Nasheed

New mediated inshad, often termed "nasheed"

With the rise of mass music media—beginning with early 20th c phonograms—new modes of commodified production and consumption were enabled, transforming the sound and meaning of Islamic music. Mass media tend both to replace traditional performance, and to standardize it, according to high-value models. While cassettes (1970s) greatly expanded mediazation, until recently most distribution was regional.

Since the 1990s, a studio-produced style called nashid or anashid, has been globally disseminated via satellite TV and Internet, in the ethos of Islamic reformism. While traditional themes of praise and supplication remain, new ones—political or social—are also taken up, in keeping with reformism’s more socially engaged worldview.

Conservative performers avoid instruments, though often admitting percussion as a matter of principle. Such nashid is restrained, with little improvisation or elaborate melisma, yet modernized through digital processing, harmonization, complex arrangements, and music videos. Production values (including studio techniques, and associated music videos) align with those of contemporary popular music, and complex arrangements featuring harmony and counterpoint are often deployed, while "musiqa" (here meaning musical instruments) is often eschewed as un-Islamic, and the focus is on solo and choral voices. Certain vocal values reminiscent of the older inshad remain however: clear, penetrating voices in a high tessitura, carrying an emotional ethos, and not infrequently by juxtaposing solo and chorus (like tawashih), or using a "dhikr" ostinato (repeating a religious formula) in rhythm with a higher and less metric melody floating on top, like the Sufi hadra.

One of the most media-savvy voices is that of the Kuwaiti Shaykh Mashari Rashid al-`Afasy (b. 1976), who also recites Qur’an and ad`iyya, serves as imam of Kuwait’s Grand Mosque, and even owns his own religious TV station (al-`Afasy TV). His nasheeds are fairly conservative.

While the style of nasheed is derived from Arabic inshad, a variety of musical styles and vocal timbres has filtered in, and new nasheed are performed in many different languages.

Some other examples of "non-music" nasheed:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI8BaqrEMdg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZiV6bmPLfw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8GDLy9K2Fk

Others veer closer to the domain of popular music, either by introducing other musical styles (western, Arab or other), or utilizing musical instruments.

Some nasheed cleaves to the older Sufi atmosphere of most inshad, which, even when not explicitly mystical, tended to focus on yearning for God and His Prophet. However of late Islamic movements of all ideological stripes have deployed nasheed, including jihadist movements.