Julien Jalaleddine Weiss

From Aljadid Magazine

"I am in love with Arab music, but my relationship with it differs from that of an Arab because I am not one. I started liking Arab music when I first heard a recording of Munir Bashir in 1976. It immediately struck me that this is highly intellectual music, call it scientific, with a spirit."

Sheikh Hamza Shakkur

From Aljadid Magazine

In Sufism, sama' denotes the tradition of listening in a spiritual fashion to music of all forms. This suggests that the act of listening is spiritual, without the music or poetry being necessarily religious in content. The major preoccupation of the mystics was to give the ecstasy real content and the music true meaning.