Qawwali

Qawwali is a form of music practiced by Sufis to inspire religious devotion and instruction. Sufism is a mystical school of Islamic thought where truth and divine love are achieved through personal experience.

Sufis are synonymous with the ‘Whirling Dervishes’ found in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Unlike Muslims, Sufis believe that one can reach God during your own lifetime and one of qawwali’s formal names means “royal court of saints”. The Qawwali form of Islamic song is practiced in India and Pakistan.

The roots of Qawwali began in the 11th Century with the tradition of sama, spiritual concerts which predate the birth of Muhammad. Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, a follower of the Christi school of Sufism used music extensively in his prayer gatherings, creating tension with the orthodox Islamics in Delhi.

In Qawwali, Persian moqquams meet Indian ragas. Not all people were a fan of this new music. Qawwali alongside Sufism suffered a decline and repression during certain periods of Islamic history when fundamentalists attacked the liberalism of the Sufis and their ‘depraved’ experimental music.

Qawwali achieved a recent wave of popularity in film music, where it forms one of the key components of Hindi films.

Qawwali concerts are a musical gathering, containing a lead singer, second singer, harmonium and tabla and a small choir of other singers all sitting on the floor. The traditions of Persian poetry which influences qawwali have similarities here; in the 13th Century Persian poet Attar’s epic poem “conference of the birds”, a group of birds and a leader go a transformative journey. The collective experience of Sufism and qawwali is like this, but one can only truly understand the power of qawwali if one experiences the holiness and spirituality of the form.

The speaker was the biggest ever Qawwal star, known as ‘Pakistan’s Pavarotti’, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, died in 1997 aged just 49.