Tucked away in a narrow, crooked street behind the Valide-i Cedid Mosque in the old Istanbul suburb of Üsküdar, Hezarfen Ney School is a vibrant arts hub. The place was opened in early 2012 by Salih BilginFootnote 1 (b. 1960), a master musician of the ney (neyzen) – the end-blown reed flute – whose professional career as a leading ney artist in Turkey has spanned more than thirty years, including two decades of teaching service at the Istanbul State Conservatorium, in addition to his continuing performance as chief ney player with the Presidential Turkish Classical Music Choir.

Hezarfen both gave instruction and engaged in a wide range of creative practices. On a typical day, one could find Salih Hoca working on the lathe, converting a piece of hardwood into a ney mouthpiece, or cooking with/for his students in the atelier section, which resembled a carpentry workshop with its workbenches, tools, and bundles of reeds left drying before their metamorphosis into neys. The long table in the middle of the room turned the atelier into a social space that glued people together not only through work, but also through sohbet (conversation), music-making and commensality. Within a year of its opening, the place became a complex hub where willing students could take up training in a variety of other pleasurable skilled activities, from classical kemençe (pear-shaped bowed instrument), tanbur (long-necked lute), and ud (short-necked lute) –playing, to Islamic calligraphy. And there were ney lessons, of course.

Taking this vibrant community of practice in contemporary Istanbul as its case study while drawing on my own experience of musical apprenticeship at Hezarfen under the guidance of Salih Hoca, in this paper I discuss how this musical practice facilitates for its master musicians and learners a particular way of engaging with Islam, shaping their subjectivities as Muslims while also fostering in them new skill-based capacities. This discussion engages with recent scholarship in both anthropology and Islamic studies of the relationship between music and Islam, much of which elaborates on that relationship using terms such as piety, post-Islamism, and Muslim moral subjectivity. As productive as this research programme has been, there is a strong tendency in many studies of music practices engaged in by Muslims to link such music-making to a particular register of Islamic discourse, one that is based on legalistic reasoning, and heavily concerned with issues of the authorization and even permissibility of music/art in Islam. My uneasiness here is with the effects of this methodological privileging of Islamic piety as a primary object of study. One conceptual and epistemological implication of this framing is that scholars, encouraged by their informants, investigate how the practice of art is justified if it addresses and communicates a religious message, or becomes a means for transforming individual subjects into better Muslims. What of other dimensions and forms of Muslim music-making that not only lack such a mission, but which actually are at odds with the project of art as piety mobilization or as missionary apologetics?

The Islamic-musical practice analyzed here pursues neither of these aims. For the artists and students at Hezarfen, music practice is not driven by an ambition to convey an Islamic message, even as some novices take up education in the ney with the aim of becoming better Muslims. Nevertheless, if they enroll with such a desire, they are strongly discouraged from continuing in it. Instead participation in this project of musical Islam fosters in practitioners an explorative way of knowing both music and Islam – a way of knowing one through the other. My argument draws on Shahab Ahmed’s conception of “explorative Islamic discourse”, which “does not seek to prescribe a single meaning” in terms of Islam, but rather, “explores a range of possible meanings as Islam and is prepared to leave those meanings both unsettled and unsettling” (2016: 284, emphasis in original).

The ethnographic exploration in this article draws on fieldwork in Turkey between 2012 and 2014, followed by subsequent shorter trips to Istanbul from then onward. In addition to my musical apprenticeship under Salih Hoca, fieldwork in Istanbul also involved observations at a wide variety of sites of pedagogy (religious associations, council-sponsored ney classes, private workshops, conservatoires, student clubs) as well as interviews with ney masters and students. Accordingly, although I offer here a close-up description of the modes of practice that emerge within one Istanbul music school, my observations concerning Muslim actors’ engagement with music and Islam derive from deep familiarity that the activity of fieldwork has enabled with the wider social world of the art of ney-playing in contemporary Turkey. I begin by sketching out an overview of some general shared traits (conceptual and empirical) in the broader literature that examines music and Islam. I then trace the alternative ways in which the project of music pedagogy at work here is imbued with an Islamic ethos. To do so, the article selectively focuses on two aspects of the skilled learning practice, including, first, its richly metaphorical language through which knowledge – both musical and religious – is produced and communicated in an explorative way. Secondly, I discuss how this musical discipline spills over into other domains of everyday life, inviting learners to participate in a wide range of extra-musical activities, from visiting Istanbul’s Muslim places to cooking. Indeed the aims of Hezarfen (literally, ‘a thousand sciences’) are partly revealed in its very name: to craft persons knowledgeable in many skills.

Art as apologetics

Over the last decade, there has been a revitalized interest in Muslim music-making in both anthropology and Islamic studies, investigating whether and how music is integral to Islam, as well as in what Muslims do with it. This interest is partly stimulated by broader contemporary debates in anthropology and other disciplines concerning public piety, the emergence of new Islamic consumerist lifestyles, media and religious art productions, as well as of practice-oriented projects of pious ‘self-cultivation’ that Muslims engage with in their everyday lives. There is now a rich array of case studies examining, among other things, how Muslim theologians and religious leaders debate the permissibility and appropriateness of music (Otterbeck and Ackfeldt 2012, Alagha 2016); the ideological and social control of the artistic sphere by states or Muslim leaders in different national contexts (Otterbeck 2012, Berg 2014, Winegar 2014); and the ways in which music (or art more generally) serves as a resistance tool (Berg 2012, Alagha 2016), as an avenue for subverting the secular public sphere (Barendregt 2012, van Nieuwkerk 2011, ter Laan 2016), or as a vehicle for religious outreach, political mobilization, and the creation of an Islamic community (Winegar 2014, Boubekeur 2007, Hill 2016, Fiscella 2012). Supplementing these research questions is growing attention to the efficacy of art practices in cultivating pious selves (van Nieuwkerk 2012, 2011, 2013; Jouili 2012), and in fostering a religious identity, global or other, among Muslim subjects (LeVine 2008).

While this research programme oriented to the study of the public sphere, piety, and the moral implications of Muslim art practice is diverse, several unifying analytic concerns are discernible. To begin with, in this literature we find an over-emphasis on those art-related discourses and practices that are driven by an overt mobilizing urge and a missionizing intention to use music/art as a tool for communicating a moral-religious message. Much in these practices can be summarized under the technical term of apologetics, that is, artistic endeavors done in justification or defense of Islam. Depending on the object of study, the kind of mobilizing intention undergirding the Islamic practice under scrutiny might vary of course. For example, studies focusing on ruling elites and political-religious leaders have shown that the instrumental use of art might take the form of a ‘civilizing’ project stirred by an ambition to educate young people and to “inculcate them into a certain social collective”, as Winegar’s (2014) work involving state actors and Islamist intellectuals in contemporary Egypt illustrates (see Düzen (2018) on the youth-directed ‘civilizing’ project of the AKP Government in Turkey). On other occasions, the use of music by power holders might be geared towards political resistance and mobilization, particularly in contexts of conflict (Massad 2005). This is a key theme in Berg’s study on the self-production and use of music by Hamas as an avenue for “spread[ing] political messages to the people”, as well as “to mobilize and exhort to action” through the transformative power of music to change people’s mood and foster a shared identity (2012: 305). Similarly, writing on the Lebanese Hezbullah, Alagha documents the selective utilization of music by the organization’s cadres as a tool for “Islamic revival and cultural resistance” that aims to “revitalize the umma and wake it up from its hibernation” (2016: 176). In both of these cases, the use of music is legitimized only if it exists within the frames of what is considered to be halal according to Islam and if there is an Islamic benefit (maslaha) connected to it (Alagha 2016: 168).

Missionary and missionizing music also figures as a common trope in another line of research that takes Islamist and piety movements as its object of study. A number of studies have analyzed Muslims’ creative engagement with religiously approved musical genres such as nasyid or anashid (‘chants’ or ‘recitations’) (e.g., Berg 2014; Barendregt 2012; ter Laan 2016; Joulili 2012) in which we often find an explicit quality of da‘wa (‘bringing closer to Islam’). Here again the mobilizing intention defining the ‘da’wa music’ or ‘sonic dakwah’ (Barendregt 2012: 320) might take a variety of forms. For example, in his account of a missionary movement in Malaysia, Barendregt argues that the intention of his Muslim interlocutors is geared towards “propaga[ting]Islam as a social ideology”, and “contest[ing] colonization and the perceived ongoing political and economic repression by the West” (2012: 319). More recently, ter Laan (2016: 87) has documented how Muslim music-making in Morocco is driven with an ambition “to teach and educate the audience about the proper way of leading a Muslim life” (2016: 87).

Further, an explicit mobilizing intent driving the artistic practice is foregrounded in another stream of work devoted to examine the political aspects of Islamized popular music forms such as rap, hip-hop, or punk music. For example, portraying Muslim hip-hop artists in the US as “verbal mujahidins”, Alim examines the potential of this “Muslim verbal jihad” “to create a counterhegemonic discourse that ‘threatens’ the ruling class and their ideas” (2006: 46). By contrast, Ackfeldt’s (2012) study in Sweden shows that using music as a forum for political protest and social justice activism is not a concern for all Muslim hip-hop artists there. For his interlocutors, making music with Islamic themes is a more “personal endeavor, directed mostly inward to the individual artist, while also serving as an encouragement to other Muslims and as a means of Da‘wa (an invitation to Islam) to non-Muslims” (2012: 284).Footnote 2

These and other works in the same vein have contributed to knowledge about the transformation that Islamist and piety movements and in some cases Islamist authorities (Otterbeck 2012) and even artists have undergone in the past two decades, by documenting their changing discourses concerning music as well as their emerging influence on the production of pious art (see George (2009) on Indonesia). According to Karin van Nieuwkerk (2013), these changes attest to the general development of “a pious cultural sphere” (at least in Egypt) where the rhetoric of “art with a mission”, “halal songs”, “respectful art” and “purposeful art” circulate widely. As her work with Muslim preachers, artists, and pious Egyptians shows, instead of declaring art to be unlawful, Muslim authorities now take a more accepting attitude – what we might call a ‘tactical’ strategy – towards it even if only to approve and accommodate those art practices that have a mission. Here assessment of their pedagogical intent is important, if directed towards the creation of pious subjects and moral improvement (2013: 192). Van Nieuwkerk analyzes this shift in the attitudes of Islamist movements concerning art as evidence of the emergence of a “new form of religiosity” among the middle class and as “an expression of the transformation of Islamism into post-Islamism” (Bayat 2005). Citing Bayat, she notes “Post-Islamism does not mean the end of Islamism, but a reformulation of Islamist discourse from within the Islamist movement aiming to reconcile ‘religiosity and rights, faith and freedom’” (2011: 10).

This highlighting of ‘new’ forms of Islamic religiosity through the trope of ‘post-Islamism’ (Boubekeur 2007; Barendregt 2012; van Nieuwkerk 2013, van Nieuwkerk 2011; LeVine 2008; van Nieuwkerk et al. 2016; Jouili 2012) is notable for how it articulates new class formations, Muslim lifestyles and consumption patterns. However we also find in such religious practices a continued orientation towards one particular Islamic “discourse formation” (Foucault 1994), that of legalistic Islam. Whether the analytic focus is on the discourses and practices of religious leaders and scholars, on Muslim activists (past or present) or pious artists, there is a strong tendency in these studies to identify and explicate a normative mode of Islamic discourse and reasoning. Another word for this is what Kelsay (2007) calls “sharia reasoning”, a discourse based on jurisprudential argumentation and overly concerned with the authorization and prescription of ‘correct’ practice, i.e. as what counts as ‘halal/proper/legitimate’ and ‘haram/indecent/illegitimate’ in line with authoritative Islamic texts.Footnote 3

What becomes occluded by this overly textual and legalistic framing of Islam for studying Muslims’ art practices is the epistemological and methodological implications that it has for thinking about ‘non-legal Islamic discourses’ (Ahmed 2016) that are different to those offered by these partisans of Islam. As Ahmed’s thought-provoking book What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) documents, non-legalistic Islamic discourses grounded in the non-legalistic sources of Islam – e.g., poetry, art, music, etc. – have not only been historically operative in the everyday lives of Muslims but, more importantly, they have been taken up by many Muslims to create normative meaning about Islam and to express themselves as Muslims (see, for example, the work of Bush (2017) and Marsden (2005) on poetry; Morris (2008) on Islamic art; Lewisohn (2010; 1997) on ghazel and samā). In other words, for Muslims, these sources can be regarded as just as authoritative as the legalistic sources of Islam.

Let me take stock here and summarize the dominant features informing this literature.Footnote 4 First, note its concentration on the apologetic and missionary impulses that drive the artistic practice in question. Secondly, it possesses a tendency to subordinate artistic practice, apprenticeship, and meaning to religious concerns and politics. And thirdly, it over-engages with questions around the legality and permissibility of the art practice under discussion. Equally importantly, it implies (whether it explores it or not) that a certain mood or affect characterizes or foregrounds the (music) practice of Muslim artists: an anxiousness, defensiveness, or activist/pragmatist attitude towards the very relationship between art and Islam. By contrast, the musical practice under discussion here is not an Islamized version of popular and essentially non-Islamic music – rap, metal, or rock – being employed to convert or convict. It has a different historical weight to it, related to a genealogy instituting a musical repertoire, style, and lineage (of master musicians) upon which contemporary masters could innovate.

At Hezarfen

Back at Hezarfen, students sit side by side around Salih Hoca in the lesson room, who acknowledges the first-time presence of a new student.

Salih Hoca: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Nihan (female, 21-year-old): I’m studying engineering at Istanbul University. I’m in my second year.

S: Do you have any prior training in music?

N: Not really, I haven’t played any instrument before.

S: Then what made you become interested in learning the ney?

N: Well, I covered myself a month ago. Since then I have been thinking of learning something new, something appropriate to our religion. So I started searching for ney lessons and came across this place.

S: And what makes you think that the ney is appropriate?

N: I guess its relationship with tasavvuf (Sufism). To me, the ney is much more than a musical instrument. I wouldn’t be so much interested in learning music if it wasn’t for the ney.

S: I’ve got some advice for you. Ney lessons are everywhere these days: in our own street two new places have just opened. Üsküdar is shrilling with the ney sound! And so much talk is circulating claiming that the ney is a religious instrument. But if we say so, does that mean that only Muslims can play it? What about those Christian ney players? Here we avoid assigning such meanings to the ney. Instead we do our music, and we take it seriously. This is what I always tell my students, we should all strive to do this music well, because as you know there is a surah in the Qur’an: “Do good, for Allah loves those who do good.”

The girl never came back.

There was nothing particularly distinctive about this first-day interchange. During the course of my fieldwork I witnessed numerous varieties on its theme. ‘Pious’ students would come. Salih Hoca would ask them why they wanted to learn the ney. Newcomers often predictably connected the ney to Islam, claiming an ‘Islamic’ quality for it. In these unfolding climactic moments, the ‘old-timers’ in the room could anticipate the direction of the exchange. Dissatisfied, Salih Hoca would try to disabuse them of their over-estimation of the religious significance of the ney, re-claiming its musical status instead and asking the person to consider whether this was the right place for them.

Despite these dialogues, Salih Hoca was more than familiar with the use of the ney for devotional and religious purposes. During his long years of apprenticeship with the legendary ney master Niyazi Sayın (1927-), he had become well-versed in not only the ethical-artistic sensibilities of the musical tradition that he was mastering, but also in a variety of Islamic ideas and practices grounded in various Sufi traditions.Footnote 5 In fact the genealogy of this artist lineage (renowned as the most prestigious lineage of neyzen masters in Turkey today) illuminates the intimate bond between the beloved ney (and Ottoman music more generally) and the Sufi brotherhoods, in particular with the Mevlevi order (see Feldman 1996). The three key nineteenth century figures of Salih Hoca’s lineage (Sâlim Bey of the Sadiyye order; Aziz Dede and Emin Dede of the Mevlevi order) practised their art in a social milieu in which Sufi orders were a normal part of Istanbul’s public and religious life. Even if the new Turkish Republic’s closing down of the Sufi lodges (tekke) in 1925 was a major blow to the music generated in these religious sites (Tekelioğlu 1996) – they performed the role of conservatoria in Ottoman cities and were the primary sites for ney-teaching – there are much more than just echoes of this long historical relationship between the ney and Sufism in the instrument’s current public life in Turkey. The wailing sound of the reed-flute continues to occupy its central place in the ritual activities of a variety of Sufi orders today, most prominently in the Mevlevi ceremony known as mukabele, which unites music and the cosmic dance (sema) of whirling dervishes. At Hezarfen, too, it wasn’t uncommon to use the ney in more explicitly religious performance contexts, including in the sporadic mukabele ceremonies and other forms of zikir (remembrance) rituals held in old tekke buildings (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

A zikir event held by Hezarfen at the Numaniye tekkesi, Bursa, 2017

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In addition to his musical training, a substantial part of which had taken shape in religious contexts, Salih Hoca had been exposed to Islamic teachings in more direct ways too. His long attendance at the sohbetFootnote 6 (spiritual conversation, suhba in Arabic) gatherings of the Cerrahi and Şabani orders, and the discipleship relationship that he had formed with a Şabani sheikh in the earlier years of his life had all been formative in his religious-artistic formation. In fact, Salih Hoca himself was highly skilled in teaching the ney through sohbet, that is, through the masterful performance of poetic speech. This essentially Islamic disciplinary practice (see Silverstein 2008) held a vital pedagogical, affective, and ethical force in his teaching practice. A substantial part of a two- or three-hour lesson would take conversation mode, bringing music (often through metaphor) into a mutually effecting relationship with other spheres of social life. As I show below, the metaphoric language of sohbet also allowed a crisscrossing between music and various Sufi epistemological ideas, explored and communicated to students through different rhetorical styles, from anecdotes to scene narratives.

Hezarfen facilitated skillful engagement with Islamic art aesthetics in other ways too. Overall, the space of the studio invoked the atmosphere of a Sufi tekke, with exquisite works of calligraphic inscriptions and water marbling (ebru) adorning its interior (Fig. 2). This was a design preference that complemented its soundscape. “The walls of a neyzen’s room should not be bare. Otherwise the ney gives no sound,” Salih Hoca used to say.

Fig. 2
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A sohbet occasion at Hezarfen

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In keeping with the general profile of ney learners in Istanbul today, the students were adult men and women, their ages ranging from 18 to their early 60s, with diverse occupational and class backgrounds, including many university students. Yet the constituency of learners at Hezarfen differed from many other lesson sites I visited during my fieldwork in one important respect. While either pious or secular students dominated most classes at other private or council-organized places, such segregation did not exist here.

What was it like to learn from Salih Hoca? And in what ways did the musical pedagogy foster ways of knowing about Islam meaningful to these skilled practitioners as Muslims? In the following, I explore this knowledge production and meaning-making by describing two dimensions of the musical activity in which it unfolds. The first one concerns the discursive language constituting teaching and learning.

Metaphor as a bridge between music and Islam

Musical apprenticeship at Hezarfen required participation in a thriving speech ‘economy’ both during and outside the actual lesson time. A salient feature of the discursive language organizing Salih Hoca’s verbal improvisations was its rich figurative quality. He would address his talebes (students) with a language that conveyed its message by continuously weaving relations between music and ways of life, made possible by an abundant use of metaphors (mecaz) and analogies (teşbih) as vital teaching tools. Simply stated, metaphors and analogies convey meaning by making comparisons, drawing out a likeness between two or more different things. Yet as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put forward in their foundational work, Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are not mere devices of embellishment; by way of implicating one thing as another (a way of sensing one thing in the image of another), they potentially enable new perceptions or insights about both, enlarging our understanding of things. As I have discussed elsewhere, we can discern the pedagogic efficacy of metaphoric language as lying not merely in its potential to transfer meaning through comparison, but in its potential to create and explore meaning (Senay 2020).

How did this meaning-making work at Hezarfen? Let me examine speech acts from two separate lessons. While each communicates the same insight of the importance and virtue of obtaining a ‘thick’, full sound from the ney – the first and foremost skilled element of ney playing – they do so by building their own metaphorical pathways. Salih Hoca remarks:

The real ney is this ney, friends [pointing at his own body]: this ney [pointing at the ney in his hand] is a symbol. We should aim to get a good sound from this ney [pointing at his own body] so that this ney [pointing at the ney in his hand] also sounds good. Achieving a beautiful sound is a precious thing. This because there is a real neyzen who blows into this ney [human being], a neyzen who plays us. “I breathed life into you, and now you breathe life into the things I said,” says that neyzen to us. So we should speak good things and carry out good works. And if we are playing this instrument, we must also do it well. We must get a good sound out of the ney.

On another occasion he says:

Here our goal is to make a good sound on the ney. We should continue to work on this even if the Day of Judgment was to come tomorrow. There is a Hadis as you know: “Even if the end of time is upon you and you have a seedling in your hand, plant it,” the Prophet said. The intention here is certainly not tree planting in and of itself. Whatever you are doing, you should continue doing it until the end, and do it the best you can. For instance, if your job is to make a ney, you should strive to make a better ney, and you must make sure that none of the neys you make are identical with each other. Are we identical? “In many-ness I found oneness.” (“Kesrette buldum vahdeti.”) Who said these words? [One of the students replies here: “Niyazı-i Mısri.”] Only from multiplicity can oneness emerge.

In these examples, the creative devices of metaphoricity and wordplay demand from listeners that they intuit the meaning of spoken words beyond and behind the surface of plain language. Each one of these speech acts foregrounds and backgrounds particular aspects of the same ‘message’, affording listeners a new perspective or experience in perceiving its meaning and force. In the first speech act, the virtue of establishing a good sound gains its meaning(s) from the analogous relationships drawn out between the ‘instrument-ney’ and the ‘human-ney,’ and, secondly, between the ‘human-neyzen’ and the ‘True neyzen’: just as the neyzen blows breath into the ney, the Essence blows life into the human-ney. The analogy is extended to gaining a beautiful sound from the instrument and to getting a good ‘sound’ from life.

In the second example the spoken language moves from the known to the unknown in a slightly different manner, this time by crossing back and forth between sound-work and other enterprises (i.e. tree-planting, ney-making, etc.) that one expends labor on in life. The perfecting of each requires commitment and persistence, and doing the best one can do today. One meaning accrues to another. The speaker demands from listeners a new exploration of meaning by inter-relating the singularity and uniqueness of each ney and of the singularity and uniqueness of each Divine creation. Their perceived likeness seems to emerge here: just as Divine creation sets out an example for making a good ney, the latter act of creation – the material world – itself stands as a metaphor for the Unseen. The metaphoric relation proposed here expresses the fundamental Sufi idea that all things in the material world are the manifestations (tecelliyat) of the Essence. To put it differently, the Seen world in which we live “is a figural or metaphorical representation [Turkish: mecaz] of Real-Truth [of the Unseen World]” (Ahmed 2016: 20). The reciting of the poetic line by the seventeenth century Sufi Niyazı-i Mısri, “In manyness I found oneness,” only makes sense (in terms of this speech act) in relation to this thought. It evokes and alludes to the Sufi idea of ‘Unity of Being’ (vahdet-i vücud), that is, the idea of the oneness of the creator and the created, which has been central to the teachings of many Sufis from Attar to Ibn Arabi.Footnote 7 The analogous language allows the master’s discourse to enlarge the meaning of ‘good sound’ by being implicated in a mutual relation of meaning with the Sufi notion of the divine unity. In doing so, the speech is able to retain and ‘unveil’ these complex meanings – for example, the complexity of Revelation in Islam – in an explorative mode.

The metaphoric language constituting the speech acts above illustrates the kind of verbalizing that orientates this musical teaching. Rather than merely declaiming the rules one needs to abide by in order to play the ney, here speech fosters a way of knowing music by bringing it into a mutually effecting relationship with the Sufi conceptualization of the world (Sufi epistemology), petitioning listeners to reflect on both. In this process, neither of the entities brought into a shared relation of meaning, i.e. music and Islam, collapse into the other, nor does one gain primacy over the other. Each makes a certain aspect of the other (more) knowable. It is precisely this semantic capacity of metaphors and analogies that makes them the best-suited means for exploring and expressing knowledge (musical and religious) in this musical apprenticeship context. Ahmed’s insight concerning the affordances of the semantic capacity of metaphor is instructive here. Metaphor, he says:

… enables words – and the users of words – to go beyond a single level of meaning (the literal) so as to generate complex meanings (and complexes of meanings) beyond the literal limitations of formal definitions … Metaphor does not seek to determine or prescribe the meaning of ‘truth’, but instead allows “for the multi-dimensional exploration of meaning(s)”… (2016: 390-391, emphasis in original).

The intentionality directing how the master communicated his instructions in this pedagogical context can be understood in the light of this point. What is achieved here is a way of knowing music and Islam whereby the complexity and polyvalency of each can be retained, explored, expressed, and communicated. The aim is not to confine their significance to one/true meaning and mobilize it, but instead to leave it open – not contraction but expansion of meaning(s) – which each listener must discover for themselves in accordance with their own capacity to know.Footnote 8 In fact while the analogous reasoning at work here potentially enables a new sense of what is entailed by the metaphor, it does so without actually naming which particular attributes or characteristics of those elements (i.e. the Divine reality) are being brought into a relation of meaning. Salih Hoca recognizes them as un-nameable and wishes to retain them precisely as such. Thus the ambiguity constituting his figurative language – in other words, the absence of a more plain, precise and logical speech form (‘If a happens then b follows’) – is not an arbitrary design element. The musical pedagogy cannot accomplish its task – that is, an exploration of possible meaning(s) – without the aid of these language tools.Footnote 9

The non-missionary, if not anti-missionary, quality of this Islamic discourse about music, or to put it the other way around, this musical discourse about Islam, is striking. The ethnographic material here presents us with a mood that is very different to the affect characterizing many other forms of Muslim musical practice that have been the focus of recent scholarly work. While their analyses foreground the serious question of their informants’ concern whether and how music is legitimate according to the traditional texts of Islamic jurisprudence (i.e. Qur’an, Hadis, the legal tradition), a lack of anxiety or interest in these questions characterizes the practice examined here. To be sure, Islamic scriptures were extensively worked into the fabric of Salih Hoca’s discursive performances. Quotations from the Word of God and reports (Hadis) of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammed were recited in his speech acts.Footnote 10 However, the master’s discursive engagement with these sources of Islam was not orientated towards an aim to authorize or prescribe meaning about music and/or Islam. Nor was there an intention to justify or defend the connection of music with Islam, to apologize for Islam through musical mission, or even to assert the absolute truth of those scriptures themselves. Instead scripture and poetry were referred to when they were helpful for thinking about music, and music was used to bring out new meanings of the Qur’an. In this sense, the musical practice here is not devoid of an instrumental approach vis-à-vis music and Islam, as it conceives them as a means for exploring meaning for another but without suggesting a hierarchical or one-way relationship between them.

“You can’t become a neyzen if you don’t know how to cook”

For the dedicated group of practitioners with whom I worked, enskilment in the ney is a transformative experience. This transformation occurs not only through developments in learners’ physical skills and sensory capacities (i.e. modes of hearing the world), but also entails learning a new way of being-in-the-world. As I discussed above, the metaphorical language orientating this musical teaching and learning is one such vital bridge to this changed sense of self. Yet in this learning environment time spent with Salih Hoca did not only consist of lessons in ney playing and in listening to his speech. Over and beyond this, students’ experiences of gaining ney competency also involved first-hand exposure to a rich variety of skilled activities of an extra-musical kind. “The best lesson is the one when hardly any playing happens,” I was told by the old-timers.

Take cooking for example, the second most important daily activity at the ney school after music! According to Salih Hoca, the path to becoming a neyzen goes through the kitchen, in learning how to cook well. For the majority of my male fellow students, the kitchen of the ney school is where they gained their first proper exposure to cooking. Not only was gender segregation discouraged in all forms of sociable activity taking place at the school, but males in particular were made subjects of socialization into tasks that are traditionally assigned to women.Footnote 11 Regular occasions of commensality were an important part of the school’s everyday life, articulated to important dates in the Islamic calendar. For example, iftar meals were prepared and shared throughout the whole month of Ramazan, while special cooking occasions were held on kandil (five Islamic holy nights) days to show hospitality to respected members of the community of practice.

Further, teaching expanded outside the classroom of the ney school, comprising a wide range of activities that Salih Hoca did with his talebes in select places in the city. Excursions that involved visiting trades shops in Istanbul’s neighborhoods of Tahtakale and Karaköy, or wandering around second-hand markets in the city, were activities that willing students participated in. Attendance in such place-based (and place-making) activities facilitated in students an embodied know-how about where to find a certain object, craftwork or even a certain food in the massive urban jungle of Istanbul, about how to discern the quality or value of that thing, and how to appreciate the skilled labor that had been invested in its making. A remark made by one of my fellow talebes is illuminating: “From Hoca I learned how to spend money and what to spend it on,” he said, “I have a limited amount of money, but I might spend all of it on a piece of [calligraphic] writing.” In an important sense, participation in these spatial practices in and around the city also cultivated in serious learners new urban competencies that involved learning how to talk to people – not to anonymous people, but to a merchant for instance – or how to bargain.

In another sense, the activities referred to here can also be seen as corporeal practices of personalizing the city or of orienting oneself towards the city. Experiential engagement with Istanbul’s landscape also extended to other clusters of places including Sufi tekkes, the tombs of saintly figures, and Istanbul’s neighborhoods with old Ottoman buildings. According to Salih Hoca, an embodied familiarity with the city’s ‘spiritual’ (maneviyatlı) places was also essential for becoming a neyzen. “You cannot blow the ney if your eye is oblivious to the calligraphy written on the fountain in the Üsküdar square.” (Turkey changed its script in 1925, so not everyone can read the Arabic alphabet). “If you want to become a neyzen, you should go to Eyüp and walk around its old streets.” “If you want to learn the ney, it is good for you to go and sit in the courtyard of the Mevlevi dergâh in Galata.” For Salih Hoca, apprenticeship in becoming a neyzen occurred through these activities as much as in playing the ney.

The transformation fostered in becoming a ney musician also involved, then, a new attitude towards the city’s urban environment. In being spoken for (and in being visited), certain places in the city were deliberately brought to the attention of students, disclosed as something to be noticed and inhabited. One fellow talebe, a kindergarten teacher in her 20s, explained to me how, since coming to the lessons, she had developed a new liking for discovering Sufi sites. “I went to Bursa the other weekend and didn’t leave a single türbe (tomb), a single tekke unvisited there,” she remarked, pointing out how such places had not been the focus of her attention earlier. The spatial practices that the ney school sponsored for students were sometimes extended beyond Istanbul. On one occasion, upon finding out that a certain talebe had not yet visited the tomb of the saintly Mevlâna Celaleddin Rumî (1207–1273), a plane ticket was immediately bought by Salih Hoca to send the young man to Konya.

Following Heiko Henkel, we can say that in enabling the constitution of Muslim spaces, these spatial practices “not only define practitioners as religious Muslims but, in fact, shape them as Muslims” (2007: 64). In his anthropological study on how pious believers seek to inhabit heterogeneous, industrial, and secular contemporary Istanbul “in a Muslim way”, Henkel writes that the old city with its Ottoman mosques and tombs, are “not part of a mold in which Muslim lives are naively shaped but, instead, [are] chosen points of reflection, poetic references” (2007: 67). Consciously ‘place-making’ Istanbul as Islamic is effected “by foregrounding Muslim elements and backgrounding other elements, by designating certain elements as significant and others as unimportant, and by visiting felicitous Muslim spaces” (ibid.: 58). Thus, to reckon with the city in new ways – i.e. to perceive it against the grain of its constitution by capital and nationalists (such as the ruling AKP government) with their ideologies embedded in the urban environment – can be seen as another vital entailment of the perceptual/ethical modification that learners experience.

In all of this, the potential efficacy of the music project to shape learners’ moral selves by fostering new ways of relating to others and to the city is evident. Yet even as Islamic references part-compose the practices that individual subjects participate in here, what this reflects – or aims for – is not a pietization of those selves by targeting “the construction of definite and distinctive life styles of new religious tastes and preferences” (Turner 2008: 2). The moral subjectivity-in-the-making here is not a ‘pious’ self, but one that involves the whole person. The primary affect informing this ethical self-change encourages a crafting of one’s life to the best of one’s ability, an ethic that applies to living in the city, to understanding its affordances, and to the taking of pleasure (keyif) from its qualities as well as from its material craft objects. Indeed keyif is an important mood in becoming a ney musician.Footnote 12 To take pleasure from those practices that are seen as ‘complementary’ with the art of playing the ney and to be emotionally affected by them, is something to be cultivated itself.Footnote 13 More than an emotion, keyif operates, in this sense, as an elevating experience for the exploration and attainment of skilled knowledge, functioning as a means for embodied and experiential knowing. The pleasures one finds in those practices that constitute the ‘lifeworld’ of ney playing complement learning. As Bush (2017: 518) writes in his work on Islam and poetry, “pleasure is an affective quality of encounters with others – either concrete others in daily life or imaginary others, mediated by,” in the case of learners at Hezarfen, “a sensory engagement with” music and a wide range of extra-musical practices that go into becoming a skilled neyzen. The emphasis in here is not just on the learner’s engagement with the rigorous activity of playing the ney, but is also on the idea of methodical immersion in the ‘lifeworld’ of this art through becoming conversant with its related fields of action.

Finally, learning where to eat the best kurufasulye (baked beans) in the town – also vital for becoming a neyzen – mastering how to cook well, and striving to obtain a better sound from the ney are also acts driven by a “desire to do a job well for its own sake”, as Sennett says for good craftsmanship (2009, 8). The musical practice and pedagogy examined here values this ethic, best expressed in the Qur’anic verse chosen to greet visitors as they walked into Hezarfen: “Allah loves the doers of good.”Footnote 14

“We aren’t that type of Muslim”

The two sections above make it abundantly clear that this ney pedagogy trains students in a musical Islam. But what does this mean? And what ‘type’ of Islam is it? Given that Salih Hoca was uninterested in definitional claims, an answer to these questions only emerged in response to a student asking about a debate that he stumbled upon in a music blog site. The controversy concerned whether it was sinful to play the ney before doing ablutions. Salih Hoca guffawed for a moment, and then responded:

We aren’t that type of Muslims. Here the issue is from which perspective one looks at music. What we see in music from the window we look through is a vehicle that helps one travel to God. The paths to God are many. You can travel to God by bus, by bicycle, or on foot. But some vehicles are so powerful that they can help one traverse that distance in the fastest way, like muhabbet (love), like music.

This response is striking for a number of reasons. First of all, it is a non-exclusivist statement that recognizes that there is a multiplicity of ways of being and living as a Muslim. It does not seek to claim that any one of these different modes is right or wrong, or that one is more ‘authentically’ Islamic than another. Instead it acknowledges, in the first instance, that historically Muslims have taken a variety of paths as a means of relating to the Divine and of exploring Divine reality. Secondly, it posits a particularly clear narrative about the ‘self’: to say, “We are not that type of Muslim” is to pronounce at the very same time that “We, too, are Muslims – but of a different sort.” Thirdly, because his answer here is not governed by an urge to recommend one particular form of authority as somehow (more) ‘standard’ or ‘orthodox’ (than others) in terms of Islam – i.e. ‘orthodoxy equals law,’ or ‘orthodoxy equals music,’ etc. – it is a non-orthodox-izing statement at its best. Thus, is it not driven by an intention to prescribe which mode of religiosity (i.e. way of travelling to God) ought to be chosen over another. By contrast, rather than proscribing, its language of analogy leaves it to the listener to work out and explore the meaning for themselves. And fourthly, while it is a non-prescriptive and non-orthodox-izing statement, it is not devoid of implied normativity. In claiming that vehicles such as music and muhabbet are especially forceful in enabling one to ‘travel to God,’ its discourse posits its own preferential values about living as a Muslim.

Equally interesting, what is the type of Muslim that Salih Hoca says ‘we’ are not? Given the immediate context in which this response came about – the preoccupation of some Muslims to ascertain whether or not ablution is obligatory before ney-playing – the statement about what ‘we are not’ takes a position in the main against a rule-centered Islamic discourse, one that is overly concerned with regulation, correction and prescription of appropriate behavior. This is not to say that Salih Hoca’s assertion deprecates legalistic Islam. Instead, while it fully recognizes a variety of modes of authority as being operative in Islam, the overriding concern here is not the identification of orthodoxy as the defining goal of living a Muslim life. In fact, what often made Salih Hoca lose his patience with those who utilize the prescriptive truth-claims of law in their own interpretations – in an attempt to establish what is orthodox and what is heresy – is their fixing of their own theological constructs onto what it means to be and/or live as Muslim to the exclusion of all other perspectives. The anti-plural and anti-liberal rhetoric often employed by Islamic dawa movements (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006) epitomizes such a dismissive tendency, complemented with an authoritative urge to address and correct other Muslims about their own ways of reaching the Divine, as well as to refute those who deviate from ‘orthodoxy.’ Informing the statement “we aren’t that type of Muslim” is a sentiment of dissatisfaction and disagreement with such exclusionist Islamic discourses. This sentiment was expressed more clearly in Salih Hoca’s continuing response to the debate about the ‘sharia of ney-playing.’ He went on to say:

There are these Wahhabi-sympathizers who dictate that levhas (calligraphic inscriptions) should be taken down from mosque walls. “Such things didn’t exist during the time of the Prophet,” they claim. Imagine what type of religion Islam would be if we wiped music or calligraphy out of it! We don’t worship these arts. They do service to us. For example, the inscription over there says, “Allah is the best companion (refik).” This one here says “From Muhammed accrued muhabbet (love).” Now we look at these writings, and use them to enrich our souls. How? Both for their visual aesthetics and for meaning-making. It is no coincidence that the Ottoman-Turkish Islamic arts developed mainly in the tekkes. The most influential calligraphers, poets, and writers of literary works came out of the tekke.

These words give further clues about both the type of Muslim that Salih Hoca says ‘we’ are not, but also about what type of ‘we’ is implicated here: Muslims who take music (as well as calligraphy and love) as a means for meaning-making and for exploring divine knowledge. What is high on the agenda of these Muslims is precisely the potential of music to facilitate an experiential encounter with and knowledge of God. In this, the emphasis is placed on the endeavor of exploration and not on prescription, a useful distinction that Ahmed makes in discussing different kinds of disciplinary projects and modes of authority that have been historically at work in Islam.Footnote 15 Urging us to consider the explorative discourses in our conceptualizations of Islam, he writes:

The notion of ‘Islam’ that gives normative and constitutive primacy to legal discourse is the ‘default’ conceptualization of the majority of scholars today (even if it is often unacknowledged by them), and is certainly the habitual one in the popular consciousness of the majority of contemporary Muslims and non-Muslims alike … The primacy that is given to the constitutive determinacy of legal discourse over other discourses serves to distort our perspective and effectively prevents us even from recognizing – let alone understanding – that, historically, Muslims have constructed normative meaning for Islam in terms that allowed them to live by and/or with norms other than, and at odds with, those put forward by legal discourse (Ahmed 2016: 117, 121, emphasis in original).

The intimate and centuries-long relationship between the ney and Islam itself testifies to the point Ahmed is making here about how historically musical practice has offered a meaningful space for many Muslims to engage with their religion and to shape their subjectivities as Muslims. Hezarfen itself is a living product of this trajectory. Although the approach I am taking here involves focusing on one particular musical institution and its constituting lineage, this non-apologetic and anti-missionary Islamic discourse about music that I analyze here is by no means exceptional within the broader Turkish context.Footnote 16 In the course of two years of fieldwork, I regularly visited and attended to lessons offered at a great variety of pedagogical sites where similar registers of explorative discourses with Islam prevailed. Even at those more explicitly religious teaching sites that I participated in, such as the lessons offered by different religious associations (dernek) in the Istanbul neighborhoods of Fatih and Eyüp, the discourses of master musicians lacked a missionizing meaning even if individual students expressed the attainment of a certain experiential relationship with their religion (i.e. ‘to develop better selves’, ‘to achieve a more spiritual life’) as a driving motivation for them.

In an earlier work (Senay 2017), I explored another commonplace register of Islamic explorative meaning-making that many Muslims participate in, and that is calligraphy, the art of shaping God’s very words. The practice of calligraphy as textual engagement with the Qur’an (and with divine Truth) strongly illuminates how many pious Muslims do engage with the authoritative/legalistic sources of Islam in an explorative way, once we think of calligrapher as someone who always strives to bring out the affective power and perceptual meaning of the text in a new visual form. In this sense, we can induce an analogy between visual form-giving in calligraphy (the same word or phrase can be rendered in many different forms) and metaphor in spoken language, as they are both means for exploring, reinterpreting, recomposing divine knowledge.

Conclusion

As we have seen already, the non-interest of the recent dominant literature on Islam and music in non-legalistic projects of Islamic music attests to Ahmed’s point. What we can add to Ahmed’s observation is that the disinclination to acknowledge such explorative discourses as ‘Islamic’ also prevents us from recognizing a certain actually existing liberality in Islam. Here I use the word ‘liberal’ in the literal sense of the word, to mean ‘munificence’,Footnote 17 which implies a generosity in accepting the validity of lives and practices (religious or otherwise) of those different from one’s own. This is particularly important, given that in the piety literature kick-started by Mahmood (2005), the hegemonic valuing of a Western liberal subject that cannot accept the desire of the pious Muslim actor to submit to the law of God is the chief target. By contrast, Salih Hoca does not valorize as a priority life lived according to sharia reasoning. Indeed his statement, “We aren’t that type of Muslim” epitomizes an Islamic liberalism, for it recognizes the ‘Muslim-ness’ of those who pursue paths different from its own even as it calmly and un-anxiously asserts its own path to be legitimate and orthodox.

This Islam-infused musical pedagogy, as I have tried to show, both enskils learners in musical knowledge and shapes their subjectivities as Muslims through a range of pedagogical practices. At Hezarfen neither of these respective processes (or ends) is given primacy over the other. Nor, for that matter, is one reduced to or subordinated to the other. Here the intricate confluence of music and Islam can be likened to a relationship of analogy: each helps explore meaning about the other, and to discover the meaningful.