Martin Stokes

Islam, the Turkish state and arabesk

The relationship between ideology and popular culture has largely been discussed in the context of developed industrial societies, in which the ideologies that might be considered to have most bearing on society in general and popular culture in particular are capitalism and socialism in the context of specific nationalisms. On the Muslim peripheries of Europe, however, the situation may be different. The appearance of ‘Islamic’ motifs in Turkish popular music and the ambiguous but conspicuous attempts by a populist government in Turkey to control and co-opt this music over the last eight years suggests that Islam has also played a powerful role in shaping the experience of popular music in Turkey. The extent to which Islam constitutes an ideology distinct and separable from capitalism and socialism has been debated at length within and outside the Muslim world. It is clear that Islam has proved less of an obstacle to the development of capitalist economies than that of socialist economies (Rodinson 1977; Gellner 1981). It is also true that the collapse of world markets in the 1970s resulted in crises which reverberated throughout the Muslim world, in which a pristine and ‘traditional’ Islam has become a focus, in various ways, for resentment at the cultural and economic dependency of the Muslim upon the non-Muslim world. Islam projects itself now as a rival and ultimately superior alternative to the nationalist ideologies within which capitalist or socialist formations have been articulated. In Turkey, the dominant and competing discourses of nationalist Turkism on the one hand and Islam on the other have framed the terms in which Turkish social and political history has been seen in and outside Turkey. The popular music known as arabesk apparently defies both of these ideologies and provides a useful case-study of the way in which they operate ‘on the ground’, shaping the identities and strategies around which people organise their social existence.

VOICES AND PLACES: HISTORY, REPETITION AND THE MUSICAL IMAGINATION*

This article examines the ways in which musicians participate in historical knowledge, through an analysis of the spatial metaphors that surround musical experience in two distinct urban locales in Algeria and Turkey. The article proposes an alternative to two approaches which have dominated the sociological and anthropological discussion of music: one which suggests that music simply reproduces social conditions; and another which suggests that it opposes them. Here I argue that the temporalities created through music constitute a form of engagement with experiences of time and history generated elsewhere. I have always found it difficult to disentangle the way I listen to places from the way I look at them. A point of view brings sounds into new juxtapositions and relationships, demanding that we attend to some sounds and ignore others. Sounds demand some kind of interpretation of the spaces they occupy and the position of the listener in relation to them. And whilst social experience insistently privileges the visual, and ethnographies unerringly continue to reproduce this fact (Clifford 1986: 11-12), what we know about ourselves and others and the spaces we create for ourselves is also built out of sounds. We forget these sounds, or pretend they are not there, to our disadvantage. I start with the proposal that we consider sounds and points of view, voices and places, as connected social experiences. This exercise raises a number of issues relating not only to the narrow focus of this article (the relationship of social and musical experience), but also to the

The media and reform: The saz and elektrosaz in urban Turkish folk music

Arabesk, a popular genre of Turkish music, is explicitly condemned by the dominant Kemalist political tradition. This critique is frequently cast in terms of an ideological distinction between the forces of a bureaucratic, secular centre and a reactionary, “Islamist” periphery. The former has promoted a reconstructed national folk musical tradition, in opposition to the “oriental” fatalism of Arabesk, associated with the latter. This dualism is however more of a political myth than a useful model of the social reality of popular music. It also obscures the strategies developed by urban professional instrumental musicians to reconcile the often contradictory demands of the state, the varied contexts of the market (piyasa) and their rapidly changing technologies. The paper examines current developments in techniques on the acoustic and electrified long‐necked lute, the saz and the elektrosaz as aspects of these strategies.