Amid its superdiverse population, the United Arab Emirate’s Islamic call to prayer, the adhān, functions at the intersection of Arabic and Islamic sound aesthetics to identify the country as an Arab, Muslim nation state while also forming discrete ethno-class publics, situated around varying mosque calls in different urban neighborhoods. Through ethnographic fieldwork from 2017 to 2019, I examine how members of an Emirati family organize their lives around the adhān to reinforce discourses of ethnonational socialization, gendered mobility, and homosociality within their cloistered urban tribal enclave of Al-Zaab in city of Abu Dhabi. I conceptualize the adhan as an orienting soundmark or unique community sound (Schafer 1994). However, I argue that in addition to producing an acoustic experience that delineates an Islamic public space, the adhān’s interpellative capacity stems from its function as a series of speech acts which situate listeners in different chronotopes—or space-time locations—and orient their responses in specific ways (Bakhtin 1981, Austin 1975, Butler 1997). Hence, the adhān is always experienced from within a situated, discursive, and embodied context that reflects the surrounding sociopolitical environment. During the event of the adhān, there exist two main chronotopes that emplace pious listeners in several nested time-space domains: the chronotope of masjid and the chronotope of jamiᶜ. For my Emirati interlocutors, the chronotope of masjid, derived from the Arabic root verb s-j-d, to prostrate, opens up a portal to communicate directly with God and engage in continual ethical self-formation outside of worldly time (El Guindi 2008). The chronotope of jamiᶜ, derived from the root verb j-m-ᶜ, to gather, positions Emiratis in the iterative constitution of their nation, community, and family in a society supported by welfare citizenship. However, over the last decade, infrastructural changes have led to a gradual shift away from welfare citizenship and extended family living in urban tribal enclaves to two-income nuclear family homes in multiethnic, middle-class suburbs. Accordingly, as members of the Emirati family discuss moving to their new home in the suburbs, the marked reduction of the adhān in new developments becomes a synecdoche for processes of social change and Emiratis’ ambivalence towards them.

This paper examines the role of social identity, narrative, and music in Turkish–Kurdish reconciliation through a comparative study of the discographies of two bands, Kardeş Türküler (Turkish: “Ballads of Solidarity”) and Bajar (Kurdish: “City”). The last three decades of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict have oscillated between periods of state and non-state violence as well as periods of de-escalation, peacemaking, and openings for civil rights. Throughout these years, bands like Kardeş Türküler and Bajar have been musicking the stories of Turkey’s Kurdish communities, aided by the lifting of restrictions on non-Turkish language publication and art-making in the 1990s. In their efforts to spark curiosity and build understanding among Turkey’s many ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and faith communities, these two bands have often grappled with contested national, linguistic, ethnic, and religious identities in Turkey. The aims of both Kardeş Türküler and Bajar fit neatly into John Paul Lederach and Angela J. Lederach’s sonic metaphor for reconciliation, which allows for an understanding of reconciliation as resounding within small, local containers of activity and relationship (rather than only on an official stage). Yet, the growing literature on the role of musicking initiatives within reconciliation is overly focused on claiming the successes of music in conflict transformation, while remaining sparse on the particularities of how music interrelates with conflict dynamics. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on social identity theory and a new matrix around the function of narrative genre in conflict to elaborate how Kardeş Türküler and Bajar construct narratives of the Kurdish experience in Turkey. In my study of a 20-song sample from these two bands, I use Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina’s collective axiology of social identity and Solon Simmons’s narrative genre model to elaborate a more precise understanding of how intergroup relationships are constructed in the context of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict and draw out potential implications for Turkish–Kurdish reconciliation. The use of these frameworks allows me to examine both the social identity content and the narrative processes at work in the sample. The results of this analysis suggest that narratives of social identity and intergroup relationship in the Turkish–Kurdish conflict can play out in both conflict escalatory and conflict de-escalatory modes. However, even in conflict escalatory modes, these narratives can still avoid denigration of outgroups, providing a better understanding of exactly how music can play a constructive role in conflict transformation and reconciliation.

In 1941, the Lebanese composer and musicologist Wadia Sabra published an article with the provocative title, “Arab music is the basis for Western art,” in which he argued that, contrary to popular belief, it was Arab music and not Greek music that had primarily influenced contemporary European classical music and had given it much of its core technique and theory. Among his arguments, Sabra claimed that the Arabs had invented the harmonic interval of a third, which is crucial to all Western art music, directly contradicting the Orientalist belief that Arab music not only lacked harmony but was indeed defined by this lack. Thus Sabra’s work inverted colonialist understandings of music and history by positioning Arab and Muslim cultures in the role of historical leaders, while also subversively invoking the modernity marker of what he called “musical science” to do it. This project developed out of the longer trajectory of Sabra’s career, in which he studied musicology in Paris and was hailed as a musical “polyglot” by his French interlocutors, going on to represent Lebanon at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music where he worked on the commission to modernize Arab scales. This paper will analyze Sabra’s career, focusing on two pivotal texts: “Arab Music is the basis for Western art” (1941) and “Exposé of a Perfected New System” (1940), the latter of which came out of his work at the Congress and sought to develop a universal musical system that brought together Eastern and Western scales through scientific methods. I ask: how can we reconcile Sabra’s attempt to make a “universal music” with his claims for Arab musical superiority? How did Sabra’s invocations of scientific language represent a rhetorical move towards a musical modernity, and how can this be situated against this period of European colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Sabra’s unique mobility as a scholarly figure? In what ways did Sabra’s work undermine or challenge colonialist and Orientalist narratives, and in what ways did it continue to underwrite their basic premises? In this paper I will show that this fascinating and understudied figure offers an understanding of the complex intersections of knowledge, culture, Orientalism, and pan-Arabism, and more broadly that by approaching music as both lens and historical object, we can gain deeper insight into the intellectual processes and political claims-making of this period.