Aesthetic Dimensions

Ṭarab is a dazzling term with a shifting history. In the pre-Islamic period, it referred to the effect of sound on animals and humans, such as the songs used by camel riders to spur on their camels (Ibn Manẓūr 2: 46). In later centuries, it came to signify a fully fledged aesthetic affect related to music, singing, and poetry. A singer is called مطرب (muṭrib, or “someone who evokes ṭarab”), and the typical repetitions of Arabic music are called تطريب (taṭrīb, or “the intensification of ṭarab”; Racy, Making Music 35). In its modern definition, in addition, it also refers to the genre of so-called classical Arab music in contrast to Western genres of music (5–6).

According to the classical concept as defined in Arabic dictionaries and thesauri, ṭarab is an aesthetic emotion ranging between joy and sadness and is elicited by instrumental music and sung verse. It is characterized by its affective

and involves bodily الحركة والشوق (“movement and passion”; al-Fīrūzābādī 109), such as clapping the hands, moving the body, weeping, and dancing (al-Ghazālī 518–33; MacDonald [1902] 1–13;). In Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī's famous anthology, كتاب الأغاني (Kitāb al-aghānī; Book of Songs), the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, when listening to the singer Ismāʿīl ibn al-Hirbidh,

The musical affect of ṭarab is part of a classical joie de vivre (Shuraydi 91–134), a refined way of living that cultivated bodily and sensual لذّات الدنيا (“pleasures of the world”; al-Thaʿālibī 93), including eating, drinking, sex, and listening to music. It sometimes reaches such an intensity that Ibrāhīm al-Yāzijī's (d. 1906) thesaurus provides idiomatic expressions such as

Ṭarab is conventionally an overwhelming aesthetic experience of music and singing, but it may also be elicited, as this essay argues, by the Arabic language and prose literature. Equipped with the morphological-phonetical structure of the classical Arabic language that allows for many sonic similarities, including جناس (jinās; “paranomasia”) and حكاية صوت (ḥikāyat ṣawt; “onomatopoeia”), and inspired by the strong emphasis of Arabic poetry on sound expressed through rhyme and meter (Gelder), Arabic texts even beyond the classical poem show a high awareness of sound and musicality. This is best seen with سجع (sajʿ), often translated as “rhymed prose,” although Devin Stewart understands it as a third form of speech between poetry and prose (138). It is used by pre-Islamic soothsayers, the Qurʾan, classical epistolary art, and the مقامة(maqāmah), an important narrative genre of classical Arabic literature. The term is also associated with the cooing of the dove, which Ibn Manẓūr describes as follows:

Writing in sajʿ is a way of producing textual ṭarab.

Ṭarab involves either joy or its opposite: sadness. For this reason, al-Fīrūzābādī considers the word ṭarab from among the أضداد (aḍdād; “words with contradictory meanings”; 109). Arab lexicographers were eager to collect such contronyms as a way of taking pride in the Arabic language (Baalbaki 188–98), while for Thomas Bauer they also show a “culture of ambiguity” (159–64), the ability and even fascination of classical Islamic culture to deal with forms of ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Identifying ṭarab's opposite meanings as a fascinating ambiguity, the intellectual al-Shidyāq elaborates:

For al-Shidyāq, ṭarab means to feel joy and sorrow simultaneously. Importantly, this ambiguous feeling goes along with the aesthetic appreciation of the singing. This inherent evaluation links ṭarab to aesthetic emotions as defined by Winfried Menninghaus and his coauthors as “full-blown concrete emotions . . . that always include an aesthetic evaluation/appreciation of the objects or events under consideration” (171). To put it differently, al-Shidyāq does not describe the conventional emotion of love as triggered by singing, but rather the aesthetic emotion of being moved by singing. Ṭarab as aesthetical emotion appreciates mixed feelings such as joy and sorrow, since the expected aesthetic experience is to be affectively moved, which is at the same time an evaluative criterion of artistic quality. Feeling ambiguous ṭarab is evidence of high art.

Somatic Dimensions

Because of the sensual pleasure of ṭarab, religious scholars debated the moral legitimacy of music, singing, and poetry (Shehadi). One of its most influential proponents was the Muslim theologian al-Ghazālī, whose magisterial work إحياء علوم الدين (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn; The Revival of the Religious Sciences) dedicates an entire book to the etiquette of سماع (samāʿ; “listening”) and the mystical وجد (wajd; “ecstasy”) elicited through singing and music. It does not directly discuss the aesthetic concept of ṭarab but elaborates on corporeal and affective effects on the سميع (samīʿ; “listener”) from an Islamic perspective (Weinrich, “Sensing Sound”). While al-Ghazālī condemns some musical instruments and social constellations, which he believes encourage illegitimate desire or behavior, he fervently defends the positive effects of music and singing on the pious listener.

In other words, music is a moral catalyst exposing the virtues and vices of the human heart. Unveiling inner truth, the sonic affect has therefore an important cognitive dimension. For the pious lover of God, music and singing allow for a spiritual experience of wajd. These revelations can be achieved only by what Ines Weinrich calls “sensing sound” through the affective body (al-Ghazālī 447–52; MacDonald [1901] 229–35). In this regard, the famous Sufi poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ describes in a poem entitled نظم السلوك (“Naẓm al-sulūk”; “Poem of the Way”) his mystical epistemology:

This synesthesia deconstructs the often-assumed primacy of the visual and equates it with the sonic. For Islamic Sufism in all its different varieties, the activities of singing, playing music, and reciting poetry play important roles in turning the body into a conscious site of religious experience (Frishkop; Shannon 106–29; Turner); likewise, the recitation of the Qurʾan may evoke ṭarab as a somatic-spiritual experience (Nelson 76–77).

In addition, the classical Arabic language has sometimes been the object of secular mysticism and eroticism that emphasize its sonic dimension. In his avant-garde literary-lexicographical work, الساق على الساق (al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq; Leg over Leg), al-Shidyāq describes and performs the aesthetic experience of words as part of an “affective philology” in order to unveil the beauty and wisdom of the Arabic language (Junge, “Exposing” 99). In a chapter dedicated to an apology for music against the critiques of religion, the text evokes the sound of the Roman Catholic Church organ by enumerating onomatopoetic terms such as طنطنة ودندنة وخنخنة ودمدمة (ṭanṭana wa-dandana wa-khankhana wa-damdama; al-Shidyāq, Leg 88), which Humphrey Davies renders into English as “strumming and humming, mumbling and rumbling” (89). This “writing aloud” (Peled 129) prompts readers to hear and feel the beauty and wisdom of the Arabic language with their own senses and bodies (Junge, “Food” 156–59).

In all these examples, the enrapturing sound of music, singing, poetry, language, and Qurʾan affects the soma of the listeners. It does not only elicit pleasure or passion but also conveys knowledge through the lived physical experience. In this regard, Richard Shusterman emphasizes the somatic dimension of aesthetic experience. In his philosophy of somaesthetics, he brings together “the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (27). From this perspective, ṭarab offers bodily pleasure and somatic knowledge that enable, for instance, spiritual experience and social performance for mystics. The symbolic capital of this somatic experience seemed so high that al-Ghazālī sharply rejects in his book all those hypocritical listeners who burst into tears, dance, and tear their clothes only because they pretend to be in ecstasy (al-Ghazālī 519; MacDonald [1902] 2). Ṭarab provides forms of embodied knowledge.

Interactive Dimensions

For recent affect theory, arguably the most important feature of ṭarab is its interactive and intersubjective dimension, since it situates sonic affect as a social product of equally affected and affecting bodies. In the lexicographical, musicological, and religious texts quoted above, this aspect is not explicitly discussed; rather, it is ethnomusicology that emphasizes the affective interaction between musicians and audience. A. J. Racy develops an “ecstatic feed-back model of creativity” where “[m]usic is seen as a participatory phenomenon that involves direct emotional exchange between performers and listeners” (“Creativity” 22). In the process of music making, ṭarab becomes possible when musicians affect the audience with their music, for example through improvised repetitions and retentions, and when the listeners express their affectedness, for example through spontaneous shouting or moving, thus affecting the musicians even more who in turn affect the audience even more. Ṭarab involves an “overpowering-empowering complex” for both the musicians and listeners (Making Music 122). Importantly, this interactive dimension is characteristic of secular concerts (120–46), religious chanting (Weinrich, “Strategies”), and mystical invocations (Shannon 106–29).

Such constellations of interaction are “affective arrangements,” to use a term by Jan Slaby. This term comprises a unique constellation of persons, but also things, artifacts, or spaces “that coalesce into a coordinated formation of mutual affecting and being-affected” (109). This also involves “a notion of distributed agency in the sense of a performative sequence jointly enacted by contributing elements” (110). The Arab practices of making music and listening to music are highly aware of affective arrangements and use them to create ṭarab together.

The affective arrangements of ṭarab are to be found, as I argue, not only in music and singing but also in the performance of literature in salons and other gatherings (see Ali 38–57). For instance, in regard to the traditional folk epic Sīrat Banī Hilāl, Dwight Reynolds has analyzed situated forms of emotional performance and audience reaction in rural Egypt (137–206). Darwīsh, the national poet of Palestine, was famous for his readings, which elicited intense emotional responses from the audience. In an undated audio recording on YouTube, for example, he can be heard reciting one of his most popular early poems, بطاقة هوية (“Biṭāqat huwiyya”; “Identity Card”), which repeats the politically assertive verse addressed to an Israeli soldier:

With the echoing sound of a large hall or a stadium, Darwīsh seems to refer to the intense atmosphere of the audience when he introduces his poem with an emphatic calm by saying:

And the audience responds with rapturous enthusiasm to repetitions of the verse, “I am an Arab” (00:00–27, 01:54–02:02, 03:15–19). Nearly everyone who has commented on the recording repeats or modifies this verse, using it as an emotional template of position taking, sometimes by adding further verses of Darwīsh's poetry or expressing aesthetic appreciation:

By expanding the concept of ṭarab to include digital practices, social media offers room for extended affective arrangements of ṭarab, where affects circulate through likes, comments, and also fan videos reciting Darwīsh's poem with instrumental music and emotive images. In the “affective economy” of poetry, using Sara Ahmed's term, a single verse may offer a “passionate attachment” that connects various readers, listeners, and viewers beyond time and place to Palestine and to Arab nationhood (118). Ṭarab is the socially engineered experience of being overpowered and empowered.

Political Dimensions

The classical concept of ṭarab is often based on an elitist understanding of aesthetics. Skilled ṭarab singers must follow musical and moral etiquette just as skilled ṭarab listeners must express ṭarab sensations in a socially appropriate way. This often excludes, for instance, singing aloud with the muṭrib and being drunk (Racy, Making Music 18–42). The elitist art of ṭarab was probably never just l'art pour l'art, but often seems to be entangled with social dynamics, power hierarchies, and political negotiations (Figueroa; Fulton-Melanson). In the anecdote about Hārūn al-Rashīd discussed above, only the caliph himself—not his court—is described as expressing ṭarab, foregrounding ṭarab as a prerogative of the powerful. In contrast, the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm (d. 1975) enraptured the masses with her affective interpretations of Arabic poetry (Fakhreddine). She became the “voice of Egypt” while also being an instrument of Nasserist ideology (Danielson). Vernacular practices of ṭarab are also important, sometimes acting as bottom-up political interventions. This is the case for the revolutionary soundscape of the demonstrations during the Arab uprisings around 2011, which involved affective creativity, somatic experience, and social interaction. Theorizing the role of emotion and affect in Egyptian and Turkish protests in the public square (mīdān), Bilgin Ayata and Cilja Harders develop the concept of “Midān moments.” They are characterized by

It is not a political ideology or social movement that connects different protestors on the mīdān to “affective communities,” but rather “a shared sensuality eliciting an implicit sense of commonality and immediateness” (Zink 289). In order to understand the shared sensuality and its inherent moments of rupture in Taḥrīr Square, it is important to also include the analysis of soundscapes and sonic practices, since they are important constituents of communities in general, as case studies on the soundscapes of modernization (Fahmy), sermons (Hirschkind), and wartime (Daughtry) have demonstrated.

Vernacular musical practices in Taḥrīr Square included the collective chanting of slogans such as الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام (“The people demand the downfall of the regime”), chants with improvised messages using popular rhythms of children's songs (Keraitim and Mehrez 54), collective singing of classical songs such as Umm Kulthūm's أنا الشعب (“I Am the People”; Sanders and Visonà 231), songs using slogans such as Rāmī ʿIṣām's عيش حرية عدالة اجتماعية (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”), and songs that became themselves slogans, like صوت الحرية (“The Sound or Voice of Freedom”). The performance of music and singing in the square produced highly interactive and affective moments, in which musicians and listeners were both aesthetically overpowered and politically empowered by music and often transgressed the etiquette of classical elitist ṭarab events by screaming, collective singing, climbing on the stage, and using Bengal fireworks.

Sahar Keraitim and Samia Mehrez have described the carnivalesque atmosphere in the square as a mulid, a popular religious festivity, which involves ritual celebration as much as social chaos (35–37). The mulid-like soundscape in Cairo's central square instilled in a protester, for instance, the “constant desire to scream loudly” (qtd. in Galeev 70), while another linked the chants and sounds with “a dream that just became a reality” (71), and a third confessed that she “would cry from joy and feel the urge to ‘join the revolutionaries’ when hearing the crowd from her home” (71). Oscar Galeev argues that the “musicality of Tahrir lies at the core of its political aesthetics and of the sense of ‘vivid presence’ in the days of the revolution” (59). Ṭarab as revolutionary joy and ecstasy is a collectively produced sonic affect attached to the Mīdān. By countering regime-dominated soundscapes such as circling helicopters or forced silence (Malmström 57–69), the festive ambience and its sonic affect create acoustic resistance. This countersound makes possible what Brian Massumi calls a disruptive “microperception” that unfolds ethico-aesthetic “micropolitics” (58). Ṭarab is an aesthetic experience of social and political power and at the same time a political negotiation of it.

How Arab Is Ṭarab?

The aesthetic phenomenon of ṭarab, as studies show, has sometimes been considered a genuine constituent of Arab kinship or an expression of cultural authenticity and emotional sincerity that opposes a westernized modernity often assumed to be “cold” (Lambert; Shannon). The intellectual al-Shidyāq, however, deconstructs such cultural essentialism in his description of Arab and European music. For him, the experience of ṭarab is rather an interplay between musical differences and cultural habituation. He argues that Egyptians are, in general, not moved by Syrian music and vice versa, while some Europeans are moved by Egyptian music after living for a long time in Egypt, observing,

Bringing together Plato, the musician Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī (d. 804), and the philologist al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363), al-Shidyāq shows that it is part of human nature to be moved by music (al-Wāsiṭah 59; Cachia 47).

The linguistic term and cultural concept of ṭarab has in some cases similar or nearly equivalent concepts and terms in North Africa and the Middle East, including the Amazigh term amarg (Lambert) and the “melancholic modalities” (Gill) of classical Turkish music. In Arab culture, ṭarab is a transgressive concept that constantly oscillates, as this essay has shown, between assumed dichotomies of the secular and the religious, the premodern and the modern, the artist and the audience, music and literature, and art and politics. In this regard, “the concept of ṭarab offers an essential clue to the understanding of Arabo-Islamic civilisation” (Lambert). In her novel The Map of Love, the anglophone Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif (b. 1950) takes ṭarab as a touchstone for cultural untranslatability, “a paragraph of explanation for something as simple as a breath, a lifting of the heart” (515). In contrast, Anna Ziajka Stanton emphasizes the possible translatability of Arabic language and literature, referring, for instance, to Humphrey Davies's sound-focused English translation of al-Shidyāq's Leg over Leg that provides a worlding of the Arabic language and its “strumming and humming, mumbling and rumbling” (Stanton 27–55).

By mapping the aesthetic, somatic, interactive, and political dimensions of ṭarab, this essay has opened the classical musical understanding toward a larger aesthetic concept that includes written literature, performed language, and cultural practices. In my reading, ṭarab is a sonic experience of music, literature, language, and culture; it celebrates musicality in its widest sense and appreciates ambiguity as high art; it comes into being through a participative interaction with other persons and things; it involves somatic intensities and provides an embodied knowledge; it is the socially engineered aesthetic feeling of being overpowered and empowered; and thus it is the aesthetic experience of sociopolitical power and at the same time a negotiation of it. Bringing it into dialogue with concepts of aesthetic emotions, somaesthetics, attachment, affective arrangements, micropolitics, and Midān moments, this essay has shown the relevance of a classical term to recent theory on the one hand and the importance of the sonic to affect theory on the other.

While ocularcentrism has been attributed predominantly to the “West” (Jay), this essay does not attribute sound exclusively to the “East.” Refraining from cultural-essentialist dichotomies, this essay rather aims to draw attention to a heightened conceptual awareness, fascination, and sensibility for sound in Arab culture that goes along with other sensual experiences (Lange) and bodily intensities (El-Ariss, Trials). Therefore, ṭarab should neither be seen as completely disconnected from other concepts and discussions of aesthetic sound (Eisenlohr 109–28; Groth et al.) nor be disregarded as an exotic or outdated aesthetic sensuality. Instead, ṭarab as sonic affect is a living negotiation between bodies and sounds. It shows that musicality matters.