AKU-ISMC's Professor Jonas Otterbeck and Professor Mark LeVine (University of California, Irvine) have recently published two articles on music in Muslim contexts for the Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives. The articles explore music in both historical and contemporary times, with greater emphasis on the 20th and 21st centuries.
Muslim Popular Music explores the evolution of modern and contemporary music in Muslim societies beginning in the late nineteenth century and how the rapid spread of “new” technologies like the phonograph, radio, and film helped make certain styles, such as Egyptian popular music, Arab tarab, and Turkish Arabesk, regionally and then globally prominent. This occurred at the same time that non-Muslim genres of music, such as European classical, rock, jazz, hip hop, EDM, and “extreme” music, spread throughout the Muslim world, helping shape and in turn being shaped by local musical styles and idioms. This article demonstrates how Muslim, Islamicate, and diaspora cultures have been profoundly shaped by the evolution and expansion of music in all its varieties in the last century, with far-reaching if too often little understand impacts on Muslim identities, law, and politics.
Music in Muslim Contexts contextualises the historical discussions on music in Islamic circles and explores the writing of philosophers, jurists, Sufi mystics, and elite intellectuals in relation to Islamic rituals, folk music, art music, and more. It ends just before the mass mediation of music was initiated during the nineteenth century. The main argument is that by contextualising discussions and positions, the internal logics of dominant discourses are made visible, making positions more graspable. The described positions are still well-known and important backdrops to contemporary Muslims understandings and discussions about music, maybe more so today than in earlier history as intellectual discourse has a much wider reach today than before the technological revolution of communication.
Biographies
Jonas Otterbeck is a Professor of Islamic Studies and Head of Research at AKU-ISMC. Professor Otterbeck is a leading expert about creativity and Islam and currently researching the artistic expressions of European and North American artists with a Muslim background.
Mark LeVine is a Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at History School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine. He is also a professional musician.
