Qawwali is a musical form associated with the sama’, spiritual concert, of the Chishti Sufi Order. In its religious context it functions as a way to bring members of the order into a trance-like state ...

Qawwali is a form of devotional music that expresses the mystical Sufi practice of Islam in South Asia, mainly in areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The term qawwali comes from the Arabic word ...

‘Sufisaints bring people together. And so do the musicians and singers who sing Qawwali, an Indian localised form of Sufimusic,’ said Haji Mohammed Idris of the Qutbi Brothers, one of India’s most ...

A group of Kashmiri musicians from the Srinagar district recently shared a satirical qawwali on YouTube which went viral. In this video, these musicians sang a song in the form of a qawwali to ...

Are newer incarnations of qawwali straying away from traditions of this revered musical form and, even if they are, does it matter? I only have qawwali to blame for my first and solitary act of ...

The annual Ramadan Samaa Sufi Festival, which began on 15 August, will see its last performance tonight by a medley of international troupes For the past four years, the Samaa Sufi festival has been ...

Fresh off his Bollywood playback debut in the Akshay Kumar-starrer Sarfira, singer Sagar Bhatia returned to Hyderabad for his third performance in the city. The evening was full of energy as the ...

The Houston group discusses bringing ancient Muslim traditions into the contemporary world — and even collaborating on music for a Disney show. Music has long been part of religious practices around ...

“There are certain things that must be done for the sake of history.” That was Manjari Chaturvedi’s motivation for curating the Qawwali Photo Project, an exhibition of photographs featuring the lives ...

*I had to watch a whole lot of Bollywood qawwali item numbers to figure out how actors are supposed to behave during a qawwali song. I'm still working on that problem, but I have a coherent theory now ...