The debaa or deba is a mixture of traditional

dance Dance is an The arts, art form, consisting of sequences of body movements with aesthetic and often Symbol, symbolic value, either improvised or purposefully selected. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

and

song A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...

practiced on the island of

Mayotte Mayotte ( ; , ; , ; , ), officially the Department of Mayotte (), is an Overseas France, overseas Overseas departments and regions of France, department and region and single territorial collectivity of France. It is one of the Overseas departm ...

, where it is reserved exclusively for women. Danseuse_et_musicienne_de_debaa

Debaa can have religious significance, be practiced as a distraction, or be akin to a competition between several groups of women from different villages.

Origin

The debaa is a recent tradition drawn from

Sufism Sufism ( or ) is a mysticism, mystic body of religious practice found within Islam which is characterized by a focus on Islamic Tazkiyah, purification, spirituality, ritualism, and Asceticism#Islam, asceticism. Practitioners of Sufism are r ...

, a form of spirituality developed in Basra through contact with Shiism by the successors of Abdou-l-Wâhid ibnou Zayd, a disciple of Al-Hassan al-Basrî, himself being a tali'i of Persian origin, that is to say an individual who has known at least one sahâbi, a companion of the prophet of Islam, the religion which is the majority religion in Islam in Mayotte. It should nevertheless be noted that the specificities of Sufism are not based on the sacred texts (the Koran and the corpus of the Hadith) unanimously recognized as authentic, and that if the asceticism of Al-Hassan al-Basrî inspired Sufism, no nothing has been reported to confirm that he was the instigator.{{Cite web, url=https://archive.org/details/shaydzmi148, title=Shaydzmi148 The debaa developed in Mayotte in the years 1920-1930 under the influence of a foundi (

Madrasa Madrasa (, also , ; Arabic: مدرسة , ), sometimes Romanization of Arabic, romanized as madrasah or madrassa, is the Arabic word for any Educational institution, type of educational institution, secular or religious (of any religion), whet ...

school teacher). Linked to the Sufi brotherhood Rifa'iyya, it was first reserved for men and of a purely religious nature, before opening up to women, then being reserved for them. The debaa is identical to the practices of Sufism with regard to chanting and music, which consists of a few simple percussions, the only notable difference being the dance.

References

Religion in Mayotte French dances Music of Mayotte