Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023): 224-227

Book Review

Lisa Nielson. Music and Musicians in the Medieval Islamicate World: A Social 
History (London; New York; Oxford; New Delhi; Sydney: I. B. Tauris, 2021). 
ISBN 9780755617890. viii + 296 pp. $120 cloth. $35.95 paper. $35.95 ebook.

and
Dwight F. Reynolds. Medieval Arab Music and Musicians: Three Translated 

Texts (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022). ISBN 978-90-04-50154-6. xii + 207 pp. $119 
cloth. $119 ebook.

Owen Wright

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

(ow@soas.ac.uk)

Since the general coverage provided by Shiloah and Sawa, academic interest in the 
premodern history of music in the Arab world has tended to devote more attention to 
the domain of scale systems, interval definitions, and intonation (culminating in the 2010 
volume by Beyhom).1 Research into the more social and anthropological aspects of music, on 
the other hand, has been prosecuted primarily with respect to their modern manifestations. 
These two publications are thus especially welcome as, sidestepping the intricacies of the 
theoretical domain, they tackle early documentation on music as social activity and, in one 
case, ethical minefield. Both are aimed at a broad readership and communicate well.

That by Lisa Nielson has the wider range, but despite its title including the capacious 
“Islamicate,” its geographical and cultural focus is firmly within the eastern Arab world. 
It does, though, provide an informative introductory survey covering the pre-Islamic Near 
and Middle East. If inevitably somewhat compressed, this is still perceptive and, with the 
particular attention it pays to the varied spectrum of gender and, especially, to female 
musicians and the complexities of their positions within systems of slavery and court 
patronage, it points to the durability of earlier structural models and signals many of the 
preoccupations of the following chapters. In these, then, we find a concentration on gender 
issues, on the position of courtesans and mukhannathūn (effeminate men or intersex 

1.  Amnon Shiloah, Music in the World of Islam (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995); George Dimitri Sawa, Music 
Performance Practice in the Early ʿAbbāsid Era, 132–320 AH / 750–932 AD (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of 
Medieval Studies, 1989); Amine Beyhom, Théories de l’échelle et pratiques mélodiques chez les Arabes: Une 
approche systématique et diachronique. I. L’échelle generale et les genres. Tome I. Théories gréco-arabes de 
Kindī (IXe siècle) à Ṭūsī (XIIIesiècle) (Paris: Geuthner, 2010).
© 2023 Owen Wright. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

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225  •  Owen wright

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023)

performers), and on the room for negotiation across social lines of demarcation (with due 
reference to al-Jāḥiẓ’s penetrating analysis of the “wiles” of enslaved female singers). Even 
if the detailed treatment of slavery tends to drift away from musical specifics, much of this 
is enlightening.

Literary sources are again called upon for nine brief illustrative biographies of 
representative court musicians, a cross-section of free and unfree, of women and men 
(including mukhannathūn). Here, once more, there are acute observations on status, agency, 
and reputation, although as the work begins with a vivid vignette of the Umayyad-era 
songstress Jamīla’s famous musical ḥajj, it is rather a pity not to see her included here too, 
especially given the status she acquired as an arbiter and as a shrewd judge of the qualities 
of her male contemporaries. 

Throughout, it is the probing attention to questions of gender, status, and power that 
impresses, with Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī (The book of songs) 
as the crucial source for the vivid account presented of performance and patronage at 
the Abbasid court and of the lifestyles and rivalries of the musicians who served it. Of 
lesser importance to a social history, perhaps, are traditional musicological concerns, but 
the handling of these leaves something to be desired. For example, it is unclear what is 
meant, in relation to the Ancient Near East, by “rhythm was likely modal and capable of 
transposition” (p. 27); the early Arab modal system is unlikely to have been as complex as 
is implied; and the emphasis on the centrality of improvisation is difficult to reconcile with 
the textual evidence for the creation, memorization, transmission, and reliable replication 
of an extensive repertoire. There are also various slips in the rather hurried exploration of 
the tricky terrain of instruments, most spectacularly that regarding the gruesome story of 
Lamak/Lamech’s creation, for rather than hanging the body of his dead son on a tree, here 
he hangs himself and models the instrument on his own bones and sinews. 

The latter part of the book is dominated by an analysis of attitudes to samāʿ (i.e., the 
permissibility of listening to music). The topic is inescapable, but the approach a little 
lop-sided, concentrating as it does on straightforwardly negative appraisals. It begins, 
perhaps inevitably, with the depressingly unsubtle Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, but then only touches 
in passing the intellectually far richer counter arguments of al-Ghazālī before exploring 
in some depth, in a chapter that amplifies research appearing in a previous publication, 
a mixed bag of texts held in Jerusalem. All are equally negative, even if expressed with 
greater finesse. Such case studies have their virtues, but in the present context a discursive 
survey of themes (as in the final Reflections summary) might have served the uninitiated 
better as an introduction to the complexities of the samāʿ controversy, particularly given its 
perennial relevance. 

Finally, two appendices include (a) a useful collection of relevant ḥadīth and (b) a glossary 
of terms, mainly of the instruments previously mentioned. The bibliography is substantial, 
but one may still regret the absence from it of Fāyid al-ʿUmrūsī, al-Jawārī al-mughanniyyāt 
(Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d.), and Mika Paraskeva, Entre la música y el eros. Artes y vida de 
las cantoras en el Oriente medieval según El libro de las canciones (Kitāb al-agānī) (Granada: 
Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2016). 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023)

Review of Music and Musicians and Medieval Arab Music and Musicians  •   226

Occasional philological infelicities occur (zammāra, for example, is regarded as a verb 
as well as a noun; and we have mention of “the participle mim”), but above all there is an 
unwelcome waywardness with transliteration that characterizes the whole book: at one 
point we are even offered the unintelligible ghanihū al-mughiyya ḍaraba (“roughly” glossed 
by the author on p. 252 as “singers striking song”). Proofreading appears to have been 
negligent in the extreme, so that missing diacritics are too numerous to mention, although 
some slips, such as rashīdūn for rāshidūn, al-Masʾūdī for al-Masʿūdī, Dūnya for Dunyā, or 
Diya for Ḍiyāʾ are maintained consistently. It is a pity to see such blemishes disfiguring a 
generally stimulating and thought-provoking study.

The very different work by Dwight Reynolds is interesting and valuable in its own right, 
but may also be seen as a complement to Nielson’s. It does not attempt a similar synthesis or 
overview but rather presents essential source material in the form of annotated translations 
of three substantial texts, each provided with a lucid and informative introduction. The first 
two consist of extensive biographical material on two pre-eminent musicians, demonstrating 
their importance as performers and teachers, and covering their outstanding contributions 
to court life. They are approachable, informative, and entertaining, and helpfully cover 
the complementary but distinct cultural poles of Abbasid Baghdad and Umayyad Cordova. 
The third, more technical, is concerned with the textual intricacies of a poetic genre, the 
muwashshaḥ, demonstrating in the process that it was at the same time a song form. It 
provides a geographical mid-point by revealing the popularity of the muwashshaḥ in 
twelfth-century Cairo, but is not really a link, as in both subject matter and approach it 
stands rather apart from the other two. 

The first text is the substantial section in the Kitāb al-Aghānī concerned with Ibrāhīm 
al-Mawṣilī that also serves as the basis for Nielson’s biographical sketch. It amply fills out the 
salient points made there, providing a compelling narrative of the vicissitudes in the colorful 
life of one of the major figures in the early history of Arab music. Perhaps of even greater 
significance for the corresponding musical tradition in al-Andalus is Ziryāb, the subject of 
the second text, by the eleventh-century historian Ibn Ḥayyān. Although much earlier than 
al-Maqqarī’s better-known account, it is still not sufficiently close to its subject to avoid 
some of the accretions that produce the mythical account of Ziryāb as the arbiter of taste 
at the Umayyad court, not just in music but in everything from food to fashion. Reynolds’ 
introduction judiciously evaluates these problems and addresses the musical innovations 
attributed to him. Although not, like Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī, a distinguished composer, he 
appears, through his performances and, especially, through his influence as a teacher, to 
have established a dominant repertoire and style, including conventions of ordering items 
in performance. The third text, perhaps inevitably, is tougher going, presenting the reader 
with a catalogue of complex rhyme schemes before allowing musical vocabulary to intrude, 
and even here it does little more than demonstrate the presence of musical elements as 
integral to the genre. Nevertheless, this is still enough to show that, in concentrating on 
questions of prosody, language register, origins, and possible influences, the abundant 
scholarly literature on the muwashshaḥ has downplayed or missed an essential element by 
not recognizing the centrality of music to both performance and composition. 



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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 31 (2023)

All three translations cope extremely well with what is sometimes quite tricky material: 
they demonstrate expertise, read smoothly, and are often deft and vivid. For the non-Arabist, 
they will be an invaluable recourse. Comments are correspondingly few. Regarding style, the 
occasional archaic expression (p. 41: “Sire, that song, by your life, …”) could perhaps have 
been avoided, while colloquialisms, although generally welcome, sometimes result in shifts 
of tone that jar; and the one-size-fits-all rendering of wayḥak as “Blast it!,” although clearly 
an improvement on “Woe unto you!,” is still not always felicitous. Diacritics, especially 
subscript dots, are supplied inconsistently.

On points of detail:
• p. 31 nadmān. In this context, prefer “fellow-drinker” to “regretful one.”
• p. 42 To “gave him” prefer “was given” (in parallel with the following “was dismissed”).                             
• p. 45 To “in the end your departure made my surrender clear”  )وإذا هجرتــك شــفني هجرانــي) 

prefer “but when I am away from you, I am emaciated by separation.”
• p. 73 To “He [al-Rashīd] reached out towards her” (اســتدناها) prefer “He asked her to/

bade her come closer.”
• p. 183 To Innā l-ḥammāmu // fī aykihā tashdū prefer Inna l-ḥamāma …