Is there such thing as Islamic or Buddhist religious music?

Factual Questions
1

“The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music.”

– George Carlin
Although an unbeliever, I’ve always appreciated Christian religious music – Catholic hymns, Protestant hymns, Gospel, spirituals. And I understand there is such a thing as Jewish ritual music, although it’s rather arcane and you need to be a professional cantor to sing it properly (see Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer).

But it occurs to me that I’ve never heard – nor even heard of – an Islamic hymn, or Islamic religous music of any kind. (I refuse to classify the muezzin’s wailing call to prayer as “music.”) Do Muslims use any kind of music in their worship services? Does religious music play any kind of role in their popular culture?

Never heard of any Buddhist religious music either. (Other than meditative chanting.) Is there such a thing?

2

For one example of sacred Islamic music, there’s qawwali.

3

Aside from “how the %&% is the muezzin NOT music?” (have you ever heard these guys? I can only assume you’ve never been in an Islamic society. do you there are radio stations that play nothing else?) you might start here, which I can assure you is the tip of the iceberg. Sufi traditions from Turkey to West Africa actually require music. You may like to Google “Jajouka” as well.

This is a general intro to Buddhist musics.

4

Shakuhachi flute music

5

They sing out their pray thingy 5 or 6 time a day. It sounds kind of spooky though.

6

If you want to try a particularly decent piece of Islamic devotional music ( IMHO of course ), try the long Whirling Dervish ( Sufis from Konya, Turkey ) finale from this set:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000DC6U/qid=1116557893/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-0083368-3191044?v=glance&s=music

The rest of the album has decent enough stuff, but the album-side-long musical/chant “medley” is particularly affecting ( don’t bother with the Amazon sampler for that one, it’s just the warming up at the very beginning and won’t give a really good flavor of the whole piece ).

  • Tamerlane
7

As this is GQ, I’ll refrain from taking umbrage. Muslims pray five times a day. The prayer, known as nam`az, consists of excerpts of the Koran and prayers of thanks to and rememberence of God. It is not sung. Rather, it is recited, often melodiously, but it is decidedly not sung.

The distinction here, I feel between the use of “sung” and “recited”, is that “singing” implies music, and music is considered inappropriate for a mosque.

To get back to the OP, there is quite a lot of Islamic religious music. As has been mentioned, the qawalis, which are a mainly Shia Islamic tradition, that originated in the Indian subcontinent, from I believe, the Hindu tradition of garbis, and Hindi religious music. As music is considered inappropriate for within the mosque, many qawalis are sung in the holy areas outside a mosque, or near/at monuments to the Shia Imams. For the best example of these, see the qawalis of the late Nusarat Fate Ali Khan. The qawalis tend to use imagery of the complete and utter devotion (ishq) of a beloved to his/her lover as a symbol for the bond between man and God.

Likewise, although strictly not music (see above comment about ‘music’ being inappropriate in a mosque, there is also the tradition of ginans and qasidas.

The ginans are Shia Ismaili devotional poems which can be recited in the mosque. Again, they are very melodious, have set patterns of recitiation (or ‘tunes’ for want of a better word), and the ginans at least, are again based very much on Hindi garbis, and written in old Hindi or local Indian dialects. In fact, many ginans contain references to Indian (Hindi) mythology, such as from the Mahabarat and the Ramayan. These ginans are prominent amongst those communities which converted to Islam from Hinduism on the Indian sub-continent.

Qasidas are an Iranian/Afghani/Persian/Central Asian version of ginans. Like ginans, they have set ‘tunes’, and they are mainly recited in Farsi or Pashtu.

With some googling, you should be able to bring up audio files of examples of many of these.

8

Buddhism is a more of a philosphy than a relegion. Where I come from (75% buddhists) , we do have relegious songs. Those are only comes to light on the months of may,june, july where we have 3 major buddhist festivals. Speaking of which, next monday is the biggest one scheduled. There will be plenty of relegious songs sung by kids and adults alike. It could be toned down this time bcos of the tsunami effect in the country.

These are not like chanting. They are actually sung by men and women alike in tune to the sri lankan music.

9

Well, since most Tibetans, Thai and Burmese are buddhist, one could say that their music is largely buddhist.

Check out Mikey Hart of Grateful Dead fame and his music of the world series. Recorded an albumn of the Gyoto Buddhist Monks. It’s tantric chanting with some drums, cymbols and horns. I think it’s waaaaaaaay cool, and it’s a buddhist as you can get since it;s the Dalai Lama’s own personal choir

10

Is there any way to tell the religious from the non-religious music if you don’t speak Arabic?

11

Sure. In the particular case of the all-day-prayer stations you’re talking about sung Quran recitations a capella by one male at a time. Very popular with taxi drivers it seems (at least this is my experience). You pick up on this pretty quickly, there’s just a certain sound. I find it fascinating and some of the singers are quite impressive. I understand that these stations are big as far as Indonesia. I can’t conceive of any way in which this isn’t singing, and often quite good at that.

There are a heck of a lot of different Sufi tradtions and I wouldn’t necessarily expect that all of the musics would be sung in Arabic, while others would be instrumentals to aid in meditative thought/prayer.

Most of the music on Arab radio is either pop or Arab classical (which one could argue, I suppose, is ‘oldies.’)

I can’t think of any exceptions offhand to which female vocals could be assumed to be secular music.

According to many traditions musical accompaniment to proper messages is perfectly halal, and in fact I have a couple of English-language pop songs for kids which espouse Muslim values.

Just about any imaginable combo of people’s beliefs and genres of music are out there.

12

I have some mp3s of budhist nuns chanting; it seems musical.