Nasheed Choir

The Church of England has played an important role in dealing with the current refugee crisis in the UK. This has been due to both its strong local network, which is deeply embedded in communities across the UK, as well as the Bible’s saying about the need to ‘welcoming strangers and foreigners’. Given that most of the refugees in the UK are from Muslim-majority countries, Nasheed Choir expands on this idea of ‘welcoming’ to propose an ‘inter-faith’ conversation between Christianity and Islam. For this purpose, Nasheed Choir utilises Islamic vocal music restructured in choral format, in order to accommodate the Islamic song and melody within the Christian tradition of the choir.

Nasheed Choir uses an old Islamic song (‘nasheed’), titled Tala’ al-Badru Alayna (طَلعَ البَدرُ عَلَینا), which was sung to welcome the Prophet Muhammad as he took refuge in Medina over 1400 years ago. The song has been arranged for two-part chorus, piano and percussion by Laura Hawley and was published by Rhythmic Trident Music in 2016. Framed copies of this piece were handed to St. John’s Church and St. Michael’s Church in Wakefield, which work closely with asylum seekers and refugees through the City of Sanctuary. Performances of the song also took place during the opening of the MIGRATION exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield (UK) on May 26th, 2017.

Nasheed Choir was initiated and developed through the Migration: International Residency 2017 (The Art House, Wakefield). Reviews of this exhibition and the residency are available on The State Of The Arts and the Corridor8.