MUSIC IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD. A CULTURAL, HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNEY

Music has always been a source of spiritual inspiration and a means of comfort as well as entertainment in Muslim-majority countries throughout history and across the world. The more radical positions of certain minority groups who have condemned the enjoyment of music have failed to undermine the vital role that music plays in the respective countries’ cultural heritage. The aim of this volume is to shed light on the relationship between Islam and music by analysing musical traditions from various perspectives: historical, philosophical, religious and literary. The contribution of Sufism, which was fundamental to the creation and development of the Islamic musical tradition, is also explored in depth in several chapters. In two chapters we also find an anthropological analysis of modern and contemporary musical phenomena in which ancestral elements merge with more recent components of the Islamic faith. The chapters cover a geographical area stretching from North Africa and the Middle East to Persia and Pakistan, and diachronically from the early centuries of Islam to the present day.