Khusro is considered by many to be the inventor of qawwali. This qawwali is a thirteenth century milestone in the history of Sufi Literature written by Amir Khusro, the leading disciple of the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Plainclothes policemen were sent to Aziz Mian’s concerts with the specific instruction to arrest him if he sang “Mein Sharabi”. The metaphor of intoxication, so central to the tenets of Sufism, was no longer acceptable. Aziz Mian was one of the first qawwals to excite the ire of General Zia, bent on remaking Pakistan into a State within the confines of a narrow interpretation of Wahabi Islam. One of my earliest memories of the music form is of a visibly inebriated Aziz Mian singing “Mein Sharabi”, a paean to the joys of intoxication. But it was the ascendancy of the Wahabi thought propagated by Zia and his cohorts that forced qawwals in Pakistan to adapt to the more intolerant and restrictive atmosphere by toning down or eliminating entirely their repertoire of qawwali’s more heterodox elements. One could argue that Partition itself was a huge blow to syncretic traditions. In this way, qawwali the music of the shrine culture of the subcontinent, a culture whose hallmark was inclusivity, has become the provenance of a single faith. The centuries old tradition of ending a qawwali performance by singing “Aaj Rung hai ae Maa Rung hai ri”, has given way to ending a performance with the durood, Arabic invocations in praise of the Prophet. How did we get to this brutal silencing? I believe the answer lies in the slow asphyxiation of syncretic traditions of qawwali.
It was hard to miss the ubiquitous sounds of qawwali, of which there were many exponents, the Sabri Brothers, Munshi Raziuddin, Bahuddin, Mansoor Niazi, and Aziz Mian to name a few. In my childhood, growing up in Pakistan in the pre General Zia era such “blasphemous” content was unarguably mainstream, a music whose popularity cut across all classes and segments of society. Within 24 hours of the murder, Hakeemullah, the head of the TTP or Tehreek é Taliban Pakistan, a homegrown offshoot of the Afghan Taliban at war with the Pakistani State, made a statement that the killing of Amjad Sabri was ordered because of his “blasphemous” qawwalis. For decades they were headlined by his legendary father Ghulam Farid Sabri and his uncle Maqbool Sabri. Habib Painter singing “Bahaut Kathin hai dagar Panghat ki”Īmjad Sabri was the scion of one of Pakistan’s most beloved qawwal families, the Sabris.
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