Memory, Music and Religion: Morocco's Mystical Chanters. By Earle H. Waugh

Abstract

Earle Waugh's Memory, Music and Religion is a book with two subject matters: the Sufi chanters in Morocco and the role of memory in the religious system. Not only is the research on the first an innovative and welcome work on the Moroccan Sufi culture, but it also affords an opportunity to examine the complex processes of the reinvention of tradition and the reshaping and localizing of Islamic culture. Waugh's point of departure for the second investigation was the Islamic concept of dhikr—a very rich Arabic and Islamic concept simplistically translated into English as “remembrance”—which led the author to the deployment of intricate and difficult ponderings on memory, music, and religion. Waugh approached the subject of the chanter tradition in Morocco from various angles and relied on several social research methods: textual analysis, observation, informal conversations, and formal interviews. There resulted a painstakingly built composition that may serve as source material for the student and scholar of religion, Islamic mysticism, and Moroccan religious culture in particular. The author, who was particularly attentive not to contradict the insiders' explanations and discourse, treated his source material through the sifting and codifying of the observed experience, filling up the gray zones left untouched by the insiders, drawing approximate conclusions, and sometimes making leaps in the realm of speculation. The tentative and repetitive elaborations on memory belong to these speculative constructions. That is why the reader welcomes with a great deal of relief the straightforward exposition of the author's thesis at the end of the book: Memory, Waugh wrote, “is crucial to any comprehensive idea about religious development; both what is remembered and how it is recalled are part of a complex religious act” (192). Obviously, no specialist of religious studies and no historian of religion can go against this analysis. Waugh's conclusion looks all the more conventional when he positions himself in continuity with Mircea Eliade's theory of the “regular return to origins” by the so-called archaic religions. For Waugh, memory, as he identified it through his study of the Moroccan munshidin, represents the mechanism or the tool for a “return to origin” (192–193).