Medieval Arabic Dance: Philosophical and Speculative Foundations of the Performing Arts in the Abbasid Era

Abstract

This paper reconstructs, through a textual and philosophical reading of selected Abbasid-era sources, the pre-expressive foundations of medieval Arabic court dance as an integrated performing art rather than a recoverable “catalogue of steps.” Methodologically, it advances an interpretive hypothesis grounded primarily in al-Fārābī's Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr and al-Masʿūdī's Murūj al-Ḏahab, supplemented by reflections drawn from al-Kindī's musical theory, while delimiting the investigation to the Abbasid period (second half of the 8th to the first half of the 13th century). The author is a performing scholar—dancer, choreographer, and researcher—whose analysis emerges from nearly thirty years of embodied practice in Arab-Islamic and Persian dance forms, and whose dancer-philosopher perspective combines firsthand performance experience with rigorous philological inquiry. The present work is the second volume of a two-part research project: the first volume (Sales 2006, Akkuaria, Roma) introduced the dancer-philosopher perspective and examined al-Kindī's philosophico-musical principles; the current volume (Sales 2025) extends that inquiry to al-Fārābī and al-Masʿūdī and develops the five-nucleus model of pre-expressive requirements. The approach integrates (i) textual-philological analysis of these witnesses, (ii) a controlled comparative-analogical reading oriented toward Persian and Central-Asian stylemes still attested “without solution of continuity,” and (iii) a dancer-philosopher standpoint developed through long practical experience, in which dance remains inseparable from musical philosophy and its ontological horizon. Results are organized into a five-nucleus model of pre-expressive requirements: professionalisation of the artist; the body as sonic/percussive extension; mimetic dance; defined repertoires and technical abilities; and the organic relationship between musical execution and choreutic practice. The paper concludes that, although reliable textual testimonies appear only from the 10th century, their described richness implies a long prior maturation “not born suddenly from nothing,” and that Abbasid court dance should be understood as multi-competent artistry (dance, song, and rhythmic percussion) structurally intertwined with music and classical Arabic poetry.