You Talk to God

By Rosemary Beham, "Sounds of Ramadan" - The National - Abu Dhabi, UAE
Monday, September 8, 2008

“Allahu akhbar!” The man in the centre of the stage sings loud and clear, and 11 more follow in unison.

“Allahu akhbar!” They hold their notes simultaneously in the air for an unfeasibly long period of time.

We are hearing the Umayyad Mosque azan, or call to prayer – one unlike any other in the Muslim world. But we aren’t in Damascus, or even in Syria. We’re in the Al Dhafra Hall of the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, on the opening night of Nafahat Ramadania, a sacred music festival which translates into English as Blossoms of Ramadan.

The man at centre stage is Sheikh Hamza Shakour, whose fine, soft, Sufi voice has made him not only the choir master of the Munshiddin (reciters) at the Great Mosque, one of the oldest mosques in Islamic history, but one of the best-known bass vocalists in the field of classical Arab religious music.

The composer and producer of dozens of albums, including the Fartek Album, Samtan wa Daani, Indassaf Al-Lail and Al-Kudsu Tunadina, Sheikh Shakour is equally at home singing solo as alongside his group, the Religious Singers Association of Damascus.

Shakour’s performance was the first of five evenings of religious chanting arranged by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, as the first ever religious music festival held in the city during Ramadan.

The evening saw the Ibn Arabi Religious Chanting Troupe from Morocco; Thursday will see a performance from the Religious and Heritage Chanting Ensemble from Lebanon and next week will welcome the Sham Troupe from Damascus and the Emirati singer Ahmad Bukhatir.

For 90 minutes last Thursday, Shakour, dressed in a traditional striped Damascene thobe, shawl and red fez, leading a group including five percussionists (playing the oud, kanoon, ney, riqq and mezar, the latter two types of drum), held his audience by singing to God.

“You are a world that is both internal and external,” he chanted, semi-hypnotically. “Ramadan is a month that has more majesty than the other months. Fasting to Islam is a privilege, and in it all the heavens become crowded with goodness.”

Even to one who doesn’t understand the language, or perhaps because of it, the rhythm of Shakour’s group was intensely compelling.

Despite leading a 300-year-old Sufi tradition in the Syrian capital, offstage Shakour is an impressively large, personable and unaffected character. His father was a muezzin, and taught him to recite the call to prayer when he was 10. His mother began to sing religious muwashaat, or rhyming verse, to him when he was three.

But what exactly is Sufi music, and where does it originate from? The type followed by Shakour comes under the Rifaeya school of Islamic jurisprudence and is characterised by a form of asceticism known as zuhd.

“Our way is a gain for the soul through the love of God,” Shakour says. “The ascetic becomes detached from this world and his soul and thoughts become orientated toward the next life. He leaves the pleasures of this life, its glory and its money, and he celebrates his soul instead and raises it to God. The Sufi way is refined and pure; it’s the core of faith.”

And faith, or a belief in benevolent goodness, seems to be one of the essential elements in devotional music. Without prompting, Shakour launches into poetry.

“If faith is lost … and the human accepts a world without faith, then he makes annihilation its twin,” he says.

Yet although there is faith, it’s a peculiarly selfless, open-ended and supplicatory form, as the second verse of a poem he sings to God shows: “If I ask to see You and be with You then please do not make your answer, ‘It shall not be’.”

“As well as religious muwashaat, there’s madeeh (praise) and ibtihal (supplication),” Shakour explains. “You talk to God, and you say, ‘Oh Thou who can see me and whom I cannot see’ and you pray that way”.