Listening to Iranian and Arab music – celebrating cultural worlds without Othering

There are two playlists that help me to write: ‘Iranian’ and ‘Arab’ music. They relate to the 17 years of my 20s and 30s in Iran, Syria and Egypt, and important relationships that have sustained long after. They invoke for me the distinct rhythms and critical humanity that I experienced there.

I am writing about this here because the two musical styles seem to be exclusively associated with distinct cultural realities – to Iran and across so-labelled Arab countries respectively. 

This is represented in the two playlists by classics that are generally thought to express civilisational identities – for example Yahaghi and Marziyeh in the first and Um Kalthoum and Fayrooz in the second. That they are distinctly different to each other and to other music that I know is evidenced by the fact that in each case it took me some time to make any sense of what initially seemed just a jumble of sounds.

I want to briefly explore how this cultural exclusivity fits with my complete rejection of the dominant ‘us’-‘them’ view that national or civilisational cultures are essentialistically different to each other? Especially considering that the labels themselves might be contestable within the vast, diverse and complex societies with which they are associated – where there are also many other music genres and also world influences that can be found everywhere.

It is instead to do with putting aside the essentialist ‘us’-‘them’ blocks, and finding threads through which cultural variety can be celebrated without putting people into defining boxes.

While I was very definitely ‘a foreigner’, I could begin to make sense of the music because I was, even sometimes unconsciously, connecting with my existing cultural knowledge and experience. A particular event helps me to see this. 

I had the privilege to give private English less­ons to the Iranian classical violinist and composer Parviz-e Yahaghi. He gave me cassettes of his music and invited us to a live concert. I remember being able to relate this, at a deeper level, to what I already knew about the nature of classical music per se. When I then begin to follow Iranian sing­ers and musicians, again, at this deeper level, I could connect how I organised this with my existing knowledge of singers and musicians per se.

I was able to locate the music within my wider engagement with civilisational histories, myths and stories because I could relate this to the very different, but somehow similarly structured stories of my English and British past. Thinking about these Arab and Iranian playlists now is somehow connected with being at the same time engrossed in an imagined Englishness of the classical composer Vaughan Williams.

These threads move in all directions in the varicultural flow – where cultural styles flow and collect, inspire and are imagined and constructed between us. My current understanding of British political satire is influenced by the satire I saw on tele­vision in 1970s Iran and the everyday critical humour I experienced in 1980s Egypt.

Imagination is a key concept here. But it must always be tempered by opening our minds and taking expansive interest in what is going on around us wherever we are. If we block off the culturally foreign as ‘them’ being essentialistically alien, we will get nowhere but prejudice.

If, when Yahaghi introduced me to his classical Iranian music, I had used my existing knowledge to say ‘no, this is not classical at all because it belongs to a different culture’, descent into ignorance would have followed. I had, instead, to be able to say ‘yes, now I can begin to see the connections’.

The threads I found in Iran regarding political satire and other things are discussed in my book, Contesting grand narratives of the intercultural.