14 - 20 March 2002
Issue No.577
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 March 2002 Issue No.577 |
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Music -- potent expression of Arabic heritage
Al-Satou Al-Sahiyuni Ala Al-Musiqa Al-Arabiya (The Zionist Plunder of Arabic Music), Farag El-Antari, Cairo: Dar Al-Kalima Publishers, 2nd edition 2001. pp136The first edition of The Zionist Plunder of Arabic Music, published in 1997 by the General Union of Arab Artists (GUAA), and introduced by the late Saadeddin Wahba, head of the GUAA then, did not receive the attention it merited. Farag El- Antari's book was most untimely. In the then prevailing climate, and under the rubric of the peace process, the Israelis, backed by the US, were seeking to penetrate an important component of Arab conscience and consciousness, namely Egyptian and Arab intellectuals. "Normalising cultural relations" was the catchphrase that led to the creation of The International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace in 1998, comprising a group of Egyptian, Palestinian and Jordanian intellectuals that soon became known as the "Copenhagen Group." US-Israeli efforts also succeeded in drawing several other cultural figures, among them the prominent playwright Ali Salem and the musician Taha Nagui, to visit Israel on cultural exchanges. They did not meet with as much success, however, in their attempts to lure such personalities as Samha El-Khouli, Leila Murad, Sayed Mikawi and Magdi Naguib. And the second edition of El-Antari's book, by contrast to the first, could not have been better timed.
The book takes readers back to the Arab Music Conference held in Cairo in 1932. How was this conference convened in Cairo? Who drew up its agenda and supervised the activities of its various committees? And why is it that the samples of music it compiled ended up in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to remain there until the present day? These are some of the questions with which El-Antari begins his study.
It is something of an eye-opener to learn that the sponsor of the conference was the then Egyptian Prime Minister Ismail Sidqi, who did all he could to facilitate the tasks of its organisers, notably the Zionist musicologist Robert Lachmann, director of the Oriental Music Department at the Hebrew University. Sidqi, an iron-fisted prime minister, notoriously hostile to democracy and to civil liberties, had developed a sudden interest in music. But it appears that he was also on close terms -- sometimes amorous, it transpires -- with members of several prominent Egyptian Jewish families, such as the Mizrahi and Kattaoui. That he was given membership on the board of directors of more than 15 Jewish-owned companies in Egypt would also have provided a tangible incentive to pursue his newly acquired musical tastes.
The conference, Al-Antari says, succeeded in compiling and presenting thousands of samples of traditional and contemporary Arabic music from North Africa and the Levant, as well as liturgical music from the Jewish and Christian communities there. According to the agreement between Lachmann, deputy chairman of the conference, and the Sidqi government, Lachmann was to take this enormous collection to Berlin to complete its study and analysis. It was not, however, agreed that the collection would then make its way to Jewish collections in what is now Israel.
Nevertheless, could this development have been foreseen? According to Al-Antari, the motivating force behind the conference was primarily Jewish. In 1930, a Society for the Study of Oriental Music was established in Berlin, inspired by the desire to apply the methodology of comparative musicology propounded by the noted German musicologist, Karl Stumpf in the early 20th century to the music of the Arab World. In that year, too, Curt Sachs, professor of comparative musicology in the University of Berlin and curator of the state collection of musical instruments, came to Cairo as a technical consultant to the Oriental Music Institute and began to initiate plans for the Oriental Music conference in Cairo. In January 1931, a French national of German origin living in Tunisia, Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, came to Cairo to participate in organising the conference. The latter was a reputed musicologist noted for his research into Maghrebi music.
GALLERY OF EGYPTIAN CLASSICAL MUSICIANS
Umm Kulthoum in the 1930s (far right); clockwise from top left: Zakariyya Ahmed, Abduh El-Hamuli, Almaz, Riyad El-Sunbati and Mohamed El-Qasabgui
Shortly thereafter, the Sidqi government set about laying the official groundwork for the conference with unusual haste, leading to the promulgation of the Royal Edict of 20 January 1932 that set up the conference's steering committee. A Jewish element undoubtedly predominated at the conference and in its activities. Of particularly note were the following individuals, both of them noted musicologists: Curt Sachs (1881-1959), chairman of the Musical Instrument Committee and member of the General Issues and Musical Education Committees, and the aforementioned Robert Lachmann (1892-1939), author of a number of musicological studies, perhaps the most important of which were on Jewish liturgical chant and on the secular music of the island of Djerba, Tunisia.
Lachmann headed the Recordings Committee, and he was responsible for collecting the recordings and manuscripts that were presented at the conference and taking them back to Berlin. Soon afterwards, he emigrated to Jerusalem to escape the Nazi regime. Other individuals of Jewish origin also played an important role at the conference, including Hans Hackmann, who became the head of the music department at the Egyptian Museum in 1934 and specialised in Pharaonic and Coptic music. Hackmann remained in Egypt until 1958, when he emigrated to Israel. There was also Bridget Schaefer (1909-1985) a German-Jewish musicologist who had undertaken extensive study of the music of Siwa. In 1943, she was appointed dean of the Institute of Female Music Instructors in Egypt and then became the head of the Cairo Conservatory when it was founded in 1959. In the 1960s she emigrated to Great Britain.
El-Antari adds that the Egyptian representation at the conference was, by contrast, very limited both in terms of numbers and in terms of expertise, strengthening Jewish control over the conference and allowing the copying of recordings that had been made under its banner.
Following on from his analysis of this 1932 conference, El-Antari goes on to argue that after the 1967 War the Israelis took up from where their Zionist predecessors had left off, conducting a second assault on Arabic musical heritage. This took the form of the largest survey ever conducted to collect and study Bedouin music in the occupied Sinai. Conducted between 1967 and 1971, the operation was supervised by the Israeli musical historian Amnon Shiloah, a Jew of Syrian origin born in Argentina.
El-Antari cites a passage in the report published in 1971 upon the conclusion of this study to the effect that its purpose had been to trace the origins of the Hebrew psalms, arguing that this reflected the extension of a hidden agenda signaled as early as 1932. For, in the closing paper given at the conference Lachmann had observed that "Arab Bedouin music in the Sinai Peninsula has different, if related, traditions [to other Bedouin music]." In effect, El-Antari comments, "Lachmann had attempted to suggest that the Bedouin music of the Sinai was not connected to the wider traditions of Arabic music, contrary to what has long been established by field studies free from Zionist ulterior motives. The songs of the camel smithy and of watering camels, together with songs of palm tree pollenisation, are as present in the Sinai as they are among all Arab Bedouin tribes, and the Sinai ballad shares the form and style of the ballad in Egypt and in other Arab countries," he writes. The "ulterior motives" to which El-Antari refers were Zionist attempts, articulated here by Lachmann, to undermine such national and pan-Arab unifying factors inherent in all Arabic music.
Such attempts to undermine Arabic music in this way were accompanied by Zionist attempts to "infiltrate" it, a word used by El-Antari for the third chapter of his study. In 1993 the Cairo Opera House itself presented a production of Samson and Delilah by the French composer Saint-Saens. According to Al-Antari, this opera, dating from the final decades of the 19th century, is based on Chapters 13 through 16 of the Biblical Book of Judges, proclaiming the Hebrew people's "right" to the land of Palestine. However, thirdly, a crueler affront yet occurred in June 1997 on the 30th anniversary of the June 1967 war when Ernest Bloch's (1880- 1959) Schelomo, or Solomon, symphonic tone- poem, was performed in the Cairo Opera House and in Alexandria. The performances passed without any sign of protest.
Lastly, El-Antari turns his attention to Zionist schemes to appropriate Arabic musical heritage. Examples of this range from Zionist assertions that the harp is of Hebrew, rather than of Pharaonic, origin and claims that the music of the Egyptian-Jewish composer Dawoud Hosni belongs to the Jewish rather than to the Arabic tradition. There have also been frequent attempts to lure prominent Egyptian performers, song writers and other cultural luminaries to Israel.
In conclusion, the republication of The Zionist Plunder of Arabic Music coincides with a period of heightened concern over long-range Zionist goals and their effects on Arabic culture. Music is one of the most potent expressions of cultural identity, and such meticulous and systematic research into concerted attempts to undermine it has an importance of the first order. We are thus all in El-Antari's debt for this pioneering study.
Reviewed by Abdel-Khaleq Farouq
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