Ingrid Hehmeyer

The preserved heritage of al-Jabin, a town located in Yemen’s western highlands, offers a unique opportunity to document traditional water engineering principles. There are no springs in the immediate vicinity, because the town is perched at the edge of the mountain escarpment. Even today, water is provided by open cisterns that collect surface run-off following a rain. But as the rains needed to feed the system are highly unpredictable, the water supply is never secure. The perimeter wall of one of the cisterns bears a group of seven signs, a detailed description of which is given in Kitab Shams al-Ma`arif wa-Lata’if al-`Awarif, awork attributed to Ahmad ibn `Ali al-Buni (d. 1225), awell-known prolific writer on magic. Al-Buni explains that the signs symbolize God’s supreme name and thus display great magical power of a protective and well-wishing nature. Generally speaking, magical practices attempt to influence the course of natural events by calling upon a superhuman force. In the case of the cistern, God’s supreme name was inscribed in the hopes that this would lead to a guaranteed water supply. While it is easy to dismiss al-Buni’s text and the observed practice in al-Jabin as superstitious frailty, one needs to bear in mind that under life-threatening circumstances, even people in the modern West easily resort to magical procedures.

Irene A. Bierman, ed., Reading, UK: Ithaca Press in association with the Gustav E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies, 2005. 172 pages.

This volume is the fifteenth publication in the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference Papers series, each of which contains the lecture presented by the recipient of the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award for excellence in Islamic studies along with contributions by other scholars dedicated to a special topic. For the first time ever, in 1996 the award was presented to an art historian, Oleg Grabar, who chose “The Experience of Islamic Art on the Margins of Islam” as the theme of the fifteenth conference.

Salim A. Elwazani

Lois Lamya Famqi

Just as philosophical and religious writings are a verbal expression of the ideology of a people, just as social and economic institutions are determined by that basic ideology, so also music and the sound arts are "translations" of the deepest convictions of a people. They fit into the cultural whole as pieces of a giant mosaic, each tessera reflecting the world view of that people and corresponding to the other expressions of that spirit. Fulfilling this role in the culture, the arts of sound become an important, even crucial, bulwark of a people's heritage.

In English, such aesthetic "translations" of the ideology into pitches and durations are known as "music"; and the term has generally encompassed all forms of sound art, regardless of their intrinsic characteristics or the circumstances of their performance. In Islamic culture, however, there is no term or expression which includes all types of sound art. The term “musiqa”, which is sometimes loosely equated with the English term "music," is certainly inadequate. That Arabic term derived from the Greek has been applied primarily to those forms which, because of context of performance or aesthetic characteristics, were culturally and religiously regarded with some degree of suspicion, or in certain cases, even condemned. The term musiqa has never included those genres of sound art which were wholeheartedly approved and fostered by the culture, e.g., Qur'anic chant, the adhan, the pilgrimage chants, madhih or chanted poetry (shi’r). Elsewhere I have therefore advocated the use of a new expression, handasah al sawt (al Faruqi 1982:30ff). This designation would cover all the forms of sound art, and thus more truly equate with the term "music" and its cognates in other European languages. It is with that expression and an appreciation of the wide meaning which it implies that this presentation continues.