Nashid or Madih (Middle East)

• Spiritual poetic recitation praising the Prophet Muhammad; performed in Sufi gatherings, mosques, or community spaces; blending melody, devotion, and self-transcendence.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In the ritual performance of nashid or madih, the self is neither performer nor spectator but an ethical node between memory and transcendence. It is a poetic discipline of self-care (epimeleia heautou), where one cultivates a sacred relationship to truth—not as doctrine, but as living resonance.

Foucault writes that “the care of the self” is a practice of freedom, a set of spiritual, bodily, and discursive techniques by which one shapes one’s relation to the divine, to community, and to desire. In nashid, we encounter exactly such a ritualized poetics of subjectivation. The singer does not simply praise the Prophet Muhammad—they enfold the self in that praise, becoming a luminous echo of sanctity.

This echoes Foucault’s fascination with parrhesia—truth-telling that is dangerous, ethical, and transformative. In madih, the singer speaks the truth of longing, vulnerability, humility before God—risking ego in exchange for union. This is a radical aesthetic of existence, where piety is not submission but artful becoming.

Moreover, the nashid voice is not “owned” by the singer—it flows through them, conjoining body, breath, and soul. The recitation is both ascetic (requiring training, restraint, purity) and ecstatic (producing states of love, weeping, transcendence). For Foucault, such dualities are not contradictions, but technologies of the self, wherein discipline births beauty.

As with the Hellenistic practices he explored, the goal is not to know oneself in abstraction, but to form oneself through devotion, poise, and poetic clarity. Nashid is thus a care of the self via the aesthetics of divine speech—where each syllable is both self-emptying and self-enlightening.