Conference Agenda

This study examines the affect of sung poetry and its ability to move the psyche in the poetic voices of the Arab-Andalusian qiyān, enslaved women poet-musicians who flourished in the Islamic Golden Age (8^th-13^th centuries). While their positionality bound them to compliance, this study argues that the affect of their sung poetry resulted in the subversion of their role from obedient slaves to an unattainable beloved, possessing immense social power over men.

A qayna was expected to possess the delicate skill of sensing her master’s emotional state and reflecting or responding to it in poetry or song. This forced her success to hinge entirely on performing an emotional state that mirrored the patron’s desire and fantasy, regardless of her genuine feeling, resulting in performative sincerity. This connection between performance and the emotional psyche highlights why Al-Jahiz, the 8^th and 9^th centuries polymath, described music’s connection as extending to the domain of psychology in his Epistle on Singing Girls.

In Al-Jahiz’s age, music’s psychological power could fundamentally subvert the social hierarchy of a court. While musicians were often socially inferior to the aristocrats they performed for, they were aware that their art had the power to psychologically manipulate the psyche of their superiors, creating a subversion of class. Al-Jahiz starkly warned that passion for singing-girls is dangerous, acknowledging the emotion they invoked as a malady which cannot be controlled.

The qiyān thus embodied a powerful paradox. Though owned and enslaved, they became the unattainable and ambivalent beloved, possessing immense social power over men, transforming the free into the lovesick. Their musico-poetic expression of love, though emotionally overt, was a brilliant yet compelled act of lyrical compliance; a calculated trap creating the foundation of their sung poetry upon insincerity, deceit, and affectation.