Landmarks of Arabic Music

This is the title of a new book by its author, Mr. Nasib al-Ikhtiyar.

Mr. Nasib al-Ikhtiyar needs no introduction. Literary circles have known him for his splendid output, his abundant culture, and his silent struggle.

It is a happy coincidence that the book should appear at a time when life has grown heavy upon people and burdened their shoulders with its loads. This book has come to spread contentment through souls, to restore to lips the traces of vanished smiles, and to carry us to those worlds that surged with melodies and overflowed with nights of good company and evening talk, fragrant with the scent of aloes-incense and the perfume of saffron...

The author has wished to show the great role that woman played in the world of art, so he has portrayed her beside the singular luminaries of Arabic music in the Umayyad and Abbasid ages, and has made us live with those geniuses, watching them from close by as they live for their lofty art..

... And woman is of all people the most entitled to the fine arts. For art is closely bound to the subtleties of her feeling, and she blended with it in a blending responsive to the needs of her soul in her distant past. This responsiveness has had its extension in the modern woman, until the fine arts have become one of the elements of her life and among the demands of her age..

And music is the hidden current that surges among sensitive, delicate souls. Plato described it, saying: "It is the source of life in inanimate things; by it thought rises high and imagination ascends; it spreads joy and gladness through the soul and lifts it above base things. It is thus one of the agents of man's refinement"...

... And if music is the symbol of a nation's progress, then Mr. Nasib al-Ikhtiyar's book has come as a delightful exposition of that Arab progress, teeming with the names of women of genius who won an ample share in the world of song — such as Ulayya bint al-Mahdi, and Jamila, and Sallama, and Habbaba, who with their melodies used to play upon hearts before ears.

... In his book Mr. Nasib has celebrated the loftiness of the art of song in the Arabs' refined age; it is a book worthy of acquisition for its delightful presentation of those who set down a splendid history for Arabic song, men and women alike, and who adorned the landmarks of art out of our distant past...