Absence and ‘presence’: el-Hadhra and the cultural politics of staging Sufi music in Tunisia

ABSTRACT

Sufisms in North Africa are both esoteric and exoteric; that is, they harbour hidden forms of knowledge and experience known only to initiates but perform them regularly in rituals that are public or semi-public, making them accessible to all. When musics of these rituals are brought onto the concert stage, then, they pose analytical challenges to binaries such as spectatorship/participation, loss/renewal and authenticity/inauthenticity. In Tunisia, the staging of Sufi music has been monopolised for decades by a staged spectacle called el-Hadhra, which, along with its offshoots and competitors, proceeds according to a modular logic of culture in which music, dance, trance and other aspects of ritual are approached as separable, extractable and available for recombination in a plug-and-play manner. This paper unpacks the implications of this logic of modularity through a close reading of el-Hadhra that focuses on strategies of minimising and maximising the ‘contextual gap’ between ritual and stage performances. The resulting ambiguities, I argue, encourage multiple and sometimes contradictory readings that nevertheless illuminate the musical and ritual chains of value activated by Sufi performance and draw attention to the shifting social, religious and political functions and meanings of Sufism in the Tunisian public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• Sufism
• ritual
• spectacle
• contextual gap
• productive ambiguity

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Tufts University Faculty Research Award Committee for their generous support for field research in Tunisia. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I would also like to thank Hamza Tebai, Adam Jerbi, Sonia Bouzouita, Fethi Zghonda, Samir Agrebi, Walid Mennai, Adel Dhouioui, Anis Tounsi, Ramzi Mrad and Haythem Hadhiri for sharing their valuable time and knowledge in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to the reporting of Amna Abassi (2015). From my vantage point high up in the amphitheater, behind the sound and lighting controls, the chants were difficult to decipher.

2 According to the official Carthage Festival brochure and evidenced by how quickly the show sold out.

3 For a video overview of the event, including behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with performers, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt4gtQdvfhc.

4 For Beji Caïd Essebsi’s visit to the Shādhuliyya ṭarīqa, see Young (2015). On the Shādhuliyya in Tunisian society, see McGregor (1997).

5 El-Hadhra followed in the footsteps of Nouba, a spectacle devoted to mizwid (a highly popular yet controversial urban mass-mediated music), also staged by the duo of Samir Agrebi and Fadhel Jaziri. Throughout the 1990s, they and other major artists organized similar spectacles, including Nejma, Taht Essour, Lamssa, El Zazia, and Tunis, chante et danse, creating an artistic trend and ideal that continues to the present day. The phenomenon is most commonly referred to in the French-language press as ‘méga-spectacle’ and in the Arabic-language press as ‘‘arḍ’ (spectacle/show) or ‘‘arḍ farjawī’ (visual spectacle).

6 To avoid confusion, I maintain the local Tunisian transliteration ‘el-Hadhra’ for the name of the spectacle, even though the standard academic English transliteration would be ‘al-Ḥaḍra’, a term identical to the name of the devotional ritual called ḥaḍra.

7 I am indebted to Martin Zillinger and Dorothea Schulz for this formulation, which is the title of their conference ‘Making and Breaking Chains of Value: Rethinking Cultural Commodities’ (January 24–25, 2017, Cologne, Germany), where portions of this essay were presented.

8 Rehearsals for el-Hadhra often included professional singers training the Sufi shaykhs in what the former refer to as ‘proper’ (that is, Western conservatory) vocal techniques (Haythem Hadhiri, p.c., 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Endowment for the Humanities [grant numbers FA5486409 and FA25163017].