• Arab music is a broad concept that encompasses music history,  treatises, genres, and instruments, as well as musically-related philosophies, attitudes, and social contexts within the Arab World.  Arab music covers a vast geographical area ranging from the Atlas Mountains and parts of the Sahara in Africa to the Arabian Gulf region and the banks of the Euphrates.

• Arabs are able to identify today with a multi-faceted musical heritage that originated in antiquity, but that gained sophistication and momentum during the height of the Islamic Empire between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries.

Little is known of Arabian music before the Hegira ( 622), but afterward under the Umayyad caliphs (661–750) a consolidation of Persian and Syrian elements with the native musical style took place in Arabia. Ibn Misjah devised a system of modal theory that lasted throughout the golden age under the first Abbasid caliphs (750–847).

In the 9th cent. at Baghdad many treatises on music theory and history were written by such men as the philosopher Al-Kindi (9th cent.) and the illustrious Al-Farabi (c.870–c.950), who wrote the most important treatise on music up to his time.In the 11th cent. under the last Abbasid caliphs a strong Turkistan influence was brought into Arabian music by the Seljuk Turks, and a gradual decay began in the traditional art.

The chief characteristics of Arabian music are modal homophony,

florid ornamentation, and modal rhythm. Instead of scales within

which melodies were composed, they became melodic formulas

to be used in composition, a system much like the ragas of Hindu

music.

Ornamentation in Arabian music consisted of shakes and trills, grace notes, appoggiaturas, and the tarkib, which was the simultaneous striking of certain notes with their fourth, fifth, or octave. In vocal music often a short melody is repeated for each stanza or verse, each repetition being elaborately ornamented.

The principal Arabian instruments, other than those borrowed from older Semitic cultures, were the short-necked lute called the ud, from which the European lute derived its form and name, and

the long-necked lute called tanbur. The sama'i (or Turkish saz semai) and the bashraf (or pesrev), both instrumental genres

used in Turkish court and religious Sufi music, were introduced into the Arab world before the late nineteenth century.

Bashraf