I love music.

My computer has Cheb i Sabbah’s “Alla Al ‘Hbab” on right now, and every time I hear it, it drives me mad. I can’t listen to it too often. The second part of the track, “Hajti Fi Gurini”, is even more intense.

I know that, in Islam, music is discouraged, at least in association with religion. So I don’t even like to say “Islamic” music when I talk about kinds of music I like.

Here comes “Hajti Fi Gurini”. Those Algerians are channeling spirits, I swear. I love this stuff.

Some say music should be avoided because it’s a stimulus. It could be said I’m addicted to it. I can, however, live without it. Our power was off for a week after Allah sent a violent whirlwind to us in March. I wished I could have played music, loud music to gather energy for the cleanup effort. I wished the dude who had borrowed my djembe had brought it back so I could drum. But I was stuck with downed trees and an astonished “Allahu akbar” repeating in my head, when I wasn’t thinking “Jai Kali Ma” (after Bhagavan Das’s song on Now). The tornado was the climax of the weekend when I became religious. I suppose only God knows if or when I’m closer to It but sometimes I swear music helps. How are Muslims supposed to invite people to Islam through eloquence and beauty, without music?!

On the other hand, I think I’m technically a universal pluralist, or even a unitarian universalist (though their church services are uninteresting), so I appreciate that people everywhere can find the divine (or be found by it) wherever & whenever. Jah live! The Dao that can be strayed from is not the Eternal Dao.

Now Sheikha Remitti is on. I don’t so much feel that magic with her music, but I’m thinking about how she grew up an orphan doing menial work in rural Algeria, and started dancing & singing about drinking and men, and how scandalous that must have been. Why would she do it? I suppose it meant something to her, enough that she would sing & dance even though it was supposed to be bad. Sometimes people do strange, questionable things, because it means something to them. Last night I found myself bottling wine on a small rug, thinking, for me, this is prayer. My friends were hanging out, having a good time, laughing, and that means a lot to me. For a while we were in the Garden.

Meaning is dependent on context, and of course the ultimate context is the Emptiness, Baraka’s uncontainable container, the Womb.

Chebiji is on again, my computer seems to be favoring tracks from La Kahena at the moment, but it doesn’t have to be Islamic music, of course. Someone I know has repeatedly insisted that he sees God when he listens to Radiohead. I’ve had the same thing happen to me. I can only hope, for their own sake, that Radiohead is catching some of the current they’re channeling while they’re in the studio.

Part of communion with the divine is in the nature of the self. We can lose ourselves in intoxication, fornication, gambling, and in a way it’s all misdirected worship. Perhaps not even misdirected. It would be difficult for me to see a TV or slot machine as not an idol, but as Baraka points out it’s the exclusiveness of the idol as vessel of the divine that makes it an idol. If we remember Allah is not only in this wafer & wine, or chalice of burning herb, or square black stone, or woman beneath me, and that we are parts of Allah communing with other parts of Allah, perhaps that will facilitate a shift of awareness from embeddedness in the particular to expansiveness in the All.

I’m beginning to sound like I’ve had some burning herb, which is funny, because I haven’t. But soon I’ll go fill a cup with homemade wine & say thanks for it. And thanks for the cold hummus sandwich for supper. Thanks for everything.