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CLASSICAL MUSIC, CULTURAL ROOTS, AND COLONIAL RULE: AN INDIC MUSICOLOGIST LOOKS AT THE MUSLIM WORLD By Harold S. Powers The general subject of the symposium for which most of the essays in this collection were originally prepared was "The Status of Traditional Art Musics in the Muslim Nations". The subject was of my devising, and though presented in topical form, it was intended as a question, a leading question, which I wanted to put to colleagues who work in Middle Eastern music. With true chairmanlike tyranny I took the occasion to expand the question at some length in the essay which follows, now slightly revised for more formal presenta- tion. MUSLIM NATIONS AND MUSICAL STATUS By "Muslim nations" I do not mean all nations whose dominant or state religion is Islam, and certainly not the largest of those nations, which are Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. I mean rather only what we might call the core Muslim world, inhabited by peoples who speak Turkish, Persian, or Arabic: that which the West calls the Near or Middle East, perhaps extended to North Africa west of Egypt and Central Asia northeast of Iran. The conquest and rule of Hindustan--now called Pakistan, North India, and Bangladesh--by successive Central Asian Turkish and Afghan dynasties from the 13th century onward eventuated in a Muslim nation of a very different kind, for while many millions of subjects of the Sultanate of Delhi and thereafter the Mughal Empire adhered to Islam, more millions continued in their idolatrous ways. In the Indonesian archipelago the conversions to Islam from the 14th century onward led to what has become an even more unusual kind of Muslim nation. The earlier conversions in the coastal trading areas--in Java, the pasisir--seem to have been peaceful and to have been made largely by way of Indian and Indo-Chinese traders. The subsequent conversions in the wet-rice based high civilization of inland Java proceeded in turn from the coast. The result was two kinds of Islam: the Muslims of the coast and the merchant groups everywhere observed Islamic laws to the best of their ability, but the kejawen Muslims in the interior integrated Islam into their existing ways of thought, be they the partly Indianized and sophisticated modes of the priyayi--the nobility and officials--or the 5This content downloaded from 130.43.141.17 on Sun, 25 Nov 2018 12:18:26 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms