By Zahra Gardezi

CENTRAL Asian music and verse is generally distinguished between the urban and the rural style. Musical instruments are often dominated by string, wind and percussion instruments. At the discussion ‘Voices and Verse of Central Asia’, the audience was first entertained with a musical performance by Razia Sultanova, Uzbek musicologist and author of From Shamanism to Sufism: Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia. She sang and played a Sufi song on a traditional instrument. She then played a wedding song — culturally played only by females. The melodic and upbeat music garnered great audience applause.

Pakistani critic, artist and writer Quddus Mirza appreciated the music and compared the secret nature of Central Asian music to that of nuclear weapons in Pakistan. He then shifted the discussion to the prose of author Hamid Ismailov who currently lives in exile in London and is the head of BBC World Service of Central Asia. Ismailov said that though his books are banned in print in Uzbekistan, they are still available online, and many readers are able to access that platform.

In response to Mirza’s question about the themes connecting Central Asian literature, Ismailov described the merging of different cultures in literature from the region. A nomadic Turkish style meets a Persian one, East Asia meets West Asia. He also said that some styles and culture in Central Asia, such as in Bukhara, and Samarkand, are similar to the Pakistani culture. However, in terms of characters, characters of different backgrounds and nationalities are more likely to appear in Russian writing than in Central Asian fiction. Uzbek writing, for example, contains only Uzbek characters, and diversifying this would appeal to more readers, said Mirza.

Ismailov’s book A Poet and Bin-Laden: A Reality Novel is a commentary on Islam and Central Asia and it was for this very reason that it was banned in Uzbekistan. Mirza asked Ismailov how he got involved in writing about terrorism. Ismailov replied that the main character of this book was purely fictional, but that still prompted intelligence agents from his home country to come to him, seeking information. He said this is how “the inventor becomes the reality”.

Ismailov proceeded to recite a nomadic Uzbek poem, written in the style of a ghazal, in an emotionally charged manner, which was appreciated by the audience. Prose in Uzbek is different from Russian or English, as the sentence generally follows the structure of subject-object-verb: unless one has read till the end of the sentence, it is difficult to tell whether it will be a question, phrase or statement. Conversely, in Russian the verb is placed at the beginning or the middle of the sentence, like in English.

Women play a specific role in Central Asian music, and when asked about the female repertoire in her songs, Sultanova said the point was to “collect the culture”. There is an entire culture in which females sing and perform in front of other females, and men are unaware of this. She once asked an academic about such activity and was told that this was inadmissible: no female had the right to perform.