The wonders of the ancient world! Apparently, as history would have it, human life began in Africa, grew and matured; moved up the Nile, whither it flourished on its sedimentary banks; moving thence over the Suez, settling again on the Mediterranean, and at the crossroads of the Tigris and Euphrates; then venturing further, out to the Caspian and beyond. Along their travels, they built towering monuments, thriving communities, and powerful religions that speak to billions around the world to this day. And now these very places are some of the most impoverished and desperate in the world, save a handful of petroligarchs (you can use that). Of those, Tajikistan is one of the poorest, and the fact that some 90% of the country is Muslim had no small part, indirectly, to do with that. During the Great Game, the Tournament of Shadows, the seething, century-long battle between Britain and Tsarist Russia for control over central Asia, Moscow took control over what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Once the Bolsheviks took over, and the State became the state religion, they had no idea what do with these… religious folk, and decided to make them essentially autonomous. This meant investing nothing in the region, while their rule under the Soviets entailed no contact, let alone investment, with anyone else, and the region slid slowly backwards. When the USSR broke up in 1991, Tajikistan declared itself a sovereign nation, and immediately plunged into civil war.

During all this, culture was still happening. As stupid as it sounds, this always surprises me, and kind of blows me away, when the most depressed, down-trodden, war-torn regions can still beat with the pulse of collective life. Stories are told, goods are made and used, songs are sung. This particular song comes from a late ’60’s collection of field recordings by ethnomusicologist Marc Slobin called Afghanistan Untouched. It’s a Felak song—the word being a derivative from a local Persian dialect meaning something like “divinity,” or “heaven,” or “fate,” depending on the context—and is roughly akin to our blues tradition; born of hardship and struggle, generally taking the form of a lament or a “rag;” only the tone of it is a bit different. It’s not quite a keening cry or a hoarse bellow, more a simple statement of fact, stinging of reportage, even if I can’t understand what the anonymous singer is singing about; he may be entreating Allah, but his voice speaks only to his humanity. He strums furiously at his dambura, never stopping, and uses the voice he has, in the only way he can.

Oh, but we’ve gotten on the subject of divine voices, haven’t we?, which brings us to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, that venerable monument (literally—ha!) to towering ragas. Well, not specifically ragas, but a certain possible raga derivative known as qawwali, a mystical Sufi tradition aimed at bringing the participants—singer and listener both—closer to Allah via a trance-like state. It begins with short, devotional phrases, pregnant with meaning, and through repetition and repetitive elision, the words slowly fall away into sound, as it spins ever higher, and ever faster, forever and ever and ever. Here, from one of his few Western-produced albums—Night Song, with Canadian guitarist Michael Brook—he’s constricted to a shorter time span than usual, closer to Western pop song length, but loses none of his wrenching, eye-rolling, trance-inducing power, while Brook keeps to the sidelines, laying out an appropriately large canvas.

And now, the trick. Originally, the spur of this article was to end on Muslimgauze, an artist I thought might typify some modern recreation of ancient devotion. If only I’d bothered to look him up. Turns out he was an Englishman named Bryn Jones, was never a practicing Muslim, and had never ventured to the Middle East. Over his nearly-two-decade career (with a vault stacked full of posthumous releases, unloaded one after another upon his death in 1999), he fixated on the Islamic world and a free Palestine with a vigor that seemed to border on the fanatical. In a 1990 interview with Network News magazine, he said of his project, “Muslimgauze have not, and will not impose themselves on any country in the Middle East. A short visit as a tourist does not improve things. Viva PLO.” So… what? Never going at all, releasing minuscule-edition copies of dozens of albums that not many heard during his lifespan, sending out cryptic missives of support for even the most despicable, genocidal autocrats—one of his most artistically successful albums is called Vote Hezbollah—is supposed to accomplish something? I now wish I didn’t know; it was difficult enough to get behind him thinking he was a local supporter of the politics of death (nota bene: this is in no way to suggest I think much of the Sharon regime either, but that’s a different article, for a different webzine, preferably written by a different person), let alone a… a what? A political tourist tossing transgressive imagery around willy-nilly, like that Great Jewish Punker Joey Ramone holding up a swastika flag? Is this an indictment of Western policies in the region? The West only comes up in the context of rhythm—beats swiped from hip-hop or local dance grooves; the rhythms of the poor and disenfranchised here. Muslimgauze, to put too fine a point on it, raises nothing but questions of the most intense-screaming-argument sort, which I suppose makes him one of this most interesting artists to turn to in a discussion of Islamic music and its portrayal in the West. On this track, from the posthumous Box of Silk and Dogs box set, he loops and strings together bits of Islamalia, into another raga of sorts, with an undercurrent of industrial stomp and tumult just under the surface. It seems so right and appropriate, but how would I know? What was this guy up to? We will probably never know.

[buy untouched/nusrat/muslimgauze]