“Not a Penny in my Pocket!”: De-Cultured Religiosity and Death of Spirituality
A powerful epiphany descended upon me today while attending a local jet-ski show named Livin’ the American Dream! … the band Pilot, whose voice serenaded the loud speaker, sang the line that brought me to deep introspection:
Not a penny in my pocket, Keep on but not alone, Keep the flags flying at home!
I was immediately taken back to my oud practice earlier in the day, when I was learning one of the oldest Arabic folk songs titled This beautiful One! by the Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish. In that song, the same line above reincarnates in a similar context:
The pocket does not even have one penny, but the mood is happy and peaceful, the door of hope is yours oh merciful one!
Of course, such a verse is quite common in folk music in all cultures, but this is hardly the point. The important fact here is that culture and arts are the best representation of a people’s conscience. It highlights in focus what is important to them and should not be desecrated; often things not written in their law books. In this sense, music as part of culture embodies the spiritual essence of a society which transcends the boundary of the language of the law. In other words, arts define us poetically while laws contain us within the ink of prose.
As I reflected upon this meeting between the deep roots of America and Egypt in their folk music, I also contemplated upon pre-modern Muslim societies where musicians were celebrated figures and revered by mystics, sultans, lay people and even some religious scholars. Consider, for example, Ziryab (b. 789) the famous musician, astronomer, fashion designer and gastronome who was so respected by the Andalusian Muslim caliph ʿAbd al-Rahman II that he was allowed to establish a school of music in Cordoba with a monthly salary of 200 gold dinars. For the sake of comparison, this works out to anywhere between 11,000 and 35,000 dollars today, depending on the gold value.
Meanwhile, in our day and age, we are faced with a drastically different reality in the Muslim religious life. The sermons at mosques and religious lectures given at Islamic schools or conferences restrict the reality of experiencing God to what we have termed the ‘ink of prose’. The only books taught at these institutions, and in turn what forms the spiritual-literary ethos of the Muslim laity, are books of theology, jurisprudence or moral-ethical Sufism. It is not a coincidence that the religious emphasis on these rational sciences correlates with the secular educational direction of the Muslim community to produce an abundance of medical doctors, engineers or lawyers and very few poets, painters or musicians.
However, there exists a fascinating parallel universe that is inseparable from the spiritual experience of God in the middle east, yet one that seems non-existent for the Muslims in diaspora here in the West. Musicians like Ziryab are reincarnated in the likes of Sayyid Darwish and ʿAmmar al-Shiri'i. Likewise, medieval literary masterpieces like Layla and Majnun find a companion in the writings of Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish or Tawfiq al-Hakim. What makes this contemporary cultural production unique is that, unlike their medieval counterparts, the lives and contributions of Naguib Mahfouz and ʿAmmar al-Shiri’i are not deemed worthy enough to be spoken about in mosques or taught at Islamic schools.
While this is the case in both the middle east and America, what separates these two geographical settings is that Mahfouz and al-Shiri’i have both established their importance in the religious and spiritual spheres in Egypt. In the case of Mahfouz, once accused of blasphemy by fundamentalists for his novel The Sons of our Neighborhood, he responded by authoring a series of novels that became representative of the country’s Sufi mystical heritage, such as The Conversation of Morning and Night and Empty Talk upon the Banks of the Nile. As for al-Shiri’i, a musician celebrated for his timeless compositions that were even performed at European opera houses, he regularly interviewed Qurʾan reciters to discuss the art of maqam (Arabic modal music) in Qurʾan recitation.
A cursory study of the content of this contemporary artistic genre proves that the predominant religious discourse in mosques and seminaries does not actually have a monopoly on the plethora of spiritual paths a society takes towards God. Consider, for instance, these verses from an Egyptian sitcom titled The Gate of Halawany, which explores the 19th century history of Egypt: