(turāth), drawing on accounts from nineteenth-century Egypt and Syria, as well as more recent writings from Syria, Lebanon, and Morocco. I examine the complex ways in which these terms find expression in twentieth-century Syrian musical discourse and practice, and argue that these debates in music participate in the composition of different visions of a Syrian alternative modernity. In chapter 3, I discuss some of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the aesthetics of authenticity in contemporary Syrian art worlds and examine how the idea of origin operates in constructions of tradition, heritage, identity, and authenticity in four narratives of the origins of Arab music. In chapter 4, I continue the discussion of musical origins with an exploration of a domain that many Aleppine musicians asserted was an origin of both their musical traditions and their own involvement with the music: the Sufi dhikr, the ritual invocation of God. I analyze dhikr both as a ritual context and as an art world in which conceptions of authenticity and personhood are conceptualized, invoked, and enacted. Moreover, I examine the role of temporality and modes of body memory in structuring the experience of transformation and transcendence in the dhikr and suggest how this relates to the construction and social reproduction of embodied experiences of moral and musical selfhood in Aleppo.
In chapter 5, I explore the waṣla or musical suite as the paradigmatic authentic genre of secular Arab music in Aleppo. I discuss three key terms in the critical aesthetic lexicon of “authentic” Arab music—melody (laḥn), lyrics (kalimāt), and voice (ṣawt)—and show how these critical-musical terms gloss emotional states that play a defining role in the constitution of authentic aesthetic experience. In chapter 6, I further explore the concept of ṭarab and argue that, like other terms in Aleppine discourses of music and emotion, ṭarab serves as a metaphor for the social context of performance and is one strategy for the presentation of positively valued conceptions of the self in the context of performance. Finally, I end this work with an examination of the concept of “Oriental spirit” in Syrian aesthetics and of how spirit and emotion perform and improvise on visions for an alternative modernity in which emotionality and sentiment are seen not as impediments to progress, but as the very substance of modern Syrian subjectivity.
ONE
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