"Introduzione alle culture musicali del mondo islamico: storie, generi, solisti, incontri"

After a general mapping of the main musical genres in Islamic world, drawn with the tools of Sociology and Musicology, I focus on two of them, of greater reference for readers and scholars: Art music known as maqām, that flourished throughout Middle Eastern and Central Asian area, and on the very particular Sufi tradition called samā‘ (‘listening, audition, spiritual concert’). Regarding the first, the article proposes a general history of Islamic Art music divided into main phases: the pre-Islamic period; the early period and the Umayyad caliphate (622-750); the Early Abbasids and Baghdad (750-900); the second Abbasid Period (900-1258); the fall of the Abbasid dynasty, the Mongol domination and the Mamluks (1258-1517) arriving to the Cairo Congress of 1932, intended as a pivot point between antiquity and modernity. The article focuses then on samā‘ in Sufism (taṣawwuf) and takes into exam the meanings of the term, the treatises composed on the question, moving to samā‘ as a spiritual practice and to the inner states that may arise among participants, proposing then some aesthetic considerations and a survey on the main traditions of samā‘ in Islamic cultures. The article closes with a survey on the main musical instruments played in Art music and samā‘.