Islamic content and Islamicate music
- Practice, discourse, mysticism
- Ritual practice
- General Language-centrality
- Specific forms of "language performance"
- Qur'anic recitation (tilawa), with its rules of pronunciation (ahkam al-tajwid)
- The pedagogy of Qur'anic recitation (kuttab)
- Call to prayer (adhan)
- Traditional genres of poetic performance, e.g. inshad, and especially its collective forms, such as tawashih (shaykh + bitana)
- Mawlid: celebration of the birth (death) days of Prophet and saints.
- Sufi orders and their liturgies (hadra) (see below)
- Discourse
- Controversy over music, and distinctions in music terminology
- Qur'anic source
- Sunna source (Hadith)
- Resulting discourses in various genres (fatwas, Sufi treatises)
- Extremes of discourse and practice
- High profile of music in the courts (Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman)
- Ethical conditions for accepting certain kinds of music
- Music as haram: Suspicion of music, Forbidding musical instruments
- Controversy over music, and distinctions in music terminology
- Mystical currents (Sufism) in practice and discourse
- "tazkiyat al-nafs, tarqiyat al-ruh" (taming the self; raising the spirit or soul)
- Batin > Zahir (Haqiqa > Sharia) (flexibility)
- Experiential relation to God
- Non-literal perspective enabled absorption of local traditions
- Aesthetic used as means to spirituality, expression of spirituality
- Use of music/poetry to express/attain spiritual state (ecstasy, union, annihilation...)
- Ritual practice