This special issue is the first collection of articles specifically devoted to Middle Eastern popular musics to be published anywhere. When we began work on this issue, we were not operating in a void, however. Popular Music has already published a number of articles on Middle Eastern topics and the ‘great names’ associated with mass distributed musics and films in the earlier part of this century – in particular the Egyptian stars Umm Kulthūm and Muhammed 'Abd al-Wahhāb – have already been the subject of excellent studies published elsewhere. This issue has, however, provided us with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which Middle Eastern musics have conventionally been studied and represented, and on the contribution that several decades of popular music studies might make to this field. The contributors have responded to these opportunities in a variety of ways and the result, we feel, is a distinctly fresh picture of the Middle East.

On 29 September 1994, Cheb Hasni, the most renowned Rai singer living in Algeria, was gunned down outside his family's house in Gambetta, a quarter of the city of Waharan (Oran). He was one of many public figures (and some 50,000 others) who have been killed since the main opposition political party, the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) was prevented from assuming power by the annulment of elections that they would have won in 1991. Like the most notable of Algeria's victims of violence, which include journalists, lawyers, doctors, television presenters and top policemen, Hasni represented a version of Algerian identity that some people clearly could not tolerate. Responsibility for his assassination has not been claimed, but the manner of his death was identical to others carried out by the armed faction of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). His death has possibly marked the demise of a genre of North African popular music known as Rai as it was produced in Algeria. Rai has been a particularly problematic idiom for Islamists and secularists alike. Both groups nurture distinct views of the place of Algeria, and Algerians in the world, and the role of Islam and liberal secularism in Algeria. Rai music constructs its own distinct trajectories linking local and global, ‘East’ and ‘West’, and, in this way, constitutes a distinct problem for Algerians, and indeed other North Africans today.

It has become an annual ritual on Israeli television that, near Independence Day, several intellectuals are gathered in the studio in order to discuss the question whether there is an authentic Israeli culture and what exactly is its nature. Soon enough, popular music turns up as a major subject. It seems that popular music has become one of the few areas in Israel in which a vivid scene of cultural activity takes place, without public funding, and which plays a role in shaping a sense of identity for various groups.

The literature on female sexuality in the Middle East has tended to treat sexuality as the product of a homogenous discourse, examining dominant discourses that focus on religious identities, and treating women more as symbols rather than reflecting their actual behaviour or experience. Sexuality is usually essentialised, treated as inherent and fixed, as if it correlates to gender divisions, and is easily separable from them. Following Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994), sexuality may be understood better as a fluid category that can be manipulated and interpreted according to changing social forms and differing perspectives, whether of men or women, dancer or audience, elite or popular. While marriage ceremonials can be seen as key markers of social status and sexual identities, divergent expectations and values associated with gender and sexual relations are also central (Tapper 1991, p. 15). A form of ‘popular’ music and dance, marked by the complex term baladi (see below), is central to the exploration of sexuality at Cairo weddings. Through looking at the ambiguous role of professional dancers (figures who orchestrate, conduct and ‘embody’ baladi musical forms), I have explored the way sexuality is created through performance: the body of the dancer can be seen as the site of multiple discourses on gendered identity, sexuality and power (see also Lorius 1996).

‘Why buy all those?!’ a street vendor in Cairo asked as I picked out photographs of young singing stars he had for sale. ‘Take more of these,’ he suggested, proffering stills from the 1950s films of Abd al-Ḥalīm Hāfiẓ and photos of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhāb and Umm Kulthūm. ‘Those were really good days … the old singers were really good singers. There's nothing like that now. Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm, they're all gone and the rest are kalām fāḍī [literally ‘empty talk’, indicating something nonsensical or of little value].’ The vendor's opinions resonate among Egyptians. When asked about music in Egypt now, listeners frequently respond by saying: ‘There are no good voices these days’; ‘The singers are all alike – you can't tell them apart’; ‘After Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm, Farīd and Abd al-Wahhāb died, there was no one’.

This article was triggered by a conversation with Jan Fairley, some years back, when she first put to me her idea for a special Middle East issue of Popular Music. My natural enthusiasm was tempered with some quite fundamental reservations. Was there such a phenomenon as ‘popular music’, in any generally accepted sense of the word, in Middle Eastern society? And if so, how were we to identify its repertoires, musicians and contexts? Could a useful distinction be made between ‘popular’ and ‘non-popular’ (or specifically, ‘art’ music) genres? And who, among my Middle Eastern music colleagues, would consider themselves scholars of ‘popular music’? As we discussed these and other such questions, Jan homed in on the truism that, for me, drawing from my experiences in Tunisian music, hit the nub of the problem: ‘of course, “popular” is different from “traditional”’.

In the final scene of Harold Pinter's play Mountain Language (1988), a guard informs the prisoners that they are now permitted to speak in their own language, at least ‘until further notice’. The guard is an agent of an unnamed state that pursues a policy of linguicide, summarised in an earlier scene by an officer who tells prisoners that ‘Your language no longer exists’. In 1993 the Kurdish Tiyatora Botan (based in Cologne) began to present Pinter's play to audiences of immigrants from Turkey, where Kurds were long called ‘mountain Turks’ (daǧli Türkler) by the government.

The synthesizer is ubiquitous on the Arab–American musical scene. Heard at every party, and on every recording, the synthesizer sings the lingua franca of international popular music. While the facade and the body of the synthesizer consist of neutral, slick, black plastic and metal technology, the soul of the instrument, when played by Arab–American musicians, is capable of a completely indigenous, if synthetic, musical idiom. In this article I draw on my experience of six performers of the Arabic ‘org’, commonly known today as ‘keyboards’, to present a sketch of a modern musical tradition.