INTRODUCTION

The historical relations between Gulf melody and Yemeni melody have recently become the subject of considerable inquiry. For the lyrics, we may trace these relationships back to the origins of the humaynî poetry's dispersion in the Gulf, a time that still has to be determined, somewhere between the 17th and the 19th century. However, this impact on Gulf poets and musicians persisted well into the 20th century. Between the towns of Kuwait and Manama, Hadramawt, and in particular, it is challenging to be as accurate with music as with poetry, but we can postulate that, at specific eras, music and poetry circulated concurrently, even if there were some chronological or spatial gaps. It is at least the theory put forth by several Gulf and Peninsula artists and musicologists, including the Saudi Târeq 'Abd al-Hakîm1 and authors Khâlid al-Qâsim and Nizâr Ghânim (1993). My goal is to compile some historical and social data that will help to explain or further understand these early interactions between Yemeni music and the Gulf.

These relations must be put in a diachronic prospect because they are the result of ancient and direct or indirect contacts which took place for at least three centuries. Yet, the first publications mentioning them gave rise, among a rather wide public, to a series of frictions and misunderstandings: some influences were probably exaggerated, while for some Yemenite authors,

Yemenite melodies were "plundered" by the musicians of the Gulf. These perceptions which are sometimes understandable must be put in perspective, because they are especially dictated by contemporary identity concerns,

for several reasons: the uneven economic development of Yemen and the Gulf, as well as the unequal development of the media in this region at the end of the 20th century; for several decades, the existence of a massive emigration of workers from Yemen to the Gulf, accompanied by the migration of many Yemeni musicians; the rise of the local nationalisms, in particular the small young states in the Gulf which were in search of identity constructions.

In the first article (Lambert 2001), I had begun to explore this question in a limited way. In the present article, I wish to deepen my questioning in particular by a more precise description of the exchanges which took place in the past three centuries, by specifying certain factual aspects and some methodological points. I'll let other publications the question of the instruments (Lambert 2019) and the formal analysis of concrete musical borrowings (Lambert 2020). I'll try to show that during this historical period, the numerous similarities (in poetry, melodies, and instruments) only seem strange to us because we forgot the actual routes of their circulations and the social mechanisms of their distribution. What is particularly difficult to understand about these courses is that they passed largely out Yemen and the Gulf, by the Hadrami and Arabic emigration in India and later in Indonesia. Thus, this requires us to return to these socioeconomic and historic facts.

THE CONTEXT OF THE ARABIC AND YEMENITE DIASPORA IN INDIA

Contemporary historical research on the Hadramis in South and Southeast Asia, in particular, has given us new information and viewpoints (Enseng Ho 2009). In India, the Hadramis was there from very early on. They worked as soldiers, traders, bureaucrats, and religious leaders for the Moghol and post-Moghol sultans. Arabs were warmly welcomed since, in addition to performing a military and religious role, they helped to increase the Muslim population in response to the Sultans' demand.

We begin to better know these mechanisms thanks to the links made between Indian, Arab, Persian, and Portuguese sources by the new historians who are followers of "the global history" as, for instance, Sangit Subramanian.

For their part, some Yemeni researchers had begun to be interested in these questions for a long time, but their works had gone relatively unnoticed until now. It will be referred here to some of the most accessible sources, without pretending to be exhaustive.

Since the 16th century at least, Yemeni mercenaries and other Arabs were already in the service of the Muslim sultanates of India, in particular in Gujerat and Deccan. For example under sultan Babur Shah (1526-1537), there are 10 000 mercenaries in the army of this sovereign, for the most part from Yâfi ' and of Mahra (Khalidi, 1997, 69.). At the beginning of the 18th century, prince Nizam of Hyderabad massively called on Hadrami soldiers (Khalidi on 1997, 69).

About the religious staff, the historian Badr Ja'far ben 'Aqîl mentions a sayyid called Bâ Faqîh who played an eminent role at the Sultan of Bijapur's court (at present Karnataka) in the 16th century, and several other learned members of a religious order, very often sayyid, which were advisers to the sultan of Gujerat Muzaffar Shah II (around 1520) ('Aqîl idem), and still another one in the 17th century ('Aqîl n.d ., 262).

At the end of the 16th century, the city of Surat (in Gujerat), "the blessed harbor" for the Muslims (Bandar mubârak), became the main port of transit of the Indian pilgrims towards Mekka, and one of the biggest ports in the world. It was also linked to al-Mokhâ, the Yemeni port, at the time of the coffee trade (Willis 2009, 23). An Indian map from the end of the 17th century describes Surat city with its institutions (Lahiri on 2012, 106-108), among which are represented the rich buildings of a Yemeni Sufi brotherhood7, 'Aydarûsî. Sangit Subramanian comments that their central position in the city shows the political and economic importance of this brotherhood.

Other cities on the west coast of India appear in the testimonies on the presence of the Arabs: according to a later Indian source (Philott 1906-1907), the poet Yahyâ 'Umar, a Yemeni from Yâfi', who was also a soldier, is said to have been living in the cities of Baroda (Vadodara, "cultural capital" of Gujerat), Calicut (further south, in Kerala), Madras (Tamil Nadu, on the southeast coast of India) between the 17th and the 18th century. During a more recent period, between the 19th and the 20th century, the city of Bombay (Maharashtra state, and the biggest Indian metropolis), established in 1668 by the British, gradually supplanted Surat, and became a focal point for the Arabic poets and musicians of the Peninsula and the Gulf ('Aqîl n.d.).

Thus, numerous and important Muslim communities specifically of Arabic origin were constituted on the whole west coast of India, from Gujerat to Hyderabad. Until today, these communities preserved their identities and their collective memory, if not the Arabic language. It is thus obvious that these relations, if they are better documented for the most recent period, represent the continuation of a long interaction going back several centuries, and which depended largely on the socio-economic and political evolution of the cities of Western India.

From the 17th and 18th centuries, it is most necessary to take into account the role of the British Empire, whose presence engendered for the Arabic communities two contradictory trends: on one hand, the British domination of India (at the beginning of the 18th century) provoked a secondary migration of the Yemenis and the other Arabs from India towards Indonesia, because their geographical, economic and political spaces tended to be reduced (Hartwig 1997, 43). On another hand, British domination was stabilized in the 19th and 20th centuries, offering a new common frame for Aden, Hadramawt, Kuwait, Bahrain, and India (Willis 2009). Numerous Arabs, from Yemen and the Gulf, were encouraged to trade in every corner of this "mare nostrum" that was the Indian Ocean for the British Vice-Royalty. Between 1800 and 1840, there was also a particular role for merchants from Oman (Benjamin 1976). But at the beginning of the 20th century, Aden was a real "El Dorado" for the musicians of the Gulf.

As was proposed by Clarence-Smith (in 1997, 3 and sq) and S.F. Alatas (in 1997, 19-34, more about Indonesia), we can and we must speak about a "diaspora" to characterize the communities of Yemenites who settled permanently in South and South East Asia and often well integrated with their host countries, but who maintain narrow links with the mother-homeland. This is particularly the case of Hadramis in India and Indonesia. We know for instance that the Kathîrî and Qu'aytî Sultans who reigned in Hadramawt from the middle of the 19th century were descendants of emigrant families from Yâfi' who had previously established real dynasties of notables and military leaders in India at least a century before, in particular in Barbuda (Khalidi 1997, 70) and Hyderabad (idem, 75). Having a not anymore major role to play in India, these two families were encouraged by the British to reinvest in the politics of their country of origin, which also served the interests of the latter in South Arabia (Hartwig 1997, 37-50). Those who could preserve their links with the mother homeland were especially the wealthiest and the most educated.

Besides the preservation of the religious and mystic links, for example, the cult of the al- 'Aydarûs saint already mentioned, as well as the 'Alawîyya brotherhood based in Tarim, these Arabic communities were used to form marital ties and commercial alliances, not only between Yemenis but also with other Arabs, which tended to make Arabic cultural features circulate transversely. We notice in particular that mergers between Hadramis and other Arabs in the emigration were favored (at least from the 18th century) by the attitude of the British colonial administration which confused all the "Arabs" in the same category (Clarence-Smith on 1997, 8). It is thus necessary to speak about an "Arabic diaspora" as much as about a "Yemenite diaspora", which obviously, complicates the picture. But such a use of the concept of diaspora allows us to understand how and by which channels, up to there, unnoticed cultural features were able to spread in such easy ways during several centuries between the Gulf and Yemen, specially Hadramawt.

This brief description of the Arabian and Yemenite diaspora in India should be deepened by and with specialized historians11; but for the time being, it will be enough to introduce our description of the poetical and musical trends which took place in the same context. In the frame of such a political and cultural presence of the Arabs in India, it would be difficult to imagine that there was no intense musical activity as well, at least in a merely religious and vocal way. Indeed, poets and musicians from Hadramawt and the Gulf circulated intensely in this universe of the Indian Ocean as a commercial system, and sometimes as a political system. But before approaching directly the musical facts, let us summarize at first our knowledge of the poetry sung in Yemen and the Gulf during this whole period.

The Yemenite poetry in Gulf and India between the 17 -20th centuries

To study the music of the Gulf, as that of Yemen, we have very few written sources. The oral tradition allows going back only till the end of the 19th century, rarely more. On the other hand, the poetry which was and is still sung on these melodies brings us much more information that can spatter on our historical knowledge of the music. The publication of the book of Mubârak al-'Ammârî in three volumes (1991-1996), dealing with the musician Muhammad b. Fâris presented an important anthology of the poems practiced in the sawt. This brought much progress in this domain (Lambert 2001). It's time to resume these first analyses and to deepen them, in particular in light of the recent attempts to write a global history.

'Ammârî's anthology showed us in particular the extent of the influence of Yemeni poetry in the sawt sung in Bahrain. His corpus containing about 600 poems sung in particular by the Bahreini Mohammed ben Fâris, but also by the other "pioneers" of the sawt, is rather representative. A quick statistical study of the book indicates that three-fifths of the poems approximately are in classic Arabic (approximately 325 poems); when the two other fifths of the corpus (approximately 250) are represented by texts in dialectal poetry, in a great majority of the Yemeni humaynî type (approximately 240), and a small minority of zuhayrî (Iraqi) type. The best-represented poet is Yahyâ ' Umar (1655-1725), a native of Yâfi ' (Yemen) (34 poems), and who represents undoubtedly a milestone in this cultural history. The other poets are for the greater part native of Hadramawt or Yâfi': 'Abd al-Rahmân Mustafâ al-'Aydarûs (30 poems), Khû 'Alawî, al- Wâhidî, Ibn Shamlân, Bâ Nabû', 'Abd Allâh Muhammad Bâ Hasan, as well as about forty anonymous authors.

How these poetic texts were scattered from Yemen to the Gulf? It is difficult to ascertain that they began to spread early when their authors were still alive. Given the general flow we already mentioned, it seems that very often, these poets themselves followed the merchants, the Sufis, and the mercenaries in the diaspora, when they did not exercise these activities... But what was the concrete course of the texts? How did this political, commercial and maritime flow contribute to their broadcasting, by which actors, and at which dates?

Here still, the article of Badr Ja'far b .'Aqîl, (s d.) is illuminating, and it allows us in particular to make interesting cross-cutting with al-'Ammârî's work. To start with, we notice in these two sources that the direct literary influence of Sanaa is much lesser than that of Hadramawt and Yâfi, which were the two main springs of the Yemeni emigration in India and Indonesia during this whole period13. If we examine more precisely the biographies of these main actors, we notice that the Yemeni poets who are represented in 'Ammârî's corpus either emigrated to India or traveled in the Gulf during this crucial period going from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century.

It is in particular the case of the poet and musician Yahyâ ' Umar, born around 1655, who died around 1725 (Bû Mahdî, 1993, 17). This native of Yâfi' seems to have lived for a long time in India, probably as a mercenary, in Baroda, Calicut, and Madras (Philott 1906-1907, 668).

According to an oral tradition, he was a singer and a player of the qanbûs, the four-stringed lutes which were already known in Yemen (idem); we shall come back to this subject later. According to certain sources, Yahyâ 'Umar may have come back to Yemen after a long absence (Bû Mahdî 1993, 13-17), or according to others, may have died in India. In his poetical work, we find several poems sung in Hedjaz at the end of the 19th century, which testifies to an even wider diffusion westward (Gavin 1988).

The abundant poetic work of Yahyâ 'Umar wears the brand of India, through his descriptions of beautiful Indian women, the mention of several place names, and the use of certain Urdu words. In a poem,

he also mentions the navigation and his passage by Bahrain ('Aqîl n.d.). According to the two main collections (Bû Mahdî 1993 and Khallâqî 2005), Yahyâ 'Umar's poetic work seems to carry a trace of the migration process: the part of his repertoire which is sung in the Gulf is almost completely different from the one which is known in Yemen16.

Another poet, the sayyid Zayn 'Abd Allâh al-Haddâd (1693-1744), a native of Hadramawt, better known under the name of Khû 'Alwî (R.B. Serjeant, 1951, 63), traveled in Iraq and Oman and is buried in the Emirates (Thânî 2007, in particular, 163-165; 'Ammârî, 1991-1996). So it is likely that his poetry spread in the Gulf in his lifetime. As we are going to see further, Khû 'Alwî is also known, in Yemen, as a singer and player of qanbûs.

As for 'Abd al-Rahmân Mustafa al-'Aydarûs (1694-1749), a poet native of Tarîm and author of two important collections ('Ammârî, 1991, 89-122), he is known to have traveled in India, in Turkey, and in Greece ('Aqîl, s.d., 276 and note 55). These last two poets (Khû 'Alwî and al-'Aydarûs) were members of descendants' families of the Prophet, ashrâf (or sayyid), and closely linked to the 'Alawiyya brotherhood, which spread out in the whole Indian Ocean, in particular in Indonesia.

In more recent dates, we also find poets from Yâfi' and Hadramawt:

• 'Alî b. Shamlân, Hadramawt, 18th or 19th century? ('Ammârî 1991, 273);
• Ahmad Sa'îd al-Wâhidî, from the region of Shabwa (northeast of Yâfi'), probably 19th Century ('Ammârî 1991, 276-277);
• Sâlim ' Abbûd Bâ Nabû' is a poet from Mukalla who lived in the 19th century (Bâ Hamdân 2011).
• Others, such as Ibn Ja'dan and Abû Mutlaq (al-'Ammârî, 1991, p. 335-338.) have not left a piece of biographical information.

Most of these poets are known to have traveled or immigrated to India and spoke about this country in their poetry, often using words of Urdu inside the Arabic text ('Aqîl s.d. 273-277).

Closer to us, the poet ' Abd Allâh Bâ Hasan (1861-1928) (represented in 'Ammârî's collection), although he did not travel to India (Bâ Matraf 1983), lived in an environment of poets and musicians where the journey to India was very common, as it was the case of his friend Sultân b. Hariharan was a musician who died in India in 1901, and who sang his texts.

If we return to the inventory established by 'Ammârî, we notice that before the years the 1920s, the poems sung in the sawt include no local dialectal text. It is thus exclusively the Yemeni poetry that was used to play this key role. It is a crucial point. Among the first ones to have composed and sung in the dialect of the Gulf in the sawt, we find the Kuwaiti Abdallah Fadâla26 and the Bahraini, Muhammad b. Fâris ('Ammârî, 1994, 43). At the same time, these two musicians continued to draw humaynî texts from the Yemeni repertoire. As we saw before, Muhammad b. Fâris recorded texts from passing by Yemeni musicians, in particular, 'Umar Mahfûz Ghâbba (who died in 1965) (Murshid Nâjî, 1983, 145); and also from his laundry worker who was a Yemeni

Immigrant ('Ammârî, 1994, 43) Whereas Mohammed Zayd boasted to have secretly recorded texts sung by the musician 'Abd al-Rahîm al-'Asîrî (a native of Hijâz), with the complicity of a walk-on hidden behind a curtain ('Ammârî 1991, 74)!

It is to say the importance of Yemeni literature for the constitution of the cultural identity of the people of Bahrein. Yet, because of the ancientness of this situation, The Gulf can also be considered a conservatory for numerous Yemeni poems which are not found in Yemen, as is the case for a part of Yahyâ 'Umar's repertoire. Isn't it that this anomaly reflects the complexity of these cultural exchanges (see footnote 14)? As far as melodies are concerned, they may have followed similar mechanisms.

THE MUSIC IN A YEMENITE-GULF-INDIAN SYSTEM

A Hadrami source from the 16th century records the existence of a cabaret run by an Indian man in the Yemenite harbor city of Shihr, which featured performances by Indian girls dancing (Bâ Matraf 1983, quoted by 'Aqîl n.d. 270)! This is the first historical mention of a musical connection between Yemen and India! Yemeni music was already thriving at the time, as evidenced by historical accounts of Yemeni artists performing on the lute in front of Ottoman authorities in the Sanaa region in the 16th century (Lambert and Mokrani 2013, 84). But it is a little later, from the 17th century, that we find some explicit testimonies of Yemeni musicians in India, and already in connection with Hadramawt and Yâfi'.

It was, in particular, the case of Yahyâ 'Umar (m. by 1725), who was not only a poet, but also a musician, and probably a composer: according to an oral testimony collected in a Yemeni community in India at the end of the 19th century, Yahyâ 'Umar, who lived in particular in Gujarat and traveled in India28, was a qanbûs player (he was called a muqarnas) (Philott 1906-1907).

For his part, the poet Zayn 'Abd Allâh al-Haddâd (Khû 'Alwî, d. 1744) who lived in the Gulf, was also probably a musician and player of qanbûs: a legend recorded by R.B. Serjeant in Hadramawt (in the 1940s) tells how, as a teenager, Khû 'Alwî played the instrument in secret from his parents, and was rescued from the reprimand by the instrument itself which began to “speak” in a supernatural way (Serjeant, 1951, 63). If these later legends do not bring us a complete certitude about Yahyâ 'Umar and Khû 'Alwî's musical practices (let us be attentive not to make anachronisms), they show us an artist's profile associating both the poetic and the musical creation and which seems credible at that time. At the same time, other testimonies show the existence of the qanbûs in Yemen during the same period, from the mid-17th century (Lambert and Mokrani 2013, chapter 3).

Closer to us, Sultân b. 'Alî b. al-Sheykh ben Harhara (m. 1901), a native of Yâfi' who died in Bombay poisoned by a jealous Indian mistress (Tha'lab 1984, 14), was also a great qanbûs player. Another great harami poet and composer, 'Alî Bâ Mu'aybad (m. 1922), lived at about the same time in the Gulf and Bombay (Ghânem 1986, 12; Tha'lab 1981).

The mentions of these musicians throughout history from the 17th century to the 19th, and 20th century, aside from other information about music in Yemen and Hejâz, suggests to us that there was an intense circulation of poetry and music between Yemen and India during this period and that the lute qanbûs played an important role in these activities. It may even have been a common feature of urban music all around the Arabian Peninsula, although under different names (Lambert 2019).

For their part, the Gulfian musicians dedicatedly frequented the city of Bombay at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; the first one to be known as such is the Kuwaiti 'Abdallah al-Faraj (1836-1901) (al-Faraj 1953). As a son of a Kuwaiti merchant settled in India, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Bombay, and was considered as having learned there the western musical notation, as well as Yemeni melodies from the Yemenite Ben Harhara (al-Faraj, 1953; Ghânim 1986, 12)). He is known to have come back to Kuwait after the death of his father in 1858 (Dûkhî 1984, 194). A confirmation of the Yemenite influence is given by a disk recorded (in India in the 30s) by the Kuwaiti Yûsuf al-Bakar (m. 1955), a disciple of al-Faraj's, with the following title: "Bin Harhara qâl" (Salhi 2012, 10).

The first musicians of the Gulf who recorded 78 rpm disks were the Kuwaitis Abdullatif, Saleh, and Dawud al-Kuwaiti in 1927 in Baghdad.29 On another hand, we have a very precise relationship between two meetings in Bahrain in 1913, then in India in 1922, between a singer from the Hedjaz, 'Abd al-Rahîm al-'Asîrî (1855? -1950) and the Bahraini Muhammad b. Fâris (1895-1947), meetings where the former transmitted to the latter many poems and melodies from Hejaz and Yemen ('Ammâri, 1991, 72). This was also the case of the other Bahraini, Mohammed Zwayd (1900-1982), who met 'Asîrî in Bombay, and where he then recorded many songs for the Odeon Company in 1935. For his part, 'Abd al-Latîf al-Koweytî lived for a long time in India, where he learned musical notation.

The specific role of Aden must be also underlined: the Kuwaiti boats going to East Africa made it an important stopover, and musical exchanges were frequent there (see Salhî 2016). The Omani Sâlim Râshid al-Sûrî (1910-1975), when he exiled himself from Muscat, went at first to Aden, and it is there that he acquired his first lute. Only after a long journey to East Africa and in Zanzibar, he landed finally in Bombay, where he too frequented the Yemeni, Kuwaiti, and Bahraini musicians (Kathîrî 2012), and where he recorded several disks.

When listening to the 78 rpm sawt recordings, or to real tapes, we often hear an announcement that says: "So-and-so, Yamânî, San'ânî, or Shihrî, or Hijâzî. Through these announcements which define commercial or traditional categories at that time, we learn several pieces of information on Yemenite regional influences. The word Shihrî especially attracts our attention, because it was designating a musical style from al-Shihr, this Hadramî harbor which was the main one to send emigrants towards South and South East Asia, and which was superseded by al-Mukallâ in the 19th century when the British took hold of Hadramawt. Thus this Shihrî musical style is an heir of the time when commercial sailing was not between Aden and Bombay but between alMokhâ, al-Shihr, and Surat...

Besides, in the noncommercial recordings made by Yûsuf al-Bakar at the beginning of the '50s, al-Bakar himself quotes many sawt as yamânî or san'ânî. Some of them can be easily recognized as Yemenites (Lambert 2020). For his part, Mohammed Zayd secretly recorded Yemeni and Hijazi poems from 'Abd al-Rahîm al-'Asîrî with the help of a walk-on hidden behind a curtain ('Ammârî 1991, 74; Kathîrî 2012). He also says that he inspired himself with numerous sawt yamânî, transforming them into something new. But we still need to assess to what extent these influences were exerted.

We must also note the direct influence of India on Yemeni music at the beginning of the 20th century which was extolled by the great Hadrami singer, Muhammad Juma Khan (1898- 1965), who was born in India. His father, of Hadrami origin, had been a musician in the military brass band of the sultanate of Hyderabad30. Juma Khân (among others) sang several songs with Arabic lyrics and an Indian melody or rhythm, in a style called muhannad31, inspired by the Indian movies displayed in Aden.

All these observations show us a very rich Arab-Indian musical life in particular in Bombay and between Bombay, the Gulf, and Aden since at least the mid-19th century. This musical life was still amplified by the beginnings of the commercial recordings in the years 1910-1920 (a period which remains very little undocumented), but it existed well before. And as we saw previously, it was the opportunity to meet Arab musicians from the whole Peninsula, the Hijaz, the Gulf, Hadramawt, and Oman via India. Thus we could speak for this modern period of the city of Bombay as a real melting pot (Green 2013), in particular for what was going to become the form sawt.

CONCLUSION

Julian musicians and poets were very much inspired by Yemenite musicians, not necessarily through direct links but very often through links tied in the Arabian diaspora in India, first in Surat around the 17th century, and then in Bombay in the 19th century: this is what shows us the examination of the socio-economical context, the history of the diffusion of the poetical texts and the diffusion of the music. To what extent these indications supplied by the sung poetry could also be valid for the music itself? If in the musical domain, sources are very scarce, especially before the middle of the 19th century, on the literary level, we saw the huge presence of the humaynî poetry outside Yemen, at a point that we could speak about a "diasporic" humaynî, whether it was composed in the Gulf, in Hijaz, in India, or later in Indonesia (Serjeant 1951). In any case, all this mainly lyric poetry was undoubtedly sung. Now it does not mean that the melodies on which it was sung were necessarily Yemenite. But the pieces of information we have on the music are largely cross-cutting those on the poetry, as it is shown by the example of the tawshiha, a Gulfian musical form that was doubtless directly influenced by a Yemenite musical form (Lambert 2020). Similarly, the hypothesis according to which such poets as Yahyâ 'Umar and Khû 'Alwî were also great lute players (and qanbûs players) seems very plausible. More specifically, this information is cross-cut with our study of the lute qanbûs itself, conceived as a musical koyne in the cities and harbors of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf for several centuries (Lambert 2020). At last, we have strong indices that the oral tradition, combined with the habit of writing poems in manuscript handbooks preserved rather faithfully these traditions during several centuries (Idem). Thus, it suggests that for quite a long time, Yemenite music was present in India and was influential on the Gulf music, although in an indirect way.

Another remarkable lesson from the confrontation of this information, is that the musicians of the Gulf were facing an important social and religious condemnation, at least at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, but probably much before: 'Abdullah al-Faraj in Kuwait ('Ammârî 1991), al-'Asîrî and Mohammed ben Fâres in Bahrain ('Ammârî 1991), Sâlim alSûrî in Sûr (Kathîrî 2012), all had to flee from their homeland or their land of adoption because of their music playing. This reminds us of similar facts documented in Yemen during the same period and at earlier periods (Lambert 1997, chapter 3; Lambert and Mokrani 2013). From this point of view, for these musicians who could not practice freely their music, and especially not as professionals, Aden on one side (since the 19th century), and Bombay (and before, Surat) on another side, had been for centuries some ideal places for finding such freedom.

If these realities have been forgotten because of the quick and drastic changes of the 20th century, we can re-discover some aspects of them now through a kind of musical archeology (Lambert 2020). Of course, this historical hypothesis will need more research to illustrate the direct borrowings of melodies and musical forms from each other, through musical analysis. This will be made possible by the recent exhumation of some historical sound archives from the Gulf from the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, the old recordings of Yusuf al-Bakar (Salhi 2016). Let us bet that the next years will show more evidence of this circulation of Yemenite and Arabian poetry, music, and musicians all around the Indian Ocean.

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