4 Popular culture Music, dance and poetry In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said gave two defi nitions of culture: an expanded and a limited one.1 The expanded defi nition conceives culture as encompassing life itself, and the limited one refers to ‘all those practices, like arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realm and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one whose principal aim is pleasure’. As the fi rst defi nition encompasses everything else dealt with in this book, the more limited one is fi tting for the next two chapters; with one reservation perhaps, that of pleasure being one of culture’s principal aims. In the Middle East it often seems that artists wish to convey pain and hurt as much as enjoyment and gaiety. Culture in its limited form has a story. This story of culture in the Middle East, as in so many other parts of the world, has until recently been told by out- siders. They narrated it with the conscious or unconscious aim of controlling and possessing the people to whom this culture belonged. In the last thirty years, scholars of Middle Eastern origin, mostly living outside the area, have criticized the external narrative, deconstructed it and offered alternative ver- sions. But even at the end of the century, Western perceptions of the Middle East dominated the way local culture was represented. These perceptions were reductionist and essentialist and were based on the dichotomy between the ‘enlightened’ culture of the ‘West’ and the ‘primitive’ at best, if not vile, culture of the ‘Arab East’. American fi lms of the 1980s still subscribed to such a view, media coverage was still loyal to it and in many places academic research did not deviate from it. (This proclivity was accentuated by the reaction in the American media and some sections of academia to the attacks on New York and Washing- ton on 11 September 2001.)2 To describe the history of culture from within it is necessary to recognize the central role that the Arabic language played and plays in it (rather than the place of Islam, which more conventional Orientalist surveys would stress). Culture is language, and Arabic in the twentieth century had become the language of 165 popular culture culture in the Middle East even before the fi nal collapse of the Ottoman–Turkish world. It was institutionalized as a language of culture by European schools, missionary at heart but nonetheless pro- Arab nationalist in practice, where Arab intellectuals systemized, modernized and adapted the classical language to become a useful tool for presenting national views on the glorious Arab past, for discussing plans for unity, and for dreaming of future liberation from foreign occupation. The last Turkish rulers of the Middle East, the Young Turks, tried in vain to Turkify the Arab peoples left within their Empire, wishing to prevent them from becoming autonomous and eventually independent. It was too late. Outside the realm of the Empire, Muslim leaders in Egypt were already produc- ing linguistic and political dictionaries for wider use in the Arab world as a whole, while Christian intellectuals in Greater Syria, inside the Empire, at the end of the nineteenth century, were already constructing Arabic as the language of nationalism and self- determination.3 The Arabic language became a weapon also in the twentieth century. In French Algeria it turned out to be a powerful tool against the French destruction of the country’s infrastructure and the subjugation of the society’s spirit in the name of enlightenment. But language did not play such a crucial role everywhere in the Middle East – at least not in the view of more critical scholarship. Conventional wisdom has it that in the case of modern Iran, the Persian language was essential for shaping the nation. However, a more revisionist view claims that the architects of the new national movement were trying to diminish the centrality of Persian and give space for the other languages spoken in the country in an effort to integrate the ethnic minorities in Iran. Hence Persian lost the paramount status it proba- bly had in earlier periods as a shaper of a national identity.4 In less trying times, culture in the Middle East was a subtle way to express identity. It still is, as can be sensed by visitors to institutions such as the Darat al- Funun in Amman. This is a home for art and artists coming from Jordan and the Arab world at large. It is housed in a 1920s building overlooking the heart of Amman, built among the ruins of a sixth- century Byzantine church. Its very construction tells the story of cultural identity, woven from layers of historical civilizations interacting with universal and global interpretations of art. It hosts visual art exhibitions in which drawings, sculpture and architecture make up a mosaic of messages about the identities of the Darat and its guests. All over the Arab world, buildings like this tell the intricate multilayered story of culture. Buildings are the product of history as is artisanship, as can be seen from the arti- facts produced by the Iranian carpet industry. Ever since 1500 it has incorporated changing tastes and interests as society has changed. The patterns on Persian rugs and carpets are more than just craftsmanship: they tell tales of history and identity. Research into them demands the combined skills of economic, social, and art historians.5 In its most visual form, Middle Eastern culture, like any other, was a matter of 166 popular culture local taste and aesthetics: a source of pleasure for those with money and time to enjoy it. In Lebanon, the philanthropist Nicolas Sursock Ibrahim bequeathed a beautiful mansion to the Lebanese people to house the country’s treasures for people to view and appreciate. The Darat in Jordan and the Sursock Palace in Lebanon host exhibitions each year produced by visual artists young and old. The older among them began working after the Second World War, spending long periods in Paris; the younger ones are already graduates of national academies of art in the Arab world. The clash between imported and local tastes – a harsh and explosive clash in the world of politics – is very delicate and subtle here. Even more veteran in this respect are the Turkish visual arts. Their modern phase began in the late eighteenth- century Ottoman military schools for techni- cal purposes. In 1883 the fi rst Ottoman School of Fine Arts was established and its impact was felt in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century. By the beginning of the century professional associations of visual artists appear (the fi rst one being the ‘Ottoman Painters Society’ of 1909. The most important school of painting was that which was known as the ‘1914 generation’.6 Its taste and orien- tation were contested later in the century by a younger and more daring school that developed new modes and styles. Both old and new schools belong in a way more to the history of European painting than to that of the Middle East, which indicates how visual arts refl ect the same hesitations of self and external identity as do political positions and economic realities. Turkey has not solved those questions of identity and belonging to this very day.7 But visual arts are a peripheral and not central feature of Middle Eastern cul- tural history. In the twentieth century the leading aspects of culture were the performing arts. Nothing compares, so it seems, with the power of music to move old and young, women and men, the rich and the poor from Fez to Basra and from Istanbul to Aden and Khartoum, as the sounds of the ud, naiya and violin. Music in the twentieth century When Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer began theorizing about music they added to previous and past research (which had begun in ancient times) the concept of music as symbolizing an intricate interplay between talent and intellect, will and competence. They defi ned music as a powerful force which motivates people as no other art can. Ever since that insight at the end of the nineteenth century, music has been not only performed and listened to: it has been also analysed and integrated into the scholarly discussion of culture.8 The process has dangerously led us away from the personal experience of music, replacing it by a reductionist appreciation. Even an analytical chapter about music should be written with a conscious awareness of the absence of the music itself. Listening to music comes before analysing and theorizing it. I have tried to compensate for this defi ciency by looking at the emotions music arouses among the people for whom it was and still is such a source of joy and pleasure. 167 popular culture As enthusiasm for music is aroused not just by the music itself, but also by the performers, an important part of this chapter is devoted to musicians’ careers and status, as well as personal stories. What I hope to show is that nowhere is the tension greater than between the pejorative and diminishing stereotyping of what is ‘Arab’ in popular Western culture on the one hand, and the complexities involved in Arabic music as a symbol for culture itself, on the other. One place where this complexity has been appreciated for many years is the Lebanese conservatory in Beirut. It is one of the oldest in the Arab world and ever since it opened, its students have laboured on a variety of musical modes, which are common only to the eastern Arab music performed in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.