Muslim World Music Day

Today, April 12, 2011, is Muslim World Music Day. Happy Bird Day!

Muslim World Music day is a project of The ARChive of Contemporary Music:

Muslim World Music Day is an online effort to identify and catalog all the recordings of Muslim music in the world. It will be a step towards making this culturally significant body of work readily available to people around the globe for study and enjoyment.

What is Muslim Music? We realize that characterizing an artistic activity as a product of a religious belief is inherently problematic. Is the music of Muslim convert Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) “Islamic”? How do we define a classical Arabic music tradition influenced by Orthodox Christianity as well as Islam? Can erotic Persian verse set to music be seen as part of the same tradition as Sufi devotional songs? What should we make of death metal from Pakistan, or hip-hop by Latino Muslims from Spanish Harlem?

Muslim World Music Day is a cultural project.

Centuries of music making in the established traditions of the Muslim world have produced shared musical vocabularies. Muslim musicians have also embraced other genres, from jazz to hiphop to hard rock, to express their faith. Today, Muslims from a range of theological perspectives continue to debate the place of music in Islam, while musicians around the world —Muslim and non-Muslim alike— draw inspiration from old traditions and invent new ones.

The definition of “Muslim music” will always be changing.

We seek to provide an inclusive overview of this music from a variety of perspectives. We hope the very act of collecting, discussing, and listening to the music gives rise to new answers to the question, “what is Muslim music?”

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[Birds are not only the ones who fly, they are also the ones who sing. Thus, when speaking of Muslim World Music Day, *The Conference of the Birds* comes to mind.

The Conference of the Birds (the Mantiq al-tayr, in Persian) is Sufi Poet's Farid al-Din 'Attar (d. 1221) most famous mystical poem. It tells about the birds of the world undertaking an arduous journey in search of their true king. Their leader is the Hoopoe. (ed.)

Listen and watch the Hoopoe singing at IBC The Internet Bird Collection

Picture: Hoopoe (Upupa epops). Photo: Wiki.]