I’d bet my house and car that this is the first time a Sufi singer has been reviewed in GIITTV and I had no idea at all what to expect. Not just any old Sufi singer, mind you, only Abida Parveen, “The Queen of Sufi Music”, the “Living Legend of Pakistan” and a “Global Mystic Sufi Ambassador with the power to induce hysteria in her audience.” Oh, and she’s recorded a Pepsi TV advert soundtrack. In the Coke Studios, in Pakistan, I kid you not. By way of a brief explanation, Sufi music is the devotional music of the Sufis, “the inward dimension of Islam”, and characterised by ritual practices, doctrines and institutions. Historically, Sufis have often belonged to different ṭuruq or “orders” – congregations formed around a grand master referred to as a wali who traces a direct chain of successive teachers back to the Prophet Muhammad. No, I didn’t know either. It has crossed genres as well. Madonna, on her 1994 record ‘Bedtime Stories’, sings a song, ‘Bedtime Story’, that discusses achieving a high consciousness level. The video for the song shows an ecstatic Sufi ritual with many dancing dervishes, and other Sufi elements. In her 1998 song ‘Bittersweet’, …
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