Maqam melodies shaped lutes, violins, and surf guitar
Arabic music spans the Arab world's dialects and styles, built on the maqam system of melodic modes without fixed rhythm. Medieval theorists such as al-Kindi and al-Farabi mapped scales on the oud, while instruments and ideas traveled into Europe—and centuries later into Dick Dale's surf guitar.
Pre-Islamic Arabia already prized music: Yemen under Sabaʾ kings was a cultural hub, and Hejaz listeners ranked Hadhrami minstrels highest. Between the fifth and seventh centuries Jahili poets recited on high notes while women singers, not the poets themselves, performed with drum, lute, or rebab in a single maqam. Forms included huda, nasb, sanad, and rukbani. Al-Kindi (801–873) urged a fifth oud string and listed twelve tones by finger placement; al-Farabi (872–950) wrote The Great Book of Music, whose Arabian tone system still underpins practice. Abulfaraj's tenth-century Kitab al-Aghani runs over twenty modern volumes of poems and songs. In 1252 Safi al-Din notated rhythms geometrically—a visual idea Kjell Gustafson only echoed in the West in 1987.
By the eleventh century Islamic Iberia exported instruments that seeded French troubadour culture; English lute, rebec, and naker descend from oud, rabab/rebab, and naqareh. The spiked rabāb is cited as ancestor of European bowed strings including the violin; the four-string oud, brought to Iberia by Moors in the eighth century, feeds guitar lineage via the twelfth-century guitarra morisca. Early twentieth-century Cairo nationalism replaced European songs with Egyptian ones. Umm Kulthum and Fairuz became secular legends; from the 1940s–60s Abdel Wahab, Baligh Hamdi, and Abdel Halim Hafez folded Western instruments into Arabic pop. Lebanese American Dick Dale learned oud skills from his uncle and forged early-1960s surf rock that later fed garage and punk.
Iraq Radio, founded 1936 by Jewish musicians Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity, modernized Iraqi maqam; Salima Pasha starred despite stigma around public female performance. Contested theories link solfège syllables to Arabic Durr-i-Mufassal—Meninski floated it in 1680—but Farmer finds no firm documentary proof, leaving hymn and Arabic origins equally open.
One modal grammar, many centuries of traffic between court, café, and electric amp.
Source: Arabic music
