The famed Quran reciter and specialist in maqāmāt (modalities of Arabic music) Uthman al-Mawsili was born in 1854 in Iraq during a drastically changing political and social landscape in the Arab and Muslim world. He flourished at a young age as a singer and Quran reciter. Later, he moved to Baghdad from his native Mosul, then Istanbul where he was a favourite Quran reciter and munshid for Sultan Abdulhamid, before finally residing in Cairo.
In the Egyptian capital, al-Mawsili took under his tutelage none other than Sayyid Darwish (d. 1923), who is considered an early milestone in the development of the school of classical Egyptian music – and Golden Age of Arabic Music – as well as the father of folk songs for labourers and more importantly musical resistance against British colonialism.
One of Darwish’s most famous songs, Zurūnī kul Sana Marra (Visit Me at Least Once a Year) was actually written and composed by al-Mawsili and gifted to his student. What we have here is an indelible proof of al-Mawsili’s influence not only on Darwish, but by extension all of classical Arabic music. Note that Darwish himself was one of the teachers of mūsīqār al-ajyāl (the musician of generations), Muhammad Abd al-Wahab (d. 1993) who is considered a second milestone in the golden age of Arabic music, who revolutionised the use of classical Arabic poetry (e.g., Ahmad Shawqy’s) in classical music.
This insight of a brief moment in recent Arab and Islamic history reveals a drastically different vision of Muslim society than we are accustomed to today. Whereas Muslim communities, particularly in the West, are still burdened by arguments and debates pertaining to the permissibility of music, musical instruments and art generally, early 20th century Egypt reveals a society where Quran recitation and classical music were appreciated on a continuum of both sacrality and ṭarab (musical ecstasy).
It is important to recognise that the period during which al-Mawsili and Darwish lived, when colonial powers like the British and French sought to divide and conquer the Arab and Muslim world like vultures, more than just land and people were colonised, but also – and perhaps more importantly – our metaphysics and arts. Whereas the land and people were brutalised through armies in uniforms, our intellectual and creative legacies were savaged differently, through insurgents of extremist ideologies in religious garb.
It is well proven now through historical documents that the British insisted on the adoption of Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab’s – not to be mistaken with the Egyptian composer above – firebrand of religious insurgency as a colonial implant in Arabia. In turn, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab not only destroyed the countless shrine complexes in Makkah and Madinah but also demanded that all the residents of the prophetic city bring out their musical instruments to be burnt in a large fire in the centre of the city.
Yes, there were musical instruments in Madinah, in every household. In Intellectual Life in the Hijaz Before the 18thCentury, author Nasir Dumairieh highlights that as late as the 17th century, Muslim scholars in the ḥaramayn (two sanctuaries) of Makkah and Madinah taught music theory as part of Islamic studies. Some even had sobriquets such as al-tanbūrī (the tanbur player). These include scholars like Siddiq b. Hisham al-Hindi, Ali al-Daniq al-Yamani and others.
Al-Qurtubi even highlights that for many centuries, the people and scholars of Madinah were known as ahl al-ghināʾ (people of singing). We have many anecdotes of scholars of hadith from the Prophet’s ﷺ city who migrated to Baghdad and shocked its residents by singing alongside narrating hadith. But this is hardly surprising, since as al-Qurtubi mentions, there were even female companions of the Prophet ﷺ who had stage names, such Jamila the singer of A’isha (ra) and Arnab the singer of Madinah.
But much of this heritage has been lost, and we are not aware of the extent to which it has been intentionally and malignantly exiled. During the early days of my doctoral study, I came across an English translation of al-Risāla al-Qushayriya, one of the foundational texts on taṣawwuf from the 10th century. I was pleasantly surprised to find an entire chapter on samāʿ (musical audition). But when I wanted to read the original Arabic as reference, I was shocked to find the chapter altogether removed from recent Arabic editions of the treatise.
I reached out to my advisor, Alexander Knysh who translated the text; he said: “I am not surprised, check a manuscript of the text from the early 20th century.” Sure enough, when I checked the manuscript, I found the chapter there intact. In other words, just as our lands have been partitioned and our people exiled over the decades, so have chapters from our texts also been separated and entire aspects of our metaphysics, intellectual and creative history displaced.
But why would the colonial powers target our metaphysics and the arts alongside our land? Because metaphysics renders scripture and the entire gamut of religious texts as palpable culture. Culture, in turn, as collective art production is how a people remember their sufferings, redemptions and triumphs. In other words, the colonial powers sought to displace our metaphysics and arts with the hope that subsequent generations forget why the land was colonised and its people massacred.
Of course, something unexpected happened, for the arts did not simply disappear from Muslim societies, just Muslim hands. For as we have seen, the legacy of al-Mawsili and others like him migrated to more secular minds, like Darwish, Abd al-Wahab, Umm Kulthum and later Mahmud Darwish and others. The commemoration through the arts continues until today, albeit with a tragic underpinning: Muslims are no longer custodians of this heritage.
Unfortunately, the reality is even more dim. Through the extremist ideology of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and others, many Muslims – even today – adopt this intellectual colonisation as part of the tradition. It is a normative belief for many Muslims in the West, for example, that music and musical instruments, sculpture, portrait painting and countless other crafts are outlawed in Islam. A mixture of historical illiteracy and deeply engraved Western epistemology has led us to this state.
It should not be lost on any of us that the colonisation of Muslim lands, peoples, metaphysics and arts was nothing but the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilise the third world. Whereas the partition of land and exile of people was an attempt to implant the model of the nation state in this part of the world – but in actuality just to facilitate resource exploitation – the displacement of metaphysics and arts, through extremist religious ideology was a Muslim-looking garb over a familiar omen: the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation.
It was an attempt to not only seclude Islam within its private sphere of mosque and seminary as had happened in Europe with the separation between church and state, but more importantly it was a concerted effort to render Islam as a shell of its former self. For the colonial powers understood that Islam thrived and flourished across east and west through metaphysics, culture and the arts. In other words, since the colonial powers could not destroy Islam from without, their best hope is to do it from within by rendering the faith irrelevant and irreverent.
Consider the legacy of Ibn Arabi, for example; one would be hard-pressed to find a major Islamic civilisation after his time that does not owe part of its legacy to his works and teachings through a longstanding school of commentators. In the Ottoman Empire, the commentary on Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Bezels of Wisdom) by Dawud al-Qaysari were adopted by the likes of Mulla Fanari whence they became foundational in the Ottoman educational system.
Further east, in Mughal India, Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani’s commentary on the same text was seminal in a cultural and spiritual efflorescence from the 15th century onwards. This revival continued further eastward, where Chinese Muslim scholars Liu Chih and Wang Tai-Yu adopted Akbarian metaphysics, through Abd al-Rahman Jami’s commentary on the Bezels in Farsi to introduce Islam in a unique neo-Confucianist light in China. Lastly, in south east Asia, Hamza Fansuri rendered Akbarian metaphysics as the intellectual, spiritual and cultural soil in the Malay Archipelago.
Muslim artists today, especially of younger generations, find themselves at a crossroad of not only social activism, social justice and fighting for the liberation of land and people, but also the need to liberate from within. Indeed, while it is easier to see colonisation of land and people, yet difficult to achieve their liberation, the inverse is true of our inner colonisation. It is more difficult to perceive the extent to which our hearts and mind are conquered, yet much easier to begin the process of decolonisation.
The way forward requires many liberations at once; Muslim artists must come to a few key internal acknowledgments. First, we must come to terms with the fact that our community is colonised from within and, in turn, unable to solve a crisis which it fails to recognise. This is why as artists, we must take on the responsibility of liberating not only ourselves, but our entire society at large. This can only happen through education by vociferously revisiting our history and metaphysics.
In this regard, we must understand that to tell our stories in this day and age – which is directly commanded by God: “Tell stories that they might reflect” (7:176) – to perform and cultivate our crafts and study the works and teachings of Rumi, Ibn Arabi and other Muslim saints are in themselves acts of resistance. For whatever has been outlawed and exiled by our community as heresy or corruption, not due to a genuine understanding of tradition, is an act of colonisation that must be resisted.
We must also do the inner work, as Muslim artists, of recognising that our crafts and talents are sacred trusts from God that are non-negotiable by capitalistic standards of economic and financial stability. It has always been the case, throughout human history, that the arts are not a lucrative career path, which is why Muslim rulers established awqāf (endowments and guilds) to support artists in all crafts. Bringing this back is most definitely also an act of resistance.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that many of our mosques and seminaries are still hostile to the arts and unwilling to support artists – with the common trope: perform fī sabīl Allah still ringing in our ears – we need to stop looking for support from within these institutions and instead seek to build third spaces. However, these liminal interstices should not be seen as mere transits for artists to become ‘more religious’ and ready for the mosque or seminary. On the contrary, they should be built and regarded as final destinations, as spaces of creative prayers where Muslim artists can journey to God through their crafts.
In the past, the path to walāya (sainthood) was not restricted to religious scholasticism, as is the case today in the eyes of many Muslims. Rather, the traditional path to the summit was through the craft, one of which is religious scholarship. More importantly, the masters of each craft were also regarded as custodians of their faith and the tafsīr, interpretation, of scripture was uniquely gifted by God to each craft and its custodians.
This ‘explorative authority’, which Shahab Ahmed posits in What is Islam alongside the scholars’ ‘prescriptive authority’ was an individual’s God-given right, not a luxury or favour bestowed upon them by the scholarly class or community. Muslim artists cannot afford to wait for their community’s permission to undertake their sacred journey as creative custodians of Islam. For it is not mere art and stories that await production, but also hearts that need to be liberated and reminded of the Prophet’s words to his poet Abd Allah b. Rawaha duringthe liberation of Makkah: “Read your poetry, for it is harsher against enemies than falling arrows.” ﷺ
