IFAO

Halim el-Dabh (1921-2017) is a collector of “traditional” music and a pioneer of electronic music. He is currently being rediscovered by a new generation of Egyptian musicians who see him as a national precursor. In 1944, El-Dabh composed one of the earliest electronic compositions in history, based on selected and transformed sounds from his own recordings, made in his hometown of Cairo. Such works, and the career of this eclectic musician, both a composer and an academic, shed new light on the production and restitution of anthropological knowledge, which is not so much developed from the act of “writing cultures” as from that of recording and restoring them in different forms, including artistic ones. This text focuses on Halim El-Dabh’s youth in order to retrace his path in a technological and cultural moment of Egypt’s history, while relating it to more global dynamics. Like other 20th century figures, Halim El-Dabh developed new ways of linking collection, research and creation. The practices and itineraries of these figures question the colonial and neo-colonial dynamics of collecting, preserving and restoring music and, more broadly, the production of knowledge.

This article proposes a politically and culturally situated preliminary reading of the biographical and artistic trajectory of Aziz El‑Shawan (1916–1993), a cosmopolitan and nationalist Egyptian composer. The article characterizes the two cosmopolitan cultural formations in Cairo in which he partook and their impact on his career and music: a «modernist capitalist» formation which developed within the framework of colonial rule and the Egyptian monarchy from the late nineteenth century up to the 1952 Egyptian revolution; and a «modernist ­socialist» formation, partly configured by Soviet political and cultural influence, from the late 1950s up to the early 1970s. The article describes how Aziz El‑Shawan became a composer, the phases of his artistic and professional career and his musical style.

The first commercial recordings of Yemeni music were produced in Aden in the late 1930s, at the time of British colonization. These 78 RPM records were first published by a foreign company, Odeon, followed by several local companies, including Aden Crown, Jafferphon and Tahaphon. All of the urban musical traditions of Yemen—ṣanʿānī, laḥǧī, ḥaḍramī, etc.—soon gained recognition and were broadcasted throughout the country in the years between 1935 and 1960, in spite of the ban on music in the north. These first recordings, which are estimated to comprise several thousand records, are still largely unknown. Establishing a chronology has proven difficult, since the various documents that are available are never dated, and many other documents, such as articles from the press, are not currently accessible.

This research must therefore resort to a kind of “industrial and musical archaeology” which attempts to define approximate ranges of dates, periods and temporal correlations. At the same time, the current “wild patrimonialization” on the Internet of these music styles as a cultural heritage allows easy access to many sound recordings on mainstream platforms, particularly YouTube. While this represents great progress in the inventory process, it also implies a very haphazard storage solution for which researchers must try to compensate through increased efforts in documentation, in particular by the development of a database. The reception of the records by the Yemeni society during these twenty-five prolific years shows us that they had an important influence on the musical practice, as well as on a more subtle aspect of Yemeni music: the definition of regional genres which was of great importance in building the cultural identity of the Yemeni people, even until more recent times.

The introduction of the record album in the field of the oral music tradition brings about a break that is as abrupt as it is complete. On the one hand, as an example of objectification, the act of recording undermines the ontological status of the oral musical form; the latter, being fixed on the technical support, acquires a specific material reality and can, therefore, be freed from the traditional environment in which it had remained enclosed. On the other hand, record albums, as commodities, carry ontological reversal to a universal dimension, as a result of which the musical form incorporates the effects of mass commercialization. Hence, such a subversion results in an aesthetic phenomenon of disenchantment. This article analyzes this phenomenon in the cultural context of the Arab world through three symptomatic aspects: 1. increased aesthetic rationality; 2. the intrusion of heterogeneity into musical form; 3. aesthetic reification. In this regard, I refer to the thought of Critical Theory, and more particularly to certain categories developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.

This article extends the results of a first study devoted to the Arabic verb combination kāna sa‑yaf ʿalu, and presents another and new combination, kāna sa‑yakūnu qad faʿala. It shows in particular how these two combinations are to be understood as the “logical” equivalents (from a linguistic point of view) of present and past conditionals of languages such as French and English, whether in the temporal uses of the conditional as well as in its modal uses. It ensures once again that kāna sa‑yaf ʿalu, if it can have a hypothetical counterfactual modal reading that French and English render by a past conditional to say what has not happened, has not, far from there, only this meaning and that it mainly expresses, in particular in its temporal and non-modal use, a present conditional reading such as the future of historians. The second combination, kāna sa‑yakūnu qad faʿala, allows to logically express the past ­conditional, which is the case in its modal uses as well as in its temporal use where it is then the equivalent of the future perfect of historians. Above all, these two combinations present themselves as immediately recognizable for what they are, unlike more classical forms that often risk exposing them to a first reading in the past of form AND of meaning and then to a second in order to restore the intended conditional meaning.

In a widely cited historical anecdote from the year 700/1301, an unidentified Maghrebi vizier is portrayed as visiting Cairo where he becomes outraged at seeing inappropriate non‑Muslim behavior. He then instigates an important act of sumptuary regulation by appealing to the sultan and his advisors. This study argues that the various iterations of this anecdote found in sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show how historians and other authors integrated polemical anti‑ḏimmī discourse in narrative historical form and participated in diachronic discussions about how an ideal Islamic society should be governed. By applying many discursive elements also found in contemporaneous anti‑ḏimmī texts to their historical narration, historians used the character of a bigoted Maghrebi visitor intervening to challenge perceived social wrongs as a rhetorical node to exemplify that ideal Islamic society in an evocative anecdotal form.

The Eighth and last crusade organized by Louis IX in 669/1270 and aimed at Tunis ends in the king’s death; it leads to the conclusion of a truce for fifteen years between his son Philip III, Charles of Anjou and the hafsid sultan al‑Mustanṣir, which settles the conditions for the evacuation of the hafsid territory. The treaty, which is only preserved in its arabic redaction, is provided with an exceptional seal, only known example of a hanging seal from a muslim ruler. The diplomatic and codicologic analyse of the document shows its great interest for the study of the hafsid chancery’s practices and unveils the negociations process, the conditions of redaction and of ratification of all the clauses of the agreement. It is nonetheless an atypical document, written in haste in difficult circumstances, not by a professional from the chancery, and whose negociations have been led by an unexpected diplomatic actor.

Muslim sources focused on the conversion of the Rabbi of Medina, ˁAbdallāh ibn Salām to Islam. However, his biography remains limited and majority of sources revolve mainly around his life in Medina. Indeed, none of the books studied refer to his mausoleum in Egypt, apart from a modest Arabic publication mentioning ˁAbdallāh ibn Salām mausoleum in an eponymous village of the Nile Delta where this emerging figure, in early Islam, is venerated by the local population. This raises the question of the memory journey, from Medina to Timay al‑Amdīd, of the first Jewish converted to Islam in 622, after his meeting with the Prophet Muḥammad.

This article deals with three variations of a panegyric dedicated to Saint Theodore the Oriental, a saint venerated by the Egyptian orthodox Coptic Christians, especially in Upper Egypt: A manuscript version preserved in the late Ottoman period, a printed version from the inter-war period and a contemporary record. We will shed light upon the Middle Arabic used in the manuscript version, and discussed the genesis of the text, we will focus on the editorial process as a reinvention and a bifurcation inside the textual tradition. With respect to orality, it will manifest itself in the recitation as a unique performance, as well as in the weft of the texts as a fantasized model and a trace of the older performances.