That photo was taken at a 2003 concert performance of Ross Daly's Iris project. Ross is second from left* and in the centre is the revered sarangi player Dhruba Ghosh who died recently. For me Iris is one of Ross' finest projects; the CD has been long deleted but the album can be downloaded legally for free from his personal website. Ross Daly's mission is not to create (con)fusions of old music traditions, but to create a new music tradition drawing on old modal forms. Iris is a case of mission magnificently accomplished; probably the best track on a stellar album is Indra Dhanush for which Dhruba Ghosh takes centre stage - audition via the stream below.
* The musicians on Iris are Ross Daly - (rabab, Cretan lyra, tarhu, tanpoura, laouto), Dhruba Ghosh - India (sarangi, vocals), Hamid Reza Khabazi - Iran (tar,vocals), Partha Sarathi Mukherjee - India (tabla), Vassilis Rakopoulos - Greece (guitar), Kelly Thoma - Greece (Cretan lyra), Giorgos Xylouris - Greece (Cretan laouto, vocals), and Pedram Khavar-Zamini - Iran (tombak)
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My photo shows a Sufi shrine in the Chellah necropolis at Rabat, Morocco. Sufism comes in many flavours, but at its core is the individual's search for truth and knowledge. It focuses attention on the Divine through self-knowledge, and uses music, poetry, dance and meditation to tune out the interference of the ego and achieve unity with the Divine. The Chellah is a medieval fortified Muslim necropolis and is the venue for the annual Chellah Jazz Festival. The festival's theme is “European jazz – Moroccan music” and it is a joint EU and Moroccan Ministry of Culture initiative. Below is a video featuring some of the 'Fourth world music' that is created at the festival by culturally diverse musicians who are well aware of the terrible danger of avoiding dangers.
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An earlier post quoting Muhammad Asad (aka Leopold Weiss) on the danger of avoiding dangers reached a very wide audience. So now I am posting the complete passage from The Road to Mecca which contains the quote. It was written in the early 1950s, but is so relevant to recent events both in and outside the Albert Hall. The photo was taken by me outside the Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, in Rabat, Morocco.
When a European travels in any country of Europe which he has never seen before, he continues to move within his own, though perhaps somewhat widened, environment and can easily grasp the difference between the things that habit has made familiar to him and the newness that now comes his way. For, whether we are Germans or Englishmen, and whether we travel through France, Italy of Hungary, the spirit of Europe unifies us all. Living as we do within a well-defined orbit of associations, we are able to understand one another and to make ourselves understood through those associations as if through a common language. We call this phenomenon 'community of culture'. Its existence is undoubtedly an advantage; but like all advantages that stem from habit, this one is occasionally a disadvantage as well: for sometimes we find that we are wrapped up in that universal spirit as if in cotton wool; that we are lulled into a laziness of heart; that it has made us forget the tightrope-walk of our earlier more creative times - that reaching out after intangible realities. In those earlier times they would perhaps have been called 'intangible possibilities', and the men who went out in search of them - whether discoverers or adventurers or creative artists - were always seeking only the innermost springs of their own lives. We late-comers are also seeking our own lives - but we are obsessed by the desire to secure own own life before it unfolds itself. And we dimly suspect the sin that lies hidden in such endeavour. Many Europeans begin to feel it today; the terrible danger of avoiding dangers.
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That photo was taken by me during a qawwali devotion at the Nizamuddin Dargah, Delhi during Ramadan and first appeared On An Overgrown Pathin 2014. Despite being a kafir I have tried during my thirteen years of blogging to present a fair and balanced view of Islam. In fact my attempts to be fair have, I know, caused some readers to think I am too sympathetic to the Islamic cause. But now those attempts have turned round and bitten me, and the story needs telling .
My travel plans for 2018 included Iran, a country whose present regime I have little time for, but one with a rich cultural history that just begs to be explored. But as my travel planning progressed I came across the recently introduced requirement in the Iranian visa application process to provide details of social media accounts. Now sympathetic to the Islamic cause I may be. But entering Iran into the Overgrown Path search box returns some posts likely to give the mullahs heart attacks. Such as one containing this quote from the sleeve notes for an album of Rumi settings by Iranian singer Ali Rheza Ghorbani: "Those who in other times, have crucified Hallāj and Sohravardi, do not hesitate nowadays to oppress dervishes in Iran, demolish their schools or Khaneghah and their sanctuaries, ban their gatherings, imprison them and persecute them in a thousand different ways".
Then of course there are my numerous posts about Sufism, a mystical tradition frowned upon - or worse - by the Iranian theocracy. And the UK government travel advice for Iran states that many Western CDs remain illegal, which means my iPod Classic with its 160 GB of mainly Western music could pose problems. All of which means I am unlikely to get into Iran*. Or more seriously, if I got in I may not get out. So my planned trip to Iran has been shelved and there will be no photo essays here about the Imam Reza shrine or Iran's many other cultural riches. But there are much more serious implications to this vetting of social media than an aborted trip.
The Iranian government's explanation for the recently introduced measure is that it is a response to the introduction in July of social media vetting for Iranian passport holders by the US government. This is a very dangerous development. The criteria for denying entry into the US or Iran based on social media vetting is unknown. As the US - the 'policeman of the Western world' - has set the precedent for this, how many other countries will follow. For instance will Morocco, a country with an autocratic administration, follow suit? Will I need to be more cautious in the future what I write about Morocco, or about the US coming to that?
With online vetting the decision of visa or no visa is a subjective call by persons unknown using criteria unknown. And the process is not just confined to visa applications. In a survey 48 per cent of hiring managers said they check the social-media and digital footprints of candidates. About a third of the managers admitted to rejecting potential candidates because of questionable personal or professional traits they noticed online, while automated vetting software for corporations and governments is big business. So we are moving into an age where having an opinion about issues of the day may result in marginalisation. Where will this end? Will we be asked to provide details of social media accounts before booking a restaurant to make sure we don't write adverse reviews? - which is not as far fetched as you may think. Or will you need to declare your online activities before booking BBC Proms tickets to make sure you are not an Overgrown Path contributor?
There has been only limited recognition of the dangers posed by online vetting. Guidance issued by the EU Article 29 working party which represents all EU data protection authorities has stated with regard to job applications that unless social media posts are relevant to the role being recruited and applicants have been clearly warned that online vetting will be used, the applicant's privacy rights may be breached. While in the US recent state-level legislation in Illinois and Maryland barred employers from asking job applicants for social media logins.
Online vetting is a threat to at least two fundamental human rights: freedom of speech and free movement across frontiers. It is one of the many paradoxes of our social media fixated age that the as yet unknown negative impact of Brexit on free movement has become an online obsession, while the very real negative impact of social media vetting is attracting so little attention. Maybe the explanation is that most social media users have nothing to fear, because their obsessive online outpourings say nothing at all.
* There is no definitive information on entry criteria for Iran. Information from any readers with first hand experience of the Iranian visa process will be gratefully received. Please contact me via a comment on this post. Your communication will be picked up in the moderation process and will not be published unless you request. Algeria is also on my 2018 travel wishlist; the same information on the entry requirements for Algeria would also be valuable.
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In this book I am describing a journey into a region whose 'differences' from Europe are too great to be easily bridged: and difference is, in a way, akin to danger. We are leaving the security of our too uniform environment, in which there is little that is unfamiliar and nothing that is surprising, and entering into the tremendous strangeness of 'another' world... But are we really excluded from that world? I do not think so. Our feeling of exclusion rests mainly on an error peculiar to our Western way of thinking: we are wont to underestimate the creative value of the unfamiliar and are always tempted to do violence to it, to appropriate it, to take it over, on our own terms, into our own intellectual environment. It seems to me, however, that our age of disquiet no longer permits such cavalier attempts; many of us beginning to realize that cultural distances can and should be overcome by means other than intellectual rape: it might perhaps be overcome by surrendering ourselves to it.
Those extracts come from Muhhamad Asad's The Road to Mecca. Muhammad Asad (1900-92) was a Jewish-born Austro-Hungarian formerly known as Leopold Weiss. He converted to Islam in 1926 and took a Muslim name; later he became a Pakistani citizen who held important posts including that of Pakistan's envoy to the United Nations. As well as his administrative roles he was an important author and political theorist. A Guardian tribute recounted how: "Asad was saddened by the intellectual insularity of the Muslim world, the intolerance of the extremists, and was a powerful advocate of the rights of Muslim women. It was Asad’s insistence that the constitution of Pakistan allow for the election of a woman leader that opened the way for Benazir Bhutto".
Muhhamad Asad's The Road to Mecca was published in 1954; but like many forgotten gems contains wisdom that is as relevant today as when written. Take for instance the warning against underestimating the creative value of the unfamiliar. Classical music has for years been obsessed with dispensing with silly conventions. But as one set of silly conventions has been discarded, they have been replaced by yet more silly and familiar conventions.
Elsewhere in his book Muhhamad Asad writes about 'the terrible danger of avoiding dangers'. Nowhere is this more true than in Western art music, which in a misguided attempt to woo a wider audience has created a uniform environment in which there is little that is unfamiliar and nothing that is surprising. But elsewhere musicians refuse to avoid danger. My recent explorations of the unfamiliar have taken me to the work of the French-Algerian singer, composer, auteur, inventor of Algerian 'Gourbi-Rock', graphic designer and caricaturist, Cheikh Sidi Bemol who is seen in the header photo. Cheikh Sidi Bemol belongs to a lineage of Maghrebian music theatre activists that stretches back to Moroccan folk revival bands Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala - his latest and recommended album L'Odyssée de Fulay seen above, which is a contemporary take on ancient Berber songs, can be sampled in the video below. (If any further proof is needed of the fear of creative danger, L'Odyssée de Fulay is brought to market not via a corporate media company but by Cheikh Sidi Bemol's own record label CSB Productions.)
One of Western classical music's silliest conventions is the Last Night of the Proms. To this institutionalised silliness has been added a new convention, that of using the Last Night to make click baiting activist gestures. If in the interests of avoiding the often predicted death of classical music we have to accept this silliness, I would like to make a suggestion. In the northern Rif region - traditionally Berber territory - there has been long-running civil unrest. This is Morocco's most serious civil unrest since Arab Spring-inspired rallies six years ago and it potentially could pose a threat to the Moroccan government, which is effectively the royal family.
This unrest has received minimal coverage in the Western media despite Morocco being just 36 miles from the EU frontier. The media lacuna is wrong for many reasons: fundamental human rights are involved, the Moroccan government is an ally of the increasingly bellicose American administration. Moreover Morocco is the fourth domino in a line where the other three, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria have already fallen into internal strife triggered by political unrest and fuelled by religious extremism. So to raise awareness of the Moroccan unrest I suggest that Sidi Bemol's version of 'The drunken sailor' sung in the Berber dialect - audition via this link - is given at the 2017 Last Night of the Proms instead of the mandatory anti-Brexit gesture.
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