delimit how individual Syrians understand heritage and its relationship to national culture.5
In general, discourses of authenticity are most prevalent among members of what might be described as the modernizing middle class—those residing for the most part in urban centers and often among the first generation of Syrians having access to higher education. I have in mind “Amjad,” the founder of a small publishing house in Damascus who hails from a peasant family from rural Aleppo and is proud of his strong voice and his ability to sing classical Arabic songs. There is “Nabīl,” a documentary film maker of Palestinian origin who loves the older music, decries the new, and organizes musical appreciation sessions in his small home. “Khalīl,” a dentist, is an avid art lover who plays the oud and gives frequent recitals in Damascus. I think of them in contrast to “Nawfal,” scion of an elite Damascene family who once proudly showed me his collection of over two thousand classical European albums, and smugly pointed out that not one of them was by an Arab artist. Or “Bashīr,” a French-trained architect who is obsessed with Bob Dylan and with what he likes to call “Bedouin blues,” the music of the Syrian desert, but dislikes the traditional urban musics of Aleppo and Syria.
Certain religious elites also promote their notions of heritage, predominantly but not exclusively Islamic heritage, but these tend to have more modernist rather than Islamist leanings. In Aleppo, for example, some of the strongest supporters of the older musical genres come from traditional religious backgrounds; indeed, most prominent musicians have had strong religious training as well (see Danielson 1990/1991; Shannon 2003b). Members of established elite families often have little interest in heritage: they more often engaged me in debates about the merits of Mozart than, say, the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthūm or the great Aleppine composer
In the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic and vulgar aspects of contemporary culture—what critics in the West usually refer to as mass or popular culture8—cultural heritage constitutes a discourse of privilege. Syrian culture brokers usually do not categorize popular Arab cultural practices such as story telling and popular medicine as “heritage”; rather, they tend to relegate these and similar practices to the categories of folklore (fūlklūr), popular arts (funūn sha
In addition to being a discourse of privilege, heritage also constitutes a privileged discourse, lying at the intersection of aesthetic practices and state ideologies of culture and the arts in Syria, especially in the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic aspects of contemporary culture (usually what critics in the West refer to as mass or popular culture).9 Through state patronage of heritage arts (in festivals and national heritage orchestras sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, for instance), and through less auspicious means of cultural fashioning such as censorship and official cultural review boards, selected cultural practices are projected as valued aspects of Syrian national culture that need to be preserved and defended, while others are prevented from thriving in the restricted public sphere. Many of the Syrian artists I know attempt to negotiate the boundaries between these two arenas of struggle, between the imagined community promoted by the state, and the everyday practices of artistic creation and reception that are often at odds with such imaginings (Anderson 1991).
Competing understandings of heritage and such metaphors as Oriental spirit, emotional sincerity, and musical rapture (ṭarab) articulate a broader concern with formulating the outlines of a modern Syrian national culture engaged with Western discourses of modernity but at the same time asserting cultural difference from if not superiority to the West. Syrian aesthetic discourse articulates notions of modernity and national culture that, while derived to some extent from European ideologies of modernity and the nation, serve as critical alternatives to them—what some scholars are calling a quest for alternative or counter modernities.10 Musical aesthetics thus comes to engage with broader debates over culture and the nation. Syrian artists and intellectuals construct and promote a sense of difference from the West through a discourse and particular critical aesthetic lexicon of the emotions. Such concepts as ṭarab, for example, express and enact conceptions of the self, community, and nation that pose a counter-narrative to European Enlightenment ideologies that stress the autonomous rational self. Instead, Syrian artists promote forms of modern subjectivity that are anchored in a domain of authentic spirit and sentiment, though for many it is not so much a matter of emotionality versus rationality, but of rationality tempered with sentiment—indeed, made more humane by it.
In many ways, Syrian and other Arab discourses of emotionality also can be read as responses to if not reappropriations of Orientalist depictions of the Arab peoples as hopelessly mired in their emotions, irrational, and childlike. As has been argued in the context of modern Arabic poetry (DeYoung 1998), the appropriation of colonial and Orientalist discourses of the emotional Arab by such Arab poets as Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, for example, can be understood as a strategy for transcending colonial and Orientalist discourses to assert an emotionality that, far from being an impediment to social and cultural progress and modernity, can be a strong foundation for an Arab modernity and modernism.
As Partha Chatterjee has argued (1993), the construction and indeed investment in the distinction of two separate realms—the material and political versus the spiritual and cultural—is a common feature of anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalisms in a variety of contexts. Unlike Chatterjee, I want to emphasize that in the context of modern Syria, the features of the so-called “spiritual” or “cultural” domain and indeed the separation of material from spiritual realms is highly contested, subject to changing dynamics, and is not always the brain child of the indigenous elites (such as the Tagores in the case of India). Rather, in the case of Syria it is defended chiefly by new entrants to Syria’s precarious middle class, by conservative elements of the traditional elite (the “notable” families in particular), and by some political elites disaffected by what they perceive to be the failures of modern Arab society. The Syrian state, for its part, co-opts many of the discourses of authenticity among middle-class intellectuals, artists, and others for use in its own ideologies of modernization and modernity—in the case of the present regime, ideologies that aim to construct Syria as the home for Arab secularism, pan-Arab socialism, and as the caretaker and promoter of Arab and Islamic cultural heritage; hence the value and importance for the state of promoting national folklore and classical traditions in the construction of an official Syrian national culture. Therefore we must strive to understand such practices as painting and music and related aesthetic discourses of emotionality and authenticity both in terms of how they express and enact competing conceptions of modernity and how they ultimately are situated within the context of ideologies of the postcolonial nation-state.
People and Places
My initial intention was to research the performance practices and aesthetic discourses of musicians in Aleppo and Damascus. “Musician” (mūsīqī) does not in any sense constitute a unified professional category, and in fact many musicians had other work, day jobs through which they earned a living and by which they referred to themselves: teachers, shop owners, in some cases engineers, dentists, economists.