Müslüm Gürses and The Rise of Arabesk

“Çilesiz bir günüm olmadı gitti
Bilmedim ömrümün suçu ne usta
Allah’ın gücüne gider mi bilmem
Verdiği bu candan ben bıktım usta

My carefree days never came
I don’t know, what is my life’s crime, master
Did I offend God, I don’t know
I’m sick of the soul that He gave me, master” – Usta

Müslüm Gürses, the famous Turkish musician who sang songs like the one above, full of despair and sorrow, passed away on 3 March at the age of 59. Watching the news coverage of his funeral, I was struck by the sheer number of people that came to pay their respects. In addition to the famous artists and politicians, such as Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the CHP, there were thousands of fans mobbing the streets to say goodbye to the beloved arabesk singer.

Of course, this outpouring of support powerfully demonstrates the popularity of Gürses, who is more commonly known as “Müslüm Baba” (“Papa Müslüm”). As many media outlets have reported, Gürses was popular for his mournful songs that blended Turkish folk instruments with Arab melodies. Yet such a summary seems especially lacking when attempting to understand what drew those crowds to his funeral and why they were inspired to so much emotion.

To unravel the story of Gürses’s success, it’s important to examine how his career mirrors the development of arabesk as a musical subculture in Turkey. Arabesk can generally be understood as a type of Arab-influenced music created in Turkey that became incredibly popular in the 1970s. Yet looking only at this time period omits a large part of the story, as the policies of the early Republican period in Turkey (which coincides roughly with the era of single-party rule from 1923-1946) factor into this narrative – a recurring theme when examining many of Turkey’s socio-political threads.

It is well-known that when the Republic was in its infancy, the state implemented a series of massive social and political transformations. While the most notable of these top-down reforms were in regard to language, education and religion, the nation-building project of Atatürk and his coterie permeated almost all aspects of culture, including music. With a focus on distancing the new nation from its Ottoman past and emulating the perceived civilization of the West, it was decided that Ottoman music, classed as ‘Eastern’, would have to go. It would be replaced by so-called ‘Western’ polyphonic music (arranged in parts for several voices or instruments). The promotion of a Western, which is to say European, ideal was pervasive.

At one point, it was even proposed that Turkish folk music be collected and reworked according to Western methods, which in practice meant making the traditionally monophonic Turkish folk music polyphonic. The details of this project to create a new national music are of course manifold and more nuanced than I am presenting here. But it is important to recognize that with the creation of the Republic came the creation of a new elite that adulated ‘Western’ music and, as a result, rejected any sort of music with an ‘Eastern’ aspect to it.

This significant shift in cultural capital contributed to the chasm that was developing between the new urban elite aligned with the secular state and the rural working-class. Increasingly these rural laborers were migrating to the cities in the 1950s and 1960s as the state’s economic policies shifted and industrialization commenced. It was among these migrant communities that arabesk was reputedly created and flourished. This style of music spread through the burgeoning cassette industry and relied on the star power of its singers, such as the incredibly popular Müslüm Gürses.

According to Martin Stokes, the ethno-musicologist renowned for his work on the development of arabesk, “the heroes and heroines of this music and its firms are – in fact or fiction – labour migrants, representatives of a society in the grip of cultural and economic transformation, but at the same time powerless as outsiders to protect their sense of value and cultural integrity.” Likewise, the singers who pioneered this musical style – such as Müslüm Gürses and Orhan Gencebay – were, for the most part, migrants themselves and hailed from what Stokes describes as the “remote and barbarised Turkish ‘orient’, the Arab speaking and Kurdish regions of south east Anatolia”. Gürses himself originally hailed from the Şanlıurfa Province in southeastern Turkey before moving to Adana, where he began his singing career.

Considering the peripheral position of both its audience and artists, it is no wonder that the arabesk music from this period spoke of alienation, melancholy and disenchantment with society. It has even been said that a certain number of Müslüm Baba’s fans would cut themselves with razor blades at his concerts, suggesting that the way he sung about these themes struck a deep chord with his audience. Even beyond such extreme actions, Gürses proved to be one of the most compelling voices to convey the feelings associated with being an outsider, both in terms of class and culture.

As the harmful ‘Eastern’ music, arabesk was found extremely distasteful by a cultural elite still tied to Kemalist principles and, as a result, was effectively banned from state radio and television stations – the state exercised a monopoly over the broadcast media – in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, Stokes tells the story in his landmark 1992 book The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey of how the populist government of the late 1980s and early 1990s attempted to co-opt this music and bring it into the mainstream.

Some have claimed that since the mid-1990s arabesk has been subsumed under Turkish pop music and found new audiences, as singers like İbrahim Tatlıses (affectionately referred to as İbo) have become more mainstream. Even so, the outpouring of grief at Gürses’s funeral shows how much his music mattered to people. Although it may appear exaggerated and almost comical to those unfamiliar with arabesk, the words of Müslüm Baba both spoke to his fans’ lives and struggles as shaped by social, political and economic forces, and acted as a force itself by validating those living on the margins – and that is something worth remembering.

Emma Harper is a contributor for Yabangee

Image intended as fair use.