Islam in Africa 
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| Title: | Islam and Popular Music in Senegal: The Emergence of a 'New Tradition' |
| Author: | McLaughlin, Fiona |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
| Volume: | 67 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Pages: | 560-581 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Senegal |
| Subjects: | Islam popular music praise poetry (form) Religion and Witchcraft Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Architecture and the Arts music |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161108 |
| Abstract: | This article explores the influence of Islam on popular music in Senegal. Almost every Senegalese popular musician has a repertoire that includes several songs that could be characterized as Islamic, but the vast majority of them take the form of praise songs not to God, but to a marabout or Sufi religious leader. The author suggests that such songs represent the emergence of a 'new tradition' in which the form of the griot's praise song, originally sung to honour ruling families and nobility all over the western Sahel, converges with the reality of a social order that is based on a uniquely Senegalese variety of Sufism. The trend is new insofar as 'pop' music is a relatively recent phenomenon; it reflects tradition insofar as it borrows from pre-existing forms of verbal art. The analysis places the emergence of this hybrid form of praise song in its social context by examining the dynamics and entailments of two patron-client relationships, one secular - the relationship between griots and the people they praise, the other religious - the relationship between Sufi leaders and their disciples. The author suggests that the recent adaptation of the praise-singing tradition to Islam represents the opening of a middle ground in which a multiplicity of cultural, religious and commercial factors converges to shape the nature of contemporary Senegalese popular music. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. |
