an important arena for the struggle for the future. These visions increasingly evoke the past, often through discourses of a return to the Arab heritage—a response that Adonis decries in the poem yet that remains powerful in Syria today. The turn to heritage in the quest for an authentically Arab modernity produces in contemporary Syrian art what I call “the aesthetics of authenticity”—practices of cultural creation and consumption that promote the formation of social worlds based on a dichotomy of the authentic, perceived as true and good, and the inauthentic, perceived as false and bad. In aesthetic realms ranging from music and poetry to painting, architecture, and narrative, among others, Syrians find either remembrances of lost glories—of the literary and scientific achievements of From the early twentieth century through the 1950s, Syrians, like their counterparts in other Arab nations, drew inspiration from the West and embraced many elements of European culture, just as Europe drew enormous inspiration from the Orient, as Edward Said (1978, 1994) has demonstrated. Yet, from the 1960s onward, many intellectuals, politicians, and artists sensed that Westernization simply had gone too far and had led to a loss of local cultural specificity. As one Syrian film critic told me, “In the fifties we used to say ‘kull shī faranjī baranjī’ [Everything from the West is Best], but now things are different. There’s a lot more interest in heritage and old things.” The category of “heritage and old things” does not consist simply in a catalogue of cultural traits and artifacts, such as what one might find in a museum. Understandings of heritage are fluid and contested, and many factors play a role in determining what particular individuals consider to be heritage in the first place. For this reason, heritage might best be understood as a tradition involving collective memories of the past, conceptions of selfhood and social identity, and attitudes toward the future (MacIntyre 1984; see also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995, 1998). In a similar manner, the Moroccan critic Muḥammad
Different cultural agents use heritage in different ways to support their interests. Self-styled defenders of tradition, for example, tend to emphasize the Islamic aspects of heritage, while cultural modernizers often see these same elements as sources of backwardness and instead emphasize more secular intellectual and artistic domains. Some Syrians reject heritage altogether as an impediment to modernity. For their part, politicians utilize the discourses of heritage and authenticity to promote claims to authority and legitimacy. This often occurs through specific channels of patronage, for example in organizing heritage arts festivals, as well as through forms of censorship that restrict the public sphere.
Yet, Arab fascination with heritage and history, suggests Adonis, has resulted not in its valorization so much as its debasement; now reified as “heritage,” Arab history is being dragged, the poet writes, “on its face” by the disastrous circumstances of the contemporary world. Echoing Adonis, one Aleppine poet remarked, “We walk on our turāth (heritage) as if it were turāb (soil); here there is little respect for the past, and little understanding of it.” According to these poets and others, an overriding interest in the Arab past and the numerous discourses of authenticity and heritage that accompany it have not led to a sought-for reawakening—instead, it merely has produced another form of cultural slumbering (see Mbembe 1992, 2001).
Another way of understanding cultural “slumbering” is as a crisis of cultural confidence—what Adonis has described as a “double dependency” on the Arab past and on the Euro-American present for cultural models because of a lack of Arab creativity in the present (1992: 80). Evidence for this abounds in contemporary Syrian culture. From modern poetry to architecture, painting, and music, the glories of Arab civilization are considered by many Syrian commentators to be long faded as novel genres, many inspired by European cultural forms, dominate the cultural scene today. Decay, if not decadence, tends to be a prominent theme in discussions of Syrian culture, and music has come to occupy a prominent position in current debates about the present course of Arab society and its future prospects. Six centuries ago, the Andalusian scholar Ibn Khaldūn argued that music serves as a barometer of social-cultural change—prophesying cultural upswings and declines.3 How can the crisis of contemporary Arab culture be heard in its musical forms? What might the turn to heritage in all its aspects, including the musical, indicate? Can it bring forth new currents of thought and give new directions to Arab society in the twenty-first century?
Poetry is the supreme art of the Arab peoples, with a rich history and vibrant contemporary presence. Indeed, modern Arab poets are somewhat akin to American rock stars and it is not uncommon for a reading by such well-known poets as Adonis or Mahmoud Darwīsh to draw crowds in the thousands. Music has been closely allied with poetry from pre-Islamic times to the present, with shared oral aesthetics of performance and listening, and shared roles in the construction of modern subjectivities around the Arab world (see Racy 2003). For that reason, the twentieth-century Egyptian diva Umm Kulthūm could rise to prominence not only as the “voice of Egypt,” as Virginia Danielson (1997) shows in her important study, but in many ways the voice of the Arab people more generally, and of their aspirations. Both because it has a distinguished place in Arab cultural heritage and because it is the most popular, accessible, and portable of artistic media, music engages and orients debates about culture and society in Syria and is an essential player in how the past is used to authenticate and thereby legitimate various contemporary cultural practices. Popular music in its many varieties is easily the most widely listened to music in Syria as elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. The music associated with high culture and the classical Arabic language—what some might call “classical Arab music”—has more limited popular appeal, though many Syrians would acknowledge its symbolic weight and importance. Yet, because of its associations with tradition and heritage, the music offers a rich cultural space in which performers and listeners mutually construct “authentic” aesthetic experience, and at the same time mutually construct what it can mean to be modern in Syria today.
Aesthetic practices such as music need to be understood not only as art forms but as mediating practices that promote modern conceptions of self and society. While these conceptions are related on some levels to European ideologies, Syrian artists and cultural brokers deploy them as critical alternatives to European modernity in what some scholars are calling a quest for alternative or counter modernities.4 The construction and evaluation of authenticity in musical performance engage with much broader and deeper debates about culture and the nation that are at the heart of postcolonial aesthetics in a variety of contexts.5 For many Syrian musicians and music lovers, modernity consists not so much in European techno-rationality, but rather in a cultural realm animated with spirit and sentiment, and expressed through a discourse of the emotions. “Oriental spirit” (rūḥ sharqiyya), “emotional sincerity” (ṣidq), and “musical rapture” (ṭarab), among other terms, not only describe musical aesthetics but also promote conceptions of personhood, community, and nation that need to be thought of as posing a counter-narrative to European Enlightenment ideologies that stress the autonomous, rational self. As Kathryn Geurts (2002) has shown, sensory aesthetic terms often index deeper affective and moral states. My aim is to uncover these associations in Syrian musical worlds and to show how affective and moral states associated with musical aesthetics participate in the construction of modern subjectivities in ways more subtle and perhaps more powerful and deeply seated than more overt intellectual discussions and debates.
For many Syrian artists, intellectuals, and critics, debates over the
