Sufism, Music and Society: in Turkey and the Middle East
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SUFISM, MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN TURKEY AND THE MIDDLE EAST SUFISM, MUSIC AND SOCIETY IN TURKEY AND THE MIDDLE EAST Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, November 27–29, 1997 Edited by Anders Hammarlund, Tord Olsson, Elisabeth Özdalga SWEDISH RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN ISTANBUL TRANSACTIONS VOL. 10 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Front cover: A Mevlevi sema performance in Darphane, Istanbul. Back cover: Calligraphy from the beginning of the nineteenth century saying: “Ya Hazreti Mevlana” (Istanbul Ansiklopedisi, vol. 5 p. 426, Istanbul, 1994). © Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the authors. Logotype: Bo Berndal Prepared by The Economic and Social History Foundation of Turkey Distributor: Curzon Press, Richmond, England ISBN 0-203-34697-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-7007-1148-1 (Print Edition) ISSN 1100–0333 Preface One of the most powerful memories from my first visit to Istanbul in the legendary student movement year of 1968 is the sound of the ezan, the call to prayer. Especially the ezan of early dawn, called out before the noise of the swarming streets deadens the distinctness of any single sound, has ever since then been coupled with undefined, but excited expectations on my part of a different, at that time undiscovered world—life itself, as a matter of fact. One summer night a few years after my first visit, I was sitting in a coffee-house in Eskişehir, a middle- sized town in Anatolia, when the müezzin called out the evening prayer. Wishing to share my appreciative feelings for the ezan, I said in halting Turkish: “How beautiful he sings!” Since people at the table smiled, almost with a kind of embarrassment, I understood that I had said something wrong. The ezan is not sung, but read! The proper expression would have been: “Ne güzel ezan okuyor!” (lit. How beautifully he reads the ezan!) Having corrected the sentence, however, I had second thoughts. What if, by insisting in evaluating the ezan from an aesthetic point of view, I had made another, yet more subtle mistake. Perhaps my first expression had been wrong in a double sense, not only grammatically, but also ethically. This question touches on the complex and sometimes controversial issue concerning the role of music in different religious rituals. As for Islam, the opinions widely diverge on this question. The traditionally most common and most orthodox view is that liturgy (especially the reading of the Koran) admittedly may be supported by different forms of chanting, but the musical element in a religious ceremony should be kept under strict control, and not entice the listener or performer to neglect sacred meaning for musical enjoyment. This puritanism is not all-embracing, however. Within Sufism, the tradition of Islamic mysticism, music has developed more freely. The Sufi order (tarikat) which is especially connected with the development of sophisticated forms of ritual music, vocal and instrumental, has been the Mevlevi order, inspired by Mevlânâ Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî (d. 1273). One of the most remembered Psalms (Nr. 42) in the Bible reads: “As the hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God.” The same mystical longing is expressed by Mevlânâ in the very first part of his massive Sufi poetical work, Mesnevi, but through another metaphor, the ney, the reed flute. In the hands of the neyzen, the ney expresses its longing for the root, from which it once was cut off. The fact that the ney, a musical instrument, is chosen as an essential symbol for the mystical longing of the Mevlevi dervishes, is a telling evidence of the importance of music in this order. The Mevlevi order has been especially important for the development of music in Ottoman society, both as sacral, mystical music and as secular, art music. It is characteristic of the development of Ottoman art music, mainly played at the court, but also in homes of people of high station, that many of the performers were Mevlevi dervishes. Close co-operation between performers of sacred and secular music developed, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was part of an early process of secularization of Ottoman society. In spite of the fact that many dervishes took part in performances of v Minarets carrying the sound of the ezan into the busy city life of Istanbul. secular art music, and that the musical performances of the dervish lodges made use of the same instruments and structural forms as art music, the genres of sacred and secular music were strictly separated; the ayin played in the dervish lodge was clearly distinguished from the fasıl, played at the court. Still, the firm distinction between art music, on the one hand, and the chanting of the Koran, on the other, that had been most common in Islamic religious thought, was blurred, and the religious ayin, and the secular fasıl could both be categorized as music—mûsîkî. This also means that, in such a context, evaluating the ezan on aesthetic grounds would most probably not have been blamed, even though posing such a question was culturally like singing out of tune. During the last two or three decades, the Mevlevi ceremony, sema, with the “whirling dervishes” has become very popular inside, as well as outside, Turkey. The first time I visited a Mevlevi sema was in Konya in 1972. The performances were held in the sports center of the city, and in spite of the somewhat profane atmosphere in the hall, I was truly enchanted. About twenty years later I attended the same ceremony together with students from my Sociology of Religion class at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Since we had to travel almost 300 kilometers to get there and did not have the financial means to stay overnight, we had to visit one of the afternoon performances. This turned out, however, to be a very different experience. Above all, the audience was different. In fact, the matinees were especially organized for women, who could not stay over night when they traveled without their husbands. They came in busloads from far and near, together with their young children, and filled the hall with chattering, soft drink bottles, and sunflower seeds. On top of all this muddle, the performance itself was cut almost half-way, a kind of short-cut sema, specially arranged for touristic purposes. vi I was filled with disappointment and confusion. The sema had become a mass attraction and had totally lost its enchantment. Apart from contempt for the womanish audience, this slipshod piece of work also reflected the profanation that occurs when sacred rituals are brought out on the market. The inevitable question posing itself as a result of this is: “What happens to the inner structure of the musical form itself under such dramatically changed conditions?” Today there is a renewed interest in classical Ottoman sacral and art music in Turkey. This trend runs parallel to an increased concern for cultural, ethnic and religious identities, and the rising tide of religious revivalism sets the tone. However, the social and cultural conditions where these renewed trends develop are very different from the ones that prevailed several centuries ago. What, now, has happened to different forms of Sufi music as society, with its political institutions, social structures, and cultural traditions, have undergone profound changes? These intriguing issues are addressed in this book, which is a collection of papers read at a conference entitled “Tasavvuf, Music and Social Change in Turkey and the Middle East” held at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul from 27th to 29th November, 1997. The conference was part of a wider concentration of programs focusing on “Islamic culture”. The book is divided into five parts. The first part on “Tasavvuf and Music” contains a single chapter written by Annemarie Schimmel, and is a general introduction to the role of music within Islamic mysticism. The second part, “Method and Aesthetics”, consists of three chapters, where various methodological problems involved in the study of music and social change are addressed. Dag Österberg presents a three- fold framework for the socio-musicological analysis: music as expression, music as structure and music contained in a context. These three notions help in classifying different musicological analyses and relating them to each other. Amnon Shiloah problematizes the concept of change by asking: “Change for whom? Is it for the objective outsider, or for the people who practice the music being evaluated?” Professor Shiloah brings up the emic/etic dichotomy and other methodological issues in relation to a rich material on Near Eastern Muslim and Jewish liturgical and ritual music. Anders Hammarlund builds his discussion on an analysis of the development of art music in the West, and relates that to patterns of musical change among different performing communities among Turkish, Iranian and Syrian-Orthodox immigrants in Sweden. Hammarlund introduces a number of theoretical pairs of concepts, where he specially emphasizes the form/ spirit (eidos/ethos) dichotomy and its relevance in the analysis of musical change among present-day performers. The third part, “Structure and Evolution” contains three chapters on Ottoman classical music. Evrim Binbaş’s chapter deals exclusively with Mevlevi music and sema in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Walter Feldman and Edwin Seroussi discuss the relationship between ritual and art music in Ottoman society. Both authors point out the fact that the Mevlevi dervishes constituted an important part of the performers of art music at the court.