A Mosaic of Activities
On June 30th, MPV held Phase I of the Muslim Musical Mosaic Project, a humanities and arts project we’ve been working on for the past seven months, thanks to the support of California Humanities a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, our long time friends Jim Kaufman and Marz Atta, and our many donors.
It was a wonderful afternoon of nourishment for the brain and heart with history, genre bending musical performances, and culture. The vision of Phase I of the Project was to develop an authentic American tradition that would create a positive emotional memory for a community that has, and continues to be, demonized and marginalized, and in doing so, pay homage to the various traditions that make up American Muslim culture.
A six-member cohort (pictured below) made up of historians and musicians of diverse cultural backgrounds gathered over the months to co-create original pieces and produce works that stretched our musical expressions, while staying rooted in our individual heritages.
As creator and producer of the project, I gave the opening remarks before the program began, anchoring the project’s vision with the historical and anthropological contributions of Muslims to America’s music culture. Alfred Madain’s presentation, “The History of Gnawa Music” introduced the historical journey, beginning with the roots of Sufisim and the musicality of the Sufi’s spiritual practice and its evolution to Gnawa, a musical genre created by West Africans enslaved in Morocco. Together we performed a Gnawa song in Arabic and in English.
LuFuki’s presentation, “Black Muslim Influence on Music in America” connected the evolution of songs from the enslaved in America to what we know now was Blues, Jazz, Funk and Hip Hop. It is said that one-third of the enslaved individuals brought to the United States were Muslims, and his presentation drew a clear link between the intonation of the field call of the enslaved to the distinctive West African Muslim prayers. LuFuki also delved into the lives of Muslim jazz musicians and how their conversion to Islam offered them the opportunity to free themselves from the religion of their enslavers. Additionally, in learning and speaking Arabic, these early Black American Muslims gained access to spaces that were off limits to Black Americans, but not Black foreigners, during the Jim Crow era.
The musical performance of Blues Salawat was Tazeen Ayub’s form of spiritual expression in Arabic over a blues track, followed by my song “In My Soul”, a new genre I refer to as Islamic Hymns. The song’s lyrics are inspired by a poem by a female Sufi saint, Rabi’a Al-Adawiyya (also known as Rabi’a al-Basri) from 7th century Iraq, set to my original composition in the classical genre. The song begins with:
“In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church where I kneel.
Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist”
Aiman Khan performed “Ya Rahman, Ya Rahim” which translates to “the merciful and the compassionate”, followed by a performance by Farah Mitha “One Love, One Heart” a song developed using a percussive rhythm from the Nubian tradition.
The event concluded with a brief question and answer session, which allowed myself and my fellow cohort members to address the censorship of the arts in Muslim communities in the United States and Europe, a topic that will serve as the foundation of Phase 2 of the project.
Click on the hyperlinks for videos and presentations!
Onward and upward…
Ani Zonneveld,
President & Founder