QARAAMI – the fading melody of Somali classical music

Qaraami is the Somali Classical Music produced in the decades of 1940 – 1960. The decision to write a book about Qaraami comes from a decade-long conversation with myself on the future of music and entertainment in our society. A debate that was going on among different sectors of the same society, some of them pro and others contra for a reason or other, an important debate that sometimes I hosted and facilitated without being formally part of the conversation. This fundamental debate is taking place in other societies as well, mainly of Muslim heritage. The purpose of this book project is not to enter that debate, although I am in favour of music. I realized, however, that in the meantime, something essential is being lost, and this time for good, if not documented now, and shared with the current and future generations, to be prepared for and be part of that ongoing debate. The typical entertainment industry lost its prestige a long time ago in the Somali context, also due to the new technology that moved part of the responsibility on social media, but most importantly because of the overall destruction of the infrastructure (theatre, school of art, home for art and culture, protection for artists, etc) in the late 1980ies created a vacuum. Hargeysa, a capital city that hosts almost 1.2 million population, living in progressive peace and prosperity for three decades, and not having a national theatre is a testimony of the difficulty around the revival of music and artistic expression in our society. The books starts by exploring “what is being lost?”

Read more about reasoning behind writing this book: why I wrote this book?

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