Youssou N’Dour film explores music and Islam

Singer Youssou N’Dour’s 2004 album of Islamic music earned him a boycott from some Muslim fans. However, in a new documentary about the album, Egypt, he says the music has encouraged a deeper appreciation for Islam. Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, a documentary by Chai Vasarhelyi that opened in New York last Friday, contrasts the enthusiastic response the Grammy-winning album Egypt got during a tour in Europe and Asia with its cold reception in his native Senegal, where it was the subject of a boycott. "I was frustrated. The music wasn’t speaking to people," N’Dour told Reuters about the reaction in his home country.

Grammy award

"When there’s a break with tradition, or something changes, people can’t accept it right away. It takes a little more time," the 49-year-old singer.

Youssou N’Dour

The film explores the controversy over the album, following N’Dour on tour and after he won a Grammy for Egypt in 2005.

In Europe, N’Dour’s performances of songs like Allah, performed in the Wolof language with a classical Egyptian orchestra, were met mostly with dancing and standing ovations, and only a few complications.

At a concert in Ireland, N’Dour, who describes himself as a devout Muslim, discovered that audience members were drinking beer. He delayed his performance for a half hour with a plea that it be alcohol-free.

In Senegal, newspapers accused N’Dour — who has collaborated with Bono and Peter Gabriel, and is known for his annual all-night concerts in Paris and New York and at his club in Dakar — of insulting Islam, arguing that pop and religious music should not mix.

When N’Dour joined other members of the Mouride brotherhood, a branch of African Sufi Islam, on the annual pilgrimage to Senegal’s holy city of Touba, he was shunned.

Descendants of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, a Muslim mystic, poet and pacifist who founded the Mouride brotherhood in the 1880s, even threatened N’Dour with a lawsuit, though the threat was later called a misunderstanding.

The controversy was largely forgotten after N’Dour, the highest-selling African artiste, won his first Grammy for the album. N’Dour went on to perform religious music with one of Senegal’s most famous praise singers.

-Reuters