Perhaps I’ll give that a listen later. But, all traditional Middle Eastern music I’ve ever heard before is crap compared to Western tonal music – or, for that matter, compared to traditional Chinese or Indian music. YMMV.
Never heard any that wasn’t traditional Middle Eastern.
Western tonal music is based on tonic-dominant-tonic phrases ultimately resolving to the tonic. At least, that’s how a classical-guitar teacher once explained it to me.
But this is just it, young men have always been the aggressive arm of nationalism, religion, and other ideology. These young men are the same ones that get involved in all these things from joining gangs to fighting wars. Islam isn’t going away, but the underlying cause is we are misdirecting the aggression of those who are naturally the most aggressive. These psychopathic ideologues are impotent without aggressive young men to implement their plans. But at a fundamental level, we just want to feel that our actions mean something, and for a kid in search of purpose, it’s a lot easier to direct that energy at destruction than toward something constructive, or even neutral.
I think a big part of the reason we have less of this in the West is that we have more outlets for this aggression and, for the most part, we castigate those who would misuse it. We have organized sports, we have artistic outlet, we have people more connected and exposed to more ideas. All the people in a lot of these regions have exposure to is a single intense propaganda.
Even is Islam did magically disappear overnight and all these people became some agnostic or atheist, I doubt we’d see much difference. After all, look at the Fascist and Communism regimes. The ideologies are different, but we still have fanatical devotion to fundamentally evil ideas.
He WAS the village atheist, when you consider the village he had lived in. Sure, he was one diety short of being an atheist by modern standards, but there were dozens of contemporary gods whose existence he denied.
Eh, all a matter of taste but I love this particular performance of a Mevlevi sama ( warning - very long, but rewards with the slow build IMHO ). Powerful stuff for this particular atheist, anyway.
So you make a sweeping statement… and in fact you don’t know anything much about it, well it does not make you much better than the people you are denouncing.
the idea of making this contrast in a history of the Andalusi music and the Spanish-Maghrebi commonalities in music, the idea of this Western tonal contra Islamic music is…
And about 1.5 million people in the armed forces, most of whom fall into that age bracket, and 2 million in prison, maybe 20% in that age bracket. Not to take away from the excellent points you made in this post
Your “incontrovertible assumption” seems to rest on “Islam is the reason for many bad things”. You also seem to think that had Abraham had not had religion, aggression would not have had another vehicle. Those assumptions of yours are as wrong as the others already indicated by other posters.
There is no evidence to support that hypothesis, and lots of evidence to disprove it. You’re not going to get much better SoCaS than you get in the US, and religions are not going away here in any foreseeable future.
Humanity will come to an end, and then our religions will end. There is no reason to believe the latter’s end will come sooner.
In their current state, they are going away. The anti-Semitic Catholicism of 100 years ago is largely gone, except for a few hold-outs like Mel Gibson. Polygamous Mormons were pushed to the fringes of society; that aspect of their religion is mostly history. The group of American’s who take biblical justifications for homophobia seriously is not gone, but is going, going…undergoing population collapse. There is no reason to think the same will not happen to Islam. (actually it is already happening, with a glacial quickness) The rituals will remain, but the widely held belief that the general tenats are an acceptable basis for modern morals or societal organization will be extinct in all but the most dystopian of futures.
Islam doesn’t need to go away it needs to be force-fed the superior virtues of western secular liberalism until it grows ashamed and embarrassed of its ass-backwards patriarchal intolerance.
BG, where do you think much of that traditional Indian music comes from, anyway? Hindustani (north Indian) musical styles have been heavily influenced by the music of Islamic cultures since at least the 14th century.