As the city gets ready to host two Sufi music festivals, the traditional singers carry on a legacy without publicity
SUFI MUSIC— it’s all about the heart, about the direct hit it makes on your soul, the straight road to God that it builds between the earthly and the divine, the trance that it spreads as an envelope around you. But toss up this term in the music market and you are likely to get stumped by the connotations that it evokes — fame and money come way ahead of everything else that Sufi music was originally devised for.
As the city braces itself for two important upcoming Sufi music festivals — the famous Jahan-e- Khusrau organised by filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, from February 25 to 28 at Arab Ki Sarai, Humayun’s Tomb, and the new Qawwali festival to be organised by Sanjeev Bhargava of Seher in the coming weeks — we decided to walk along the fault lines that mark the world of Sufi music. It was an interesting walk down the historical lane to the practitioners of Sufi music who continue to sing the way their forefathers sang when music began to be an integral part of the Chishti order of Sufism in India. And that was about a thousand years ago.
“What is Sufi music? Singing a prayer to God and making an illclad girl gyrate to the rhythm? Positively not,” says Mohammad Idris Qutubi, the younger of the two Qutubi brothers who have been the traditional Sufi singers attached to the oldest dargah of Delhi, that of Khwaja Syed Muhammad Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli, popularly known as the Qutub dargah. “As a family, we’ve been singing for the Khwaja Sahab for the past 825 years,” informs the elder brother, Mohammad Ilyas Qutubi.
http://newageislam.com/reclaiming-sufi-heritage/islamic-culture/d/2480
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5:17 AM
Moderate Islamist here
