ABSTRACT
Contemporary literature concerned with Arab music reveals a strong interest in the capacity of music to affect emotion and with the terms Arabs use in accounting for this. This chapter highlights aspects of performance practices in the Libyan Ma'lūf related to affect and the way these are visibly or sonically transformed in the course of performance. It evaluates the aesthetic potential of the restyled nawba and the degree of affect that it generates and, consequently, how such experience differs from that in the Ma'lūf az-zwiya. The concept of sam is described in the Sufi tradition as the integration of musical audition into the practice of meditation. Artistic growth in the turth as it develops in the zwiya is strongly pivoted on the love of the Sufi for this art, a kind of reverence that shapes the entire process of assimilation in terms of both content and attitude towards it.
