The Islamic world is home to one of the richest and most important musical traditions on Earth. It doesn't hurt that it also spans an incredibly vast area, stretching west to Morocco and east as far as Indonesia, and that it contains an intricate tapestry of races, languages and cultures, or that it is an area where just about everything we recognize today as elemental to human civilization first arose. With music, as with so much else, people from the Islamic world have had a lot of practice.
Today, many Muslim musicians find themselves trying to convince audiences across the globe that their myriad homelands contain far more than the Kalashnikov-toting terrorists, women-hating clerics and, by turns, hapless and megalomaniac political leaders that flash across our television screens every night. They are the proud inheritors of a vast musical tradition -- beginning long before the 7th century emergence of Islam -- through which life, love and faith have long been celebrated, and if the artists due to perform in cities throughout Japan beginning this Saturday as part of the Ramadan Night Muslim music festival are any indication, their traditions are alive and well.
Named after the holiest month of the Muslim calendar, which began this year on Sept. 23 and ends on Oct. 22, the festival will feature performances by renowned Persian classical musician Kayhan Kalhor and the Pakistani singer Faiz Ali Faiz, arguably the greatest living practitioner of qawwali, an ancient form of Sufic devotional singing from Pakistan and northern India. Kalhor and Faiz represent the traditional side of the festival's program, while concerts by the Paris-based North African roots group Gnawa Diffusion and DuOuD, along with Mercan Dede from Turkey, will showcase the melding of traditional musical forms with everything from rock and funk to Western electronic music.