Listening to Arab Women's Voices: Society for Asian Music 2018 Keynote Address

This article illustrates the near-constant presence of Arab women's musical voices in Middle Eastern societies and the ways in which these voices affected their societies and exercised power. Examples are drawn from the centuries of the Islamic Empire, the decades surrounding World War I in Cairo, Egypt, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the Arabian Gulf and Peninsula. Attention is given to theories of voice. Emphasis lies on urban, usually professional, performers.