Both scholarship and journalistic accounts of Middle Eastern rap and Algerian rai tend to focus on their political and sociological dimensions, rather than on their sounds and aesthetics. This is especially the case when it comes to hip-hop from Palestine, which is almost inevitably presented as a transparent expression of the political grievances and issues of the Palestinians. Little attention has been paid, by contrast, to Palestinian rap as “art,” and in particular to its sound. Meanwhile, recent popular trends in Algeria, involving the mixture of rai and hip-hop or rhythm 'n' blues (sometimes known as “rai 'n' b”) have been almost entirely ignored. Marc Schade-Poulsen (1999) has helpfully suggested that the use of “Western” sounds (disco, rock) into rai music represents a kind of incorporation of an “other” that represents greater access to consumptive power. What happens to “local” sounds when drum machines and synthesizers are adopted and incorporated into the Palestinian and Algerian soundscapes? What sorts of new identities are imagined? Do Palestinian youth feel themselves to be part of the “hip-hop” nation? Does the collaboration of rai artist Khaled with Magic System, from Ivory Coast, create a sense of transnational community and increase the solidarities of so-called immigrants in France? An attention to the sounds and the aesthetics of Palestinian rap and Algerian “rai 'n' b” promises to provide important insights into new imagined identities and rethinkings of the relationship between “art” and “politics.”

Thinkers on the political significance of sound have highlighted the capacity of specific audial environments and listening practices to create and propagate ‘affective’ subjectivities and communities (Attali, Nancy). And, indeed, the Islamic tradition has from early on and very controversially thought about the significance of listening practices and sound because it precisely recognized aurality’s power. These debates have gained revived interest recently within the Islamic revival movement, given the emergence of a new music and artistic scene in its midst. By investigating the ethical and political entailments of these contested and evolving music styles and listening practices that take place within Britain’s emerging Islamic cultural scene, this presentation aims to contribute to a larger discussion about the significance of “aurality” within the anthropology of religion. On the one hand is the Islamic cultural scene in Britain marked by internal contestations around what constitutes a legitimate form of contemporary ‘Islamic’ music. And while the doctrine of the illegitimacy of musical instruments is not globally shared by the revival movement, too much beat, too much synthesizer, or too much bass are still often judged as rendering difficult the capacity of the ethical ear to listen and to contemplate on the messages. Rather, it is said to distract by addressing the bodily inclination for rhythm and movement. Yet, for others, it is precisely this effect that is deemed to reinforce the ear’s capacity to listen and to feel. These debates, however, are not only reducible to normative or moral concerns, but reflect a complex articulation of these concerns with questions of taste or aesthetic sensibilities defined by generation or cultural and ethnic background. Such debates expose a clear concern with “listening” as a central activity within Islamic ethical practice. Though these issues invite us to reflect phenomenologically on questions of sensory experience, perception, and embodiment, I abstain from using these notions in terms of a self-evident and authentic realm. I intend, instead, to elaborate them by articulating the insights from phenomenological approaches to listening with a body of literature that thinks through the lens of power, modes of habituating and governing the body, producing and governing affect (i.e. Asad, Massumi, Foucault, Bourdieu). In this case, modes of listening are defined and redefined as much by the moral pedagogical impetus of the Islamic revival movement, as by post-9/11, post-7/7 ‘preventing extremism’ discourses and policies of British state actors.

Encountering music in the Middle East has transformed over the past half-century. In Morocco, where once researchers traveled far afield, now folk musicians from across the country are brought together to play at festivals. Instead of rustic field equipment, the stages have professional-quality microphones and mixers. But perhaps most importantly, at the largest festivals the recordings are not made with scholarly or fan interest in mind. Instead, the various funding sources--government ministries as well as private corporations from Morocco, Europe, and the United States--have vested interests in these recordings. For example, the state-owned satellite channel 2M is interested in generating content for its broadcasts. Sounds and images that were edited and produced live during performances, projected onto large screens for the benefit of the huge crowds at the Essaouira Festival, later turned up almost unchanged on television, often months and years later. As the musicians and the fans continued to see themselves on television during the winters, they responded to this new mediation of their performances. They became more conscious of the camera crews and shots; of themselves as contemporary festival audiences and performers, and as future televised ones; of the qualities of sound produced by instruments and bodies; and finally of the potential advertising revenue streams that were opened through these recordings. Each of these areas--knowledge about the mediated self, aesthetic judgement, and money or profit--yields questions about rationality and performance: When musicians know more about how the final product will look and sound, what changes do they make to their performances? How do they adjust to account for stage and television audiences? How do they develop criteria for new aesthetic judgements? How do they manage expectations for income based on advertising revenue? Most importantly, what is the power of aesthetics to change subjectivities, particularly those regarding youth identity, and ultimately to change politics? More and more, as Middle Eastern governments find so-called "beach and antiquities" tourist markets to have become saturated, capitalist pressure to expand and grow leads these governments to evaluate and exploit the "soft" targets of tourism: folk music and culture. These questions indicate new directions in the anthropology of music in the Middle East that, while still mainly confined to the study of pop music and cultural studies, will become increasingly relevant more broadly in the anthropology of music.

For the first few decades of Israel’s existence, Middle Eastern musical traditions, viewed as “other,” were marginalized and largely excluded from dominant musical media (i.e., radio, musical festivals, national performances). The decade of the 1990s, however, marked the beginning of a new era for the performance of Arab and Middle Eastern music in Israel with optimism toward peace at an all time high. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Israelis began forming a range of Middle Eastern-and Arab-influenced bands. The violence of the 2000s—with the second intifada underway—stood in sharp contrast to the unfettered hopefulness of the previous decade. Yet performances of Middle Eastern music set in motion in the 1990s continued to flourish during the turbulent period of the 2000s. For example, the biggest Middle Eastern music festival in Israel, the Oud Festival, began in 2001 and grew steadily each year as it continued gaining global sponsors. This festival and others like it always included several concerts of collaboration between Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis. Hearing lyrics sung in Arabic and Eastern modes containing quarter tones performed by Jews and Arabs on Israel’s most prestigious stages evoked glimmers of hope for peace to diverse Israeli audience members—Palestinian and Jewish—who were in desperate need of a respite from the violence. Though their political views, age, and ethnic make up differed from one another they engaged actively in “listening for peace” together with one another—often exiting the performance space more hopeful about prospects for peace than when they entered. As I will also illustrate, however, the impetus for these musical collaborations of coexistence between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis only rarely came from the musicians themselves. Because the (often global) funding for these concerts and festivals were based on the premise of coexistence, some collaborative projects were specifically created for that purpose by festival organizers. This paper—like other recent scholarship—points toward the powerful ways that musical audition can uniquely transform diverse audiences. Yet it also reflects upon the meaning of these affective moments (when these sonic imaginaries of peace are co-opted and truly imaginary), theorizing on ways in which aural culture can obscure conflict and issues of power at play.

Music’s ability to subvert, circumvent and transgress borders escapes neither the musicians who live on these divides nor the scholars who study them. This paper explores some ways in which scholars have employed Israeli and Palestinian musical intersections as sound evidence for a resolution agenda. In other words, the employment of musicians who cross enemy lines as exemplars of a larger societal impetus toward a just and resolved coexistence. Reviewing recent scholarship on Israeli-Palestinian border crossing in the works of Brinner (09), Saada Ophir (05), McDonald (08), Regev (06), and Horowitz (10), I ask whether the crossing of sound barriers predicts political realignment in conflict zones. To interrogate the interactive roles of music and politics in disputed territory, I expand upon Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s notion of the relational as a corrective to context (11). I suggest that contextualization may result in a process of embedding one field within or of the other, for example “text in context” or “politics of the aesthetic” rather than analyzing music, sound, politics, conflict, and aesthetics as embodied fields that inhabit both their own territory, and also behave in relation rather than “within” or “of” one another.