Qawwali, now a world music staple, began as Sufi worship with no instruments allowed
Qawwali was meant to carry listeners towards ecstatic remembrance of God, not to entertain them. Early Sufi authorities even banned musical instruments from the gatherings. Today harmonium and tabla drive the sound, and singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan carried this shrine music to festival crowds around the world.
The name comes from the Arabic qaul, a saying, which in Sufi use came to mean a devotional song built on sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. A qawwal is the one who utters it. Tradition credits the 13th-century poet and musician Amir Khusrau, a disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, with shaping the form by blending Indo-Persian music and poetry for listening assemblies called mehfil-e-sama. In the Chishti order, listening itself was a spiritual discipline meant to awaken divine love and, for those prepared, a state of rapture called wajd.
The rules were strict at first. Listening was allowed only if the singer was an adult man, the words were free of obscenity, the audience listened in remembrance of God, and no instruments were present. Instruments crept in over time, and the harmonium, tabla and dholak are now standard. Performers traditionally belong to hereditary families serving a particular shrine, above all at the anniversaries of saints' deaths, and they are regarded as servants of the ritual rather than its focus.
A traditional programme follows an order. An opening qaul, built on a Prophetic saying, is followed by a hamd praising God, then a na'at praising the Prophet, then songs honouring Imam Ali or the saints. The ghazal, made of independent couplets, appears in most performances because its repetition lets the singer circle a phrase as a form of remembrance. Its imagery of wine, drunkenness and unrequited longing stands in for the mystic's yearning, and qawwals must keep that metaphor from slipping into mere worldliness.
Songs are mainly in Persian, Urdu and Hindi, but also Punjabi, Saraiki and dialects like Braj Bhasha. In medieval India the form echoed Hindu Bhakti devotion, whose ideas of love and the pain of separation mirror Sufi longing; Khusrau sometimes used imagery linked to Krishna. Releases on the Real World label by Nusrat and by the Sabri Brothers, plus their sets at WOMAD festivals, did much to win qawwali a global audience.
Source: Qawwali
