Music
Many Muslims are very familiar to listening to music. Islamic music is Muslim religious music, as sung or played in public services or private devotions. The classic heartland of Islam is Arabia and the Middle East, North Africa and Egypt, Iran, Central Asia, and northern India and Pakistan. Because Islam is a multicultural religion, the musical expression of its adherents is diverse. The indigenous musical styles of these areas have shaped the devotional music enjoyed by contemporary Muslims:
- Arab classical music
- Religious music in Iran
- Hindustani classical music
- Qawwali music
The Seljuk Turks, a nomadic tribe that converted to Islam, conquered Anatolia (now Turkey), and held the Caliphate as the Ottoman Empire, also had a strong influence on Islamic music. See:
- Turkish classical music.
Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines also have large Muslim populations, but these areas have had less influence than the heartland on the various traditions of Islamic music.
South India: Mappila Songs, Duff Muttu
All these regions were connected by trade long before the Islamic conquests of the 600s and later, and it is likely that musical styles traveled the same routes as trade goods. However, lacking recordings, we can only speculate as to the pre-Islamic music of these areas. Islam must have had a great influence on music, as it united vast areas under the first caliphs, and facilitated trade between distant lands. Certainly the Sufis, brotherhoods of Muslim mystics, spread their music far and wide.
Read more about this topic: Muslim Culture
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)