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Maṭla: Among the Jasmine Trees

Soon after arriving in Damascus, I met Fateh Moudarres (1924–1999), one of modern Syria’s—indeed, the Arab world’s—greatest artists. “Ustāz Fateh,” as he was known to his students and friends, was famous for his powerful paintings that evoke the Syrian countryside with their rich colors and characters drawn from rural life.¹

A native of Aleppo and graduate of academies in Rome and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, Moudarres advocated both modernism and authenticity in his art, arguing that authentic Syrian art in any medium should evoke a strong sense of place, of local geography, the smells and sounds of the countryside, the animals and plants, the very soil. His works convey geographical specificity through the use of strong colors, natural pigments, abstractions of simple themes from folk life and mythology, and an acute awareness of temporality—that is, of timelessness. His paintings, which have hung beside the works of Miro and Picasso, won several international prizes. Yet, he claimed that Syrian artists had not yet managed to achieve an authentic modern vision despite a few individual efforts, his own included.

In addition to his painting, Moudarres also published several collections of stories and poetry and recorded some of his own compositions on the piano. Indeed, he claimed to me to be a musician at heart but to prefer painting because, as he put it, music is “too noisy” for his tastes. Yet, he playfully suggested that one could experience what he called “silent music” in his canvases. Some of his works include portraits of peasants playing on simple reed instruments or carry titles that suggest a relationship to music.

Fateh Moudarres in his studio, Damascus, 1981.

Katrina Thomas/Saudi Aramco World/PADIA.

Entering his studio for the first time, I find it dark, almost cave-like, its rooms cluttered with canvases, paint supplies, and shelf after shelf of books in several languages. Ustaz Fateh is seated in the main room at a table cluttered with small tea glasses, ashtrays, books, pens, and various papers. He is conversing with a young artist, who gives up the seat of honor across from Moudarres when I arrive so that I can sit and speak with him. Small of stature and frail with illness, Moudarres nonetheless is a powerfully charming and charismatic man—his bushy eyebrows arch as his eyes gleam with brilliance and mischief. His voice, soft and grave, commands attention, like that of an ancient sage: No matter what he says, you simply must listen.

He has just finished another of his aphorisms, written on a blank sheet of paper and signed, “Fateh.” I look around me and find them hanging here and there around the main room of the studio like so many manifestos or Confucian analects. Some are obscure—“That brigand paints the mountains with his voice”—others profound—“with one painting a man is able to found an entire nation.”

After I introduce myself, we begin to speak about my research on Arab music and I ask him his opinion of the music today. Leaning back in his chair, he replies, “The music today is mostly rubbish . . . there’s a lot of rubbish out there. It is the music of the ‘mob,’ not serious. Oriental music (mūsīqā sharqiyya) is serious, thoughtful, meditative. But today it is mostly lost. If you want to study it you must go and search for it. You must go to Aleppo, to the old buildings and neighborhoods, to the orange and lemon trees. You must hear the birds. . . . Go to the old quarters of Damascus, listen in the courtyards of the old Arab homes. There, among the jasmine trees, you may find it. . . .” Then, sounding like an old Sufi master—his bushy brows raised and a wry smile traced on his mouth—he proclaims: “You must choose between them.” Pausing to roll a cigarette, he turns to another artist friend who has just joined us and asks him, “How was your exhibition?” leaving me to ponder his remarks.

What choice must I make?

Fateh Moudarres was challenging me to make a choice, I believe, between two worlds, the first the world of the older music—in his view associated with authenticity and deeply seated geographical and cultural truths and memories—the second the world of the contemporary Arabic pop song—in his view one of inauthenticity, vulgarity, and superficiality. While music is by no means the only domain in which the tensions of modern life are expressed in the Arab world, and Fateh Moudarres had similar observations concerning contemporary literature and painting, it has become one of the most important in recent debates over the trajectory of contemporary culture in Syria, as throughout the Arab world.² Partly in response to the rise of new, so-called “inauthentic” forms of culture, many Syrians, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world, call for the preservation of the old, “authentic” culture. The dialectic of the old and new, authentic and inauthentic, manifests deeper contradictions of modernization and cultural modernity that I explore in chapter 3. In this chapter, I explore why someone like Fateh Moudarres would advise me to seek authenticity “among the jasmine trees” in the old cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Why Aleppo in particular has come to serve as the premier metonymic site of musical authenticity in modern Syria requires an outline of the city’s political and economic history, an exploration of the principle musical genres that are performed there, and an analysis of the practices through which Syrians cultivate habits of listening to and evaluating music as “authentic.”

Walking the streets of Damascus soon after my arrival, I came across a most curious advertisement for a computer company. Computers are readily available in Syria, hardware and software surprisingly inexpensive (much of it bootleg), and computer advertisements widespread in the major cities. However, this particular ad stood out because of its direct appeal to tradition. It depicted a computer tower case, keyboard, and monitor sitting on a glossy table top, but reflected in the table top were images of two large cuneiform tablets mirroring the computer and monitor. Above the image read the words, “Building on the achievements of our forefathers . . .” and the name of the company. The advertisement implied that the computer—icon of technological development—is an extension of early (very early) developments in Levantine civilization. In fact, some Syrian scholars claim that the earliest “computer” was developed in Mesopotamia, meaning a variety of the abacus and the concept of the zero, allowing for the eventual development of binary numbers and, five thousand years later, the electronic computer.

Notwithstanding these fantasies, the cuneiform computer advertisement illustrates some of the ways in which Syrians assert claims to cultural authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of heritage and the past—often the distant past (pre-Islamic, even prehistoric). Other examples include the use of the names of famous Muslim scholars and luminaries in the names of contemporary businesses. One finds an “Ibn Haytham Pharmacy” in every city, named after the great Muslim pharmacist. Likewise, “al-Rāzī,” graces many a Syrian hospital, referring to the great Muslim doctor, while “al-Kindī” movie theaters are found in Damascus and Aleppo, though what the relationship between the philosopher and the cinema might be is unclear. In earlier decades, many theaters and establishments in Damascus and Aleppo carried European names, such as the “Luna Park,” the “Dolce Vita,” and “Versailles.” The heritage names reflect both a modern nationalist sentiment as well as adherence to a law that requires all Syrian businesses to have an “Arabic” name, though what qualifies as “Arabic” is flexible. For example, the proprietor of the “Shām Dān” music shop in Damascus asserted that the words of his shop’s name could mean something in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, the three sources of the Arab-Ottoman musical tradition that the store features. In Aleppo, musical ensembles carry such names as “The Heritage Ensemble,” “Ensemble al-Kindi,” and “Ensemble Urnīnā,” referring to the famous singer and dancer at the Assyrian temple of Bal.³ One shop in Aleppo combines two well-known Aleppine tastes: “Heritage Sweets.”

These few examples illustrate some of the diverse domains in which Syrians assert claims to authenticity and cultural legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of heritage. In addition to public culture such as advertisements, political discourse is full of references to the past as part of official practices of legitimization and authentication of state power (see Wedeen 1999). In the realm of the arts, concern with heritage, however it may be conceived, presented, and understood by artists and their audiences, reveals the contradictions of the aesthetics of authenticity in contemporary Syrian culture. In conjunction with systems of patronage and Syria’s major cultural institutions, this aesthetic sensibility constitutes a Syrian “art world” (Becker 1982; Danto 1964) in which artists and intellectuals debate and construct the meanings of authentic culture, the past, and heritage. Of course, different artists and audiences have different notions of authentic culture, the past, and heritage; indeed some reject the conceptions of others as “inauthentic.” Still others reject the discourse of authenticity as false and misleading, arguing for cultural and political forms distinct from—indeed, liberated from—heritage.

The contradictions of these views and discourses reverberate through the art worlds of contemporary Syria. Around the Arab world and Middle East region in general, the arts play an important role in discussions about the direction of contemporary society and culture.⁴ Conferences from Cairo to Casablanca draw intellectuals to debate poetry, painting, architecture, and music, and how they either reflect an ongoing sense of crisis or provide a means of articulating alternative courses for the future. The concept of authenticity and discourses of a return to the Arab heritage often are deployed by Arab intellectuals as foils to promote or critique modernist projects and identity politics (see Jābrī 1999, 1991; Ṭarābīshī 1991, among others). Debates surrounding Syrian arts participate in these regional intellectual and critical currents.

Concern with authenticity might be understood as simply a clinging to tradition if not a rejection of modernity. Yet, the turn to heritage in Arab arts participates in a broader concern among intellectuals, artists, and politicians with articulating the contours of a society and culture at once authentically Arab and modern—and neither “Arab” nor “modern” constitutes an exclusive or welldefined essence. Rather, these terms are cultural and political constructions that serve different interests. In the Syrian case, the construction and evaluation of authenticity articulate with conceptions of culture, ethnicity, and the nation that inform debates over postcolonial subjectivities in a variety of contexts.⁵

By investigating how Syrian musicians conceptualize and articulate their music, my aim is not only to provide ethnomusicological detail, but also to offer an interpretation of Syrian culture through its music, using the music as a window or rather as an “ear” into contemporary Syrian society and culture, and by extension onto debates that echo around the Arab world today. In turn, the Syrian case provides comparative material for an understanding of the aesthetics and politics of musical performance in diverse postcolonial contexts and contributes to a growing awareness of the sonic dimensions of cultural modernity.⁶

Aleppo and Its Musical Legacies

What would account for Aleppo’s importance both in discourses of authenticity and in the history of Arab music, past and present?⁷ Although some Syrians questioned my interest in Arab music and even the existence of “Arab” music altogether, almost no one questioned my desire to study that music—of whatever origin it might be—in Aleppo. Many people I encountered in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria mentioned Aleppo’s status as an important musical capital and the great preserver of Arab musical traditions (Saadé 1993). For many residents of the city, Aleppo’s strong and venerable musical traditions are a source of pride along with the city’s fabled architectural, literary, and culinary legacies. Although Damascus, as a result of the traditional rivalry between the two ancient cities, might challenge Aleppo’s claims to fame in architecture, literature, and cuisine—to name just a few domains—few would challenge Aleppo’s role as a great center for music. Indeed, Damascenes and others from elsewhere in Syria commonly assert their musical identity by praising Aleppo’s achievements, especially in contrast to the more often recognized achievements of Egyptian musicians. Aside from recognizing the “Big Three”of famous modern Arab musicians—the Egyptian artists Umm Kulthūm, Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, and Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ—many Syrians argue that “true” Arab music is found in Syria, not Egypt. Some even claim that Egyptian music is at best overrated, at worst the root of contemporary depravity and vulgarity in Arab culture.

Historically, the musicians of Syria have contributed significantly to the development of Arab music in terms of both theory and practice, with Aleppo enjoying a particularly prominent place (Shiloah 1995: 72; Touma 1996: xix).⁸ Known in local discourse as “The Cradle of Arab Music” and “The Mother of Ṭarab,” Aleppo has been home and host to many of the Arab world’s greatest musicians, composers, and theorists.⁹ The great tenth-century philosopher and music theorist al-Fārābī wrote much of his Kitāb al-mūsīqā al-kabīr (The Great Treatise on Music) while resident in Aleppo at the court of Sayf al-Dawla al-Ḥamdānī.¹⁰ While resident in Aleppo in the same period, al-Iṣfahānī wrote sections of the monumental Kitāb al-aghānī (Book of Songs), the first great encyclopedic reference on Arab music and poetry (Shiloah 1995: 72). During my first residence in Aleppo (1997–1998), an enlarged copy of the index to this work could be found on the wall above the card catalogue in Aleppo’s National Library, indexing not just the great work but also its importance in Aleppo’s musical-cultural consciousness and memory. Aleppine artists also played a significant role in reviving and preserving the Andalusian muwashshaḥ genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Touma 1996: 83); the muwashshaḥ remains the staple of the Aleppine musical suite (waṣla), the premier “authentic” performance genre.¹¹

In the modern period, Aleppo has been home to a large percentage of the Arab world’s leading vocalists, performers, and theorists. Perhaps Aleppo’s most famous musical son in the modern era is Alī al-Darwīsh (1872–1952), who is remembered today as a skilled composer, performer of the nāy flute, and an important musical theorist and teacher.¹² Alī al-Darwīsh taught such Egyptian masters as the great Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Wahhāb, and Riyād al-Sunbāṭī while an instructor at the King Fuād Conservatory of Music in Cairo (Mahannā 1998: 124–28; Ibrāhīm al-Darwīsh, personal communication, 1997). In addition, al-Darwīsh worked with the French Orientalist and music scholar Baron Rodolfe d’Érlanger while resident in Tunis from 1931 to 1939, helping him compose his important treatise La musique arabe (d’Érlanger 1930–1959; Mahannā 1998: 128–29; al-Sharīf 1991: 105). Alī al-Darwīsh was likewise an important presence at the first Congress of Arab Music (Mu’tamar al-mūsīqā al-arabiyya), held in Cairo at the behest of King Fuād in 1932. His sons Ibrāhīm (1924–2003), Nadīm (1926–1987), and Musṭafā (1928–2003) were trained by their father and made important contributions to Arab music theory, composition, and pedagogy. For example, Nadīm al-Darwīsh compiled and notated Min kunūzinā (From our treasures), a standard source book containing twenty-three suites performed in Aleppo (Rajāī and al-Darwīsh 1956). It is also important to note that, like so many prominent artists of his era, Alī al-Darwīsh was an active member of Aleppo’s Sufi orders, including the mawlawiyya or “Whirling Dervish” order (Mahannā 1998: 124–25; al-Sharīf 1991: 105; Ibrahim al-Darwīsh, personal communication, 1997).

The Aleppine composer and musician Kamīl Shambīr (1892–1934) worked along side Sayyid Darwīsh (1892–1923), the great Egyptian composer and popularizer of the musical theater and Arabic operetta in the early twentieth century (Mahannā 1998: 150). Shambīr is thought to have notated some of Darwīsh’s works and himself wrote some twenty-seven musicals while working for the theatrical troupes of Najīb al-Riḥānī and Amīn Ata Allāh in Cairo.¹³ Shambīr also composed a number of light tunes and instrumental dances that are still performed today, such as “Dance of the Coquettes” (Raqṣ al-hawānim).

Zuhayr Minīnī, Damascus, 2004.

With respect to composers and performers of the muwashshaḥ, few names stand out as much as that of Umar al-Baṭsh (1885–1950), the great Aleppine religious singer (munshid) and composer of muwashshaḥāt (washshāḥ). Like Alī al-Darwīsh, al-Baṭsh was active in Aleppo’s then-vibrant Sufi communities. According to a view presented by many Syrian music scholars, al-Baṭsh was almost solely responsible for reviving the muwashshaḥ genre in the Arab East and giving it renewed vitality (Mahannā 1998: 137–44; al-Sharīf 1991: 132–33). Certainly the muwashshaḥ was composed and performed elsewhere in the Arab East, but al-Baṭsh’s output was prodigious. He is thought to have composed over 130, of which some 80 have been notated and survive today. Umar al-Baṭsh moreover revived older songs and “completed” those that had been inherited with certain sections (khānāt) “missing,” including many by Sayyid Darwīsh (Mahannā 1998: 140).¹⁴ In addition, al-Baṭsh trained the majority of Aleppo’s major singers of the last fifty years, including Sabri Moudallal, Mustafā Māhir, Zuhayr Minīnī, Hassan and Kāmil Bassāl, Muḥammad Khairī, and Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī. His stamp is still heard in Aleppine performances today, in terms of both compositional and vocal style.

Other important names from among Aleppo’s musical progeny include the composer and vocalist Bakrī al-Kurdī (1909–1978); Sabri Moudallal (b. 1918); Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī (b. 1933), arguably the greatest living Arab vocalist; the late Muḥammad Khairī (1935–1981); Nouri Iskandar (b. 1938), former director of the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo, noted composer, musical modernizer, and researcher of Syriac and other ancient Levantine melodies; Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl (b. 1946), a music researcher, current director of the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo, and among the finest contemporary oud performers in the Arab world (and my main teacher); Saad Allah Agha al-Qalah (b. 1950), currently Syrian Minister of Tourism, former Professor of Engineering at Damascus University, and a respected qānūn performer and music scholar; Mayāda al-Ḥinnāwī (b. 1958), among the Arab world’s leading female vocalists; and many others.

Ḥassan Baṣṣal (center), with (from left to right) Abd al-Ḥalīm Harīrī, Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl, the author, and Ghass ān Amūrī, Aleppo, 2004.

Just as important as its reputation for distinguished scholars and performers has been Aleppo’s reputation for its knowledgeable and cultivated listeners, the fabled sammīa or “connoisseur listeners” explored in depth by ethnomusicologist A. J. Racy (2003).¹⁵ The sammīa are those who claim a “special talent for listening” (Racy 2003: 40; see also Elsner 1997) and a high degree of musical taste. Traditionally, they also functioned as arbiters of musical taste and aesthetics in urban center such as Cairo, Beirut, and Aleppo. Aleppine musicians often claim that no major Arab artist, including Umm Kulthūm and Muḥhammad Abd al-Wahhāb, achieved fame without having first earned the approval of the Aleppine sammīa. Numerous stories—nay, legends—abound of the importance of Aleppo’s sammīa in determining the course of modern Arab music. One oft-told legend states that in the 1930s the then-rising Egyptian star Muḥhammad Abd al-Wahhāb came to perform in Aleppo. On the evening of his first concert, only a small number of Aleppines came to hear him—perhaps as few as seven in a theater that would hold two thousand (often said to have been the famed “Luna Park” theater, now long-since demolished). Abd al-Wahhāb was stunned and disappointed but nevertheless gave a strong performance. On the second night, the audience overflowed the theater onto the streets, with over two thousand people showing up to hear him inside the theater and some two thousand standing outside the theater. After this second show, Abd al-Wahhāb asked the stage manager, “Why were there only a few people the first night and an overflow crowd tonight?” He was told, “Ah! Those who came the first night were our sammīa. No one in Aleppo will go to a concert unless the sammīa say the artist is good. You did well and therefore everyone came on the second night!” In other words, Abd al-Wahhāb passed the test of Aleppo’s sammīa and this allowed him, in the eyes of the Aleppines, not only to succeed in Aleppo but to succeed in the Arab world at large. He got their coveted “seal of approval.”

Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, Aleppo, 2000.

Another legend involving ‘Abd al-Wahhāb and told in numerous versions, as most legends, says that the great artist wanted to meet with Aleppo’s musicians and learn what he could from them. In an evening gathering with Umar al-Baṭsh, Alī al-Darwīsh, and others, Abd al-Wahhāb asked if they had any muwashshaḥāt in the mode sīkāh, since none in this mode was known in Egypt at the time. Umar al-Baṭsh replied that, of course, they had a full suite in that mode. When Abd al-Wahhāb asked to hear it, al-Baṭsh replied that the time of day was not appropriate for singing that mode and that therefore he should come back the following morning when the stars would be more favorable, evoking the neo-Pythagorean theory of the correspondence between the different modes, the times of day, and particular moods. When Abd al-Wahhāb departed, ‘Alī al-Darwīsh turned to al-Baṭsh and said in surprise, “We don’t have any muwashshaḥāt in that mode! What are you going to do?!” Umar al-Baṭsh replied, “Well, it’s not appropriate for a city like Aleppo not to have any muwashshaḥāt in sīkāh, so I will compose some!” and that same evening he composed three and taught them to a chorus of singers. When ‘Abd al-Wahhāb returned the following morning, to his astonishment, and the astonishment of everyone else, al-Baṭsh and his chorus sang a complete suite in the mode (Mahannā 1998: 139–40; al-Sharīf 1991: 131–32).

What might account for Aleppo’s famed musical importance? Many Aleppines attribute the city’s musical and cultural strength to its historical importance as a center for commerce, learning, and industry. Located in northwestern Syria on the western end of the famous Silk Road, Aleppo served since the rise of the Ottoman Empire (in 1516) as the major center in the Levant for the overland textile and spice trade between Europe and Asia, via the port city of Alexandretta (Iskandarun) (Faroqhi 1987: 315; Inalçik 1997: 244; A. Marcus 1989: 146–48). Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Aleppo had extensive and sustained contact with European powers, especially Venice, France, and England, whose merchants bought large quantities of raw silk in exchange for gold, silver, and woolen and silk cloth, much of which was later redistributed to cities in the North and East (Faroqhi 1987: 337; Inalçik 1997: 244–45; A. Marcus 1989: 148). Trade with Europe was never stable, but Aleppo remained an important center until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, growing to be the third-largest city in the Ottoman Empire after Istanbul and Cairo, with a population topping one hundred thousand (A. Marcus 1989: 337–41). By the middle of the eighteenth century, European textile trade began to shift to Izmir and Istanbul (A. Marcus 1989: 152), and by the nineteenth century, Europe had come to dominate world textile trade, especially after British cotton “invaded” the region (Inalçik 1987: 381–83; Mitchell 1991: 15–16).

Aleppo’s Citadel, 2004.

Like other cities in the Mediterranean Basin, Aleppo’s commercial wealth spawned an active artistic and cultural life in the city. Aleppo developed strong traditions in music, literature, popular arts such as shadow plays and storytelling, and religious and other forms of intellectual scholarship (A. Marcus 1989: 227–37). Numerous scholars and local inhabitants refer to the Ottoman period as one of decline. Yet, Ottoman influence stimulated the culture of the Aleppine elites, some of whom did not even speak Arabic because of their Turkish provenance, and as a consequence the arts and culture of the city proliferated. Aleppo’s participation in pan-Ottoman culture still can be felt today in the city’s architecture, cuisine, music, and even dialects, which use many Turkish words.¹⁶

Because of its commercial prominence, Aleppo was a magnet for traders from near and far, thus serving as a meeting point for people of diverse cultural traditions. Gathering in the numerous caravansaries after a day’s labor, as locals like to narrate their history, these traders had no concern other than to sit back and relax, enjoy a fine meal, and listen to some music as a reward for their efforts. Soon Aleppo boasted a cosmopolitan mixture of musical and culinary styles—two areas of local culture of which many Aleppines are proud. The Aleppine genre of popular music known as the qudūd ḥalabiyya includes songs of Iraqi, Egyptian, Turkish, and Kurdish as well as Syrian origin (Qalajī 1988: 165–74).¹⁷ Even today these songs, most of which probably date from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, are sung in approximations of their original dialects: Aleppine, Iraqi, and Egyptian, for example. Aleppo’s culinary traditions are also unique in Syria, especially the emphasis on grilled meats and zesty dishes. All of these factors grant the city and its cultural practices a special “nakha,” a particular scent or flavor that Aleppines argue distinguishes their traditions from those of Damascus or any other city.

Despite Europe’s advances in world trade, Aleppo remained an important regional center for commerce and industry into the late nineteenth century, producing quantities of raw materials, textiles, soaps, agricultural products, and other commodities for regional and world markets. However, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 undermined Aleppo’s position as European merchants took advantage of sea-based routes to India and the Far East. The shift from overland to sea-based trade coincided with a series of Ottoman reforms that had the effect of further marginalizing Aleppo from the growing global economy in textiles, its major export, while burdening the city with a flood of migrants from rural areas fleeing onerous taxation and seeking employment opportunities (McGowan 1988: 18).

The period of the French Mandate (1922–1944¹⁸) saw an expansion in Aleppo’s economic position as new lands were claimed for agricultural development. At the same time, the center of commercial and administrative power began to shift to Damascus, site of French colonial authority. Syria’s rapid economic growth lasted through the 1940s and 1950s because of a series of economic reforms that gave Syria one of the fastest-growing economies among developing countries at the time (Mason 1988). Yet, political instabilities and changing global patterns of trade in the postwar era challenged Syria economically and adversely affected Aleppo and its position as a commercial entrepôt. The city’s economic position was undermined further by a prolonged drought in the late 1950s and by the nationalization of Aleppine textile and agricultural industries under the ill-fated union with Egypt (1958–1961), leading to major capital flight to nearby Lebanon, Europe, and the Americas, drastic declines in production, and the virtual decimation of Aleppo’s merchant class. The decline of the city’s merchants and urban bourgeoisie precipitated a decline in the context of much music making: the evening soirées (sahra-s) of song, food, and merriment held in the homes of the bourgeoisie, which epitomized early twentieth-century urban musical aesthetics in the Levant (see Racy 1998, 2003).

Aleppine Courtyard: Bayt Wakīl, 1982.

Katrina Thomas/Saudi Aramco World/PADIA.

The city’s economic fate was sealed with the rise of President Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad in 1970 and the centralization of political and commercial power in Damascus, especially after the “events” of 1982 (spoken of, if at all, simply as “al-aḥdāth”), when Islamist insurrections in Aleppo and Hama were violently repressed (Van Dam 1996: 89–94, 111–17). Compared to Damascus, Aleppo has nearly as large a population as the capital but has not received as much investment in infrastructure or its fair share of development programs, according to many Aleppine intellectual figures. They claim that this is a form of punishment for the earlier “events.” Where the city has received attention, it has not always been benign: the destruction of an entire neighborhood for the purpose of building an ugly park featuring a statue of the president; the routing of major thoroughfares through older parts of the city, often bisecting entire neighborhoods and even individual buildings. Today, as Syria struggles to steer an economic course of development in the twenty-first century, increasing divisions between rich and poor, the evaporation of the middle class, and the increasingly Western cultural orientation of the elite means that the chances for the revival of the culture of music making characteristic of the era of the sammīa (the musical gatherings known as sahra-s) seem small.¹⁹

Music in Aleppo Today

Although its star has faded with the rise of Damascus as the political and economic center of Syria, Aleppo is still considered Syria’s musical capital and retains an active group of musicians and numerous ensembles that perform the urban art music traditions that many refer to as “classical” (klāsīkī) Arab music.²⁰ Each of these groups is based on the so-called takht ensemble or some variation of it, consisting of the qānūn, oud, nāy, riqq, violin, and vocalist. Some add other instruments such as the frame drum (daff), and less often the synthesizer. So-called classical music today tends to be performed in restaurants and night clubs, venues considered less reputable—from the standpoint of the cultural elite and many musicians as well—than the private gatherings, which are fondly remembered by older musicians and even memorialized in television serials today.²¹

The “classical” tradition of urban art music in Aleppo consists of the genres of the musical suite (waṣla). More than any other city in the contemporary Arab world, Aleppo has made the waṣla the staple of the evening musical gathering (sahra). Aside from the muwashshaḥ, the waṣla includes instrumental pieces (samāī, bashraf, and dūlāb), instrumental improvisations (taqāsīm), the layālī (improvisation on the words yā layl yāayn, “O night, O eye”), the qaṣīda (classical poetry sung to an improvised melody), the mawwāl (colloquial poetry sung to an improvised melody), and the qudūd ḥalabiyya (popular songs), and other light songs from the Arab urban repertoire. These genres share elements with a pan-Ottoman musical culture that arose in the important administrative and commercial centers of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Cairo, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Beirut, and other important Levantine cities.

The periodization of Arab-Ottoman music is not precise and it would be misleading to apply the categories of European music to Arab music (Danielson 1997: 14). In some ways, the use of the term klāsīkī reflects modernist concerns for classifying the music and culture and differentiating various genres: popular (shabī), folkloric (fūlklūrī), bedouin (badawī), classical (klāsīkī), and the now ubiquitous contemporary pop song. “Classical” implies music commonly thought of as deriving from the Arab heritage and therefore of anonymous or very ancient composition; contemporary compositions by known artists in the same or similar styles might also be labeled “classical,” such as the works of Umar al-Baṭsh. Because this term arose in the modern period and in the context of nation building in the Arab world since the waning of colonialism, perhaps it is more accurate to refer to the music as “classicized.”²²

The “classical” repertoire derives most of its authority and authenticity from its opposition to the contemporary pop song, which is considered by defenders of tradition to symbolize inauthenticity. These songs, which borrow extensively from the instrumentation and style of Western music, commonly are heard on radios and in taxis and buses around Syria. As the new songs overwhelm the airwaves and cassette shops, they provoke strong emotional responses among critics (see also Danielson 1996). Antagonists refer to the contemporary songs variously as vulgar (hābiṭa), banal (mubtadhala), cheap (rakhīṣa), or—less judgmentally—youthful (shabābiyya). One publisher asserted that they are not only bad, they are dangerous to one’s health (qātila, lit. killer); “they might cause you to have a heart attack due to their quick, repetitive tempos,” he claimed. In many regards, the contemporary pop song has become the foremost symbol of cultural decline and decay for Syrian and other Arab intellectuals; it also has come to serve rhetorically as a negative pole in their aesthetic evaluations of authenticity as the prime exemplar of inauthentic culture—although in practice many intellectuals do in fact listen to and enjoy this music.

Closely related to the “classical” repertoire is that of sacred music. Aleppo has served as an important religious center for Sunni Islam as well as for a variety of Sufi brotherhoods (ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa), and it is home to number of Syria’s leading religious singers (munshid-s), who perform varieties of religious song (inshād) at weddings and other celebrations in Aleppo. They also perform at weekly dhikr rituals at Aleppo’s numerous Sufi lodges (zāwiya-s) and in private homes throughout the city.²³ The repertoire of the waṣla and dhikr overlap to an extent, and indeed many munshid-s perform “sacred” music in the dhikr as well as “secular” music in concerts of the waṣla. The close relationship between the two musical domains suggests that the distinction between “sacred” and “secular” is not clear-cut in Aleppo (see Shannon 2003b). Moreover, the majority of Aleppo’s major vocalists and musicians have had strong training in religious song; it is commonly argued that training in the dhikr and other varieties of inshād is the best preparation for singing the “secular” repertoire (Danielson 1997: 21–27; Frishkopf 1999). This observation holds true for Aleppo’s large Christian population as well, which has produced a number of fine vocalists and musicians who are skilled in the “classical” repertoire as well as the liturgies of their various congregations. Some Christian artists also have studied Islamic inshād to further their musical training (though I have found little evidence of Muslims attending Christian liturgies to learn their modal practices).

Aleppine musicians claim that the contemporary musical scene is far less active than it was even fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet, many are proud that at least some groups still preserve the tradition through performances and teaching of the older repertoires. Damascus has a far richer cultural scene in terms of overall numbers of concerts, shows, recitals, and exhibitions. Most of the major recording studios are located in Damascus, as well as numerous night clubs and performance venues. However, most musical activity in the capital tends not to be associated with the Arab tradition, as in Aleppo. Many of the concerts and recitals are of European music, for example the annual concerts of the Syrian National Symphony and the numerous recitals at foreign cultural centers, which draw large audiences. Much of the music produced, performed, and recorded in Damascus follows the modern pop styles. One is far more likely to hear a concert in Damascus by the pop icon George Wasoof than by Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī.²⁴

However, Aleppo hosts far more concerts and recitals of the “classical” Arab repertoire. The city has its fair share of night clubs, the cabarets of old that were once respectable performance venues but have now declined into less desirable places, if not down right seedy; they tend to feature renditions of contemporary pop songs and favorite songs from the 1950s though 1970s. Many musicians who used to earn a good living performing in these cabarets attribute their decline to the influx of wealthy “Arab” tourists (usually wealthy Arabs from the Arabian Gulf). With rising conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, many of Aleppo’s mercantile and religious elite shied away from the once-famous cabarets and many musicians gave up performing in them. Now considered off-limits for “respectable” people—mostly meaning the middle classes and elite but also the pious in general—these establishments tend to attract denizens from the lower classes, migrant workers, and foreigners, though higher-class cabarets in Damascus are patronized by the wealthy.

Local musicians such as Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, the master oud player, give seasonal performances of “classical” music at some of Aleppo’s ancient caravansaries and heritage buildings that date from between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The annual Syrian Song Festival, although held in a dreary sports arena during the period of my research, is now held in the Citadel. In addition to the Citadel, Aleppo’s numerous private clubs host summer evening concerts for local and regional artists. Concerts of European music also are held from time to time in Aleppo, though less frequently than in Damascus, and they garner only modest audiences. Occasionally, foreign cultural centers will sponsor jazz festivals or concerts of European and “World” music (non-European and non-Arab, in this context). More common are concerts of contemporary Arab pop music at Aleppo’s clubs featuring pan-Arab superstars like Syrian George Wasoof, Lebanese Diana Haddad, and Egyptian Amru Diab.

Despite the importance of Aleppo in modern Arab music, almost no research has been done on the contributions of Syrian artists to Arab music (see Belleface 1992; Saadé 1993). In contrast, studies abound of Arab music in Egypt (e.g., Danielson 1997; Frishkopf 1999; S. Marcus 1989; Racy 1981; Reynolds 1995; Van Nieuwkerk 1995), and to a lesser extent Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, and the countries of the Arabian Gulf (Lambert 1997; Schuyler 1990/1991; Touma 1996). The focus on Arab music in Egypt reflects both the common sentiment that Egypt is the cultural leader of the Arab world and the relatively greater openness of Egypt to foreign researchers.²⁵ In terms of Egypt’s role, many Arabs and non-Arabs make the implicit identification of “Egyptian” music with “Arab” music. The Egyptian styles flood the contemporary markets and the past masters of Egypt have gained significant audiences outside of Egypt through the influence of the Egyptian mass media (Armbrust 1996; Danielson 1997; Racy 1977).

Syria, whose media and broadcast centers opened later than Egypt’s and remained on a smaller scale, does not have the same pan-regional effect that Egypt enjoys. Non-Arabs as well as Arabs resident outside of the Arab lands perpetuate the identification of “Egyptian” with “Arab” music through concerts featuring Egyptian tunes and through their memories that draw on a time when Egyptian artists were ascendant.²⁶ Texts that treat “Arab music” as a whole often specialize in one region with only brief information about musical practices in others; this is the case, for example, with Touma’s The Music of the Arabs (1996), which has rich information about music in Iraq, Morocco, and the Arabian Gulf (where the author had done research) but little information on music in Egypt and the Levant. Racy’s Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Ṭarab (2003) provides rich detail about music performance practices in the Levant, and especially the concept of ṭarab, but does not treat North African music cultures for whom the concept of ṭarab is also important, for example in the music known as ṭarab andalusī and ṭarab gharnāṭī (though North African understandings of ṭarab are distinct in many ways from those of the Levant). Moreover, his work does not address the wider concerns of music making in Arab society, for example broader issues of aesthetics that reach beyond music into the realm of politics and ethics. Among the Jasmine Trees thus aims to fill part of a gap in our knowledge of the diverse Arab musical traditions by offering insights into music performance practice and ideologies of music and culture in contemporary Syria, as well as to establish an ethnographic framework for understanding them in Aleppo. In this sense it complements and extends the work of other scholars.

Music and Musicians in Syria: Ambivalences

According to one popular account, in early modern Syria musicians were grouped with thieves, dove trainers, and people who eat on the streets as those whose testimony was not permissible in court (Qaṣṣāb Ḥasan 1988: 85, passim). Dove trainers were suspect because they loiter on rooftops to train their birds, where they also have a view into the private domains of homes and thus are scandal-prone. People who eat in the streets were suspect (and remain so) because no one with a solid family and home would have to eat meals on the streets in the first place. As for musicians, their case is far more complex. As numerous scholars have indicated (for example, al-Faruqi 1985/1986), music and song have always occupied an ambiguous status in Islamic cultures, as in many other cultures. Despite the histories of celebrated court musicians of the Arab past, today musicians usually occupy a low position on the status hierarchy in the Arab lands, something clearly demonstrated by Karin Van Nieuwkerk in her research on dancers and musicians in Cairo (Van Nieuwkerk 1995). I found this to be the case in Syria, where muscians are looked upon by non-musicians with some distrust if not disdain, even among those who enjoy listening to music. Therefore the choice to be a musician or even to learn music is often a difficult one for Syrians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

For example, my main teacher, Muḥhammad Qadrī Dalāl, hails from a prominent religious family in Aleppo, his father having served as the sheikh of a prominent mosque and his wife’s father having been the city’s chief religious authority (muftī). His desire to study music was met with resistance from his father, who only allowed him to study once he had demonstrated his serious intent in school and passed his preliminary school exams. Once he passed, his father hired the famous singer and composer Bakrī al-Kurdī to tutor him in music and song. Dalāl later went on to earn a degree in Arabic literature from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, a prominent religious institution, and taught Arabic literature and language in Syrian and Moroccan schools for many years before devoting himself full-time to music performance and research. Music alone would not have been an appropriate career.

Many older musicians, especially those from more prominent families, claimed that they had to practice music in secret for fear of their parents’ wrath. One man, an employee at the Syrian Ministry of Pious Endowments (awqāf²⁷), hid an oud in his closet and would only play when no one else was at home. He reminisced with me about the old days when he could “croon” (yidandan) with his oud. Even respected and established musicians from an earlier generation are said to have had others carry their instruments for them in the streets to avoid public censure. To be seen on the streets with an oud was considered shameful (ayb), and this is still the case to some extent today. I was chided once by a gentleman for carrying my oud with me on the street. He argued that music was forbidden (ḥarām) and that no respectable person should perform it.

At the same time, music has gained some prestige as a diversionary hobby and as a finishing element of polite education among the elite. One way of avoiding the public censure of music making in recent years has been for families to allow their children to study European music and instruments, such as the Western-style violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano. Many elite families and those struggling to join their ranks associate European classical music with modernity, progress, and civilization, and consider Arab music to be backward. A Moscow-trained violinist and instructor at the High Institute for Music in Damascus, the son of a well-known Syrian family of musicians that includes prominent performers of Arab music, claimed that Arab music is irrational, leads to irrational behavior, and in general is an “insult” (bahdalah). At the time of my research, the Arab Music Institute in Aleppo had long waiting lists of students wanting to study piano and violin, yet only five students were studying the oud and six the qānūn—two quintessentially Arabic instruments. One day, during a conversation with the Institute’s director, a woman came in to register her young son. When the director asked if the boy would like to study the oud, the woman proudly (and loudly) declaimed: “Oh no! My son would never play that kind of music. In fact he only listens to Beethoven and Mozart!” The director glanced over at me with a look in his eyes that said, “Not another one of those!”

Other families encourage the study of the “classical” repertoire as part of a heritage-based program of self-enrichment and study not dissimilar to classical notions of adab, polite education, which recommend study of the musical arts (Bonebakker 1988). One prominent Aleppine family includes members who, though all accomplished in music and the arts, earn their livings through more “respected” professions, such as medicine and engineering; for any one of them to become a professional musician would be unthinkable. I was often suspect because of my association with musicians and their domains, such as the Artists Syndicate, which conjures ignoble connotations of dancers and night clubs in the minds of elites ignorant of the syndicate’s important role in Syrian arts. My position as a foreign researcher, though anomalous because of the subject matter, allowed me to retain some status in the eyes of suspicious elites; my focus on the “classical” repertoire and not the contemporary pop song assuaged their concerns. Paradoxically, the great Arab musicians and especially singers are praised and enjoyed on a daily basis, but nevertheless the upper classes do not consider music to be a noble profession. Acting and to some extent even painting also are frowned upon. This is especially the case for women artists, whose activities are suspect in the eyes of conservative members of society, elites and others.

With respect to religious views on music, during my research I encountered individuals who told me that Islam prohibits music and that I might be better off leaving it alone. I recall attending a mawlid (a religious celebration, lit. “birthday”) held for a young man who had successfully passed Syria’s rigorous baccalaureate examination, a prerequisite for admission to university. A group of three munshid-s were invited to recite the Qurān and present some religious song. Afterward, I spoke with the main vocalist about his training and experience in religious song. He proudly stated that his golden voice was a gift of God so that he could better proclaim His praises. In fact, he claimed that while he was in London studying dentistry, many “unbelievers” (kāfir-s) had converted upon hearing his voice. He then took me aside and said, with some concern, that once I completed my study of music I should devote my life to something more “serious” and not let this interest lead me away from “the Straight Path” (that is, Islam). When I offered that many devout Muslims also have an interest in music and some in fact are performers, he stated that then they are headed for Hell because, according to Islam, only the human voice (ṣawt) and the frame drum (daff) are allowable, citing a well-worn Prophetic saying (ḥadīth) to support this claim. Musical instruments of all other varieties, he stated, are “forbidden” and should be broken.

A young hotel worker also claimed that I was endangering my soul by studying music and learning to play the oud. When I asked him about the fate of great Arab musicians such as Umm Kulthūm and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb, both of whom had strong religious training, he shook his head and said that they will pay a price for their music, that is, on Judgment Day. But many devout people, I offered, consider Umm Kulthūm to be a “munshida” (female religious singer) because of her religious training in Qurānic recitation (tajwīd) and religious song; there are even recordings of her reciting the holy text. “The female voice is an imperfection [al-ṣawt al-unthawī awar],” he stated in a mechanical drone, as if reciting from memory, “and Umm Kulthūm will suffer for her singing and recitation of the Qurān.”²⁸

However, other Aleppine artists who consider themselves devout Muslims argue that the above views are excessive and that those who hold them are rigid extremists (mutazammitīn). For my teachers, all of whom were raised in religious families and served at different times in their lives as muezzins (those who give the Muslim call to prayer) and munshid-s, it is more the context of musical performance and less the music per se that determines its permissibility, though the type of music performed is also an important factor. If performed in a “respectable” venue—one defined tautologously as a place where “respectable” people would go—then music is something allowable (masmūḥ) in Islam. That is, it must be performed in a place where no alcohol is served, dancing is limited or non-existent, and where men and women do not mix in a socially unacceptable fashion. Examples of “respectable” venues include the Citadel’s amphitheater, Aleppo’s few public theaters and concert halls, the ancient caravansaries that are being renovated as performance spaces, and the private homes of “respectable people.”

With few exceptions, those musicians and “respectable people” who denounce “vulgar” music decry Aleppo’s night clubs as disreputable venues because they serve alcohol and cater to listeners’ carnal rather than spiritual interests. One leader of a heritage-style ensemble, when I praised the voice of a promising young singer, told me that he would like to have that singer join his ensemble but since the young man performs in a cabaret he cannot allow him to join his group. Performing in the cabarets is definitely ḥarām from this musician’s standpoint. Of course, from the perspective of the young singer and others who make a living performing in the cabarets, such work is permissible because it allows them to survive and provide for their families, especially in the absence of alternative “respectable” venues. One friend who performs in a cabaret claimed to earn approximately $800 a month performing six nights a week in a cabaret. By comparison, a university professor might earn $150 to $200 per month. Though they recognize that the atmosphere of the cabarets usually is not conducive to proper Islamic behavior nor very healthful, many of these performers claim to be at least as devout as those who spurn the cabarets.

However, repertoire is also an important factor in determining the permissibility of music. “Allowable” music usually means the classical repertoire, often including what some term folkloric or popular (shabī) songs. The important criterion is whether the music feeds listeners’ spiritual needs or rather leads to irreligious thoughts and motivations. Most contemporary pop songs are thought to fall in the latter category and therefore are decried by more conservative listeners as immoral, debased, and inappropriate. Yet, many contemporary listeners also take issue with certain songs performed within the context of the classical repertoire, such as songs that are overtly amorous (ghazalī). For example, some consider a well-known song performed by Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī to be inappropriate because it suggests the drinking of wine and irresponsibility.²⁹ While some listeners argue that such songs refer metaphorically to spiritual love or have deeper, Sufi meanings and therefore should be permissible, others argue that the style of the performance makes the difference in deciding whether or not a song is appropriate. For example, an amateur musician found Ṣabāḥ Fakhrīs performances “vulgar” (shāriī, “from the streets,” or sūqī, “from the market”) because he felt that Fakhrī emphasized the profane and not the spiritual aspects of the words.

Aside from ambiguous Qurānic verses and various examples from the ḥadīth literature concerning music, many of my teachers and friends cited the twelfth-century Muslim jurist al-Ghazzali’s statements on song and dance in his The Revival of the Religious Sciences (al-Ghazzali 1901–1902, 1991) to support their advocacy of a “Golden Mean” or Middle Way between prohibition and unequivocal acceptance of music in Islam. In his writings, al-Ghazzali evaluates the evidence for a prohibition of song and dance and argues, in essence, that so long as song and dance lead the participant to serve Allah, then they are permitted; song and dance that excite only the carnal desires are clearly forbidden. He refers to song and dance with the term samā, which literally means “listening” or “audition” and associated kinesthetic practices, and which in Sufi literature refers to a spiritual audition of sacred truths and not merely listening to music (al-Faruqi 1985/1986; see also Hirschkind 2001, 2004). According to alGhazzali and other Sufi thinkers, samā leads one to Allah if done properly; otherwise it is dangerous and can excite desires and lead to sin.³⁰

Learning Music in Syria

I conducted most of my research among intellectuals and artists, including many who consider themselves to occupy a middle-ground position in these debates: devout Muslims who are also practicing professional musicians. Although some Syrians might not have thought my studies to be serious enough, for one reason or another, one prerequisite of my engaging in debates in the field was learning the critical language used by Syrian intellectuals to discuss aesthetic issues. Regarding music, this required that I acquire numerous tapes for different artists, learn to follow the melodies and modulations, appreciate vocal qualities, and differentiate between strong and weak performances. Achieving this aesthetic awareness required intensive study and listening, often carried out in cassette shops over glasses of tea or small cups of coffee. It also meant taking music lessons and learning an instrument. Prior to my arrival in Syria, I had studied the oud for several months in Cairo with a private teacher.³¹ This came about almost as an accident. While studying Arabic in Cairo, I had hoped to get acquainted with more Egyptians in order to learn the local dialect better. I also was pursuing a preliminary investigation into Islamic discourses in non-traditional domains and had decided that musicians might be an interesting group in which to study contemporary forms of Islamic practice and discourse, precisely because of music’s ambiguous status in Islam.

In Egypt, I learned many of the basic modes and several popular Egyptian songs. I began to appreciate what numerous musicians told me are the three most important elements of a good song: the melody (laḥn), the lyrics (kalimāt), and the performer’s voice (ṣawt). For a song to be good—and also “authentic”—it had to have a strong combination of all of these elements; lacking one of them is enough to make the song or the artist weak, if not “inauthentic.” Despite my studies in Egypt, my understanding of the modes and technical skill on the oud remained limited, due in part to the complexity of the task, my own limitations, and my instructor’s limitations as well.

Arriving in Syria in the late fall of 1996, I sought an oud teacher and found both a teacher and friend in the Aleppine virtuoso Muḥammad Qadrī Dalāl. Through our intensive sessions on the musical modes, the major genres and history of Arab music, and oud technique—over an hour a day almost every day for several months—I came to appreciate better the subtleties of the music and to become familiar with the terminology and critical discourse of music in contemporary Syria. Nonetheless, much of my fieldwork time in fact was spent convincing Syrians that I, as a foreigner, actually could understand their music and appreciate it. Many Syrian musicians and others expressed the common and not entirely unfounded belief that Arab music is too complex for Westerners and non-Arabs in general to understand; in fact, many Arabs do not understand it. Oftentimes I was told that a period of a year or two or three is insufficient for a non-Arab to understand the music and write anything intelligent about it. Quite accurately, one scholar suggested that I would probably be suspicious of him if he went to America and proposed to write a study of American jazz after only a year or so of study. One would need ten years in order to understand the music and its intricacies, not to mention the language, he suggested (and he had a valid point).

My position as a foreign music researcher meant that I was expected naturally to be ignorant of the music though praised for attempting to learn it. Yet, it also meant that I had to prove myself constantly before the suspicions of those who thought Arab music to be ineffable for non-Arabs. Whenever an oud was available, I generally was asked to play for people in order to demonstrate what I could do, and especially as a test for any manifestations of “oriental spirit”—that key yet elusive element of Arab musical aesthetics. Sometimes I was asked to sing songs, quizzed on specific modes, or enjoined to explain what I had “discovered” in their music. Only after many months of fieldwork was I able to convince people that I had at least a modicum of “oriental spirit.” My public lectures (in Arabic) on musical topics and performances in public contexts convinced some of the doubters that I had entered, if only in a rudimentary way, the heart of their music and understood some of its secrets. In this fashion, my own performances as well as the recordings and performances of Syrian musicians became an integral part of my search for the keys to authenticity in Syrian music and culture.

Listening, Aesthetics, and Forming a Tape Collection

As much as knowledge of the genres and styles and skill on an instrument, it is one’s skill as a listener that forms an essential component in announcing musical cultivation and taste. I constantly was asked, “To whom do you listen?” and given suggestions for tapes, specific recordings, and concerts. The question of what one listens to and what recordings are in one’s collection are absolutely critical in marking and defending claims to authenticity. Among nonspecialists, a claim to listen to Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb is one common way to make a claim to being a cultured person and respecting cultural authenticity (especially to the foreign music researcher). Among the discriminating, however, to answer “Umm Kulthūm” is not sufficient. At a listening session organized by a dramatist friend at the home of a well-known woman music teacher, my discrimination as a listener was put to the test early. “To whom do you enjoy listening?” asked the teacher. I replied, “Umm Kulthūm,” and, with a look of resignation that suggested to me, “Is that all there is?” she asked, “From which era [of her career]?” I had just listened to a harangue by a local cassette vendor about how beautiful and pure the early Umm Kulthūm was in comparison to her later work, so I replied, “Her early work, before she became well-known.” This elicited a nod of approval and the remark, “Her best recordings are from the period of about 1928 to 1930. Afterwards she became too repetitive and emotionally less sincere (muftaala),” she remarked.³²

Forming a collection of cassette tapes (and, recently, compact disks) is another component of determining and even performing one’s musical taste as a symbol of wider “culture” (thaqāfa).³³ When I began my oud lessons, my teacher instructed me that the first thing I must do aside from obtaining a decent oud and practicing four hours every day was to begin collecting good tapes and listen to them regularly. Listening is considered a creative act among Syrians, and one’s collection of recordings announces one’s level of discrimination and culture. My teacher, for example, argued that he listens to “everything,” and indeed he has recordings from numerous diverse musical cultures to prove it. Another musician friend went to great lengths to show me his “jazz” tapes that for him symbolized his cosmopolitanism.³⁴

Most Syrians listen to music on cassettes, which form the backbone of a thriving “cassette culture” (Manuel 1993). Although first-run recordings are available in the market (the so-called “original” recordings or aṣliyyāt), most are bootlegged copies from original tapes, reels, and CDs, or copies of other copies. The quality of tapes hence varies tremendously, though a number of specialty stores have arisen that deal in high-quality cassettes, usually costing two or three times what a standard tape might cost (for example, SYP100 to 150 versus SYP50).³⁵ It is not uncommon to see audience members with rudimentary tape recorders at concerts, and not long after the concert bootleg versions of these tapes will appear in the market, now often in poor-quality MP3 format on CD. Yet, “bootleg” is hardly the appropriate term. Until 2001 and the enforcement of laws protecting intellectual property in Syria, “copyright” was not a word found in the colloquial dictionary; even with the new laws, Syrian artists rarely if ever receive any remuneration from the sale of recordings. As one musician and studio owner put it: “We have no rights in the market.” In a way, the circulation of cassette tapes and MP3s has democratized the music market in Syria.³⁶

The majority of music shops in Damascus and Aleppo carry the average run-of-the-mill recordings of the most recent pop stars as well as a handful of tapes of older masters. However, a few stores specialize in the “classical” repertoire and the great Arab artists of the twentieth century. I got most of my collection (almost entirely in the form of cassette tape) from these shops. I also would exchange recordings with my musician friends, with whom I would compare collections and ask advice about certain artists and recordings. Trading music became an important context for learning about musical aesthetics. Why was one performance of a given artist preferred over another? In which genres did a certain artist excel and, the converse, in which was he or she less skilled? What makes for a good voice, a good melody? Through engagement with local “cassette cultures,” I was able to acquire certain habits of listening that allowed me to learn much about the music that I could not have learned from lessons alone. As one musician told me, “You have to learn how to listen before you can learn how to play the music.”

Old and New

In the exchange of tapes and in the cassette culture in general, discourses of the old (qadīm) and the new (jadīd) are very important. I found that there is widespread agreement that earlier material by older artists is better than their recent material. For example, the owner of one cassette shop, a young man of perhaps twenty-two, argued that the older recordings of the popular singer George Wasoof are better than his new recordings, whereas anything by the late Egyptian singer Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would be better than Wasoof’s repertoire from any era. In discourses of authenticity, the old is almost always better than the new, which marks decay (inḥiṭāṭ). Indeed, the newer songs are blamed almost universally for lowering musical taste in Syria. Even many cassette vendors, whose livelihood depends on the sale of the “cheap” songs, argued that they prefer the older material. But closer examination of this discourse of debasement and the threat of the contemporary songs to the existence of the older ones reveals a somewhat different picture. First, not all is lost with respect to the “classical” songs and their conventions. Umm Kulthūm remains the single most popular artist not only on the airwaves but at cassette stands around Damascus and Aleppo. The owner of a stand in central Damascus that sells a variety of modern and “classical” songs, folk music, and even Western pop music claims that on any given day he sells about twenty-five Umm Kulthūm cassettes, whereas he might sell that amount of a contemporary singer only in the first few days after the cassette is released to the market. By comparison, he might sell five to ten George Wasoof tapes or a handful of Amru Diab tapes—both very popular Arab artists who have large audiences in Syria. But the Egyptian diva still reigns as queen of the market with an average of twenty-five tapes a day, every day, for the several years this man has been selling them. Other vendors claimed similar sales proportions: the new singers might sell a lot when their tapes first hit the market, but Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ, and Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb—the venerated Big Three—remain the top sellers. Syrian stars such as Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī also do well, especially in specialty shops that do not offer the “cheap” music. In such shops in Damascus and Aleppo, one finds aficionados, young and old, of older styles and artists such as Asmahān, Laylā Murād, Nūr al-Hudā, Bakrī al-Kurdī, and Zuhayr Minīnī.

The Stratigraphy of Musical Authenticity

The valuation of the old also is expressed visually in a stratigraphy of musical authenticity. In surveys of dozens of cassette shops in Damascus and Aleppo, and especially those in which cassettes were displayed in vertical cases rather than in storage boxes or drawers, I detected an interesting pattern among the cassettes. In almost all of these shops, Umm Kulthūm occupied the top row in the display cases. Only when the shop or stall also sold recordings of the Qurān was she displaced from the top rung, and in some instances she shared this honor with recordings of the holy text.³⁷ Even in those stalls in which tapes were arranged horizontally, Umm Kulthūm occupied the first row at what would be the top were the case to be righted vertically. In Aleppo, Umm Kulthūm often shared the high spot with other religious vocalists.

The association between Umm Kulthūm, musical authenticity, and her occupation of the highest strata in Syrian cassette shops was demonstrated graphically one afternoon at a small cassette shop near the Victoria Bridge and Hijaz Railway Station area of central Damascus. This particular stand consisted of a vertical display case standing upon a table that held another horizontal case as well as a large cassette player. Running the shop was a young man from Ḥasaka, a town in the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, and he was accompanied on this particular day by two young men, one from Ḥamā in central Syria and the other from the Ḥawrān region in the south. I approached the stand and asked them if they had any tapes of Khiḍr Yās, a well-known Iraqi singer who was scheduled to give a performance in Syria that month. The young man produced three tapes and placed one in the cassette player for me to listen to it. After a few minutes and the perfunctory questions (You speak Arabic!? Where are you from? Why did you learn Arabic? What are you doing here?), I spoke with them about their musical preferences and asked what they thought was the best music. I had been following up on Iraqi singers after discovering that many rural residents and the denizens of the microbus stations frequently listen to them. After debating the qualities of various Iraqi singers such as Khadr Yas, Alī al-Issawī, and Kāzim al-Sāhir (the popular artist), the young man asked me if I wanted to hear something really good and authentic. When I said yes, he stood for a moment thinking, then grabbed a chair, stood on it rather precariously, and reached up to the top shelf of the display case to bring down a tape of Umm Kulthūm’s “Amal ḥayātī” (Hope of my life). “This is the real thing,” he seemed to be saying as he placed it in the cassette player; to me, his putting in the tape spoke better than any words to his understanding of authenticity. We stood there, the three of us, listening to the great voice, which for these young men, like so many others, was the voice of tradition, perhaps even of the Arab nation (Danielson 1997).

After Umm Kulthūm, I was surprised to find Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ occupying the second tier in the stratigraphy of musical authenticity in Syrian cassette shops. This Egyptian crooner, popular among youth and especially women but often considered a symbol of vulgarity by the cultural elite during his lifetime, has been resurrected as an icon second only to Umm Kulthūm (and the Qurān), at least in popular cultural displays. In almost all instances when Umm Kulthūm occupied the top rung, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would occupy the second. Only rarely was he displaced by others, and then usually by Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb or religious singers.

To my initial surprise, however, Abd al-Wahhāb did not always occupy the third place of pride in Syrian cassette-shop stratigraphy, though he almost always is mentioned among the Big Three. In fact, he often was exiled to a side display case or mixed indiscriminately with other artists having some relation to him or to musical heritage: Ṣafwān Bahlawān (a Syrian artist who studied with Abd al-Wahhāb and adopted his style of singing), Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, and so on. Often Abd al-Wahhāb occupied his own corner. Instead, after Abd al-Ḥalīm, a variety of contemporary popular singers jockey for third place: Amru Diab, George Wasoof, Diana Haddad, Nawāl al-Zughbī, and other Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian singers. In fact, the majority of the shops and stalls feature a revolving collection of recent pop hits as well as the numerous “variety” collections and theme tapes, such as “ ‘Variety 1998,” “The Most Beautiful Dabkāt of 1997,” “Best Songs,” and “Love Songs 2002,” produced by the shop owners themselves or, less often, by local studios. All of them, of course, are bootleg compilations.

This stratigraphy suggests that the older artists and hence older aesthetic values are not on the verge of extinction, as critics of the contemporary pop song claim. Yet, there is a strong sense among musicians and intellectuals that the older generations represent a Golden Age that never will be repeated. This is why the modern pop songs are considered to be such a threat; there appears to be no alternative. Unlike the West, where contemporary genres and styles have displaced but not entirely replaced the older, there is a fear in Syria that once the present “cultivated listeners” pass on, there will not be a generation capable of appreciating the older music and of promoting its aesthetic standards. This is confirmed in the music conservatories, where students are shunning the study of the Arab instruments, instead flocking to the piano, violin, clarinet, guitar, and other European instruments.