Middle Eastern and North African music traditions

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Middle Eastern and North African folk music includes many styles, dances, and instruments. But 'folk music' is hard to define and means different things to different people. 'Traditions' here aren’t fixed categories; they depend on who’s describing them—scholars, journalists, listeners, the music industry, politicians, or nationalists—and on factors like race, place, language, religion, tribe, or ethnicity. The list uses broad categories common in English-language scholarly work. These traditions can overlap with each other and with geographic or political borders. Most scholars would say there aren’t folk traditions that are completely pure and unchanged by contact with others; they mix and overlap in many ways. The Rough Guide to Music is a common reference for these ideas.