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The Yemen Tihama: trance & dance music from the Red Sea coast of Arabia. Recordings & texts by Anderson Bakewell. From the International Music Collection of the British Library National Sound Archive. Topic World Series, Topic Records Ltd. TSCD920. 2002. One audio CD, fifteen pages of notes (general notes, track notes, glossary), illustrations (3 photos, 3 watercolors, one sketch), map.
Broadly, the Tihama (Ar. "land descending to the sea") is the Red Sea coastal plain of Arabia, from Aqaba to the Mandeb Straits. More typically, "Tihama" designates the southern portion of this coastal plain, a narrower strip including Tihamat 'Asir in modern Saudi Arabia (south of Layth), and Tihamat al-Yaman, the "Yemeni Tihama." It is the latter which is the focus of Anderson Bakewell's remarkable musical ethnography, drawing upon a broader multi-disciplinary study of the same region (Stone 1985).
The Tihama is an Arabian-African border zone, a margin between margins, and a cultural hybrid. Yemen, marginal in the Arab world, is controlled from the San'a' highlands slightly east of Tihama, cool and verdant "Arabia Felix" where legitimization of political authority is symbolically rooted in ancient Sabaean and Himyarite civilizations. Here, the dominant Zaydi sect (Shiite, yet close to conservative Saudi Islam) rejects esoteric, mystical, and ecstatic Islamic practices. San'a'is speak of the Tihama as another world-exotic, primitive, "African".
Perhaps it is another world by mutual agreement; Tihamis sometimes call the highlands "Yemen." Certainly the contrast is stark, despite common nationality. Along the torrid Tihama, conical huts provide some relief from the scorching sun, though not from humidity or malaria. Yet the Tihama is not isolated. Historically active in Red Sea trade routes linking the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia, Tihami cultural fusions reflect far-flung political, social, and mercantile interactions, especially around the Red Sea littoral and further to the Indian Ocean basin. The sea is not a barrier, but a road upon which the Tihama has always depended economically. Here too, the dominant Shafi'i school of Sunni Islam is more tolerant of "popular" Islamic practices rejected by Zaydis, including saint visitation, music-induced trance, and self-mutilation.1 The Tihama's geocultural openness has produced a unique racial and cultural hybridity. And all these characteristics are reflected in its music.
In early 1982, the Tihama Expedition set out from...