“ To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist, One must be willing to release one’s mind and soul from one’s body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.” — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Gateway Theatre in Chicago, 1993 in an interview to Andy Carvin

The soft-spoken Umair Jaffar, CEO of Toronto’s Small World Music Festival, stepped onto the stage with the quiet composure of someone about to open a door into another world. Before him, the audience murmured with anticipation, drawn by the promise of “powerful Sufi voices and rhythms,” a phrase that beckoned many. Jaffar paused, met their gaze, and offered a gentle correction, wrapped in gravity: “This is not entertainment.”

The atmosphere shifted. The stage became a sanctum. What followed, in the voices of Fareed Ayaz, Abu Muhammad, and their chorus of hereditary qawwals, was not a concert but a passage. The audience, knowingly or not, found themselves folded into a centuries-old act of devotion, where rhythm was ritual and listening, a form of surrender.

In a world where music often rushes to commodify emotion, qawwali remains one of the rare traditions that insists on transcendence. It is a form that does not entertain but enraptures, a performance in which the boundaries between singer and listener, self and other, dissolve into ecstatic dissolution. I was raised in the presence of the Sabri Brothers’ sound—a sacred echo that shaped my sense of longing, devotion, and the divine. Today, among its greatest living exponents are Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal, custodians of a centuries-old art form that is as much about spiritual invocation as it is about sonic mastery. Their work, particularly in conjunction with modern platforms like Coke Studio Pakistan, is not merely a preservation of tradition, it is a recalibration of how we might understand devotion, cultural memory, and musical lineage in an age of rupture.

Qawwali is not just music; it is a metaphysical experience grounded in Sufi Islam. Its roots trace back over seven centuries to the spiritual confluence of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and South Asian musical sensibilities. As a form of sama‘, a Sufi spiritual concert, it was designed to open the listener’s heart to the divine. The primary purpose of qawwali has always been to induce a state of wajd (ecstatic trance) in the audience, leading to communion with the Beloved, the divine principle evoked throughout Sufi poetry.

Its structure is both rigorous and improvisational. A qawwali performance follows a deliberate trajectory: beginning with the slow, meditative hamd (praise of God) and naat (praise of the Prophet), then progressing into the more intimate manqabats and kafis that give voice to spiritual longing, divine love, and ecstatic union. Call and response, melodic repetition, and accelerando rhythms create a rising emotional temperature. The language may be Urdu, Persian, Braj, or Punjabi, but its grammar is affective and spiritual.

A Lineage of Sound: Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad

In the heart of this tradition stand Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal, scions of the Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana of Delhi, arguably the most significant lineage of qawwals in the subcontinent. Their forebears were disciples of Amir Khusrau, the 13th-century polymath and mystic widely regarded as the father of qawwali. To listen to Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad is to hear centuries whisper and roar through the room. Their mastery does not rest in technicality alone, it is in the way they summon the past without embalming it.

What distinguishes their performance is not merely fidelity to tradition but a profound awareness of the stakes of transmission. They are not only performers but inheritors of a sacred epistemology. Fareed Ayaz, in particular, often offers exegeses before launching into a performance, explicating the philosophical and theological dimensions of a piece. These are not mere introductions, they are acts of care, gestures of stewardship over an endangered form.

In their vocal command, they are unsurpassed. Fareed Ayaz’s voice has a rough-hewn gravitas that evokes an ascetic’s austerity and a lover’s vulnerability. Abu Muhammad’s harmonies anchor the ensemble, grounding its flights in gravity. Together, they enact a dialectic of flight and return, Ayaz propels the audience skyward, Abu Muhammad calls them back to earth.

What Ayaz and Abu Muhammad restore to qawwali is its original subversiveness. Sufism, particularly in the Indian subcontinent, was never simply a pietistic withdrawal from the world; it was a critique of orthodoxy, a protest against hierarchy, and an assertion of love as the highest form of knowledge. In medieval South Asia, Sufi shrines were spaces where caste and creed were momentarily suspended. Qawwali, as its sonic emissary, staged this egalitarian vision through its very performance.

In the postcolonial moment, however, qawwali became increasingly relegated to the shrine and the tape recorder. Its radical valence was blunted; it was aestheticised and depoliticised. Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad have resisted this reduction. Their performances remain alive to qawwali’s syncretic legacy, where Persian couplets—often drawn from Rumi or Khusrau—resonate alongside bhakti-inflected kafis by Bulleh Shah.

This syncretism is not incidental; it is the secret architecture of the qawwali. In pluralistic societies, particularly those under strain, qawwali has often functioned as a subterranean archive of tolerance, a counterpoint to narrow nationalisms. In Pakistan, where the state has historically oscillated between Islamisation and modernisation, and where minority cultures have faced erasure, the performance of qawwali itself can be a quiet act of resistance.

Coke Studio and the Making of a New Sonic Modernity

Enter Coke Studio Pakistan, a televised music platform that has emerged as an unlikely space for cultural reinvention. Since its launch in 2008, it has sought to bridge the past and the present, the classical and the popular, the sacred and the secular. In doing so, it has offered qawwali a second life,not in the dusty corners of heritage festivals, but in the digital mainstream.

Their performance of “Kangana” on Coke Studio Season 4 (2011) marked a turning point, not a debut, but a revelation. Set in the austere gravity of Raag Malkauns, and anchored in a traditional bandish, the piece wove Persian verse with the devotional charge of qawwali, all while holding its ground amid modern musical textures. It was not the form that adapted to the platform, but the platform that yielded to the form.

In this haunting, hypnotic rendering, Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad did what few can: they made the ancient sound urgent, the classical rebellious, the sacred personal. “Kangana” did not merely expand their audience, it reoriented the listener. Cameras captured Ayaz mid-incantation, sweat on brow, voice trembling with force; fidelity of sound met fidelity of spirit. It was not a performance, but a transmission. Not the beginning of something new, but the unveiling of something eternal.

In “Aaj Rang Hai” (Season 6), they performed one of the most iconic qawwalis attributed to Amir Khusrau. The rendition was nothing short of revelatory. Its chorus,“Aaj rang hai, ri ma rang hai”,became a viral expression of joy and divine intoxication. Importantly, this was not qawwali as museum artifact but as living tradition, intact, persuasive, and infectious.

Through Coke Studio, qawwali became newly legible to younger generations. In an era of Spotify algorithms and TikTok virality,  Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad have shown that authenticity need not be sacrificed at the altar of accessibility. Indeed, their presence on Coke Studio affirms that what is timeless can be timely.

A Sonic Cosmopolitanism

Qawwali, in their hands, becomes a form of sonic cosmopolitanism. It speaks across time, religion, and language. When they perform “Man Kunto Maula” in front of a diverse audience, it is not merely a Shi’i invocation of Imam Ali, but a call to spiritual fraternity. When they sing the Punjabi verses of Baba Bulleh Shah, they collapse the boundary between the faqir and the philosopher, the sacred and the subaltern.

In an era marked by polarisation, where identity is often weaponised and art instrumentalised, their music offers a counter-imagination. It reminds us that the deepest forms of cultural resilience are not reactive but generative. Their qawwali does not merely survive in modernity, it reshapes it.

The significance of Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad cannot be overstated. They are not simply performers but philosophers in voice, mystics in resonance. In their hands, qawwali becomes not a heritage to be conserved but a horizon to be entered. They invite us not to observe but to dissolve, to become, however briefly, part of the circle, part of the song.

Their work is a lesson in listening. Not the distracted listening of a background soundtrack, but the listening that unravels certainty, that makes one porous to beauty and terror alike. In an age of noise, theirs is a sound that insists on depth. In a world of acceleration, theirs is a music that asks us to pause, and perhaps, even to pray.

Listening to the Ephemeral

I have often found myself wondering: what becomes of the vast, embodied knowledge carried by qawwals and ustads, those master-musicians whose art is inscribed not in notation but in breath, gesture, and memory? What happens after a concert, a performance? Where does that knowledge go, so meticulously honed, yet so vulnerable to silence?

It is a question that resonates with the work of Katherine Butler Schofield, historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean world (c. 1590–1860), and a leading voice in the reconstitution of South Asia’s sonic past. Her scholarship refuses the disembodied abstractions of conventional musicology. Instead, she offers a historiography that listens, with urgency and precision, to the fleeting, the felt, and the fugitive. For Schofield, music is not a static object of study but a relational force: an ethics, a politics, a mode of being.

At the core of her intervention is a direct challenge to a long-standing colonial myth, the figuration of the South Asian ustad as an illiterate vessel of mystical instinct, a passive transmitter of inherited knowledge who sings but does not know. Schofield dismantles this orientalist fantasy. Drawing on a wide corpus of Persian and Urdu sources, from tazkiras and letters to visual and oral archives, she reconstructs a world in which musicians were not merely artisans of mood, but thinkers of emotion, theorists of form, and ethical subjects navigating the politics of patronage, caste, loyalty, shame, and honour. 

Schofield’s articulation of “ephemerality” aligns with postcolonial critiques of archival erasure while simultaneously offering a methodology for studying non-textual forms of knowledge. She reads sound historically, but does so by refusing to flatten it into data. Instead, she honours its fugitivity—its ability to shape and be shaped by moods, bodies, and spaces. In this sense, her work is an important complement to scholars like Veena Das and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who argue for the minor, the fragmentary, and the oral as sites of historical imagination.

Her recent monograph, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral (2023), is a landmark in this regard. It recasts music history not as a catalogue of styles or ragas but as a moral and political discourse, a way of being in and with the world. The “ephemeral” in her title is not a lament for impermanence but a philosophy of presence. What disappears does not necessarily vanish. What resists the archive must still be heard. In doing so, Schofield constructs an alternative archive, one that hears the ustad as thinker, feels music as theory, and understands listening as a mode of historical consciousness.

Equally important are her co-edited volumes, Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (2015) and Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (2018),which extend this approach by anchoring musical practice in the intimate weave of language, ritual, seasonality, and affect. Here, music is not isolated formalism but emotional infrastructure, an architecture of sensation that transcends the written page. In this “alternative archive,” the ustad emerges not only as a master of craft, but as a philosopher of resonance.

Such a framework fundamentally reframes how we might approach the work of Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal. They are not merely descendants of a sonic genealogy; they are living theorists of listening. Their mehfil is not simply a concert, it is a ritual pedagogy, an ethical space in which comportment, transmission, and transformation converge. Like the ustads of the Mughal courts, they do not teach songs alone; they teach how to listen, how to submit, how to inhabit the sacred tension between voice and silence.

To hear them through Schofield’s historiographical ear is to recognize that they do not perform, they philosophize in resonance. Their practice restores qawwali to its rightful domain: not merely the stage or the studio, but the deeper, often imperceptible space of ethical encounter. In an era of algorithmic flattening and hyper-visibility, where music is increasingly severed from its epistemic roots and repackaged as ambient content, the work of artists like Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad becomes not only spiritually urgent but politically profound.

In their voices, we find a continuity of thought and feeling that defies erasure. They embody what Schofield so precisely captures: a music history that is not archived, but lived, a music that listens back.