Fes, 2006. By Youssef Rakha.
When I was in my late teens, I surprised the gathering at an older writer’s house here in Cairo by insisting that we should play neither Eric Clapton nor Omm Kulthoum but Yassin al Tohami, the star munshid (or performer of devotional chanting, called inshad).
Not that I was aware of it at the time, but as an irreligious whippersnapper studying in England, it must have seemed strange for me to be interested in what is, roughly speaking, Islam’s liturgical music, which in the case of Sheikh Yassin, what is more, relies on grass roots Upper Egyptian melodies.
When I showed such keenness on dhikr (that is, the ceremonies of remembrance of which inshad is part), my host and many others could only scoff at my supposed pretension. And, ironically, it was their dismissiveness that made me think there must be something to it, after all: if I cared so much about something so little expected of me then maybe I, this musical preference of mine, or both of us together were in some way special…
I am now in my late thirties and little has changed in my response to Sufi music. That summer break in 1996 or 1997, as it turns out, was the beginning of an enduring love story.
My next discovery was that the breath-stopping verses of the 13th-century “Sultan of Lovers” Sidi Omar ibn al Farid performed by Sheikh Yassin were not Sheikh Yassin’s exclusive property. The great turn-of-the-century Quran reciter and munshid Sheikh Ali Mahmoud (one of Omm Kalthoum’s mentors), for one, also sang them. His style was to Yassin’s what a heavenward beam is to tectonic rumblings, but somehow he had the same effect on me.
Initially on cassette tapes, both Yassin and Ali Mahmoud were to accompany me through the rest of expatriation, my return, and the slow emergence of my hybrid identity.
And so, since first becoming aware of myself as an adult with tastes that could be idiosyncratic enough to make older and wiser Egyptians laugh at me, Sufi music became the soundtrack to my life. Through CDs, then MP3s, and increasingly online, I was to connect with euphonic mysticism again and again: through the Syrian masters Adib al Dayekh and Hassan al Haffar, the Iraqi Sheikh Ahmad al Mawsili, the dhikr of Tunisia’s Bedouin, the female devotional trills of Mauritania… It was an attachment that would last, surviving Marxist and Freudian spells, and living past atheistic and new-age phases into my mature agnosticism.
A resounding beat and taut vocal chords, often without any other accompaniment, can go far.
For, whether or not you give in to the trance state they induce, rituals of praise and invocation have the power to make you aware of being not alive per se, but conscious: a charged particle in what appears to be universal mind, however much you deny such a thing’s existence; an electron circling a nucleus the way a planet orbits a star; or the way a Mevlevi dervish, having emerged all in white out of his black cape, whirls around his sheikh… All of which gives the image of pilgrims circumambulating the Kaaba fascinating significance.
It happens inside of you while you’re listening. As your breath echoes the rhythm, you feel like a bead in the infinite rosary of cosmic intention. But before you know it, it’s the rhythm that’s echoing your breath and all that is left of you is the echo. You have turned into the grain of sand that is all of the world, and through that transformation you reach the unreachable.
Never mind the religious beliefs that I’m supposed to have which I don’t. Using Sufi music to access this plane of awareness has always been a compelling and rewarding exercise: a way of going above and beyond not only my individual ego and physical body but also mathematical space and time. And to this day making my way to that place remains the closest thing to a rite of worship that I’ve performed regularly through the years.
Though not one of those people who “can’t live without music”, playing or attending live dhikr, occasionally participating in the dance-like group movements that accompany it in a public context, has given me experiences far deeper and more meaningful than any relaxation or fun I might otherwise associate with song.
As music, in fact, dhikr tends to be repetitive. But you never grow bored of it — and not only because of the way it subtly dominates your senses, radiating from the ears inward as it dissolves the boundaries between what you’re hearing and the you that is hearing it.
There are also traditions of dhikr wherever Muslims are be found on earth. Within the Arab world alone, the magnificent variety of Sufi sounds maps out endless routes to that secret sanctuary of selfless self. Its range is astounding, from the African-flavored gnawa of Essaouira — which, like Sudanese zar ceremonies, is associated with magic and exorcism — to the Turkish-influenced sama of Aleppo where canonical love poems are chanted alternately with ney solos…
I don’t know if it’s being Egyptian that makes me respond so much more viscerally to modal than symphonic music. It could be unconscious childhood programing, it might even be genes. I do know that the tarab (or “enchantment”) that sets eastern euphony apart is only a small part of what goes on when I hand myself over to dhikr.
The rest has to do with the most fundamental of Sufi insights: that the divine can be sought without recourse to God-given (or any) laws, that the heavens are more about the ecstasy of making contact with Oneness than living by the rules, and that we are here not to moralize and presume but — being of the same substance as the universe and made to forget that we are by our egos — to remember.
Written for The Outpost
