中国文化与宗教专家学者讲论系列 (二)
Abstract
The Islamic World, the regions where Muslim communities form the majority, stretches from Southeast Asia to North Africa, encompassing a large number of nations and cultures which have been shaped variously by the one faith they share. This is particularly evident in their music: on the one hand, there is a significant controversy surrounding the permissibility of music in Islam, leading some communities to ban music and musical instruments; yet, at the same time, there are many practices in Islam, such as the call to prayer and the recitation of the Qur’an, that have an undeniably musical quality even though they are not nominally called ‘music’; furthermore, we know that most Muslim communities have their own hugely popular musical traditions that animate different public and private occasions, some of which have even attracted a global following for the spirituality that many perceive in them.
In this lecture, we shall explore the idea of ‘Music in the Islamic World’ through understanding the status of music in Islam, surveying music traditions & instruments in different parts of the Islamic world, and exploring their connections and specificities in terms of both the musical contents as well as the social context where music is made. Audio-visual examples will be supplanted by live performance of musical instruments from the Middle East and Central Asia.