ARABIC MUSIC AND THE OUD - Paperback

Many books have been written on the subject of Arabic music, most of them
by Western authors who presented the subject from a Western perspective with
no knowledge of Arabic music other than from theories reported by authors
relying mainly on other Western and often inaccurate sources.
Ahmed Mukhtar's book is most important because, precisely, it narrates his
account of Arabic music, and especially oud music, from the perspective of an
accomplished oudist and composer who has received his knowledge principally
from oral transmission which sometimes conflicted with historiography.
However, oral transmission is a fundamental epistemological tool of Arabic
culture of which the West is suspicious. I have often heard stories about early
Arabic music by musicians from Damascus, to Baghdad, to Fez which I often
disdained as tales but then, decades later, I found out that they were supported
by manuscripts. In a land which commits its Holy Book to the memory of the
Hafiz, is it not reasonable to assume that the history of music, too would have
been committed to orality? Western musicology should revise their views about
the transmission of Arabic theory and rely on probability rather than on
subjectivity. Was it not Farmer who said that the Arabs had a lute twice the size
of the normal type? I never heard such a story from the mouths of any Arab
musicians...