Sahrawi Music

Sahrawi music is the music of the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, heir to the Moorish tradition shared with Mauritania and southern Morocco. Its core, the haul, is a modal repertory of praise, epic and love poetry sung in Hassaniya Arabic to the tidinit lute and the women's tbal drum, ordered by a system of modal 'paths' with white and black modes. Following the 1975 exile of much of the population to refugee camps in Algeria, the tradition was reshaped by revolutionary song, the Polisario liberation bands and the replacement of the tidinit by electric guitar, producing the desert-guitar style carried internationally by *Mariem Hassan* and *Aziza Brahim*.