Qawwali
Qawwali is ecstatic Sufi ensemble singing powered by lead-and-chorus exchanges, harmonium, clapping, tabla or dholak, accelerating intensity, and texts of divine love, surrender, longing, and mystical paradox. Its structure is cumulative: each repetition is not redundancy but pressure, and the pressure is the point.
History
The genre developed in South Asian Sufi shrine culture and became one of the region’s most recognizable devotional-performance traditions, transmitted both in sacred settings and commercial recordings; the Sabri Brothers, Aziz Mian, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Fareed Ayaz & Abu Muhammad, and later Rahat Fateh Ali Khan brought the form to mass audiences while maintaining its spiritual grammar of build, invocation, and release.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- qawwali histories
- Sufi music scholarship