authenticity, constitute what I am calling the “aesthetics of authenticity” in contemporary Syrian art. Within the framework of this aesthetic sensibility, artists and cultural practices that are thought to be endowed with such emotional qualities as oriental spirit and sincerity, or that produce the experience of ṭarab in audiences—however these terms are understood—are considered to be authentic, whereas those that do not usually are dismissed as inauthentic. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture is often but not exclusively articulated in terms of the opposition of authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha); other common binaries in Syrian critical discourse include Western and Eastern (gharbī/sharqī), modern and traditional (muMany Syrian intellectuals and artists assert their claims to cultural authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of the past—often the distant past (pre-Islamic, even prehistoric)—and heritage. Heritage evokes images of the collections of costumes, folk crafts, and customs that are found in so-called “heritage and folklore” museums throughout the Arab world. In a succinct critique of the notion of heritage in ethnomusicology, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 169) suggests that the category of heritage usually encompasses “the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, and dead, and the defunct” within a society. The designation of social practice or material culture as heritage, moreover, often “adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable . . . or that were never very economically productive because the area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 370). My research has shown that in Syria, the broad category of heritage in many instances serves as little more than a catalogue of obsolete and dead cultural traits and artifacts—often those displayed in museums or in gift shops as traditional crafts or lifeways. Yet, in Syria “heritage” (in the form of discourses of turāth) at the same time plays a complex role in contemporary aesthetic and critical discourse, as well as in the constitution of modern Syrian national culture. Of course, not all Syrians would agree on what even counts as heritage. Does it include bodily habits and comportment as well as musical genres? Principles of creative engagement with the world as well as the material products of this engagement? Intellectual achievements in philosophy and science, as well as folkloric understandings of the world? Conceptions of heritage are fluid and frequently contested, and many factors (among them social class, religious and educational background, and gender) delimit how individual Syrians understand heritage and its relationship to national culture.5
In general, discourses of authenticity are most prevalent among members of what might be described as the modernizing middle class—those residing for the most part in urban centers and often among the first generation of Syrians having access to higher education. I have in mind “Amjad,” the founder of a small publishing house in Damascus who hails from a peasant family from rural Aleppo and is proud of his strong voice and his ability to sing classical Arabic songs. There is “Nabīl,” a documentary film maker of Palestinian origin who loves the older music, decries the new, and organizes musical appreciation sessions in his small home. “Khalīl,” a dentist, is an avid art lover who plays the oud and gives frequent recitals in Damascus. I think of them in contrast to “Nawfal,” scion of an elite Damascene family who once proudly showed me his collection of over two thousand classical European albums, and smugly pointed out that not one of them was by an Arab artist. Or “Bashīr,” a French-trained architect who is obsessed with Bob Dylan and with what he likes to call “Bedouin blues,” the music of the Syrian desert, but dislikes the traditional urban musics of Aleppo and Syria.
Certain religious elites also promote their notions of heritage, predominantly but not exclusively Islamic heritage, but these tend to have more modernist rather than Islamist leanings. In Aleppo, for example, some of the strongest supporters of the older musical genres come from traditional religious backgrounds; indeed, most prominent musicians have had strong religious training as well (see Danielson 1990/1991; Shannon 2003b). Members of established elite families often have little interest in heritage: they more often engaged me in debates about the merits of Mozart than, say, the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthūm or the great Aleppine composer
In the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic and vulgar aspects of contemporary culture—what critics in the West usually refer to as mass or popular culture8—cultural heritage constitutes a discourse of privilege. Syrian culture brokers usually do not categorize popular Arab cultural practices such as story telling and popular medicine as “heritage”; rather, they tend to relegate these and similar practices to the categories of folklore (fūlklūr), popular arts (funūn sha
In addition to being a discourse of privilege, heritage also constitutes a privileged discourse, lying at the intersection of aesthetic practices and state ideologies of culture and the arts in Syria, especially in the context of what Syria’s cultural and political elite deem to be inauthentic aspects of contemporary culture (usually what critics in the West refer to as mass or popular culture).9 Through state patronage of heritage arts (in festivals and national heritage orchestras sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, for instance), and through less auspicious means of cultural fashioning such as censorship and official cultural review boards, selected cultural practices are projected as valued aspects of Syrian national culture that need to be preserved and defended, while others are prevented from thriving in the restricted public sphere. Many of the Syrian artists I know attempt to negotiate the boundaries between these two arenas of struggle, between the imagined community promoted by the state, and the everyday practices of artistic creation and reception that are often at odds with such imaginings (Anderson 1991).
Competing understandings of heritage and such metaphors as Oriental spirit, emotional sincerity, and musical rapture (ṭarab) articulate a broader concern with formulating the outlines of a modern Syrian national culture engaged with Western discourses of modernity but at the same time asserting cultural difference from if not superiority to the West. Syrian aesthetic discourse articulates notions of modernity and national culture that, while derived to some extent from European ideologies of modernity and the nation, serve as critical alternatives to them—what some scholars are calling a quest for alternative or counter modernities.10 Musical aesthetics thus comes to engage with broader debates over culture and the nation. Syrian artists and intellectuals construct and promote a sense of difference from the West through a discourse and particular critical aesthetic lexicon of the emotions. Such concepts as ṭarab, for example, express and enact conceptions of the self, community, and nation that pose a counter-narrative to European Enlightenment
