The Devotional Pulse of Sufi Music

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Qawwali is designed to do something to the listener. That is not a description of its effect but of its purpose. In the Chishti Sufi tradition, listening is a devotional discipline called sama, and the music exists to carry an assembly toward wajd, a state of ecstatic absorption in which the listener is understood to be overwhelmed by the divine. Everything structural about a qawwali performance, from its length to its repetitions to its escalating tempo, follows from that goal. Judged as concert music it can seem repetitive. Judged as a technology for altering a room, it is precisely engineered.

The Chishti order was founded around the tenth century in Chisht, in present day Afghanistan, and established in South Asia by Moinuddin Chishti, who settled at Ajmer and whose shrine remains one of the subcontinent's great pilgrimage sites. The order's characteristic positions were a refusal of proximity to political power, an emphasis on love, tolerance and openness, and a defence of music as legitimate spiritual practice. That last point was never uncontested. Other Sufi orders and many jurists held that instrumental music had no place in worship, and the argument over sama is old, internal to Islam, and still live. Early qawwali was performed without instruments for exactly this reason.

Amir Khusrau and the Question of Invention

Qawwali's origins are conventionally traced to Amir Khusrau, who lived from 1253 to 1325, was a disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, and served as a court poet under successive Delhi Sultanate rulers. He is credited with fusing Persian, Arabic, Turkic and Indian musical and poetic material for the mehfil-e-sama, the listening assembly, and with writing devotional verse in Persian and in Hindavi, the early form of what became Hindi and Urdu.

The attribution deserves care. Khusrau is also popularly credited with inventing the tabla and the sitar, and scholars regard both of those claims as unfounded, with the sitar in particular now generally traced to an eighteenth century Mughal court figure. The pattern is familiar: a culturally central figure attracts inventions to his name. What can be defended is that Khusrau was central to the formation of an Indo-Persian devotional repertoire, that compositions attributed to him remain in active use, and that the qawwali tradition of the Delhi shrine identifies itself with him. What cannot be defended is a tidy story in which one man invented a genre in one lifetime.

How a Performance Is Built

A qawwali party normally numbers eight or nine performers. There is a lead singer, one or two side singers who can take over lines, a chorus that both sings responses and provides sharp unison hand clapping, a harmonium or two, and percussion on tabla or dholak. The harmonium is itself a nineteenth century European import that was naturalised into Indian devotional and classical music, so the instrument most people now associate with qawwali is not ancient.

The programme follows a thematic order. It opens with a hamd, in praise of God. A naat, in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, follows. A manqabat honours Imam Ali or a Sufi saint, and at a shrine it will honour the saint buried there. Ghazals then supply the poetry of longing, in which the beloved may be read as human or divine and the ambiguity is deliberate rather than accidental. Individual items are frequently preceded by an unmetred introduction, sometimes a qaul or a recited couplet, before the drum enters.

Once the rhythm starts, the machinery of intensification takes over. The lead singer states a line, the chorus answers, and a single hemistich may be repeated many times, each repetition shifted in pitch, ornamented differently, or thrown to a different singer. Tempo climbs gradually and rarely retreats. Improvised melodic passages called girah allow the lead to insert a couplet from another poet that illuminates the line in hand, so a performance is partly an act of live literary curation. Duration is open ended: an item may run five minutes or forty, and the decision is made in the room, in response to the listeners.

From the Shrine to the World Stage

Qawwali's twentieth century expansion happened through recording and touring. The Sabri Brothers, from Pakistan, brought the form to international concert halls. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who lived from 1948 to 1997, came from a family that had practised qawwali for many generations and first performed publicly as a teenager. His recordings for Peter Gabriel's Real World label, his collaborations with Michael Brook on Mustt Mustt in 1990 and Night Song in 1996, his contribution to the Dead Man Walking soundtrack with Eddie Vedder in 1995 and his work with A. R. Rahman gave qawwali a listenership that had no connection to Sufi practice at all.

That success created a genuine dilemma. Qawwali performed for a ticketed audience in a hall, timed to fit a festival slot and mixed for a record, is not the same event as qawwali performed at a shrine on the anniversary of a saint's death, where listeners may rise, weep or give money in response. Much of what circulates commercially as Sufi music, including a large body of film songs and pop production, borrows the surface of the tradition without any of its ritual context. The distinction is not a matter of authenticity policing. It is simply that the music was built for a specific purpose, and it behaves differently when that purpose is removed.

The tradition also remains physically vulnerable. Sufi shrines in Pakistan and elsewhere have been attacked by militant groups hostile to shrine devotion and to music in worship, and prominent qawwals have been killed. The argument about whether music belongs in Islamic practice, which the Chishtis answered in the affirmative eight centuries ago, has never entirely stopped.

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