Memory, Music, and Religion

"With Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco's Mystical Chanters, Earle Waugh grants us powerful insight into the nature of personal and collective memory in situating religious experience as part of cultural life. From the context of the Moroccan chanting tradition, he illuminates how music functions as a tool for reshaping and reclaiming the past by the present and how the munshid tradition, so often neglected by researchers, serves as a point of entrance for understanding Moroccan national identity."—Dale F. Eickelman, author of Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable

"Waugh's intricate analysis of the Moroccan dhikr and chanter traditions offers original insights into the role of music in the mystical performance cultures of North African Islam. Carefully grounded in the classical poetic heritage of Sufism and first-hand knowledge of the life-histories and musical repertoire of the munshids, this provocative account will be of interest to ethnomusicologists and scholars of religion, mysticism, religious music, and Islamic and Moroccan culture."—Tazim R. Kassam, author of Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams