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SUFI MUSIC FROM AFGHANISTAN by Bruce Wannell A NOTE ON MODES AND BEATS In so far as Afghan musicians talk at all about music theory, they tend to use terms and concepts closely based on North Indian classical music. Thus the modes Asa, Bairawi and Kehrawani correspond to similar RAGs, and the beats Geda, Dadra, Kahroba and Tapia correspond to the TALs, counted in MATRAs of 4, 6 and 8 respectively. Afghan musicians will often wander into several modes in the course of one piece, though usually returning to the initial home-mode by the end. Afghanistan's close geographical, historical and cultural links with the Indian subcontinent to the south-east have been as important as its links with the Iranian lands to the west and Turkish Central Asia to the north. Sher 'Ali Khan in the mid-19th century imported North Indian classical musicians to Kabul to provide music for the court: that colony thrived in the Kucha-ye Kharabat in Kabul, and its influence spread with the establishment of the Afghan National Radio in the 1920's so that the North Indian tradition overlay the older traditions of Turco-Iranian Khorasan, while also absorbing elements from the Pushtun folk tradition.
The Afghan national instrument is the RUBAB - a waisted short-necked lute struck and plucked with a plectrum - strong in the Pushtun folk tradition, it is also felt to have an aura of purity, especially when played solo: the shrine of the Pushtun poet Rahman Baba on the outskirts of Peshawar (one-time Afghan winter-capital, now in Pakistan) is frequented by amateur and professional rubab-players, especially after dusk, who play the rubab and sing the mystical verses of the saint under the trees. The instrument has become an integral part of Afghan art-music ensembles, as promoted by the court and by the state radio, especially for the Kabuli GHAZAL. The HARMONIUM is a small portable reed-organ played with the right hand while the left operates the bellows. Since being introduced by French missionaries into India in the mid-19th century, it has replaced the bowed stringed instruments used earlier to support the voice of singers and has become a principal feature of devotional singing QAWWALI in Muslim shrines throughout the Sub-Continent. In Afghanistan, it is used more by urban professional and amateur musicians in private sessions of devotional singing in KHANEGAHs as well as at court and at weddings and on the radio. Purists deplore its fixed pitch and tone-relations, which contradict the subtleties of the modal system. The TABLA is the pair of tuned drums of North Indian classical music, adapted in the 18th century from the older long drum which is said to have been cut in half. It is capable of the greatest rhythmic subtlety and polyphonic complexity. With the harmonium it has become the standard accompaniment to Qawwali group singing, as well as to individual singing of mystical GHAZALs, and also to the dancing of courtesans. The HERATI DUTAR is a long-necked lute with metal strings evolved from a long tradition of similar Khorasanian instruments - Herat was for centuries the principle city of Khorasan, Persian in culture, but looking to Turkestan for Sunni religious orthodoxy, until the British in the late 19th century guaranteed, at the cost of destroying much of its glorious Taimurid architectural heritage, that the city was permanently incorporated into the Afghan state. Under the influence of the prestigious Kabuli-style of Afghan art-music since the establishment of radio and a recording industry, the Dutar has developed sympathetic strings and a capacity for more chromatic tonalities.
The DAFF is a flat frame-drum, the simplest and most classic accompaniment of rhythmic Sufi ritual, as also of women's celebrations. It is found throughout the Islamic world, an instrument whose legality is fully supported by incidents from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. However, Islam has had an ambivalent and sometimes hostile attitude to other more complex musical instruments, which rigourists and extremists (most recently the Taleban) have considered it an act of piety to smash and burn. SHRINE, PILGRIMAGE, KHANEGAH Controversy and condemnation have haunted music-making in the Islamic world since the revelation of the text of the Qur'an in the 7th century and the subsequent collection of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Music is too essential a human need to be suppressed and has survived in folk traditions or in the art-music of the spiritual and aristocratic elites exempt from effective puritanical strictures. However the primacy of the text has always been maintained. Texts were recited and declaimed unaccompanied, but embellished with free melody and rhythm, primarily in the tilawa of the Qur'an and the soaring melismas of the azan call to prayer, secondarily in na't praise-songs to the Prophet, and subsequently in the DHIKR and mystical poetry of the Sufis. Instrumental music came to be accepted as a further embellishment of this last category of texts, especially with those instruments which had, in their respective areas, an aura of purity, such as the reed flute and the frame-drum and the rubab. Sometimes these concessions have been explained as a necessary technique of proselytisers in recently conquered Islamic borderlands - notably Anatolia and India in the 13th century, where the Mevlevi and Cheshti sufi orders respectively gained popular support and royal patronage. The theoretical defence and justification of listening to music in a Sufi context - SAMA' - had been elaborated well before this time, as had the tradition of music as an integral part of court ceremonial and entertainment. Whereas the military elites all too often in the Middle Ages made music accompany drinking bouts and lascivious dancing, the spiritual elites cultivated music for its power to induce HAL, a state of mystical exaltation and self-transcendence and return to the divine origin of all creation. Naturally in the traditional societies of the Muslim world, the conventions were of sobriety, honour, courtesy, and a distinction between the private and public sphere - so Sama' often was directed at a small private circle of cognoscenti - and yet paradoxically was also used to attract wider public support of the saint or sufi or patron by overtly flouting the conventions of privacy and sobriety. The greatest shrine to attract musicians in Afghanistan is the (putative) noble mausoleum of 'Ali at Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan which is the focus of the spring festival the MELEE-ye GUL-e SURKH where many dedicate their art to 'Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and focus of much Sufi and Shi'a devotion. A later saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, buried at Sehwan-e Sharif in Sind, is the focus of much popular devotion by Baluch and southern Pushtuns as well as by professional musicians like the great khiyal singer of Lahore, Ustad Salamat 'Ali Khan. The two folk songs which end the program are representative of this folk-tradition of pilgrimage to shrines. Though much influenced by the Indian Cheshti tradition of Qawwali in public shrines, Afghan musicians have tended to perform in more private sessions in the Khanegah centres of the elders of the Cheshti order, where music is married to texts of considerable theosophical complexity - as in Qandi Agha's sponsoring in recent decades of performances of Bidel Dehlawi's enigmatic and powerful ghazals. The poems by Shah Niaz Ahmad Dehlawi - said to have established the Cheshti Khanegah in Kabul at the time of the influx of Indian musicians to the Afghan royal court - and of Mastan Shah Kabuli, are typical of this elaborate tradition, whereas the songs of Khasta-del and the illiterate naswar-seller Sufi Ashqari represent a more popular aspect of the tradition. The greatest text of Sufism in Persian is the Mathnawi Ma'nawi the Spiritual Couplets of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, and the concert begins with the exordium the Song of the Reed, where the reed flute, hollowed out with the fire of love, sings of the pains of separation from the reed-bed, just as human song and poetry and art are an expression of existential loss of primordial unity and innocence. Some of the major poets of mystical Islam expressed in Persian language are connected with Afghanistan or Khorasan - Ansari of Herat in the 11th century, Sana`i of Ghazni in the12th century, Rumi of Balkh in the 13th, Jami of Herat in the 15th, down to the poets of the khanegah tradition in Kabul in the 19th and 20th centuries. This tradition has indelibly marked the secular art- music of Afghanistan, so that a sharp distinction between music of the shrines, khanegah, pilgrimage or court and radio can often no longer effectively be made.
Gah 'arsh, gahi kursi
As you served my master the Prophet, he called you his own body and soul; This world's faulty reason fell short of your sublime knowledge; The Prophet gave you his own pure daughter as your wife,
THE PERFORMERS Ustad Asef Mahmud was born in Kabul in 1946. He comes from a long line of musicians originally from Kasur - the shrine of Bulleh Shah - in the Punjab, who moved to Kabul in the 19th century with other North Indian court musicians. They settled in the Kucha-ye Kharabat where they maintained their traditions, not least of devotion to the CHESHTI order of Sufism, which has always given a prominent role to music in its ceremonies. Asef learned tabla from his famous older brother Ustad Hashem, and later studied further with Allah Rakhah Khan in the Punjab GHARANA. His son, Yusuf Mahmud, was born in Kabul in 1974, studying tabla with his uncle Ustad Hashem and singing with another uncle Wahid Khan. He often took part in musical sessions at the Cheshti khanegah of Haji Qadir in Kabul. Later, a scholarship allowed him to study tabla in India with Bandu Khan of the Ajrara gharana and more recently in Bombay with Allah Rakhah. Wahid Shaida`i was born in 1959 in Kabul and studied singing with his father Ustad Shaida the brother in law of the great classical singer Ustad Sarahang. His career was mostly with the institution called Afghanmuzak. Ghulam Husain was born in 1960 in the Kucha-ye Kharabat in Kabul and studied rubab with the famous Ustad Muhammad 'Umar before working with the orchestra of the Afghan Army. Ghulam Haidar was born in 1943 in Herat, studied dutar with the great Herati master, Karim-e Dutari, and later worked at Radio Kabul. Ahmad Anusha was born in 1950 in Marand, northern Iran and worked in Iranian Television playing and teaching the nai and studying the works of the Persian mystic poets, especially Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi. Husain Zahawi was born in 1980 in Iranian Kurdestan, studying the daff with his uncle, a dervish from Khaneqin in Iraqi Kurdestan and later in Tehran with Bijan Kamkar who was responsible for acclimatising the daff into modern Iranian art-music. © Bruce Wannell & Asian Music Circuit Tours / Concerts / Education / Summer Schools / Artists / News / Shop / Asian Music Centre / Membership / Links
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