A Call to the West
Tags: Islam, Music, American Dream

A Call to the West

How an 800-Year-Old Islamic Gospel Music Made Its Way to the States.

Brook Martinez has never been to Pakistan or India. He doesn’t speak a word of Urdu or Farsi. And he’ll quickly admit that he’s no scholar of Islam. Yet, Martinez has a unique bond with South Asians that most people from suburban Connecticut don’t share.

“Was I 100 percent comfortable taking a sacred music and playing it a non sacred context with no one who is even close to Sufi?,” said Martinez, recalling his initial doubts. “No.”

Brook Martinez (far right) playing at Barbes in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 2012.

Martinez is the leader of an 11-piece jazz band that covers the region’s popular genre of music called qawwali, or Islamic gospel. The spiritual tunes have been around for a while, almost 800 years, but it’s only in the last few decades that the the music has gained traction in the West.

“It was used as a way to attract people to Islam and started spreading from the very beginning with the Chistiya Sufis of Afghanistan and throughout Central Asia,” said Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology at UCLA.“And that’s carried into this century because of technology like the radio, television and more recently with the Internet.”

“It’s no longer exclusive.”

Qawwali, which is rooted from the Arabic word for “call,” remains a stronghold in South Asia, largely because of its ties to classical Hindustani music. The performances typically range from 15 to 30 minutes and start off very slow, building up to a trance-like chorus and rhythm well suited for meditation or prayer.

The Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Party performing at the University of Washington in 1993.

Today’s qawwali parties are made up of 6 to 10 members that include a lead singer; an accompanying singer, backup vocalists, a harmonium player and a tabla player. The music’s call-and-response rhythm, improvisations and thunderous choruses make it easy to get hooked.

However, it’s taken some time for the sacred songs to spread, largely because of the religious nature. The Sufi devotional music stems from the idea that one must pay remembrance to God, what’s referred to as zhikr, specifically samaa, an auditory form of prayer.

“The idea is the singing of one person or group actually leads to the religious experience or ecstasy of those who listen,” said Shazad Bashir, a religious studies professor at Stanford University. It’s why most qawwalis are about God, the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet’s cousin Ali and the folklore of various Sufi saints.

Traditionally, one would have to go into the depths of Pakistan and India to listen to a qawwali performance. “This kind of music was only accessible to people who made pilgrimages to Sufi tombs or shrines,” said Sakata, who spent time in Pakistan observing qawwali. “They would walk to these places to show their devotion to their Sufi saints.”

But that changed as qawwalis slowly started to play outside the shrine and on the radio all the while becoming intertwined with India’s Bollywood scene. Eventually, the Sabri Brothers, a popular qawwali troupe that still performs today, brought the music for the first time to Carnegie Hall in 1975.

“The audience was clapping and shouting deliriously, and one man went so beyond himself that he bloodied his head—banging it into the side of the stage,” wrote John Rockwell, a New York Times reporter who attended the concert.

“It was really a reaffirmation of the power of music, and an extreme extension of the very sort of ecstasy that Western music-lovers experience with their own music.”

It took a few more decades until the genre’s most famous singer made his way to the states. “It’s when people like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan started getting very serious in the West that qawwali reached a much greater celebratory status in places like Pakistan,” said Bashir, who specializes in Persianate Islamic societies.

Khan, who passed away in 1997 and would’ve turned 65 this Sunday, was an international superstar and is widely considered the most important singer in qawwali history. He was awarded the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Prize in 1995 and posthumously made it to TIME’s 60 Years of Asian History issue and NPR’s 50 Great Voices list.

It was Khan’s willingness to collaborate with western artists like Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder and Michael Brook that distinguishes him from other qawwals. And though he was often criticized by traditionalists, his ability to fuse the music’s old-school elements with new genres helped spread the religious theater to broader audiences.

“He was always conscious of trying to interest people in Islam through his music and was anxious in trying to attract young listeners,” said Sakata, who followed Khan in Pakistan and subsequently invited him as a visiting professor when she taught at the University of Washington.

It’s because of Khan and the exposure he brought to the genre that bands like Fanna-Fi-Allah, a northern Californian all-Caucasian qawwali band, exist.

Tahir Faridi (second from left) performing with his band in Santa Rosa in 2012.

“I’d say being white has been something that’s made it easier for us on a lot of levels because it’s been surprising and more interesting for people,” said Tahir Faridi, the leader of the band. “But capturing the hearts of Indians and Pakistanis has been the most challenging part because they think ‘Oh, they’re white and can’t probably sing and are just pretending.’ They end up being very impressed by our devotion, passion and study.”

Over the past decade, Faridi and his group have traveled extensively through Pakistan not only to learn the ancient art, but also to continue it. The group’s members have been invited into the living rooms of the genre’s biggest teachers, known culturally as Ustads, where they’ve spent countless hours in lesson and practice. That training ultimately paved the way for the group to play across the region’s sacred Sufi shrines and can be heard in their performances in the West.

“Our aspiration in performing qawwali is to play it as well as we can in hopes of paying respects to our teachers and what they’ve offered,” says Faridi. “Over the years, hopefully the band will be a source of religious and spiritual upliftment in the West that continues to give back to the tradition.”

While it’s rare to find a group like Fanna-Fi-Allah that has gone to Pakistan and back, there have been other instances of the sufi devotional music sprouting across the states. A group of South Asian Americans in Austin, Texas recently formed the Riyaaz Qawwali Party and perform traditional songs across the country.

And abroad, the fusion that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan started still continues—qawwali elements can be heard mixed with the likes of flamenco to dub step.

Hiromi Lorraine Sakata pictured with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan / Shantha Benegal

“It’s kind of a natural process where one hears something new, is excited about it and starts to use it and claim it as his own,” Sakata said. “This is the way traditions continue. It has to be vital. If no one is interested, or nobody uses it or listens to it or composes in that style, then it’s not going to continue.”