Music, its community and its uses

This lesson asks you to analyse, from in-depth research, how music answers to and reflects the community it arose in, and what functions it serves there. The museum offers three cases: an institution of singing women in early Abbasid society, a Sufi singer who learned to sing at the shrines of saints, and a recording that joins qawwali to ambient music and Senegalese musicians. Other traditions and your own research come from your class. ¹

In each record, name who listened and where, and who made the music. Then mark what is your own inference and not in the record.

Sort the three cases by function: entertainment, worship, a meeting of traditions, or another. Then compare what changes from one case to the next.

In Duha al-Islam, Ahmad Amin describes the qiyan as singing slave women, a social institution of the early Abbasid period ². Their masters and the teachers of singing trained them in melodies and voices, and Ibrahim al-Mawsili taught his own slave women the art ². Some belonged to the caliph, the princes and the wealthy ². The Kitab al-Aghani is full of their biographies, among them 'Arib, Mutayyam, Badhl, Dhat al-Khal and Farida, and some of them were poets and writers ². The record shows who trained them and whom they served. It lists no repertoire.

Abida Parveen's record says she sang with her father at the shrines of Sufi saints ³. Ibn al-Qayyim, in his Madarij al-Salikin, asks whether listening to songs and poems with instruments belongs to the wayfarers' path, and the museum's record of the question does not decide between the two sides ⁴. He reports, without naming who held them, the permitters' arguments: that it is naturally pleasing, and that a fine voice is a blessing ⁵. He answers that pleasure shows neither that a thing is permitted nor that it is forbidden ⁶, that taste and state are judged and do not judge, and that in a dispute the reference is revelation ^{7 8}. The record gives these as his judgements, and the legal schools' positions from their own sources are not yet in it.

Three records, three kinds of witness. The qiyan record rests on Ahmad Amin's Duha al-Islam alone ². Abida Parveen's rests on English Wikipedia, in a revision of 7 August 2026, and a Wikidata item ^{3 9}. Night Song's rests on English Wikipedia in a revision of 20 September 2026, and its one statement about what the music is for is a reviewer's: Consumable Online wrote that the two musicians make a pronounced effort to lead the listener towards pure spiritual ecstasy ¹⁰. The other two records give the places and the makers, not a listener's account.

Ahmad Amin places the qiyan in the households of the caliph, the princes and the wealthy, and Abida Parveen's record places a singer at shrines. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: can records like these tell us what music was doing for its listeners, or only where it was heard and who made it?

• The qiyan: the training of the singing women, whom they served and the book of their biographies.
• Abida Parveen: her father's school, the shrines and the forms and languages of her singing.
• Night Song: qawwali vocals, ambient music and Senegalese players on one album.
• Is listening to singing and poetry a devotion on the spiritual path?: Ibn al-Qayyim's discussion, with the permitters' arguments as he reports them.

Read the records The qiyan and Abida Parveen. Write two sentences on the audience each sang for and what the music did for it.