Muslim World Music Day is an idea that came from Bob George of the Archive of Contemporary Music in New York City.

The ARChive collects, preserves and provides information on the popular music of all cultures and races throughout the world from 1950 to the present. Since the ARChive’s founding in 1985 our holdings have grown to over 2 million sound recordings, making the ARChive the largest popular music collection in the United States.

The Day, is “an online effort to identify and catalog all the recordings of Muslim music in the world. It will be a step towards making this culturally significant body of work readily available to people around the globe for study and enjoyment”. Among its impressive achievements is an online database of almost 10,000 recordings.

You can also watch a huge collection of YouTube videos of Islamic music. Scan the list of countries in the bar on the right. Each contains a wealth of music videos.

Listen to The Afropop Worldwide radio podcast for the event. And to explore further, listen to some other Islamic music-related Afropop radio shows available online.  (The Umm Kulthum show is notable)