Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria

Preface

xv xv P R E FA C E Now in the final act, disaster tows our history toward us on its face. What is our past but memories pierced like deserts prickled with cactus? What streams can wash it? It reeks with the musk of spinsters and widows back from pilgrimage. The sweat of dervishes begrimes it as they twirl their blurring trousers into miracles. —Adonis, from “Elegy for the Time at Hand” Maœtla⁄: An Elegy for the Time at Hand In his “Elegy for the Time at Hand,”the Syrian-born poet Adonis evokes a sense of the modern condition in the Arab world.1 With lines echoing T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he conjures a bleak vision of a society mired in decay and grief for a withered past. Later in the poem, images of decay and waywardness mix with an almost apocalyptic violence as the Arabs approach what the poet calls “the final act”of their contemporary drama. Facing an eternal “sea”of exile and impotent to shed tears, they utter bootless cries while the salt spray stings their wounds. According to Adonis, “the time at hand” has come, the here and now of the struggle for the future; and yet, in this vision the Arabs respond to impending disaster by escaping to the banality of nostalgia and the solipsistic comforts of mysticism. Adonis presents a bleak vision of contemporary Arab society, and a deeply cynical view of current responses to the crisis of modernity in the Arab lands. xvi Preface Indeed, the Arabs find themselves living through a period of marked crisis, their aspirations for cultural and social modernity thwarted by lengthy periods of colonialism, postcolonial instabilities, persistent economic stagnation, and crises of political legitimacy. From the struggle for Palestine and the devastation and bloodshed in Iraq, to internal struggles for self-determination from the Maghreb to the Mashriq, Arabs still face numerous challenges in meeting the needs of the present and in articulating visions for the future—one that looms as increasingly uncertain.2  Among the Jasmine Trees investigates how music in Syria shapes debates about Arab society and culture, and how discourses of decline and crisis have shaped music. In doing so I attempt to show how, contrary to Adonis’s bleak vision, many Syrians recover a source of strength and vitality in their cultural heritage in an effort to negotiate a pathway to modernity. In the context of the search for modernity, aesthetic practices such as performing and listening to music come to play an essential role in the elaboration of concepts of personhood, community , and nation. They do so through accessing rich domains of sentiment and affect, which, I argue, play an important role in defining modern subjectivities in Syria today. In Syria, as around the Arab world, the arts are an important arena for the struggle for the future. These visions increasingly evoke the past, often through discourses of a return to the Arab heritage—a response that Adonis decries in the poem yet that remains powerful in Syria today. The turn to heritage in the quest for an authentically Arab modernity produces in contemporary Syrian art what I call “the aesthetics of authenticity”—practices of cultural creation and consumption that promote the formation of social worlds based on a dichotomy of the authentic, perceived as true and good, and the inauthentic, perceived as false and bad. In aesthetic realms ranging from music and poetry to painting, architecture, and narrative, among others, Syrians find either remembrances of lost glories—of the literary and scientific achievements of ⁄Abbasid Baghdad, medieval Cordoba, or early Arabia—or reminders of present failures—of imitation of the West, the loss of traditions, and shattered hopes for the future. From the early twentieth century through the 1950s, Syrians, like their counterparts in other Arab nations, drew inspiration from the West and embraced many elements of European culture, just as Europe drew enormous inspiration from the Orient, as Edward Said (1978, 1994) has demonstrated. Yet, from the 1960s onward, many intellectuals, politicians, and artists sensed that Westernization simply had gone too far and had led to a loss of local cultural specificity. Preface xvii As one Syrian film critic told me, “In the fifties we used to say ‘kull shµı faranjµı baranjµı’ [Everything from the West is Best], but now things are different. There’s a lot more interest in...