3. Between myth and history

‘Between myth and history’ begins with the 1932 Cairo Congress in Arab Music. The Arab contingent sought advice on progress, while the European delegates romanticized traditional Arab music. These contradictions, and Islam’s relationship with music, shaped the life-stories of three figures: 14th-century polymath Ibn Khaldūn; 20th-century Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm; and ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann, who found musical echoes of Muslim and Jewish pilgrims in Djerba, where he had been expecting to find local music fixed in time by isolation. The Mediterranean has inspired written and sung epics, which were translated into architecture and politics, taking them from myth into history.