Music and Social Movements

William Roy's recent book, Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States (Princeton Univ Press 2010), is quite successful in revisiting the role of music in mobilization. I particularly enjoyed his analytical approach to culture. According to Roy, scholars tend to analyze social movements as knowledge-bearing entities that focuses on cultural change. This is especially evident in oft cited work of Eyerman and Jamison- Music and Social Movements (1998), where the authors stressed the cognitive praxis of social movement activists. This approach, Roy continues, regards culture as system of symbols and meanings; and therefore, pays attention to content of that system than the concrete social relations that embed in. In this sense, Roy asks an intriguing question: what explains the fundamental differences between the musical achievements of the Communist Party and those of the civil rights movement.

Throughout the book, Roy documents how the civil rights movement was more successful than the Communist Party at facilitating music as an integral part of collective action that actually informed movement practice. Although the Communist Party activists achieved to diffuse their movement culture into the broader culture, they could not make their music remains at the core of social network. Roy concludes that the effect of music on social movement activities and outcomes depends less on the meaning of the lyrics or the sonic qualities of the performance than on the social relationships within which it is embedded.

Although I agree with Roy in his theoretical criticism, it would be very nice to see a recognition of recent works in similar lines. Roy is not the first author who criticizes the study of culture in social movement scholarship. And, there are some important contributions that regard culture as the constitutive of the structure (Polletta 1999; Steinberg 1999; Williams 2004; Armstrong and Bernstein 2008). The author did not engage this emerging literature in the field.

I appreciate Roy's emphasis on the fact that music is primarily a social relationship. I also believe that studying relations between music and social movements in the age of Youtube & Facebook requires further analysis. My ongoing study on Islamic protest music repertoires, which explores the link between transformation of social relations after Youtube revolution and the Islamic activism, is an endeavor in this vein.

Democracy in Iran

Compatibility of Islam and democracy has widely been discussed especially after the 9/11 attacks. At the center of these debates, a country is often on the spot: Iran. Lately, the post-election protests in 2009 summer were much debated in the Western media, posing questions about mass mobilizations among younger Iranians. Ali Mirsepassi invites us to read the mass political mobilization over the “missing votes” within the broader historical context in which the continuing struggle for democracy against both Islamist and secularist authoritarian ideologies over the decades. Therefore, according to the author, today’s massive movement for democratic change is hardly surprising. Indeed, “like similar movements in the history of Iran, it is represented by a cross-section of Iranians from the poor to the middle class, the religious to the secular, the lay people to the clergy, and so on” (p. xi), and therefore, it is well embedded in the culture of public protest in modern Iran.

Mirsepassi’s book calls to re-think the historical trajectory of modern Iran to understand complex relationship between Islam and democracy. In the opening chapters, the author criticizes the Eurocentric notion of monolithic modernity by suggesting a nuanced conception of multiple modernities in which multiple forms of rationality, secularism and cultural expression are analyzed. Mirsepassi warns against the traps of culturalism, which views Islam and democracy as incompatible, within the Eurocentric model of modernity by pointing out historical-temporal structures of Muslim populated countries including economies, technologies, populations, organizations, languages and discourses. The author also engages with oft-cited analyses of Talal Asad on secularism. Mirsepassi questions Asad’s description of secularism as a specific political tradition in Europe, claiming that the politics of secularism have become a significant part of national democratic struggles in Islamic societies.

Democracy in Modern Iran is a good introduction to reflect upon relationship between Islam and democracy. I hope that this work will be followed by more concrete institutional analyses, ethnographies, and quantitative studies alike so that Mirsepassi’s analytical approach bears illustrative fruits in future.

Symbolic Politics, the Arizona Law, and the Mosque Controversy

So called "Ground Zero mosque" reinforced long tension between the two Americas that Joseph Gusfield described in his Symbolic Crusade : There is a changing face of the United States, the America that has welcomed all sorts of diversity and appreciated pluralism versus the old, the first United States that emphasized its Protestant Anglo-Saxon heritage. As Gusfield brilliantly explained, the American Temperance Movement, which seemed to be a social movement that targeted the practice of alcohol consumption, was in fact a large social backlash to the great immigration waves in the 19th and the early 20th century. The alcohol controversy was the tip of the iceberg. The two Americas were in fight: The Protestant Anglo-Saxon America showed its reaction to predominantly Catholic "immigrants" through the alcohol debate (since it was the "immigrants" who consumed alcohol as a part of their everyday life). For the "real" Anglo-Saxon Americans, the culture of the immigrants should be transformed. In other words, they should be assimilated to be a part of United States. Yet, what the Anglo-Saxon Americans did not explicitly assert was the fact that they did not like the Catholic "immigrants" who posed a challenge to their economic and social status. Thus, the whole issue, according to Gusfield, was predominantly about status and power. It was only translated thorough symbolic fights over the alcohol.

Although the immigrants of the 19th century has long been a part of the United States (and some of them even joined the old America), the war between the two Americas has never ended. Today, the old/first America has named new "immigrants" who should be adapted/assimilated, i.e. Mexicans, Latino/a Americans, Arab-Americans, Muslims, etc. Of course, the issues that are raised should be symbolic in nature (as we had alcohol consumption in the 19th century).

In symbolic politics, the target is a cultural product such as language, headscarf, mosque, minaret etc. Consider the English-Only movement (http://www.us-english.org/). It is reminiscent of the American Temperance Movement: at a first glimpse, you think that it is about one specific issue (alcohol or language); yet, only when you go to the roots, you can understand the crux of the matter. It's a social backlash against the Latino/a "immigrants" whose language is Spanish. Now, come to the Mosque controversy in New York. If you just look at the posters/slogans of those who oppose the mosque (which are predominantly about "Sharia," "Iran," "Taliban," etc.), you would think that Americans will vote on constitutional change or something. The poll results that indicated 1/5th of Americans believe that Obama is a closet Muslim demonstrates how the mosque controversy has become much about symbolic politics and less about apparent debate. We hear less about the crux of the matter: increasing number of Americans who are less tolerant towards the "other" minorities because of the economic downturn, and that the old/first America has become more worried about their economic and social status. Following Gusfield, I read these issues as larger status politics. Using Spanish, building Mosque? The tip of the iceberg!

The Politics of Mosque and Minaret

There is a considerable literature on headscarf politics as an expression of symbolic boundary work. It seems it is time to conceptualize other dimensions of Muslim exclusion/integration. Now, the Ground Zero mosque debate has intensified symbolic politics in the US, a country where the headscarf practice is a non-issue. As the debate becomes a symbolic power game, meaning of mosques themselves are also in change radically. In near future, mosques might increasingly attain a political meaning, i.e. symbol of victory or defeat, since the issue has become much politicized.


Last year, the Swiss ban on minarets was quite a shock to Muslims in the West. In the November 2009 referendum, a constitutional amendment banning theconstruction of new minarets was approved by 57.5% of the voters. Only four of the 26 Swiss cantons were in opposition to ban. The largest party in the Swiss Parliament, the Swiss People's Party, strongly supported the campaign against minarets, which was seen as a symbol of radical Islam. Wonder how many minarets were in Switzerland last year? About a population of 400.000 Muslims (which makes the Switzerland's second largest faith after Christianity) had only four minarets. The poster campaigns targeted the Swiss people's feelings of freedom and liberty as demonizing Muslim women.