Women and Religious Music

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Anne Rasmussen's Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia Courtesy: University of California Press


    Through reading Anne Rasmussen's Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia I was really fascinated by the differences in Qur’an recitation cross-culturally. Learning about the significance of Indigenous Indonesian styles of music and Arabic poetry traditions was certainly eye-opening. The way that the Qur’an is used and honored by Muslim people are vast, complex, intimate yet public. 

    A very damaging misconception about Islam is that women are not allowed to participate in activities or express themselves in any way. While it is unfortunately true that many Muslim women are subject to abuse and control, this absolutely does not automatically apply to all Islamic communities. The Indonesian Islamic songs sung by women that we listened to in class, particularly Al-Quran, were inspiring, emotive and empowering. The singer herself, Hj Nur Asiah Djamil, is an accomplished, highly knowledgeable and skilled Muslim woman. 

    Rasmussen writes, “Nur Asiah Djamil’s songs, for which she claims nearly exclusive authorship of tune and text, borrow heavily from Egyptian compositions of the 1960s and ’70s, exemplifying again the practice of direct (or partial) contrafacta, this time not with traditional tunes, but rather with more recently composed Arab (mostly Egyptian) music that circulated by means of cassettes and films. Her arrangements rely on a keyboard synthesizer but also employ electric guitar and bass, violins, rebana, and the Indonesian side-blown bamboo flute, suling, which Djamil herself plays very well.”


Nur Asiah Djamil. Courtesy: https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/67331


    A concept that was really interesting to me was women giving their voice to the Qur’an. To have a woman’s voice reciting or singing about the Qur’an creates a world where Islam honors and celebrates women expressing themselves and their culture. Another inspirational person we learned about was Maria Ulfah. Women writing, singing, producing and performing music is, in many cultures, a powerful action. “Maria’s search for a citation is just one example of individual female agency that may well affect the entire nation,” Rasmussen writes on page 214. The ripple effect that is produced by seeing people


    I have recently been listening to the music of Grouper (AKA Liz Harris). Harris grew up in a Fourth Way commune in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and had limited access to different styles of music other than what her parents and other “groupers” (what the adolescent members of the commune called themselves in an act of defiance, and Grouper’s namesake) listened to. I have always been drawn to religious music, or music inspired by religion. I love how ancient much of it sounds, and sometimes it simultaneously comforts and unsettles me, or is so heartbreaking and thought-provoking that it moves me to tears. Knowing the historical context behind Ulfah’s, Djamil’s or Harris’s music definitely allows the listener to appreciate what they have created all the more.



Grouper's 2007 song You Never Came



Works Cited:



Rasmussen, Anne. Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, University of California Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wheatonma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=572072.

Created from wheatonma-ebooks on 2022-04-05 16:10:35.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grouper_(musician)

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