Among the Jasmine Trees. Jonathan Holt Shannon

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      Musicians at Omayyad Palace restaurant, Damascus, 1996.

      But I am there for two things: the food and the music. Having cleaned my plate and gone back to the buffet for seconds, I return to my table and settle in to hear the music to which I will be devoting my research. My notepad and pen feel itchy in my jacket pocket, but I decide to set anthropology aside and try to just absorb the experience. A group of five young musicians are seated along the back wall before an enormous and gorgeous inlaid wooden chest, a number of swords, and a large golden tapestry depicting a scene of Arab horsemen hanging from the wall behind them. The musicians are dressed in traditional clothing, each wearing an embroidered white abāya or woolen robe, and playing the instruments of the traditional Middle Eastern ensemble (or takht): qānūn (lap zither), oud, nāy, ṭabla, in addition to a vocalist. Not withstanding the garish banner hanging to one side announcing in red and yellow letters “Happy New Year and Marry Christmas” [sic], the scene is entirely “authentic.” To the other side of the ensemble sit two men dressed in flowing white robes with elongated conical brown turbans on their heads; they are the group’s mawlawī or “whirling dervish” dancers, named after the Mawlawiyya Sufi order of the thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi.

      The musicians are performing a samāī, one of the basic instrumental genres of the traditional Ottoman-Arab repertoire.⁴ I have already learned several and recognize that they are playing one of the “standards” composed by the famous nineteenth-century Ottoman composer Tatyus Effendi. However, I am a little dismayed at the somnambulant performance. The musicians look as if they are asleep and their playing seems mechanical to me, but still it beats hearing the loud hotel singer and her synthesizer accompanist. After the samāī, the ensemble begins to perform a slow muwashshaḥ, a genre of classical poetry of Andalusian origin set to music. The mawlawī dancers rise and begin their unique dance: twirling slowly counterclockwise, their heads tilted to the right, their right arms raised and left lowered at an angle to their bodies. Their loose skirts billow as they spin, faster and faster, while the ensemble plays a steady beat behind them. Yet the dancers too seem tired—bored, even—and I, though fascinated, wonder what on earth Sufi dancers are doing in a Damascene restaurant.

      The other patrons, soaking up the sounds like so much sonic décor, busily attend to their dishes and conversations. Every once in a while someone pauses to nod a head or shout a feeble Aywa! [Yes!] or Ah! in the direction of the ensemble. Some of them seem enraptured by the atmosphere, while others are apparently less moved. The gurgling of nargīla-s can be heard coming from the corner where a bunch of men sit and stare off into space.

      “Whirling dervish,” Omayyad Palace restaurant, Damascus, 1996.

      Sitting alone watching this parody of “tradition,” I feel depressed. Did I come all the way to Syria to conduct research in restaurants listening to this mechanical stuff?

      Among the Jasmine Trees explores how musical performance offers a cultural space for the negotiation of modern subjectivities and the construction of modernity in Syria and the Arab world today. The modalities of performing and enjoying music in Syria, diverse and contested as they are, reveal some of the nodes of solidarity and fractures in a society coming to terms with itself and its place in the modern world. In Syria, the concept of “authenticity” (aṣāla) has come to play a particularly important role in precipitating debates, clarifying points of cultural cohesion and conflict, and motivating performances among intellectuals and cultural agents: writers, painters, poets, architects, journalists, playwrights, cinematographers, essayists, and, not least, musicians. What is “authentic” Syrian and Arab art? What is “inauthentic”? Who determines the shifting boundaries between authentic and inauthentic, between culture and vulgarity? In the diverse and overlapping art worlds of contemporary Syria—worlds not unto themselves but participating in a series of loosely defined regional and international art worlds and scenes—debate over cultural authenticity must be understood as an expression of the contradictions of the experience of modernity, contradictions felt across the Arab world today.

      In Syria, as elsewhere in the postcolonial world, the arts are an important arena for the struggle over visions of the past, present, and future. These visions—always plural, sometimes incommensurate—have since the 1960s increasingly been articulated in the domain of the arts through discourses of authenticity and authentic culture, often articulated through the notion of a return to heritage (turāth) as the basis for creating a viable modern Arab culture; in this manner, authenticity becomes the marker of an Arab spirit distinct from Western modernities. A common feature of these discourses is their use of a specific language of sentiment and spirit to support claims to authenticity. Such terms as oriental spirit (rūḥ sharqiyya), emotional sincerity (ṣidq), and musical rapture (ṭarab) form part of a critical aesthetic lexicon for evaluating specific artists, works of art, and performances, often in terms of their putative authenticity. The discourses of authenticity and heritage, and the critical emotional lexicon employed to evaluate authenticity, constitute what I am calling the “aesthetics of authenticity” in contemporary Syrian art. Within the framework of this aesthetic sensibility, artists and cultural practices that are thought to be endowed with such emotional qualities as oriental spirit and sincerity, or that produce the experience of ṭarab in audiences—however these terms are understood—are considered to be authentic, whereas those that do not usually are dismissed as inauthentic. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture is often but not exclusively articulated in terms of the opposition of authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha); other common binaries in Syrian critical discourse include Western and Eastern (gharbī/sharqī), modern and traditional (muāṣir/taqlīdī), and new and old (jadīd/qadīm). The fundamental assumption behind these oppositions is that traditional culture is authentic, and modern culture is inauthentic. As I endeavor to show in this work, both “tradition” and “modernity” and the binary oppositions they enable must be understood as products of the rise of modern sensibilities and subjectivities in Syria, as around the world.

      Many Syrian intellectuals and artists assert their claims to cultural authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of the past—often the distant past (pre-Islamic, even prehistoric)—and heritage. Heritage evokes images of the collections of costumes, folk crafts, and customs that are found in so-called “heritage and folklore” museums throughout the Arab world. In a succinct critique of the notion of heritage in ethnomusicology, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 169) suggests that the category of heritage usually encompasses “the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, and dead, and the defunct” within a society. The designation of social practice or material culture as heritage, moreover, often “adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable . . . or that were never very economically productive because the area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 370). My research has shown that in Syria, the broad category of heritage in many instances serves as little more than a catalogue of obsolete and dead cultural traits and artifacts—often those displayed in museums or in gift shops as traditional crafts or lifeways. Yet, in Syria “heritage” (in the form of discourses of turāth) at the same time plays a complex role in contemporary aesthetic and critical discourse, as well as in the constitution of modern Syrian national culture. Of course, not all Syrians would agree on what even counts as heritage. Does it include bodily habits and comportment as well as musical genres? Principles of creative engagement with the world as well as the material products of this engagement? Intellectual achievements in philosophy and science, as well as folkloric understandings of the world? Conceptions of heritage are fluid and frequently