Religious Affairs Office

The Office of Religious Affairs (OAR) has been collaborating with the "Trànsits” cycle organised by the Museu de la Música de Barcelona. Featuring conversations, concerts and liturgies, the cycle explores the role that music plays in the religious practice and spiritual life of several religious communities living in Barcelona.

The OAR began collaborating with the Museu de la Música de Barcelona, as it has been doing with the city’s other cultural institutions since 2019, through cycles on issues with cross-cutting effects on several religious traditions. This cycle, “Trànsits, la música de l’esperit”, is not just a concerts programme but also about facilitating attendance, participation and sharing of a set of living practices.

QAWWALI. THE MUSIC OF SUFISM

A musician, Islamologist, doctor of Arabic philology and specialist in Sufi mysticism Halil Bárcena talks about the musical and spiritual aspects of Pakistani Sufism and Qawwali with Hasnat Hashmi, a lawyer and practising Sufi from the Minhaj al-Qur’ân Islamic association in Barcelona, part of the Qâdiriya (tarîqa) brotherhood.

Qawwali is one of the musical expressions most clearly associated with Islam in the Indian subcontinent. Understood as a song of praise that encourages the transition towards union with God, it is one of the fundamental devotional rituals of the Punjabi Sufi communities, both in Pakistan and in the north of India. This musical genre involves singing poetry derived from Sufi mysticism by solo singers – qawwal – who are usually accompanied by tabla, harmonium and a plucked stringed instrument within a rhythmic framework that suggests constant repetitions of the name of God – the dhikr – on a path that leads listeners and participants to ecstasy: a feast for the soul and the senses.

Halil Bárcena and Hasnat Hashmi agreed that “qawwali is not just a manifestation of music but also a means for saying something”. In fact, the word qawwali (قوالی) comes from the Arabic qaul (to say); its singers — all men — are called qawwal (قوال) [which means “sayers”].

Hasnat Hashmi explained that he had “listened to qawwali early on, during his childhood, not from a religious point of view” but simply because he liked the music. As he grew up and mature, however, he began to understand the message conveyed by this music. According to him, ,“qawwali is a tool: you need to use it properly to be able to communicate. It’s a religious tool: qawwali allows you to connect to Allah”.

Halil Bárcena remarked that qawwali music has numerous aspects, it’s something not just to listen to but also to see and take part in as well, because the qawwal sing not only with their voice but with their body, their hands”. It is a type of music created in a very specific context of Sufi meeting places, commemorating birthdays or deaths of masters, on the death of friends or family members, etc. This is the proper place of qawwali adapted to settings.

Hasnat points out that “qawwali music is not written down or inflexible or codified”. And he adds that “qawwal masters want to move their audiences and will repeat what they perceive according to the response and spiritual vibrations that they receive from their audience, which dominates the tempo. They live by the moment. Repetitions create a habit and habits lead to a state”. A Persian theologian used to say that “the chamber of the heart is entered through the gateway of the ear”. The audience’s gratitude is made clear. There is a traditional way of expressing gratitude, by throwing money at the musicians (far from being a materialist act, it expresses the will to renounce the material world) or sweets.

It also incorporates melodies with a single lyric, with alterations of voice, as is done in Flamenco music. There is considerable play with poetry and words, in Persian, Arabic, Punjabi, Urdu or Hindu, always bringing to mind transition and death in Sufism. In the Pakistani context, Persian is considered a cultivated language. Bear in mind that not all Sufi musicians are alike, qawwali is intended to make an impact, to succeed in influencing the truly personal or sensitive fibres of an individual.

Both the men here point out that “qawwali often sets music to the words of the great authors of Persian poetry”. For example, the poems of: Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (a Muslim Persian poet of the 13th century. The author’s love poems and odes are set to music and sung) and Allama Muhammad Iqbal (a 20th-century Persian-Urdu poet, thinker and philosopher, as an awakener of conscience). Halil asserts that “the best poetry is being set to music, and this has a very specific symbolism. It is conceived in poetic images and sound rhythms, which allow many layers, many levels of interpretation”. It is an often ambiguous language, with several ends: to break the mental logic of its listeners, for example. You need to know its symbolic nature before you can fully understand qawwali.

The conversation was followed by a concert given in Hall 4, Alicia de Larrocha, at the Auditori, performed by the famous group Shuaib Aftab Qawwal, who offered their audience an opportunity to immerse themselves deeply in this truly rich universe of sound. Shuaib Aftab Qawwal is an internationally famous group in the qawwali tradition. It is led by Shuaib-Aftab-Ahmad Mushtaq, a Sufi musician from the Khayal and Qawwali tradition and seventh generation from the Gwalior Gharana school, trained under the guidance of Ustad Sher Ali Meher Ali, with his siblings and grandchildren.