ABSTRACT
This book addresses the importance of music, culture and identity in the Muslim world through the study of performance, politics and piety, and in a timely fashion, offers a theoretical basis for the understanding of the pleasures and politics of Muslims worldwide. Today, within stereotyped characterizations of Islam, pleasure, debate and performing creativity find little place. Rather, mainstream discourses’ strongest signifiers of Islam are violence, fundamentalism, repression and joylessness. Such simplifications are misleading. Across the world, diverse communities of Muslims live their collective identities in dialogic interaction with various social forces: the legacies of colonialism, the imperatives of globalization, the pressures of diaspora, the demands of modernity, the pull of sacred pan-Islamic radicalism, and the perceived injustices of the ‘war on terror’. The criss-crossing axes of the global, the local and the transnational impel them to consolidate collective identities, confirm their historical legacies and look forward to the future. Like all human beings in all societies, they also engage in enjoyable and pleasurable expressive acts while doing so, in particular, by making, listening to and being emotionally sustained by music.
