The Saracens, whose long metal trumpets greatly impressed the Christian armies at the time of the Crusades, were ultimately responsible for reintroducing the instrument to Europe after a lapse of six hundred years.

From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, the nafīr and the straight or S-curved, conical metal trumpet kārna belonged to the Persian military bands and representative orchestras (naqqāra-khāna), which were played in Iran, India (called naubat) and were common as far as the Malay Archipelago (nobat).

In Arabic, būq is a term used for conical horns, whether curved or straight and regardless of the construction material, including shell, bone, ivory, wood and metal.

[14][15] Among the early ritual instruments mentioned in the Old Testament is the curved ram's horn, the shofar, and the straight metal trumpet chazozra (hasosrah) made of hammered silver sheet.

Queren is rendered in the Aramaic translations of the Bible (Targumim) with the etymologically derived qarnā, which later appears in the Book of Daniel (written 167–164 BC) as a musical instrument (trumpet made of clay or metal).

In the (Septuagint) Greek Bible, the original animal horn qarnā is rendered salpinx and in the Latin Vulgate tuba, thus reinterpreting it as a straight metal trumpet.

The Romans knew from the Etruscans the circularly curved horn cornu with a cup-shaped mouthpiece made of cast bronze and a stabilizing rod running across the middle.

[21] The technology to bend metal tubes was also lost until the problem was re-addressed by Europeans in about the early 15th century, when illustrations began to appear of trumpets with curves.

In the Persian national epic Shahnameh, trumpet players and drummers are mentioned who acted in the battles against the Arabs at the beginning of the 7th century on the backs of elephants.

During his time as Sultan of Egypt (until 1193), the historian Ibn at-Tuwair († 1120) wrote about the parade of a representative Fatimid orchestra at the end of the 11th century, which included trumpeters and 20 drummers on mules.

[34] As a possible early precursor of this nafīr type, Joachim Braun (2002) mentions the depiction of two short wind instruments with funnel-shaped bells on an Israelite bar kokhba coin minted between 132 and 135 AD.

[40] In the Arabic version of the tale One Thousand and One Nights, the nafīr occurs only in one passage as a single trumpet, played together with horns (būqāt), cymbals (kāsāt), reed instruments (zumūr) and drums (tubūl) at the head of the army going to war.

[44] Nefir, or nüfür in religious folk music, was a simple buffalo horn without a mouthpiece, blown by Bektashi in ceremonies and by itinerant dervishes for begging until the early 20th century.

panduri), gaita (from al-ghaita), exabeba (axabeba, ajabeba, small flute, from shabbaba), rebec (from rabāb), atanbor (drum, from at-tunbūr), albogon (trumpet, from al-būq) and añafil.

[47] After the disappearance of the large naubat orchestras in Persia and northern India at the beginning of the 20th century, nafīr refers to a long trumpet that still exists in Morocco today.

After the end of the Western Roman Empire, curved horns of various sizes and shapes existed, as shown by illustrations, from about the 5th to the 10th century, but hardly any straight trumpets.

In the epic heroic poem Beowulf, written in the late 10th or early 11th century, Hygelac, the uncle of the eponymous hero, calls the soldiers to battle with 'horn and bieme'.

The eyewitness Fulcher of Chartres was impressed when he reported how the Egyptians jumped ashore from their ships in 1123 with loud shouts and the blowing of brass trumpets (aereae tubae).

[59] Curt Sachs (1930) is of the opinion that the oriental trumpet, adopted by the Muslims, was understood by the Christians as a "ceremonial weapon, equal to the standard" and as a "precious trophy in the religious struggle in hard strife... snatched from the enemy" and as due to its princely origins, it remained a “noble instrument” in Europe as part of the booty.

[60] Alfons M. Dauer (1985) contradicts this when he suspects that the combination of trumpets and drums was adopted as a whole and served in Europe with the same purposes of representing and deterring the war enemy.

[2][75] The naqqāra-khāna of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) existed according to the court chronicle Āʾīn-i Akbarī written by Abu 'l-Fazl around 1590[2][82] It included 63 instruments, two thirds of which were different drums.

What remains are simple naubat ensembles with the pair of kettledrums nagara and a conical oboe (shehnai or nafiri) at a few Muslim shrines in Rajasthan, including the tomb of the Sufi saint Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, where — following tradition — they appear at the entrances.

With the founding of Islamic sultanates, the African rulers adopted kettle drums, long trumpets and double-reed instruments from the Arab-Persian tradition in their representative orchestras and as insignia of their power.

At the sultan's palace, this military band (tabl-chāna) played the same instruments, but reinforced by cone oboes (surnāy), based on Egyptian models, while the audience stayed silent.

[91] The Moroccan nafīr,[92] with which only one tone is produced, consists of a brass or copper tube averaging 150 centimeters in length, the outer diameter of which is reportedly 16 millimeters.

On one occasion five Aissaoua musicians performed with three frame drums banādir (singular bandīr), a conical oboe ghaita and a trumpet nafīr louder than anything else.

The first small Muslim empires with a naubat (Malay gendang nobat) were probably the Sultanate of Pasai on the northern tip of Sumatra and the island of Bintan in the Riau archipelago in the 13th century.

[94] According to the Sejarah Melayu ("Malay Annals"), a historical work probably first written in the 17th century, the nobat orchestra was introduced in the Kingdom of Malacca after the third ruler Mohammed Shah (r. 1424–1444) converted to Islam.

[95] The orchestras usually consist of one or two kettledrums nengkara (nehara or nekara, derived from naqqāra, head diameter 40 centimetres), which are not played in pairs here, two double-headed drums gendang nobat, one or two conical oboes called serunai (derived from surnāy), a trumpet nafiri and in Kedah and Brunei a hanging nipple gong (in the latter two large gongs are added), while in Terengganu the cymbals are called kopak-kopak.

[99] The rulers trace their lineage through a son of the last Sultan of Malacca to the kings of ancient Singapore and on to the mythical founder of the Malay empires who once appeared at the sacred site of Bukit Seguntang (near Palembang) in Sumatra.