English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In recent years, alongside the concurrent rise of political Islam and reactionary state policies in India, Sufism has been championed as an “acceptable” form of Islam from neoliberal perspectives within India and the Western world. Sufism is noted as an arena of spiritual/religious practice that highlights musical routes to the Divine. Among Chishti Sufis of South Asia, that musical pathway is qawwali, a song form that been in circulation for over seven centuries, and which continues to maintain a vibrant sonic presence on the subcontinent, both in its ritual usage among Sufis and more broadly in related folk and popular iterations. This paper asks, what happens to qawwali as a song form when it circulates in diaspora? While prominent musicians such as the Sabri Brothers and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan exposed audiences in the West to the sounds of qawwali, in recent years, non-hereditary groups of musicians based in the US and UK have begun to perform songs from the qawwali repertoire. In the traditional setting, textual meaning is paramount; this paper asks, how can performers transmute the affective capacity of qawwali in settings where semantic forms of communication may be lost? How do sonic and metaphorical voices lend themselves to the circulation of sound-centered meaning? Through a discussion of the Sufi sublime, this paper considers ways sonic materials stitch together the diverse cloth of the South Asian community in diaspora.

Qawwali Routes: Notes on a Sufi Music’s Transformation in Diaspora