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)
    • Ethical conditions for acceptable music
    • Suspicion of music, Forbidding musical instruments
    • Contrast with high profile of music in the courts!
  • 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...)