These were new songs written between the walls of makeshift hospitals, under an oppressive sun that tuned out the music of life as it stripped lives of their eyesight. A corner of the Horn of Africa where Europeans unsaw the natives as real people, and recorded laws and the history that followed to strip them of dignity, followed by American successors with new marching orders. But there is music in unmaking the dehumanizing word of empire, and Kalsoum’s sublime prayer sang with lyrical rebellion. “This is exactly how the music called jazz began,” wrote James Baldwin, “and out of the same necessity: not only to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European [and American] notion of the world. For until this hour, when we speak of history, we are speaking only of how Europe [and America] saw—and sees—the world.” But there is a very great deal in the world which Europe does not, or cannot, see.

XREF: Connects to James Baldwin's writing on jazz and Black music as redemption; parallels with broader postcolonial theory about subaltern voices. SEED: Could be an essay on music as anti-colonial resistance, comparing Kalsoum to jazz and other traditions of rebellion.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 112