Setting the record straight.
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Dimitri Ehrlich: I know that your music is based on the Sufi tradition, but what is your personal religious affiliation, if any? Do you meditate or pray?
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: I am not Sufi, but I spent a lot of time since my childhood with the Sufis, and I deeply studied them. Sufi music, especially, is a kind of prayer. If you sing in this manner, you will become closer to God, very close. That’s basically what I do.
What is your inner, mental experience when you are singing? What do you think about, or don’t you direct your mind in any specific way?
When I sing traditional spiritual songs, I always concentrate on who it is that I’m singing about. For instance, if I am inspired by the Holy Prophet, I concentrate on the Prophet. In my mind, there are many things, but when I sing, I sing for God, and for Holy Prophets, for Sufi saints. When I sing, their personalities are in my mind. I feel like I am in front of them. I feel their personalities, and I pray. I feel like I am in another world when I sing. I am not in the material world while I am singing these traditional Holy messages. I’m totally in another world. I am withdrawn from my materialistic senses; I am totally in my spiritual senses. And I am intoxicated by the Holy Prophet, God, and other Sufi saints.
Is there a different sort of prayer or meditative mode associated with songs concerned with Allah, Mohammed, and the Sufi saints, respectively?
When I sing for God, I feel myself in accord with God, and the house of God, Mecca, is right in front of me. And I worship. When I sing for Mohammed, peace be upon him, our Prophet, I feel like I am sitting right next to his tomb, Medina, and paying him respect and admitting to myself that I accept his message. When I sing about the Sufi saints, I feel like the saints are in front of me, and as a student, I am accepting their teachings. And I repeat again and again that I accept it, that I am really their follower.
I know that Sufism is essentially a mystical sect of Islam, but are there also strains of other religious thought involved with the liturgy or philosophy of Sufism?
Every religion has its own way of describing God. For instance, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhs-they all have their own way of following God. Sufism basically describes God and teaches how to come closer to God. So basically, I follow the Islamic form of Sufism to find my way to God.
I know that when you were sixteen you had a visionary dream in which your father, a great qawwali singer who had recently died, came to you and told you that you had been given his musical gift and should devote your life to qawwali. Since that dream, how has your understanding of your music changed?
Since the age of sixteen, when I started singing, I have had the same message to deliver to people about Sufism. But some changes have come accordingly as I grew and my experiences grew. Of course you really go to greater depths as time passes, more and more and more, and you grow and grow with the songs.
So how would you define your message?
My message is the message of humanity, love and peace. The goal of this message that I bring to people is to bring them toward brotherhood, to bring them closer to each other, without hatred, without any concern for race, religion or color. I try to bring people, through spirituality, to a position in which they’ll be more honest with each other, and live a truer life, less concerned with the materialistic world where they cannot find themselves. I try to bring them to a place where they can at least recognize themselves.
Other than your musical practice, which clearly has a very powerful spiritual dimension, do you have any formal religious practice?
I pray five times a day. And I pray before I eat, giving thanks to my God for the opportunity to eat this food. And after eating, I pray and give thanks again. And after all of my practices of my music, I always pray and give thanks to my God and say, God, I am your slave, and thanks to you I have this opportunity to give my message to the world.
For many performers, the gulf between the ecstatic experience of being in the spotlight and the “coming down” that inevitably accompanies going offstage draws them into drug addiction and other self-destructive behavior. Obviously you’ve avoided that pitfall, but do you ever feel any kind of emotional depression from coming down from the high of being on stage?
During the time I am singing traditional qawwali songs, I feel that I am in a prayer position in front of God. When I finish my prayers, whether is it my singing or the formal prayers I do, I feel deeply peaceful. I feel that I have had some success in accomplishing the mission that God has given to me. I have no difficulty making a transition from that frame of mind to my normal daily activities because prayer is a routine part of my life and I do it all the time.
In Buddhist psychology, there is a vast pharmacopia of different meditative antidotes that can be applied to various mental afflictions. So, for example, there are certain practices you can do if you are very angry, and different meditations if you are greedy, or jealous, or hateful or whatever. Do you have any kinds of specific prayers that are designed to deal with specific problems, such as anger, jealousy and greed?
Because of this music and because of this message which we have in our hearts and our minds all the time, it is extremely rare to feel anger toward anybody. This is the basic medication that controls us, preventing us from getting angry and keeps us happy.
What did you learn from your father, other than the specific musical training that you got as a singer of qawwali?
From my parents I learned my religion, how to live and follow Islamic rules. When I was young I went to the mosque and read the Koran and learned all the Islamic rules. From my teachers I got a basic education in science, mathematics, geography, English, Urdu, all the common subjects. And from Sufis I learned about Sufism. I try to learn and integrate the teachings from these three sources-from the saints, from school, and from my father. Of course when I was a child, before I turned sixteen, I was just a regular young person. I got angry, I argued, I lived like a boy. But since I saw the dream and became a follower of Sufism, and began singing the traditional qawwali, it really gave me peace in my heart. Since then my life has been totally changed. Since then I control everything that comes to my brain and to my heart.
Let’s talk a little about motivation. For some pop musicians, there is a desire for success that is equal to or even greater than the desire for excellence. Your music is so transcendentally spiritual, I wonder whether you ever think about making money and being a star as a motive behind what you do.
When I started singing, of course, I had in my mind the desire for success. I was always thinking that the people should listen to me, that the crowd should pay me respect as the artist. Of course, I wanted applause and felt that the singer should get some reward in the shape of appreciation from the public. But as time went by, I found myself in a situation where all I wanted was to give a lesson, the purpose of which was to give more happiness to people. My sleeping, my waking, my talking, my eating, everything in my life, the music is always with me in my mind. I’m always thinking about new tunes, new discoveries, and new music.
Dimitri Ehrlich writes for Interview, The New York Times, and other publications. His band, Dimitri and the Supreme 5000, released its debut album last year. He is currently writing a book about music and spirituality.
Translation:
O Master of the Universe,
How sweet is your magnificence!
Your threshold is the Sacred Land,
Your face is the Quran!
We have understood the secret of your face,
That even Allah makes recitation of your face!
In the Universes, you are the highest after Allah,
Everything in this Universe is coming from you,
We read the Quran, the guide of our Belief,
The Quran reads you, O my Master!
O Seal of the Prophets,
You are the Sultan of the Messengers,
Your face is the most beautiful,
May the universes be sacrifice for you.
O Master of the beggars, protect us!
Be generous on us, O Sultan!
Take away the difficulty of our pains,
It is easy for you.
You are the groom of the Miraj,
You have reached to the Home of the Creator,
You are the Beloved of the Greatest One,
You are the guest of the Divine Throne.
How amazing is your threshold,
O Master of the Two Worlds,
Your presence, O Chosen One,
Is the Proof of Faith.
I said here:
“The principles of Islam, when applied in a thorough fashion, led people to a thriving, principally independent, culture from the west. We see in history, when Islam was applied and Islamic societies emerged, that Islamic art was not just ghetto art used now for Arabic calligraphy. Islamic music was not harmonizing boy-bands singing about the Prophet (S). Islamic family lifestyle was not the American dream. Islamic governance was not democracy. Muslim children weren’t raised with a Muslim muppet on TV.”
Then I saw a new muppet kids show…
Examine the character, the personae, the behavior towards sacred words and concepts and draw your own conclusions. Consider the change of secular American children’s programming over the past 30 years (and the rise of ADD). Adam’s baby toilet humor, potentially obscene for its time, is starting to look old fashioned and nostalgic.
Delving further into the theories and precepts of modern ‘American Islam’ and its fundamental list of principles and beliefs, we begin to see a list of beliefs concentrating and culminating on ‘ilm’.
3 ) Since Islam is a filter of good and bad, one needs to obtain ‘ilm’ (religious knowledge) in order to learn how to behave. Studying ‘ilm’ is paramount in Islam, and most ‘ilm’ is in Arabic.
4 ) What is taught by people in classes at seminars and ‘events’ is a translation and summarization of what is considered ‘ilm’.
5 ) Your status is defined by how much of this seminar-event-based ‘ilm’ you know.
6 ) Your source of English-’ilm’ is infinitely better than other peoples source of English-’ilm’.
7 ) If you learn Arabic yourself you will one day know exactly without a doubt that #6 is true.
8 ) ‘Ilm’ can be expensive.
As earlier stated, Suburban Capitalist Islam is inherently an American cultural product. What most Muslims in the West experience as the Islamic message is actually American culture filtered through certain Islamic injunctions. Under this paradigm, Muslims are able to argue day in and day out over details as to which particular filters/knowledge/’ilm’ they should apply in their lives, while ignoring the overarching logical breakdown and inconsistency between their belief system and their actual lifestyle, filled with TV, video games and shopping.
Since it is a fundamental aspect of the ‘modern Muslim ideal’ that life remains ‘Islamic’ as long as one abstains from certain aspects of Western society (drinking, gambling, clubbing), there is a psychological gap that needs to be filled. What are these cultural concepts replaced with? What are the youth to do with themselves while they are struggling in being ardent abstainers from these aspects of Western society? Surely, Islam must provide some alternative?
Largely this gap has been filled with the pursuit of ‘knowledge’. The message has been that through knowledge you are empowered to controlling your own Islamic future. While knowledge has been important to Muslims since the time of the Holy Prophet (S), it is only now that we see studying being associated so directly with piety and spiritual progress. ‘Knowledge’ has been set up as this idealized form of certainty and conviction. The more knowledge you get/purchase/sit in, the more everything about Islam makes sense, the more easier it becomes to justify the abstaining from the few ‘bad’ things surrounding us and also rationalizing our largely Western lifestyle as being halaal. And doesn’t everyone want self-justification and doesn’t everyone desire for it all to make sense?
If one notices, every one of the points that are held by Suburban Capitalist Muslims regarding knowledge are relating to the self. Self-esteem, self-certainty, self-motivation. On the other hand, historically, knowledge such as this was thrust onto people by their parents, curriculum, or just osmosis from the culture which surrounded them. There used to be very little ‘self’ to think about when it came to learning *facts* about the religion. This allowed the ego to be removed from the equation when it came to applying such facts.
The consequence? People were as proud of their ‘tajweed’ as today’s college graduates are of their basic pronunciation of English. In other words, it was hardly given a second thought, it was just done.
In fact, the entire realm of knowledge that institutes sell today was largely that which was taught to children. From Tajweed, to the Arabic language, the sunnahs of wudu, only a few really sincere people were studying these subjects well into adulthood in times of Islamic Empire, and if they did so, they were studying intricate details and they did it under guidance and permission of high teachers. But now the masses are doing so, through their own decisions, with a variety of levels of sincerity and ego.
American Muslims, proud in their knowledge, seem to actually be stamping ‘infantile’ on our foreheads.
Most of these ilm-sessions are set up as the Islamic equivalent to very secular self-help seminars. This cultural stand-in has allowed for competing institutes and community programs to emerge, each giving their own message of specific information-based knowledge. And it should be carefully noted that what is being peddled is information-based knowledge versus knowledge of the self or other forms of tacit knowledge which was how much of Islam was implemented in Muslim lifestyles.
It is also interesting to note that although they technically compete on the ‘message’ they deliver (with some specific differences on where they place their feet in ritual prayer or on what type of functions they allow in their Masjids), the lifestyle the people reach under varying programs is quite similar.
A primary consequence of this Western approach towards Islam is the productization of ‘Ilm’, religious knowledge. What does Western society bring if not the concept of marketing? Catchy slogans, professional videos ads, hype-machines and superstar personalities have been built up to bring ‘Islamic knowledge’ into our lives. No one could deny, if given the opportunity , ‘American Muslim Institutes’ would be clamoring for some sort of witty ad selling their wares during Superbowl commercials.
Frankly, if given the opportunity, they would want their own team and hijab-laden cheerleaders.
In this way ‘modern ilm’ has begun to have more in common with Doritos than the sacred, sober and ecstatic people that claimed it a hundred years ago. Since we are customers of ‘ilm’, it needs to be made appealing and worthwhile to us. We are the consumer so we dictate what we want to hear. And therefore we are largely changing the messages to suit what meets our needs. Controlling student egos is hard to do when they are paying the bills and the goal is trying to fill up the hall as much as possible.
“1) American culture is the primary definition of the way we dress, the food we enjoy, the entertainment we seek (Movies, TV, video games).
2) Islam can be understood practically as a filter of the ‘bad’ aspects of the American lifestyle out of ones life. The bad aspects are the obvious haraam (forbidden actions). It can also be an encouragement of the ‘good’ aspects of American life.”
Response:
A culture can be understood as the output of a ‘program’ with various inputs. The inputs, in this case, are principles on theology, philosophy, human nature, rights, etc.
We can see this easily through examples. If the input is the principle that all humans are equal in all ways, then a culture emerges which reinforces that position, with regards to the overall lifestyle including the art, entertainment, workplace, definition of justice, and overall relationships.
The same can work in reverse. If the input is that humans are not equal at all, then a culture emerges which reinforces the degradation of the unfortunate class, and this permeates through the culture down all the way to how news is reported and how different people are depicted in art, film and even casual conversation.
Everyone accepts this so casually that it is largely a matter-of-fact, and we end up with American slavery and the colonial era.
Western culture is the output based on its own inputs, and the fact of the matter is that it is too young to have any firm inputs. The example of slavery is clear on this matter, within a few hundred years attitudes towards slavery changed as a result of new principles being applied. Within another few decades attitudes towards everything from body image, sexuality and religion have dramatically changed.
On the other hand, Islamic cultures which developed out of 1400 years of exposure to Islam also have had their own independent inputs. These principles have stood the test of time. Further to this, Middle Eastern and Eastern cultures did not just deal with Islam as a matter of choice or an alternative lifestyle, it totally consumed their whole being.
This went to such an extent that even non-Muslims in the polity were affected by Islamic culture, much like today where the situation is reversed and Muslims are affected by non-Islamic culture. And frankly, Muslims have been affected even more than their non-Muslim counterparts were in Islamic times.
The situation with Muslims today is that the West defines principles (inputs), and we get a culture out of it (i.e. modern consumer culture), and then Muslims attempt to filter the result through ‘Islam’. The problem with this approach is that Islam is not just a filter of culture. It contains within it the seeds of developing its own culture.
The principles of Islam, when applied in a thorough fashion, led people to a thriving, principally independent, culture from the west. We see in history, when Islam was applied and Islamic societies emerged, that Islamic art was not just ghetto art used now for Arabic calligraphy (link). Islamic music was not harmonizing boy-bands singing about the Prophet (S) (link). Islamic family lifestyle was not the American dream. Islamic governance was not based on boards of trustees. Muslim children weren’t raised with a Muslim muppet on TV (link).
But if Islam remains a filter, that’s all we’ll ever get. A slightly adjusted version of a culture we already know. We won’t get music that’s entirely our own, we won’t get a dress that is entirely our own, we won’t get art that entirely our own, we won’t have a perspective that is entirely our own, and we certainly won’t get a spirituality that is entirely our own.
Historically, converts to Islam, and specifically we see this in the European converts of the pre-industrial age, were people who totally accepted adoption of faith, principles and culture. When they converted, yes, they totally adopted the culture and perspective of the people which taught them Islam, and they abandoned that which was based on kufr in their hearts. They had no alternative, really. They knew what they were putting aside and what they were picking up.
But today, even Muslims born into the faith find it unfathomable to wrap their minds around the concept that some basic attachments to Western culture needs to first be abandoned in order to build something Islamic.
We all know the maxim, “if you see something wrong the least we can do is dislike it in our hearts.” But today we give excuses to this capitalistic materialistic society and try to find why it *is* Islam, and why its cultural output is ‘not so far’ from Islam. Just let us tweak it here and there. Add some minority-fiqh and it’s all legal too. Rationalization at its finest.
Forget abandoning Western culture and principles from which it arose, we don’t even want to dislike anything about it in our heart.
Is it even possible to put aside Western culture completely? Probably not. We can never forget Rocky or LOST. However, with commitment and a guide who is carrying that Prophetic message, we will see that slowly there is an independent alternative. Leaders such as that replace a void with something fresh and growing and alive.
But at the same time we must know it is difficult to separate from any lover, even ones who are bad for us. So, of course, inching progress will occur and compromises will be made. But until this fundamental decision is made in the heart to (at least) incline away from the current cultural hegemony, little progress towards a true Islamic lifestyle in one’s own household will be possible.
the truth on 
m.a.kidwai,CME/IND.RLY.(retd.) on 
