The initial encounter of Easterners and Westerners with each other's music did not, in most cases, result in love at first sight, or rather sound. Instead of poetical associations or feelings of delight, the other's music often reminded the novice listeners of a dog's barking.
In the mid-tenth century, an early Iraqui traveler to Europe, Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, reported, "I have never heard worse singing than that of the people of Schlesvig. It is a humming that comes out of their throats, like the barking of dogs, but more beastlike." In August 1648, the French traveler M. de Monconys attended a dervish ceremony in Cairo, which he described in macabre terms: "They all danced for more than an hour with horrible shoutings and screamings; they whirled with violence and a vertiginous speed to the extent that their dance went beyond what the wildest imagination can conceive of the witches' Sabbath....They frequently alter their screamings to voices which sound now as enraged wolves and now as the barking of suffocated dogs." More courteous in his observations was the Ottoman envoy to Spain, who wrote in 1780, "All the great men, by order of the king, invited us to meals, and we suffered the tedium of their kind of music."
Coming closer to our time, we find from the sardonic pen of the French composer Hector Berlioz such evaluations as, "The Chinese sing like dogs howling, like a cat screeching when it has swallowed a toad." Or the following judgment on Oriental music, "They call music that what we designate by charivari.....Their song consists of nasal, guttural, groaning and hideous notes similar to the sounds that dogs emit, when after a long sleep they stretch their limbs and yawn with a marked effort."
Music is not automatically a universal language. It is subject to misunderstanding as are other aspects of culture, but music, the language of feelings and symbolic values, reflects thoughts and beliefs, and is thus able to encounter other worlds.
The development of Arab music
The general name Arab music covers a variety of musical genres with a long history of development, spreading over a huge geographical area stretching from central and west Asia to the Islamized lands of black Africa. It comprises the communal songs and dances of the desert Bedouin going back to the period before the advent of Islam, diverse rural styles found among the numerous ethnic groups that embraced Islam, the learned and sophisticated type of music which was elaborated in the context of the supranational Islamic civilization, and, last but not least, the sacred music of various forms and complex relationships of different religious denominations.
The advent of Islam in A.D 622, it rapid expansion over vast territories, and its encounter with old and prosperous civilizations led to profound social transformations including changes in musical concepts and behavior.
One of the most striking illustrations of transformation was that even in the first century of Islam, the two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, became celebrated places of entertainment and diversion. Witnesses recount the magnificence of the daily gathering in the literary salons that attracted crowds of female and male musicians, poets, intellectuals, and notables of the ruling class.
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