A Higher State Of Mind

By Mira Sethi, *The Ecstatic Sounds of Peace * - The Wall Street Journal - NY, USA
Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Persian poet Rumi said that listening to Sufi music was like hearing the creak of the gates of heaven.

On Tuesday, Union Square Park will open its gates to the sound of tambourines, reed flutes, harmoniums and guitars as more than a dozen Pakistani musicians take to the stage to launch the inaugural New York Sufi Music Festival.

Conceived by the Pakistani Peace Builders, an independent cultural-diplomacy campaign, and presented in association with Asia Society and the Rubin Museum, the festival aims to repair Pakistan's image in the West through music that insists on the shared humanistic values of peace and plurality.

Musicians from Pakistan's four very different provinces will combine regional, contemporary and ancient influences to create music featuring Sufi poetry.

Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam that uses expressive forms of worship—poetry, dance and music—to contemplate the divine. Orthodox Islamic clerics brand Sufi music haram, or forbidden, because it is considered so powerful, often leading the performer into a trance. Yet reaching a higher state of mind is precisely what Sufis long for in their communication with God.

Like the best devotional music, Sufi music communicates across religious and racial lines, fueled by its own exultation. It is at once radically inward-looking and communal.

Deep knowledge of Sufism will not be necessary to appreciate this concert. The message in many ways is the sound—infectious and ecstatic. Audience members will hear the loud, ringing bass of the dhol, a double-sided barrel drum, and the plaintive, probing tune of the reed flute, a sound that focuses one's senses, moving from confusion and uncertainty to fear and, finally, hope.

On the bill is the Balochi folk singer Akhtar Chanal Zehri, whose handlebar moustache and curling beard identify him as soon as he walks onto the stage with his guitar-like five-stringed instrument, the dhamboora. Also scheduled is the Mekaal Hasan Band of Lahore, a group famous for its contributions to the Sufi rock genre, which blends Sufi lyrics with conventional rock music. The band's fusion of Eastern sensibilities and Western harmonic complexity has created a cult following in the underground music world of urban Pakistan.

Appearing, too, is the remarkable ethnic Pashtun female duo of Zeb and Haniya, whose music, be it in English, Urdu, Persian or Dari, mixes blues, jazz and pop influences to create a breezy whimsicality loved by schoolgirls and septuagenarians alike.

But every concert has a headliner. And the New York Sufi Music Festival knows that the star power of Abida Parveen, known from Morocco to India as the "Queen of Sufi Music," will be the most anticipated performance of the evening.

"We need anthems to pull us together," says Brooklyn-based Mahnaz Fancy, a co-director of the festival. "And who better to do it than Abida Parveen?"

Ms. Parveen is completely at ease in both sacred and secular venues—from the shrines of saints in her native Sindh to the world's greatest concert halls. Her deep alto voice famously moves those who share neither her language nor her faith.

"Parveen could sing a shopping list and have an audience weeping," wrote the BBC's Peter Marsh when her album "Visal" was released in 2002.

Usually clad in a full-sleeved tunic with a traditional red Sindhi scarf thrown around her neck, Ms. Parveen jabs her finger in the air to emphasize certain lyrics, the thrum of the tabla—a hand-drum from North India—accompanying her in rhythmic, cyclical beats. Sometimes she will circle a low note, improvising and stretching its melody. Sometimes she'll soar to deep, anthemic heights, rising to the demands of her deeply emotional music. She has immortalized the lyrics of the Punjabi poet Bulleh Shah, whose mysticism was the assertion of the soul against the formality of religion.

In late 2008, at the World Performing Arts Festival in Lahore, Pakistan, Ms. Parveen was the last performer of the night. The audience, packed in an open-air theater, had stayed on to hear her sing. She appeared at midnight to shattering applause, extending her raised arms to appease the crowd. She sat cross-legged on the stage, and leaned into the microphone: "Countries that don't have respect for music, these countries fall apart." And the loud applause returned.

Asked what Sufi music means to her, Ms. Parveen, speaking into a staticky phone line from the airport lounge in Lahore, Pakistan, said in Urdu: "It is the light of the planets. It is the light of humanity."

Ms. Sethi is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.

Picture: Sufi singer Abida Parveen (center), performing in Delhi, India. Photo: Getty Images/WSJ.