The "Qur'an" and the "Qasidah": Aspects of the Popularity of the Repertory Sung by Umm Kulthum

Abstract

Recent scholarship has produced two generalizations about Arabic music which will serve as useful points of departure for this discussion. First, and probably unsurprising, is that common terms of categorizing music as "popular," "classical," or "folk," "Eastern" or "Western," "rural" or "urban," "religious" or "secular" are inadequate to describe musical life in the Arab world today. Describing the musical scene in 20th-century Cairo and its pervasiveness throughout the Arab world, Jihad Racy commented that its repertories "elude stylistic typology." Racy proposed that there is a single, large "central domain" of Arabic music which draws from the musical styles of other repertories, indeed still present in the Arab world but having much smaller or occasional audiences and thus lying outside the mainstream of musical life (1981:6, 16). These subcategories, according to Racy, are Western popular music, Western art music, Arab folk music, religious music and "old" Arabic music dating from before 1919.3