1985:258). The distinction corresponds to that between poiesis and esthesis in Nattiez' terminology (Nattiez 1990:11-12). In this sense, what is heard is not conceptualised as an art, that is, above all as a human product.

But is music here the proper analogy? With the devotee--master or disciple, shaykh or murid--we are made aware of a new and culturally salient perspective on music. What the shaykh praises is not music, but sama.' Music is the way to fana. it is a means. In the case of a Sufi saint-such as Nizam ud-din 'Awliya--who is not himself a musician, it is all but immaterial that the medium of a certain effect, the vehicle of a quest, is musical. The saint is concerned, not with music, but with devotion. Some of the best-remembered saints were themselves spectacularly affected by sama (Lawrence 1978:chapters 2, 3) and the sublimity of their affect is held up as a pattern of devotion which the murids of today, however, are not invited to emulate.

The Qur'an and its recitation

We may return now to the topic of Qur'anic recitation. This recitation is the subject of a science which takes into careful account such matters as 'pronunciation, timbre and meter' and countenances a variety of styles to meet the occasion but in which, writes Nelson (1985:xxi), 'actual melodic practices and reciting conventions remain unregulated and generally even undocumented'. Musicological studies are to be found, she writes, but these too 'remain within the tradition of textual studies in which sound is described as a system of pitches and durations ... without reference to the aesthetic practices of Arabic music'. There is a science of sound, not altogether subordinated to the study of meaning; but this science is not identified with any enquiry into the principles of music as such:
The importance of tajwid to any study of the Qur'an cannot be overestimated: Tajwid preserves the nature of a revelation whose meaning is expressed as much by its sound as by its content and expression . . . Tajwid is believed to be a codification of the sound of the revelation as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and as he subsequently rehearsed it with the Angel Gabriel Reciting according to the rules of tajwid also fulfils a divine command . . . The science of tajwid is transmitted orally, the student imitating and practising the sounds produced by the teacher. (Nelson 1985:14-15)

If we are to view the recitation of the Qur'an as music--as no Muslim is encouraged to do--it is a music, then, which is heard, taught and regulated as if it were something else, something generically different from music, although it is certainly sound; something, moreover, which carries a presumption, or sanction, which no 'mere' music does. The 'music' of Qur'anic recitation performed according to the science of tajwid substantially repeats the experience of revelation for the first learner--that is, for Muhammad, who, we are told, rehearsed it with the angel.

Here we need to consider, for the first time, something of the phenomenological character of Qur'anic revelation. To a Christian reader the Qur'an when compared with the Bible, may appear unsatisfactory because of what is perceived as its miscellaneous structure, the discontinuity of the narration, the way in which a given sura, or 'chapter', far from consolidating the treatment of a particular theme or narrative, seems rather to round up a diversity of Qur'anic themes which are to be met with elsewhere; as if, in order to proceed, it became necessary to first touch all the bases. This gives the Qur'an--with the eyes of a non-Muslim contemplating the text--a kind of pulverised quality. But to the Muslim, the unity of the Qur'an is found to consist precisely in this referral or reciprocation of themes, as if the whole were present in every part. 'Islamic revelation abolishes the atomism of tense . . . the moment of revelation is eternal' (Nelson 1985:6). Similar evaluations have been made of other Islamic cul tural institutions: of the mosque, for example, which, far from being oriented towards the mihrab as a Christian cathedral is towards the altar, seems to place the worshipper in a space equidistant from every point (Burckhardt 1974). It would perhaps not occur to the Muslim worshipper to describe his or her experience of the Qur'an (or of the mosque, or its decoration) in such words. The effect may be hidden, as a predisposition, likely to evade representation. Or perhaps it is only the Western scholar, overly familiar with a quite different sacred tradition, who finds it so hard to resist the apperception of 'timelessness'. Henri Corbin, to add another example, in characterising Islam as a prophetic religion, (Corbin 1964) would deny it the Western preoccupation with historical change, with the vicissitudes of a community through time. This is not (in Corbin) so much a tenet of Orientalism, as part of a bid to annex the distinctive aspects of Islam to the mystical tradition.

But whatever the consciousness, among Muslims listening to the Qur'an of its unity as a book, of the timeless character of the revelation, it is emphatically the case that it is a book that is heard (Fisher and Abedi 1990). The Qur'an constitutes a text, but it is a text that is read aloud to oneself or others. It is received by audiences-and above all by non-literate audiences--thanks to this reading, and the forms of this reading are prescribed and learned. These circumstances, in their relation to music, are remarkably suggestive, and worth considering at greater length.

Music and the 'extra-musical'

Qur'anic recitation may be considered not, in the first place, as music, nor again as the mode of revelation to a sacred community, but as the product of a science of sound. In this science of sound, the phenomena specified as data are rather different from those specified in the Western musicological tradition. In the Western tradition, these data may include, for example, 'the timbres imposed by classical, baroque [or] modem instruments; the durations and rhythms measured by the time-signature and counterpoint; pitches defined by notes and scales; even intensities'-all those 'regulations transmitted by schools and conservatories' (Lyotard 1991:168) which to many, once inspiration and a willing ear are added, constitute the whole of music. But on a different perspective, one informed (as is Lyotard) by a sense of the potentialities of contemporary practice and technologies, such a list, while by no means superseded, is inadequate. On Nelson's account, her own interest in Qur'anic recitation:

... was caught and held by the power of sound itself. . . One of my first discoveries . . . was that while the rules governing pronunciation, timbre and meter have been carefully delineated, actual melodic practices and reciting conventions remain unregulated and generally even undocumented. (Nelson 1985:xix)

The science that is tajwid, then, concerns itself with the regulation of certain aspects of sound, whereas other aspects-including 'actual melodic practice'-are either taken for granted or left, indifferently, to the performer. There are still other elements which are not neglected, which may not be quantified as sound, but are inextricably linked with performance and with the appreciation of actual recitation by listeners. Among these are close attention to the meaning of the text (linked with the basic hermeneutic discipline of tafsir), and the quality of the intent (niyyah, plural niyyat) with which a passage is intoned or received. A hadith reported by Nelson (1985:58) runs: 'Recite the Qur'an as long as your hearts are united with it, and when you differ then arise from it'. This concern with intent is a concern proper-so we might say-to worship, and not to music. We can locate it, however, within a science of sound in which a concern with the meaning of the text, with its bearing on conduct, and with p roper intention is no more fortuitous or extra-musical than is, say, the concern of 20th century listeners to European classical music with 'expression', with music as the representation of something expressed.

A further point arises directly out of this concern with meaning. This point, to be adequately made, requires a fuller comparison between Islamic music or non-music- specifically, Qur'anic recitation-and elements of the Western musicological tradition, the practice of the performance and reception of music, which have become 'second nature' to most Westerners. As an expositor of that 'second nature' I turn to Adorno (1992), writing in 1956. Music, according to Adorno:

... resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds. They say something, something human
As Benveniste (1974) and Levi-Strauss (1994:20-30) have also argued, music 'creates no semiotic system'. The difference, writes Adorno, between the 'concepts' or, at least, 'lexical items' which arise in tonal music, and those generated by language, 'is that the identity of these music concepts [lies] in their own nature and not in a signified outside them' (1992:2).

... The succession of sound is like logic: it can be right or wrong. But what has been said cannot be detached from the music' (1992:1).

Not only does Adorno write almost exclusively of Western music; he is also, as any reader of his Aesthetic Theory (1984:5, but passim) can testify, thoroughly Eurocentric in his conception of music, as of art in general. Whether one enrols him as a modernist or among the adversaries of modernism, his concern with theorising social crisis (if no more was needed) places him foursquare in the Western tradition, which provides, of course, for the perspective of revolution:

[The] unchanging identity [of the 'musical concepts' above] has become sedimented like a second nature. That is why consciousness finds it so hard to bid farewell to tonality. But the new music [that of Schoenberg and his contemporaries] rises up in rebellion against the illusion implicit in such a second nature. It dismisses as mechanical these congealed formulas and their function. (Adorno 1992:2)

Here Adorno acknowledges the contingent nature of a given musical system. He comes to this acknowledgment not by comparing the Western tonal-functional with other systems, but by referring to a prospect of overthrow. In his musicology--as in his Marxism, tutored by the history of the expansion of capitalism--he presupposes one world. He does not look about him in an anthropological, or a social-comparative spirit. He looks to the future, no doubt without fully believing it. But even in the future his eye is on the vicissitudes of a single autonomous strand, to be renewed (if its renewal is possible) from within:

The language of music is quite different from the language of intentionality. It contains a theological dimension. What it has to say is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Its Idea is the divine Name, which has been given shape. It is demythologized prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meanings. (Adomo 1992:2)

Adorno has in mind the predominantly instrumental music of the Austro-German tradition. Let us consider these strictures on the language of music as if they sought a genuinely universal application. Let us consider them as if they apply to Quranic recitation. This music (not the Muslim word for it) is by no means equivalent to a human effort to 'name the Name'--although the mystical tradition in Islam recognises such an aspiration. Of the principal functions of tajwid, the most important is as far as it could be from dispensing with 'the communication of meaning'.

Tajwid has the function of communicating the divine message in words. This function can be thoroughly didactic. It couples 'music' with 'text'. It should be noted that most music has a text, here and in the Islamic world. Even dance tunes, both in traditional societies (including those of medieval Europe) and in, say, the successive jazz-playing communities from New Orleans to New York (where the pianist Cecil Taylor built an abstract masterpiece out of 'one of the most terrifyingly maudlin pop tunes of our time' Jones 1968:110) pertain to a text which is very often known, at least in part. This being so, not a great deal of music is freed to 'name the Name'. The music adds its resources to what is named by the text, or it negates or transforms the text, or else--to adopt here a deliberate personification, following the example of Adorno in his 1956 essay (Adorno 1992)--the music 'agrees' to subordinate itself to the text. But even apart from the text, there are other powers than that of 'the Name'. There ar e many kinds of contestation, or of subordination of one to the other, between music and text, or between music and such music-craving interests as the military genius of a nation, the mystique of salesmanship, and the intimate, 'private' symbolism of human individuals and of human couples. The 'musical' component of 'visual' (properly, synaesthetic) art forms is commonly underestimated. To visual anthropologists who began as film buffs, it is appropriate to point out that most films can be watched with the eyes shut because, once the characters and their situations are established, the music will convey what is happening. In all these cases, music (personified) is willing to co-operate, and has enough confidence in its reserve powers to lend itself to all kinds of association, sacred and profane.

Besides all these attributes, Qur'anic recitation has a quality of its own which is not to be found in other kinds of musical performance. It has the recognised function, not only of carrying the divine message, but of showing, or representing that message in its sensuous character as it was conveyed by the Angel Jibrail to Muhammad at the time of revelation. In fact, terms like 'represent' are too weak. Qur'anic recitation, according to the rules of tajwid does not merely represent or recall that message; it is that message in its character as experience. In this it has the force, not so much of commemorative ritual, but rather of those rituals in which a presence appears, for example, the Catholic Eucharist (Redondi 1987:195-226). There are numerous South Asian examples including, at one extreme, possession rituals and, at the other, the transformation of a Tamil Hindu girl into the Devi (Goddess) on the event of her puberty celebration (Ram n.d.). Yet there is a difference.

What is experienced in Qur'anic recitation is not so much the revelation of a transcendent presence, but rather the immanent moment of human receptivity. Neither this aspect of tajwid, nor that discussed above--its communicative, didactic function--appears to correspond to what Adorno means by 'theological' in the quoted passage. Adorno's formulation is appropriate to much 19th and 20th century music, as it is, no doubt, to mystical currents in Judaic and other traditions. The likeliest sphere in Islam for its application is the music accompanying Sufi practice, in its aspect of longing. But recitation of the Quran, on the understanding I have postulated, does not offer a mystical dimension either as longing or as the attainment of a spiritual 'station' (maqam).
My point is not complete, and I wish to pursue it by taking a further thought from Adorno, who is surely right in saying of music that it appears to behave like a language. Those elements in music which appear to resemble lexical or conceptual units in language differ from those they resemble in that they point to no signified outside the text. This statement, though true, is insufficient for it is bound to be complicated by the ever-renewed association of music with text:

Music aspires to be a language without intention . . . [But] Music is permeated through and through with intentionality.... Music points to true language in the sense that content is apparent in it, but it does so at the cost of unambiguous meaning, which has migrated to the languages of intentionality. And as though Music, that most eloquent of all languages, needed consoling for the curse of ambiguity, its mythic aspect--intentions are poured into it. (Adorno 1992:3)

In this striking passage, eloquence and intentions are placed at odds. Music's 'eloquence' is served by a logical mode of progression which is coherent to the performer or the listener but 'never culminates in a decision' (1992:4) in a resolved utterance outside the framework of the music. The eloquence of music does not sustain any proposition of its own. Let us unite this observation to the datum that music accompanies or is accompanied by a text--not only in the case of tajwid--but typically so.

The anthropologist Friedson, writing of the crucial role of music in the healing rituals of the Tumbuka of Malawi, is highly scathing about the attention some researchers lavish on texts; perhaps, he says, it is because they are unable to find anything of interest to say about the music as such. Appealing to the 'lived experience' of 'clinical reality' in the vimbuza healing ceremony, he observes that the Tumbuka, for their part, 'do not seem particularly concerned with or interested in the meaning of songs' (Friedson 1996:130). Friedson views texts as extra-musical. His polemic on the matter serves a wider aim, which is to demonstrate the indispensability of music (most of all, the drumming) as a means to effecting the experience the vimbuza must carry if it is to work its change. But an experience, like any other effect, in or out of ritual, may itself be extra-musical; and the distinction between 'effect' and music is nowhere more evident than when Friedson persuades us that in this case, and in line with his epigraph from T. S. Eliot ('you are the music/while the music lasts'), drumming serves 'clinical reality' to effect a cure while producing in the listener a mode of 'being-in-the-world ... Music and the world are given together. There is no distance between the two; they are equiprimordial' (Friedson 1996:134).

I do not dispute this insight, which is brilliantly explored in the passages that follow. What I do dispute is the implication that, although 'texts' are extra-musical, 'clinical reality', the presence of the vimbuza spirit, and other effects procured ('constructed', Friedson 1996:130-1) by the music, are themselves intra-musical. My purpose is not to take issue with Friedson over the reality of an experience whereby 'there is no distance' between music and the world, but rather to argue that, in cases where text is 'epiphenomenal' (1996:130) the music may well fuse with some culturally designated and ritually intended effect to bring about a phenomenal reality in which the parts, distinct in principle, prove inseparable 'while the music lasts'. It is a different question whether, when music is accompanied by words and the words are neglected, or are not understood, those words don't matter: for there is more to words than their meaning. But what I am arguing here is that, although we may agree that words, or a proposed aim, like a cure or a 'clinical reality', are in principle extra-musical, music may constitute an integral experience mingled with the extra-musical: with words, with a ritual structure, with a cultural intention, or with all these at once. Music may fuse to the point of indistinction with words. Music may fuse, too, with an action designated from outside; and of course, as Adomo would be entitled to remind us, there are cases where no fusion is sought. There is such a thing as pure music.

We are presented then, with the case of an autonomous power, sublime when it wishes to be, which does not insist on being the master in its own house. Music may not stand alone but may be called on to lend an 'eloquence' beyond words even to trivial emotions. At its grandest it may appear to rule heaven and earth. Music resembles a language; but it is even more untrustworthy than language and--unlike language--there is no way of calling it to account when it lends its eloquence to the indefensible. Luther, for Christian purposes, raided the devil's tunes. Music acknowledges neither god nor devil and may consort with both. It is supremely above (or below) morals.

I think we are in a position to understand why Qur'anic recitation is not conceptualised by believers as music. In respect of this practice, the Muslim suspicion of music reflects unease at an implied challenge to divine power. If tajwid is called music, the God-given text is yoked to a power which fuses with the eloquence of the text but has a character of its own and is man-made, not God-given. The impasse is solved by an ontological statement, a statement about the being of divine revelation. The Qur'an is ijaz', inimitable. It is a book and it persists as a book, highly synchronous and interlinked, with a mosaic rather than a linear structure, and with much cross-stitching of phrase and motif. But it is more than a book: it is also an event and it persists as an event in the form of its proper recitation. The recitation is the way it is because in this form it was imparted to God's messenger. What might have been called music is not music. It has acquired its character not according to the human criterion of what is musically expressive or beautiful but according to the divine criterion of event: although of course it requires a good deal of human ingenuity to preserve and defend the constitutive proportions of the event.

In the last resort, an ontological argument provides the best defence for Muslims against the intrusion of music into the sacred domain. What is heard is not music: it is unique. What appears to be music is the divine effect of the heightening of a speech which, moreover, is not poetry (Quran: sura 26, verses 224-6).

To ban something may not be to abjure or revile it. By considering music as an object of interdict, we are able to refresh our notion of music by considering some of the potentialities that are attributed to it. There are those, as in seventeenth-century England, who distrust theatre, for example, because they are conscious of the energies released among the audience by an inspired performance and are pessimistic about the chances of moralising these energies: Rousseau comes to mind but the locus classicus is in chapter 3, capitolo 2 of Augustine's Confessions ([1631] 1977), a passage which continues to resound in Western culture. The principal difference in Islam is that music (in the Western sense) is wedded so very closely to the divine word. It is a great shame to ban music but there are worse things you can do to it: turn it into muzak, for example, where the objection is not so much to the profane use (encouraging people to empty their pockets), since there were always profane uses, but to the gutted quality of what is offered.

I have focused in this article on Qur'anic recitation rather than on the devotional music of the shrines. Devotional music in Islam is a rich mine to quarry; but my concern here has been with the relation between worship and music encountered by the orthodox believer, whether or not he or she frequents the shrines. The power of music--which appears as the spontaneous effect, in a recitational context, of heightened speech--is an indiscriminate power which may be found anywhere. When music is heard away from that context, one may sense whatever is autonomous and unsubordinated in this power of eloquence which is not 'language' but only 'language-like'. Music may be judged in these differing contexts from the company it keeps and the settings in which it finds itself at home. The news is not always bad, of course: it is not always an affair of the professional singers with their loose morals, the untrustworthy Caliph or Mughal monarch with his courtiers and sycophants pronouncing human, merely 'aesthetic' judgm ents, the woman who has a devil in her, the dangerous-looking, cut-throat qalandars and qawalli-singers with their hair long and tousled, coloured handkerchiefs round their throats, ornaments on their wrists, their mouths stained with betel-nut, claiming, moreover, to address God in their music or to celebrate the adored perfections of the Prophet. But reflection seems to show that, when and insofar as one agrees to call this power by the name of music, and to recognise the association of divine words and a divine moment with this human faculty, then one acknowledges a distinction between two elements that should be blended, the 'words' and the 'music', while, at the very worst, to call Qur'anic recitation music risks a possible demonstration of the lame character of divine utterance except when it is supported by the profane eloquence of this merely human power.

[dhuusa_deer]

Oh if it isn't the girl who just few months ago didn't know how to pray preaching and sermonizing.