Memory, Social Authority, and Composition in Damascene Dhikr By Jeffrey McCullough Piatt A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Stefania Pandolfo Professor Charles Hirschkind Professor Benjamin Brinner Spring 2014 Memory, Social Authority, and Composition in Damascene Dhikr Copyright 2014 by Jeffrey McCullough Piatt Abstract Memory, Social Authority, and Composition in Damascene Dhikr by Jeffrey McCullough Piatt Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair This dissertation examines the contemporary paradoxes, impasses, and new possibilities negotiated by Syrian Muslim men who practice the musical group worship of dhikr. Dhikr is group activity often associated with Sufism, and has long been an important part of Islamic practice in Syria and many other societies. Its historical tendency to rely heavily on song, movement, and affective expression within its ceremonies and discourses uniquely situate it as a site where questions are raised concerning the role music and emotion are to play in the building of ethical lives. Likewise, this dissertation takes dhikr as a site where modern transformations of society, of authority, and of norms governing the relation of religion and society are framed, and stances toward these issues worked out. Dhikr does not cleanly map onto the categories that are typically deployed to describe and study it, including the categories of mysticism, orthodoxy, and music. This research therefore also examines the way these categories, which inevitably must be discussed to understand dhikr, introduce their own particular distortions. By addressing these distortions, I am able to make better sense of the input of the men I got to know at dhikr events, in listening to their stories and memories, and in informal discussions with them. These men make keen observations regarding the radical transformations and disenfranchisements which the modern state has visited upon Syrian society over the last half-century and more. Together with these men, I explore a specific case of the possibilities and limits generated by the transformation of societies along lines established by Western modernity and its norms. Ethnographic research was conducted in Damascus, Syria among three main groups of Sunni Muslim men: dhikr participants and singers, Sufi sheikhs and others with formal and informal leadership roles within the dhikr community (including a prominent composer of dhikr music), and men who did not practice dhikr but who had serious and illuminating views on the practices and the questions I was researching. Part of my aim has been to explore the ways that certain modern Western framings of spirituality, mysticism, music, and art, which in many ways serve within liberal sensibilities as catch- alls for the highest good, serve to obscure other modes of religious practice, ethics, and 1 creative production. To the extent that these Western framings become normative or exert a normative force within modern configurations of life, they also extend the outer reaches of state power, despite not typically being considered part of it. In the interest of this question I have focused attention to the notion of musical art, and the types of social configurations and modes of creative production that, due to recent social change, are either no longer viable or have just recently become so. I have written this dissertation during the years of horrible conflict which began after I returned to Berkeley from the field, and I want nothing more for this research than for its themes to be once again relevant to the lives of the men who helped shape it, whose sets of concerns and questions have been tragically reduced to the scope of bare survival. 2 For Rajaa, Biso, and Sibal (for now) and for all who have suffered and been killed in Syria while I have written i TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures iii Acknowledgments iv Curriculum Vitae vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Memory and Authority 32 Chapter 3: Valuations, Frames, Images 74 Chapter 4: Composition, Art, Creativity, Part I 92 Chapter 5: Composition, Art, Creativity, Part II 117 Bibliography 140 Figures 149 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Standing portion of a dhikr meeting, dance of alternating steps. 149 Figure 2: Photo of a Mawlawi dhikr at the Umayyad Mosque, 1960’s. 150 Figure 3: Photo of the Damascus Mawlawi order leadership, 1920’s. 151 Figure 4: Iranian TV crew filming a Mawlawi dhikr in a downtown mosque. 152 Figure 5: Hired film crew at dhikr on the night of laylat al-qadr in Ramadan. 153 Figure 6: Cell-phone cameras at dhikr on the night of laylat al-qadr. 154 Figure 7: Zuheir Mnini and his calligraphy teacher, Badawi Dirani. 155 Figure 8: Photo from the Midan neighborhood of Damascus, 1927. 156 Figure 9: Magazine advertisement for the Casio VL-1 synthesizer. 157 Figure 10: Zuheir Mnini with sheikh and munshid at dhikr in Bab Msalla. 158 Figure 11: Scan of musical notation for rafaʻtu yadī by Zuheir Mnini. 159 Figure 12: Scan of lyrical text for rafaʻtu yadī by Zuheir Mnini. 160 Figure 13: Portrait of Sheikh Umar al-Aita. 161 Figure 14: Dhikr meeting in the Old City of Damascus. 162 Figure 15: Dhikr meeting and sitting of religious song (inshād). 163 Figure 16: Dhikr meeting. 164 iii Acknowledgments For institutional support, I thank the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program at U.C. Berkeley for allowing me to continue Arabic language study before my fieldwork. I thank the Graduate Division and Anthropology Department at U.C. Berkeley for helping me during all stages of my research, from coursework to fieldwork to writing. I thank William Morris for introducing me to the field of Islamic Studies at Oberlin College, and for being the first person for whom I understood scholarship to be a life-long journey and engagement. I thank Noah Solomon, who I met in Damascus before graduate school, for suggesting anthropology might be a good field for pursuing the questions in which I was interested. Without him and our conversations, I would not have found anthropology. I thank the graduate students with whom I participated in informal dissertation reading groups, who taught me to receive and give collaboratively-minded feedback. Their many comments pushed this dissertation forward. These colleagues include Dan Husman, Emily Wilcox, Mark Godwin, Shana Harris, Nick Bartlett, Zhanara Nauruzbayeva, Mika Tanaka, Mather George, and others. My research has benefited from a great many people at Berkeley. Margaret Larkin’s instruction in classical Arabic poetry gave me new understanding of the poetry of dhikr. In anthropology coursework, Paul Rabinow provided a stirring introduction to the field’s theoretical foundations. Samera Esmeir and Alexei Yurchak challenged and encouraged my thinking in the earlier stages of my project, including by reminding me that taking walks and imagining your audience are good for you. I thank Saba Mahmood for defining my sense of the types of issues addressed by postcolonial theory, and opening my eyes to what could be accomplished within anthropologies of Islam. Hers is a model of the kind of scholarship that illuminates questions, themselves illuminating, that had not previously been possible, much less asked. Without her, the research I have pursued at Berkeley would not have started. Ned Garrett, Kathleen Van Sickle, and Linda Eason have provided much support during my time at Berkeley. I thank them for their kind help in navigating the circuitry of the department and the institution. Ned was the person I spoke with when I was making preliminary phone contact with graduate programs. He was the only one among those I contacted across the country who did not make me feel embarrassed for my ignorance of how graduate programs work. I thank him and the whole department for consistently providing a sense of welcome. In my teaching-assistant role I have had the pleasure of learning course material and pedagogy from many compelling perspectives. My work as a teaching assistant has played a large role in my understanding of anthropology and my broader sense of the possibilities inherent to intellectual life. For their instruction and inspiration in this regard, and for providing me the tools with which all my future teaching will be geared and tuned, I thank Liu Xin, Luca D’Isanto, Aihwa Ong, Raya Shani, Charles Briggs, Cori Hayden, Lawrence Cohen, Deborah Gordon, and Christine Hastorf. I especially thank Stanley Brandes for his generous support and care, and for the many helpful suggestions he gave regarding my writing and future academic career. iv The members of my dissertation committee, Stefania Pandolfo, Charles Hirschkind, and Benjamin Brinner have brought this research to its fruition through their guidance, encouragement, comment, and criticism. In different ways they have each shaped the course of my interests and questions, while making me feel all the while that my research is my own and important. For their patience and support during the arduous process of writing I am grateful. My adviser Stefania Pandolfo has been the central facilitator of my navigation of the sometimes bumpy road of becoming an anthropological scholar. Her interventions, from applying theoretical correctives to demanding I examine my motives in a particular phrasing or approach, have shown me how one situates scholarship in life, and her input often put me back on track when I had lost sight of the way forward. Charles Hirschkind has provided comments and suggestions on my work which have somehow always ended up turning into magic keys that secured again the evanescent sense of my research’s purpose. With his help I have seen that dry spells end, and have ends—an important lesson.