With general relevance to the conceptual confusion caused by “world music” marketing strategies, I highly recommend a review by Michael Frishkopf of The Rough Guide to Sufi music (Asian music 43.1, 2012, online here). It’s important background for several of my fumblings on the cultures of West/Central Asia, such as Bektashi/Alevi ritual (here, here) and the Naqshbandi order, and is instructive for traditions further afield—including China, where concepts like “religious music” and “Daoist music” may also confuse.

While praising the CD’s “wonderful collection of stellar performers and powerful performances”, Frishkopf trenchantly criticises its scant twelve pages of liner notes, “replete with misleading stereotypes, Orientalist-inflected, market-driven verbiage (alongside some outright errors)”.

First he addresses “world music”, itself a problematic category—an industry marketing label for musical performances from “elsewhere”, often combining elements (sonic, textual, or contextual) unfamiliar to Western listeners with others conveying reassuring familiarity (notably percussive grooves, or the timbres of Western popular music).

With the noble exception of labels aimed at the non-pecuniary goals of preservation, scholarship, or education, “the typical marketing strategy for this world music includes techniques for selection and description designed to maximise sales, not representational accuracy”.

In search of sales, most world music representations are biased—in both sound and description—to conform to the expectations for the world music idea, underscoring unfamiliarity by stressing features such as exoticism, ecstasy, trance, and spirituality, oſten emphasizing physical aspects (movement, dance, possession), and de-emphasising text in favour of the (supposedly) more transcultural power of musical sound.

On such compilations, the process of abridging original liner notes compounds rather than corrects representational errors. And “connections between different tracks typically cannot be intelligently described because such connections are not present anywhere in the source material; their interpretation requires knowledge of the broader musical scene that has already been omitted in the original re-presentation.” Moreover,

radically different kinds of world music—in this case Sufi music from field recordings, studio recordings, live performances from the world music circuit, fusions with scant existence outside of world music circles—are oſten juxtaposed without comment, simply because they were marketed under the same labels by the chosen source CDs. Some artists are widely known in their home country, others enjoy only local fame, while still others have built careers in world music and aren’t known back home (the essential elsewhere with which they are associated) at all. In the case of music identified as spiritual, some performers are recognised as religious authorities, while others are masters of music alone. Some performances are intended as spiritual utterances, while others have been denatured as a staged art.

Next Frishkopf turns to “Sufi music”, problematising both words (cf. Rectifying names):

First, one must consider the different perspectives on music (both as word and as phenomenon) and related concepts (e.g., sama’, spiritual audition; ghina’, singing) in Islam, and in Western discourse about Islam. In my opinion, the crux of this problem is not that the word music must never be used to describe the sounds of Islam—certainly the semantic scope of this English word is broad enough to encompass that which many cognates (e.g., Arabic musiqa) do not—but simply that this status, and discourse, must at least be discussed, and the etic use of the word music acknowledged. The present CD does not problematise the term at all.

Second, and perhaps more critically, is the slippery concept of Sufi, a word whose ethnocentricism is masked by its status as a legitimate Arabic word describing certain particularly pious Muslims of mystical inclination. Sufism, on the other hand, is an English neologism; the corresponding Arabic term is tasawwuf. In fact, as scholars such as Carl Ernst and William Chittick have recently observed, the current English sense of Sufism (like the terms Salafism and even Islam) has been shaped and promulgated by Orientalists, as a blanket term to designate diverse phenomena—from theosophy to voluntary religious associations (turuq), from ritual ecstasy to simple veneration (madih) of the Prophet Muhammad—throughout Muslim lands, in contrast to an imagined orthodoxy. Yet no single term covers such a vast range of phenomena in the languages of the Muslim majority regions, and indeed until the modern rise of Islamism, Muslim societies did not distinguish two spheres now known as Sufism and Islam; what is now called Sufism permeated rather than counterposed Islamic belief and practice. Sufi thus appears as a crypto-etic term. My point here is not that the term Sufi music should never be used, but rather that such a term (and its constituent parts) should be problematised, however briefly, considering its etic status and Orientalist genealogy, and (consequently) the ways it tends to mask difference.

He lists some examples on the CD. Whereas in most Muslim practice (Sufi or otherwise) language is foregrounded, in such packages instrumental music is stressed more than poetry.

In the cover statement “Islamic mystics harness the power of music”—sometimes true, though certainly not always—the sensory is transformed into the sensational, a technique for selling CDs. On page 3 of the notes booklet appears the phrase “hypnotic and trance-inducing”—an exemplary instance of world music marketing.

Following scholars of religion, Frischkopf queries the notes’ use of terms like “sects” and “orthodoxy”. And commenting on “the religious orthodox have tried to keep music out … but the Sufis have harnessed the power of music … and turned it to the service of God”,

this statement misleads in several directions at once. First, if music is taken in its broadest sense, even most Sufi writers tended to object to music in general and would approve of particular forms of chanting and—occasionally—instrumental performance only in carefully prescribed and regulated contexts. Second, if music is taken to include religious chanting, even the orthodox have always accepted certain kinds of music such as the cantillation of the Qur’an (tilawa), the call to prayer (adhan), and the recitation of religious poetry (inshad), provided that its themes remain within the bounds of religion, that the musical practices focus on text rather than emotion, and that men and women do not mingle.

Moving on to the second paragraph of the notes (!),

one finds further representations of Sufism through rituals and festivals that are described as exotic, dramatic, extreme, and ecstatic; a bodily spirituality reaching heights of bliss while radiating agony and death, evoking both Eros and Thanatos; ironic transfigurations of similar discourses today deployed—harshly—by so-called Muslim fundamentalists, the Salafiyya, for whom such features constitute adequate proof that Sufi ritual is a wholly illegitimate bid‘a (heresy; literally, innovation), having nothing to do with true Islam. Orientalist fantasies and fundamentalist critiques, both drawing on Sufi stereotypes, are thus unwittingly paired.

Frishkopf sums up:

All the artists and recordings presented here are aesthetically outstanding, though the relation of performers and performances to Sufism is quite variable. Most tracks appear to be concert or studio performances (oſten in international world music contexts) rather than field recordings, a limitation which could easily be excused if it were at least acknowledged. The selection is limited in range (so many regions and traditions have been omitted, while others are overrepresented), and biased toward instrumental music (though sung poetry nearly always prevails in Sufi contexts). Finally, the notes, which appear to rely entirely on texts drawn from source CDs (thus repeating and compounding their errors), suffer from serious inadequacies. Worse than unscholarly or error-prone, they are badly afflicted by overgeneralizations, unproblematized categories, essentialisations, and world music stereotyping, echoing Orientalist discourses, presenting misinformation, and failing to suggest important connections. Finally, understanding is severely curtailed by the absence of poetic translations. It is a rough guide to Sufi music, indeed.

His conclusion is almost comically tactful:

As a result, this album can only be recommended for teaching music, ethnomusicology, or Islamic cultures under two conditions: (1) if it is supplemented by additional readings and critical classroom discussions; or (2) if it is presented as an instance of the world music phenomenon, to be interrogated as such. For the listener, however, these tracks present a rich aesthetic experience, one that can easily be extended by recourse to the generally available source CDs, and beyond. For this service, and for highlighting the work of these remarkable musicians, the editors and publishers of The Rough Guide to Sufi music deserve commendation.

Frishkopf doesn’t interrogate a second edition (on 2 CDs) curated by William Dalrymple (cf. his film Sufi soul—see under From the holy mountain).