Qawwali

Qawwali is a form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing originating in India. Originally performed at Sufi shrines or dargahs throughout The Indian subcontinent, it is famous throughout Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan and has also gained mainstream popularity and an international audience as of the late 20th century.
While hereditary performers continue to perform Qawwali music in traditional and devotional contexts, Qawwali has received international exposure through the work of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Aziz Mian and Sabri Brothers largely due to several releases on the Real World label, followed by live appearances at WOMAD festivals. Other famous Qawwali singers include Abida Parveen, Fareed Ayyaz & Abu Muhammad, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Badar Miandad, Rizwan & Moazzam Duo, Qutbi Brothers, the late Amjad Sabri, Wadali Brothers, Nizami Bandhu, Bahauddin Qutbuddin, Aziz Naza, among others. Most modern Qawwali singers belong to the famed 'Qawwal Bachon ka Gharana' school of Qawwali, which was based in Delhi before 1947 and migrated to Pakistan after the Partition of British India.
Qawl (Arabic: قَوْل) is an "utterance (of the prophet)", Qawwāl is someone who often repeats (sings) a Qaul, Qawwāli is what a Qawwāl sings.
Delhi's Sufi saint Amir Khusrow of the Chisti order of Sufis is credited with fusing the Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian traditions in the late 13th century in India to create Qawwali as we know it today. The word sama is often still used in Central Asia and Turkey to refer to forms very similar to Qawwali, and in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, the formal name used for a session of Qawwali is Mehfil-e-Sama.
Originally, musical instrument use in Qawwali was prohibited. The following conditions were initially placed on Qawwali:
Sufi Saints such as Nizamuddin Auliya, the teacher of the famous Sufi singer Amir Khusrow, were quite blunt about the prohibition:
Eventually, however, musical instrument use found its way into Qawwali. Instruments such as the harmonium, tabla and dholak are now common in many Qawwali parties.
Traditional qawwali practice is built upon a system of hereditary training, in which qawwals are part of the service community connected to a particular shrine. Their primary function to the shrine is to service formal activities, primarily the death anniversaries of Sufi saints (Urs).
Since the intention of qawwali is to act as a bridge toward the experience of Sufi mystical love and builds upon religious chants and chanted poetry, the practice is viewed as permissible in what Islamic scholar Lois Lamya al-Faruqi refers to as non-musiqa. Qawwals themselves are central figures within qawwali ritual but are not regarded as the focus and are still regarded as part of the servant class.
Qawwals are trained in two primary ways: (1) as part of a bradri or brotherhood of performers in which they learn the fundamentals of the music, and (2) within Sufic teaching circles typically reserved for the higher classes in which they learn about Sufism. The understanding of the spiritual aspects but also the form's reliance on poetry requires a level of literacy in order to fulfill the role.
Ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi distinguishes between "old" tunes (purānī dhuneṅ, purānī bandisheṅ) and "tunes of nowadays" (ājkal kī dhuneṅ). The "old" tune repertory includes movable tunes that can be adapted to multiple poems as well as "special" (makhsūs, khās) settings of poems, which are identified by their text. Qureshi also includes "typical Qawwal tunes" (Qawwālī kī thet dhunen) in this category, referring to tunes that can be used for a variety of poems based on the music's structural features.
The songs which constitute the qawwali repertoire are primarily in Persian, Urdu, and Hindi, although Sufi poetry appears in local languages as well (including Punjabi, Saraiki, and dialects of northern India like Braj Bhasha and Awadhi.) The sound of regional language qawwali can be totally different from that of mainstream qawwali, as in the case of Chhote Babu Qawwal, whose style of singing is much closer to the Bengali Baul music than to the qawwali of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, for example.
The central themes of qawwali are love, devotion and longing for the Divine. The Sufi poets whose texts have made up the qawwali repertory often used worldly images to convey mystic spiritual love. As such, it is not uncommon to see mentions of worldly or forbidden concepts such as romantic longing, wine, and drunkenness, which are used as metaphors for the mystic state. Qawwals bear the responsibility of maintaining a spiritually appropriate context for such songs, so as not to distract from the religious focus of the Qawwali occasion.
Qawwali songs are classified by their content into several categories:
A group of qawwali musicians, called a party (or Humnawa in Urdu), typically consists of eight or nine men including a lead singer, one or two side singers, one or two harmoniums (which may be played by the lead singer, side singer or someone else), and percussion. If there is only one percussionist, he plays the tabla and dholak, usually the tabla with the dominant hand and the dholak with the other one (i.e. a left-handed percussionist would play the tabla with his left hand). Often there will be two percussionists, in which case one might play the tabla and the other the dholak. There is also a chorus of four or five men who repeat key verses, and who aid percussion by hand-clapping.
The performers sit cross-legged on the ground in two rows — the lead singer, side singers and harmonium players in the front row, and the chorus and percussionists in the back row.
Before the fairly recent introduction of the harmonium, qawwalis were usually accompanied by the sarangi. The sarangi had to be retuned between songs; the harmonium didn't, and was soon preferred.
Women used to be excluded from traditional Muslim music, since they are traditionally prohibited from singing in the presence of men. These traditions have changed, however, as is evident by the popularity (and acceptance) of female singers such as Abida Parveen. However, qawwali has remained a predominantly male business and there are still not many mainstream female qawwals.
The longest recorded commercially released qawwali runs slightly over 115 minutes (Hashr Ke Roz Yeh Poochhunga by Aziz Mian Qawwal). The qawwali maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has at least two songs that are more than 60 minutes long.
Qawwalis tend to begin gently and build steadily to a very high energy level in order to induce hypnotic states both among the musicians and within the audience. Almost all Qawwalis are based on a Raga from the Hindustani classical music tradition. Songs are usually arranged as follows:
The singing style of qawwali is different from Western singing styles in many ways. For example, in words beginning with an "m", Western singers are apt to stress the vowel following the "m" rather than the "m" itself, whereas in qawwali, the "m" will usually be held, producing a muted tone. Also in qawwali, there is no distinction between what is known as the chest voice and the head voice (the different areas that sound will resonate in depending on the frequency sung). Rather, qawwals sing very loudly and forcefully, which allows them to extend their chest voice to much higher frequencies than those used in Western singing, even though this usually causes a more noisy or strained sound than what would be acceptable in the West.