Setting the stage

The period under surveillance in this chapter divides with discomforting accuracy into two vastly contrasting national moods. America in the 1920s, retrospectively tagged as the Jazz Age (from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1931 essay, ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’), the Roaring Twenties or, more euphemistically, Prohibition, experienced a decade of unprecedented prosperity and self confidence. Republican presidents, for whom the business of America was business, led the country. Immigration, which had in the previous generation brought the parents of future songwriters to America, came to a virtual halt, and isolationism reigned as the prevailing sentiment. Women voted for the first time in the election of 1920 and the Smart Set began to explore social freedoms as well, such as public smoking, reading sex and confession magazines, applying make-up, bobbing their hair and wearing short skirts. As further manifestation of what contemporary social historian Frederick Lewis Allen called ‘a revolution in manners and morals’, both men and women sharply increased their alcohol consumption, imbibing in thousands of newly sprouting metropolitan speakeasies in Prohibition America. By the end of the decade radio became a family ritual, and sound films revolutionised an already popular entertainment and created new opportunities for musicals, both adapted from the stage and original. The 1920s introduced an exceptional generation of American playwrights (Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson), novelists (Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald), classical composers (Edgard Varèse, Aaron Copland) and jazz artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington).

Can one recapture the excitement that A Chorus Line brought to Broadway? The Broadway musical seemed moribund in the middle of the 1970s. The big hits of the previous decade, such as Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha, had closed and the era of the great musical plays that followed the Rodgers and Hammerstein model was over. Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince combined for major artistic successes between 1970 and 1973 with Company, A Little Night Music and Follies, but their appeal was limited, as can be seen by the length of their runs and their mixed commercial success. The rock musical had become a Broadway reality with Hair, Two Gentlemen of Verona and other shows, but rock was a new musical language that many in the traditional Broadway audience had not yet accepted. Creators of the musical theatre searched for a new mould that might combine new musical styles and contemporary thinking with tradition, building upon the genre's proud history. A Chorus Line did all of this as a veritable celebration of Broadway dance and dancers, bringing new life to the genre and taking it into the colossal hit era of six-thousand-performance runs.

Those who saw A Chorus Line during its original run will not easily forget it. The plot was minimal and somewhat artificial, but the characters were engrossing. We recognised types of people that we knew and with each part of their stories our fascination grew. The singing and dancing had a special immediacy because, within the world that the director Michael Bennett magically created, we knew that these characters would express themselves through music and movement.

This volume presents a series of critical scholarly reflections on the evolution and major themes of pre-modern Muslim theology. Given Islam's salience in religious history and its role as final religious inheritor of the legacies of monotheism and classical antiquity, such a collection hardly needs justification. The significance of Islamic theology reflects the significance of Islam as a central part of the monotheistic project as a whole, to which it brings a distinctive approach and style, and a range of solutions which are of abiding interest.

Despite this importance it is fair to say that until recently the study of theology was something of a Cinderella subject within Islamic studies, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. In part this flowed from the persistence of nineteenth-century assumptions about the marginality of abstract intellectual life in Islam, and about the greater intrinsic interest and originality of Muslim law and mysticism. It was also commonly thought that where formal metaphysics was cultivated in Islamic civilisation, this was done seriously only in the context of Arabic philosophy (falsafa), where it was not obstructed by futile scriptural controls, and where it could perform its most significant function, which was believed to be the transmission of Greek thought to Europe.

THE QUR’AN

The Qur'an is the starting-point of Islamic theology, and indeed of all things Islamic. As technically defined by Islamic theology and law, it is “the corpus of Arabic utterances sent down by God to Muhammad, conveyed in a way that categorically establishes its authenticity”.

For the tradition, this classical definition summarises the basic characteristics of the Qur'an and distinguishes it from anything else the Prophet said. The key phrase is “sent down by God”, for God speaks directly in the Qur'an, and Muhammad is seen as a passive recipient to whom the Book was simply “sent down”; however, it is the last element of the definition which is most significant in considering the historical basis for Islamic beliefs.

According to the Muslim historians, the first revelation consisted of two lines in Arabic: in the year 610, Muhammad was engaged in a spiritual retreat in a cave outside Mecca when he was approached by an angel who said to him: “Read!” He replied that he could not read, but the angel repeated the command, and received the same response; the third time, the angel recited to him the words: “Read, in the name of your Lord, who created” (96:1-6). This revelatory experience was soon followed by another, when a second short passage was delivered; and between that time and shortly before the Prophet's death at the age of sixty-three years, the entire text of the Muslim scripture gradually appeared. New revelations appeared in order to supply new teaching, commenting on events or answering questions according to circumstance.

Soon after the end of slavery, African Americans formed musical troupes to sing, dance and act in a variety of shows. One of the first black companies was the Georgia Slave Troupe Minstrels, which was organised in April 1865 by a white manager, W. H. Lee. Another Georgia Minstrels company was organised in Indianapolis, under the management of a black performer, Charles B. Hicks; his company was to achieve fame as the foremost African-American minstrel troupe of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In these shows, African Americans followed the practice of established white troupes: they darkened their faces with burnt cork; staged burlesques on popular operas and operettas of the time, such as Jacques Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein; performed farces, such as Mr Jinks; pranced through eccentric and grotesque dances; and sang dialect, plantation and well-known minstrel songs both as solos and as ensemble pieces. The novelty of the black minstrel show was the race of the performers – the Georgia Minstrels, for example, advertised that in their shows the black performers were offering audiences a glimpse of ‘genuine’ plantation music and dance.

Not all black troupes during the 1870s and 1880s, however, were of the burnt cork minstrel variety. The Hyers sisters, Anna Madah (1855–1920s) and Emma Louise (1857–?99), performed operatic excerpts, art and parlour songs, and jubilee songs and spirituals during their concert tours in the first half of the 1870s. From 1876 to 1883 the sisters performed as part of the ‘Hyers Sisters Combination’, managed by their father, Samuel B. Hyers.

Critics in every generation lament the dearth of good material on the Broad way musical stage, but these lines, published in Musical America in 1906, do not actually sound the death-knell of a genre. The first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of great foment during which producers, performers, librettists and composers grappled with the notion of a single genre that could combine the best of all worlds into a unified, coherent whole. The problem of varied and inconsistent terminology, implied in the phrase ‘so-called comic opera’, was a legacy from the nineteenth century that continued to plague critics in the early decades of the twentieth. Musically well-educated writers often adopted a highbrow stance and treated anything lighter than opera with disdain while other critics, reviewing the same work, might praise it as a cut above similar fare. Composers in the dawning century struggled to reconcile their inheritance with the evolution of a new and uniquely American art-form: what we now blithely call the Broadway Musical. Several things had to happen in order to establish the book show as the norm. Librettists had to create plots that chimed with the rhythms and concerns of contemporary experience; this eventually caused a shift from the politically tinged satires of Gilbert and Sullivan and Offenbach to the sentimental romances of Herbert and Romberg. Composers had to discard or integrate remnants of hand-me-down imported musical vocabularies into a language that embraced American vernacular idioms in song and dance.

Prologue

At a crucial moment in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), our hero(ine), Hedwig, is abandoned by Sgt Luther Robinson and left to fend for him/herself in an isolated trailer park in Junction City, Kansas – a long, long way from his/her East Berlin home. Images of the Berlin Wall being torn down play on the TV and a few piano chords are heard off-screen as the TV reporter comments: ‘The Germans are a patient people and good things come to those who wait.’ With this indirect reminder of what might have been had Hedwig stayed at home, the camera pans from an anniversary present (a ‘Wig in a Box’) across the interior of the trailer and we catch a glimpse through the window of a lone immigrant musician outside playing a toy-like keyboard slung around his neck before Hedwig is revealed lying disconsolately on the couch. Though all appears to be lost, Hedwig begins to sing about the healing power of performance. The second verse adds guitar and drums to the accompaniment and the camera again pans to the window to reveal a guitarist outside. After the second chorus, a band of itinerant, Eastern European immigrant musicians (whom Hedwig will later call the ‘ambassadors of Eastern Bloc Rock’) file joyously through the door of the trailer brandishing guitars (though none is plugged in) and an impossibly small portable drum set and continue accompanying this song of recovery and rejuvenation.

GENERATIVE INFLUENCES: AN OVERVIEW

The initial conditions leading to the formation of the discipline and study of philosophy in Islam were complex, but in general it can be said that this philosophical tradition was almost entirely based on Arabic translations of Greek texts. What is commonly designated as “Islamic philosophy” is marked by wide-ranging textual traditions in the genesis and development of a predominantly syncretic yet systematic philosophy in Islamic civilisation from Andalusia to India from the ninth century to the present. The majority of its texts are in Arabic, but a large number came to be written in Persian, a process which accelerated after the twelfth century.

Islamic philosophy grew out of the desire by learned members of the community to uphold the authority of Islamic revelation against arguments increasingly posed by members of the many divergent peoples who were living in lands united by the conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. After the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad (750), subjects of various faiths contributed to an atmosphere of relatively free debate concerning the main constructs of religion, such as God, creation, causality, free will and divine authority. Increasingly, Muslims were forced to uphold the universalist ideology of Islam from a rational perspective and within civil institutions. Thus, although the majority of the practitioners of philosophy in the Islamic world were Muslims of differing cultural, social and linguistic backgrounds, their ranks also included many notable members of other religions.

So recalled Kurt Weill's widow about the performance of The Threepenny Opera at Brandeis University's Festival of the Creative Arts on 14 June 1952. The concert featured Bertolt Brecht and Weill's 1928 work, Die Dreigroschenoper, in an English translation by Marc Blitzstein, who also served as narrator. Nearly five thousand people filled the new Adolph Ullman Amphitheatre, and Lenya stopped the concert cold with her rendition of ‘Pirate Jenny’ (see Plate 15). The following year, a fully staged Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village. It ran for ninety-six performances, but closed because of a previous booking at the theatre. Reopening the following season, The Threepenny Opera ran for 2,611 performances to become (for a time) the longest-running musical in American history. Lenya won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical, and the production garnered a special Tony, highly unusual for an off-Broadway show.

The conductor for the 1952 concert performance of The Threepenny Opera had been Leonard Bernstein, then a Brandeis faculty member. The concert proved a turning point for both Weill's and Bernstein's careers. Weill, who died in 1950 at the age of fifty, had fled Germany in 1933 and emigrated to the United States two years later. The Brandeis concert ushered in the so-called ‘Weill renaissance’ and the rediscovery of his German works by American audiences. The Threepenny Opera's ‘Mack the Knife’, in renditions by Louis Armstrong, Dick Hyman, Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, successively climbed the hit parade to sell over ten million records.

There are eight names for God, among the canonical ninety-nine, which direct our attention to Allah as the source of all that is: al-Badī' (Absolute Cause), al-Bāri' (Producer), al-Khāliq (Creator), al-Mubdi' (Beginner), al-Muqtadir (All-Determiner), al-Musawwir (Fashioner), al-Qādir (All-Powerful) and al-Qahhār (Dominator), each with various connotations of creating. Nothing seems simpler than identifying the one God as creator of all that is; indeed, that has ever been the preferred route for calling attention to the fact of divinity, as in the so-called “proofs” that there is a God. And understandably, since the standing link between such a One and everything else is its origin in that One, so that originary fact connects the revelations proper to each Abrahamic faith tradition with everything we encounter: “the heavens and the earth”, as well as the human speculation which attends everything that surrounds us, and especially ourselves as the portion of creation impelled to that speculation. Moreover, when one is urged by those revelations to make the fantastic attestation of a single creator of all, what results is an ontological divide between the one creator and everything else. For if the God of Abraham can be defined, as Thomas Aquinas does at the outset of his Summa Theologiae, as “the beginning and end of all things, and especially of rational creatures”, that lapidary formula has but one clear implication: God is not one of those things, and this affirmation sums up Islamic tawhīd.

INTRODUCTION

Concepts of God aremere simulacra. Such, in brief, was the teaching of the great Hispano-Arab mystical theologian Muhyi'l-Dīn ibn 'Arabī (d. 1240). In his typically outspoken formulation, the conceptual God is just a “created God”. He is, according to Ibn 'Arabī's expression “the God created in dogmas” (al-Haqq al-makhlūq fi'l-i'tiqādāt). In the Islamic ethos, such a deity is ultimately a deception. “All that you worship instead of God is nothing but names which you have invented, you and your forefathers, for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high!” (Qur'an 12:40). In a “civilisational event” charged with numinosity, at the conquest of Mecca on Thursday 20 Ramadan 8 (11 January 630), the Prophet enters the Great Sanctuary on his camel Qaswe, fully armed. He first touches his staff to the Black Stone in the north-east corner of the Ka'ba, magnifying God. In a deafening crescendo, the cry Allāhu akbar (God is most great) is taken up by the thousands of onlookers before the Prophet hushes them with a gesture. After making his tawāf, the seven ritual circuits of the Ka'ba, the Prophet next turns to face the surrounding idols of the pagan Arabs. There are 360 in all, standing for each degree in a vast circle of universal illusion. The Prophet rides slowly round, pointing his staff at each totem, and intones the verse of the Qur'an: “The Real has now come and the false has vanished: for behold, the false is bound to vanish!” (17:81). As he points, one idol after another lurches forward on its face.

Immigrant groups from all parts of Europe, several Latin American countries and Asia staged musical theatre works in their native languages that reflected their particular concerns and experiences. Audiences attended musicals of various sorts brought from the homeland as well as new pieces created in the United States. Such works constitute the core repertory of America's many immigrant musical stages from the late eighteenth century to World War II. While non-English-language stages were always open to outsiders, they functioned primarily for the entertainment and cultural education of the ethnicities that produced them.

Transplanted foreign-language musical theatre (especially French, German, and Italian opera and operetta) also existed in the United States. These works, however, were representative of foreign cultures and did not directly reflect the immigrant experience; instead, they were geared toward diverse audiences that spoke a variety of languages and came from multiple backgrounds. French opera in New Orleans (a dominant theatrical form in the Crescent City from at least 1796 until 1919) and Spanish-language theatre in long-lived Hispano and Latino communities in the American Southwest (practised there since the early seventeenth century) constitute yet another dimension of the history of non-English-language musical theatre in the United States. While musical stage repertories were mostly imported to New Orleans or Santa Fe, the French- and Spanish-speaking residents of Louisiana and New Mexico were more frequently long-established residents than recently arrived immigrants.

Following the Aristotelian example in the field of metaphysics, it is often preferable not to accept received wisdom as to what a discipline is, but, after inquiring into the possibility of its existence, to go instead in search of it. This is certainly advisable in a field like Islamic ethics, where the very concept of such a science has not originated in the place in which one looks for its manifestation. In this case, instead of insisting on an already established understanding of ethics gained from ancient Greek philosophy and from its interpretations in the course of Western philosophy and then transplanting these into Islamic theologies of ethics, one should rather go so far as to risk their failure. Such failure can, of course, attain the concept of the ethical itself. But the price paid can be a gain when it opens the ear to an unheard-of version of ethics. If one prefers, however, to begin from a common root, then there will be two minimal assumptions to be made: that ethics is a science, a knowledge, in the Greek sense of the word, and that the object of this science is human action.

That much said, when one starts to inquire into Islamic ethics, one will soon notice where ways begin to part. Any knowledge, any “science” in Islam, as well as the initiative and the ways to practise it, must be derived from the Holy Qur'an, the Word of God, and from hadith, the reports of the sayings of the Prophet of Islam.