This dissertation is based on the accounts of four Syrian refugee children who now live in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn. It focuses on the children’s narratives of their treacherous flight out of Syria into refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey, their accounts of their daily lives in the Bay Ridge area, and their views about the future. Each child has had similar experiences, coping with the tragic loss of family members and friends during the Syrian Civil War. Through their journeys the loss of the other destabilizes the self, forming a mode of being-with-other that allows the dead the possibility of “living-after.” It opens the children to being responsible for the wellbeing of the dead other, shaping the children’s narratives as a response to the non-responsive other. For the children, the dead other stimulates a way of being-in-the world that is constantly (re)orienting their moral experiences. The dead other becomes an open-ended engagement.

This intersubjective relationship to the dead other is examined through Islamic ethics and Sūfī ideals the children have been socialized into and have learned to uphold. The dissertations focuses on Islamic philosopher al-Ghazālī’s concept of “happiness” and philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī’s notion of barzakh (“obstacle” or “separation”), the in-between space of “the world of imagination.” These concepts emphasize Islamic and Sūfī ideals as lived experiences for the children, informing individual virtues as a set of characteristic patterns of knowledge, rationality, motivation and action. The significance in examining Islamic ethics and Sūfī ideals in relation to the children’s lifeworlds is the understanding of ethics as a relationship between moral norms and unpredictable situations. These situations of unpredictability, exemplified through the openness towards the dead other, are a form of being and becoming for the children shaped through their dynamic (re)interpretation of the past and the unpredictability of the future.

This dissertation is based on the reflections of three prominent Iranian ustādān (master musicians; plural of ustād)—Lotfī, Jankouk and Sālem—on what defines beauty in mūsīqī-e sonnatī (traditional music). The judgment of beauty incorporates an array of ethical queries conveyed through a language that is heavily entangled with Islamic revelations, mystical beliefs and traditional values. The three ustādān’s perceptions of beauty are articulated through their understandings of how akhlāq (ethics, morals or manners) shapes the ideals of mūsīqī-e sonnatī. Akhlāq defines a set of principles that form the attitudes and actions relevant to the process of music-making. This dissertation examines the judgment of beauty and akhlāq in relation to mūsīqī-e sonnatī based on an examination of language, logic, politics and metaphysics. For the three ustādān, beauty is mainly reflected upon thought a metaphysical and spiritual perspective, that they have learned through readings of Iranian poetry and literature.

Beauty and ethical ideals shape how the three ustādān make use of the radīf (Iranian musical repertoire) as the main source of akhlāq in their music classes, and the ways in which their role has now extends to the public sphere to advance the position of mūsīqī-e sonnatī. In the past four decades Iranians have witnessed the “Islamization” of the political, cultural and social norms. More recently, Iran has seen the disengagement of their youth from the traditional values. This detachment among the youth highlights a breakdown of conventional akhlāq principles, creating an ambiguity of the normative social and cultural practices in Iran. The youth’s nonconformism steps beyond socio-normative principles and Islamic values to create its own ethos. The three ustādān are faced with the unravelling of the norms, as they are confronted with a desire to adjust to the music tastes of younger Iranians. As the ethical values are being undone, newly-formed ideas about the judgment of beauty are being demarcated. Based on the current political, religious and social undertakings in Iran, this dissertation examines the correlation of ethics and beauty in mūsīqī-e sonnatī.

This dissertation contributes to the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology and Middle Eastern studies by a) serving as an in-depth ethnography exploring the relationship between music-making, judgment of beauty, and akhlāq from the perspective of the three ustādān, Shī’a authorities and Islamic scholars; b) mapping out akhlāq as a matrix incorporating language, logic, politics, Islamic values, and music’s affective power over individual sensibility and emotion; and c) exploring the tension, derived from individual musical experiences, between religious and cultural obligation and personal desire. This dissertation also explores urgent questions shared among the wider Iranian public and Western academics: a) What is it in the act of listening to or participating in music that could make it good or evil (bad)? and b) To what degree are beauty and ethics compatible, considering the intensity with which Iran is changing?