Yobadi, friendship through Music

Yobadi means friends in Bambara which is one of Mali's national languages. Yobadi is an album written in collaboration between Karim Ziad the artistic director of the Gnawa World Music Festival organized in Essaouira, Morocco and M'aalem Hamid El Kasri who is a renown Moroccan M'aalem. The two artists wanted to create an album that would be likeable by a huge part of the public in order to make them discover the Gnawa music, which explains that they mixed a lot of musical styles. Gnawa music is one of the most important musical currents in Morocco and some other parts in Northern Africa such as Algeria. In several Gnawa songs, the M'aalem refers to the prophet or Allah's greatness even in a song such as the one we chose that is named Yobadi as well which is refering to the friendship between the two artists.

The word Gnawa is derived from the Amazigh word Gnawi which means the black man and that can be directly linked to the fact that this word was used to describe a group of western african people that were enslaved by Moulay Ismail and turned into an army to protect him.

Most of these slaves were transported to the port city of Essaouira which explains why the city is renown worldwide for the Gnawa culture. The Gnawa ethnic group was a unique one as they were from different cultures but had slavery in common. They were all marginalized and as a result they formed such a group in order to help each other overcome the hardtime they were going through. They adopted Islam after the Islamization of the berber and the abolition of slavery and combined it with their own traditions which gave us today their rituals that are not regarded for many Shi'i Muslims are Islamic rituals since they are more related to Sufism. The Gnawa music originated from these religious rituals, and refers to the ethnic group's ancestors, the prophet and Allah.

In today's context the Gnawa are still living in some parts of Morocco such as the city of Essaouira, and their rituals are still performed as they were performed by their ancestors. The Lila is one of these rituals where people will get together and invite a Maalem that will play several songs and some people will enter a trance. The Lila consists of two parts, the first one is dedicated to the living world while the second one is dedicated to the unseen world of supernatural entities. And there are two different types of music, each one dedicated to a part of the ritual. The first one is a non possession type of a music played by the Maalem while the second type is used to possess people with the mluk. However, the Gnawa in Morocco are not known for their rituals that are usually private, but for their music and the Gnawa World Music Festival is a great example of that. The genre unites people from different cultures, countries, religious beliefs etc. and this was probably one of the main reasons this music genre was developed, to help a group of slaves from different parts of Africa to from a group and be united.

An important part of the Moroccan people is Shi'i, but it is not the case of the Gnawa. After the Islamization of the berber and the abolition of slavery, the Gnawa turned to Sufism, because their traditional rituals were related to spirit possession which is something that is sometimes practiced in Sufi Islam in Morocco. The Gnawa also adopted Bilal as their ancestor and patron saint, and it is a name that we found in several Gnawa songs. Bilal was a companion of the prophet and the first black perosn to convert to Islam. Another important thing about Gnawa and Islam is that Gnawa is not a brotherhood like we can find many in Sufi Islam, Gnawa is a mystic order, and the place of the women in the Gnawa culture is very different from the one in Islam. They are not treated differently, or separated as we can see in some Muslim rituals. For example during rituals, the men will deal with male spirits while the women will deal with female spirits, but they will all be together in the same place. They are also the ones that supervise the rituals and ceremonies.

The song Yobadi talks about friendship, but it is also the direct collaboration between an Algerian and a Moroccan musician, the two artists come from a very different cultural background and even musical background, but they ended up collaborating thanks to the Gnawa genre, and this is what the Gnawa culture does, it unites people.

1. Are there other branches of Islam for which music is as important as it is for Gnawa (regarding history, rituals etc.) ?
2. The Gnawa rituals are a combination of Islam and Western African rituals and involve trance, spirit possession etc. Are they seen as Muslim rituals or are they just associated with Gnawa as an ethnic/cultural group and not a religious one ?

El Hamel, C. (2013). A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. Black Morocco.

Maisie, S (2011). Staging the Sacred: Musical Structure and Processes of the Gnawa Lila in Morocco. Ethnomusicology, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 77-11. University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology

El Hamel, C. “Gnāwa”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, Edited by: Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Consulted online on 18 December 2019 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27488>

Yobadi - Hamid El Kasri [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofFXtKLq6wc

Gnawa Music Instruments [Image File]. Retrieved from: https://www.musicinafrica.net/fr/node/4107

Gnawa Performers [Image File]. Retrieved from: https://www.leseco.ma/les-cahiers-des-eco/weekend/58451-festival-gnaoua-et-musiques-du-monde-noces-de-porcelaine-pour-un-festival-en-or.html