You’d think that one of the greatest vocalists of all time might have some notes for rising musicians. But as a judge on the 2012 reality singing competition Sur Kshetra, famed Pakistani Sufi singer Abida Parveen was often exceedingly neutral. When asked in an interview why she avoids sharing criticism despite being appointed as a judge, she responded with her typical wisdom: “Because it’s music, not war.” The journalist interviewing her followed up, asking who she hoped would win the competition. “I pray Allah makes a good decision. That’s all.”
Parveen’s humility and diplomacy are almost comical given her position as one of the most famous and influential musicians in South Asian history. When she was 5, her father chose her over her brothers to become his successor in their family practice of Sufi singing, and by the age of 23, she was named the official singer of Radio Pakistan, the national public broadcaster for radio in the country. Now 70 years old, Parveen, who is often referred to as “the queen of Sufi music,” has released over a hundred albums, received the Nishan-e-Imtiaz—Pakistan’s highest civilian award—and is credited with helping popularize Sufi music and culture among young people in South Asia and around the world.
Parveen’s modesty despite her immense success is part of her religion. She makes music in the tradition of Sufism, a mystical, philosophical expression of Islam that began in the 10th century. Sufism prioritizes spiritual purification, a divine, intoxicating connection with God, and a sense of humility that comes from prioritizing that connection above all earthly desires. In interviews, Parveen often deemphasizes her importance as a person, instead positioning her performances as a means for communing with God. “The truth doesn’t need to be told,” she said in an interview in 2001. “It can only be experienced. Remember, I’m not performing. He is singing through me. It is His song, and it sings by itself.”
Sufism also specifically deprioritizes the role of the singer in music-making. The Sufi practice of sama’—listening to music with the intention of achieving closeness to God—instead privileges the listener. The concept of sama’ has inspired artistic movements across the globe from Turkey’s whirling dervishes to Morocco’s Gnaoua music, which has had an outsized influence on jazz greats in the West like Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, to name just a couple.
On stage, when Parveen channels the greatness of God, she transforms completely. She sometimes hallucinates while on stage, or brings the audience to tears by singing just a few notes. Nowhere is her singular vocal talent clearer than on her excellent 2000 album Raqs-e-Bismil. The album title translates to “Dance of the Wounded,” and on the record, Parveen conveys burning desire and yearning for God through the subtleties of her singing: the poise with which she delivers a single note, the husky, smoldering tone of her voice, her interplay between precision and fervor. She’s often compared to Nina Simone, whose shows have been described as “having the aura of sacramental rites.” The two artists sing with such dynamism and heart that when you listen to them, you feel transported beyond the limitations of your body and individual perceptions and into a spiritual realm of infinite possibility.
Even though Parveen is such a prolific artist, Raqs-e-Bismil remains one of her most critically acclaimed and impactful albums because of the beauty of the lyrics and how eloquently she delivers them. She also refers to it as her fusion album, undoubtedly among her most sonically adventurous. The arrangements are sparse—often just tabla, strings, and synth—but cohesive, inky, and foreboding. It’s an album fraught with tension: between the earthly and the divine, the beauty of her voice and the devastation of her words, the stylized Urdu and the more colloquial folk language she oscillates between, and the foundations in South Asian classical music and Western influences.
At the time of its release, international audiences were primed to hear it. Western listeners had become increasingly familiar with South Asian Sufi music over the latter half of the 19th century. Qawwali, the most well-known form of Sufi music from South Asia, had been practiced since the 13th century, but started to be used in Indian film music beginning in the 1940s. In 1975, The Sabri Brothers played at Carnegie Hall, the first qawwali musicians to perform in the United States. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan went on to experiment with the form and collaborate with a number of Western artists including Peter Gabriel, Eddie Vedder, and Michael Brook. His and Brook’s collaborative album, Night Song, was nominated for a Grammy for Best World Music Album in 1997.
When Khan died in 1997, Abida Parveen was seen as his successor, especially in Western media. But as an assessment on Parveen’s talent, defining her as a successor to Khan felt inadequate. She was more his peer than his pupil—she had been singing for four decades when he died— not to mention the two artists also have entirely different musical approaches. Khan’s famous qawwali performances engross the listener in a cacophony of sound. The music generally begins with slow, rhythmic instrumental interludes and meditative vocals, but the performers use hand claps and lively calls and responses between the lead singer and a backing chorus to build to a frenetic climax over the course of 10 to 30 minutes. Parveen specializes in kafi, a sparser, more repetitive form of South Asian music that features only one singer and pulls from regional folk traditions in Sindh and Punjab. Qawwali creates a sense of orchestral grandeur, while kafi focuses on the effect and emotion of the individual singer. It’s the difference between walking through a garden in full bloom and observing the singular beauty of a wildflower.
On Raqs-e-Bismil, she sings kafi as well as ghazal, a third form of South Asian poetry defined by rhyming couplets and highly stylized Urdu language. All forms of Sufi music aspire to remind the listener of the ecstasy of communing with God, but ghazal and kafi do so by emphasizing lyricism and introspection over the fervor incited in qawwali. Raqs-e-Bismil pushes the solitary, contemplative mood to almost unbearably heart-wrenching levels. On Parveen’s album Janaan, released the same year, a bright bamboo flute trill or cascading synth blip sprinkle the mix with whimsy and color. On Raqs-e-Bismil, the arrangements are far more meditative and entrancing. Even compared to other releases like 1997’s Humsafar or 2000’s Ho Jamalo, where the instrumentation is pared back, Raqs-e-Bismil sounds much more lush, cohesive, and immersive. The boisterous spontaneity of those other arrangements is replaced with poised, expansive synth and tabla notes that fill the room like fog.
For the arrangements and lyrical selections on Raqs-e-Bismil, Parveen worked with composer and filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, a collaborator who was just as committed to Sufi mysticism as she was. While working on these compositions, Ali traveled to India’s northern mountainous region and let the natural beauty there inspire him. In his autobiography, he speaks emphatically about this period in his life, and the arrangements that came from it. “I saw in the mountains around me, in the magnificent trees that embraced these mountains, emitting a fragrance as the rains lashed to loosen their embrace,” he wrote. “The mythology became poetry, and poetry became rhythm, and the rhythm, a melody. Each ghazal I chose and composed gripped the soul…They came alive in the monsoon mist rising from the Naini Lake...Poetry is a bridge that helps you cross oceans and mountains. I was doing that in Raqs-e-Bismil.” While driving from the mountains of India down to the capital of New Delhi, he got into a car accident maiming his thumb so badly he had to have skin grafted from his thigh to fix the injury. This experience, he says, is how “pain entered the ghazals of Raqs-e-Bismil.”
It’s an incredibly dramatic account of his life and creative process, but there would be no Raqs-e-Bismil without that kind of emotion. There’s a profound vulnerability to this music because the audience hears Parveen in the middle of her quest. Her devotional practice is ongoing, incomplete, and constantly transforming, and yet she invites us to bear witness to her attempt. As much as she sees herself as a vessel for God, she inevitably evokes the sublime through the prism of the earthly. There will always be the performer, the microphone, the ego, the fallibility that contrasts with the pristine ideal she evokes. And when you as the listener experience the ecstasy that she describes, you have to hold it next to the other realities of your own life: the buzz of your air conditioner, the grocery list you’ve started making in your head, the itch of a mosquito bite. These oppositional experiences don’t deter from one another but rather make both feel more accessible, more intertwined, and more understandable.
Parveen takes many paths towards holiness. There are songs of denial and songs of joy on Raqs-e-Bismil. On “Zahid Ne,” she sings, “The preacher has not yet seen the essence of my faith/He has not witnessed the tresses that hide the beauty of your face.” She briefly enters a frenzied state of unity with God, then defines God as everything that is inaccessible to her. There are fleeting moments of fluorescent ecstasy too, especially in the two kafi songs on the album: “Roshan Jamaal-e-Yaar” revels in a lover’s charm and captivating gaze, comparing it to divine beauty. And though “Ji Chahe” speaks of self-destruction—of losing your sense of self like a moth burning up in a flame—the understanding is that this transformation would be a welcome spell of euphoria.
The writing on many of the ghazals is elliptical, attempting to write around the concept of God, or to define him in terms of what he isn’t. On opener “Yaar Ko Hamne Ja Baja Dekha,” Parveen describes her lover as a series of opposites: sometimes he is hidden, sometimes he is apparent. Sometimes he is a king descending from the throne, other times a poor man carrying his water. Indirect writing often only vaguely gestures at emotion, but on Raqs-e-Bismil, the slipperiness and opacity of Parveen’s interactions with God contrasts with her deep desire for closeness. She is constantly searching, lamenting, and struggling to grasp onto a sense of unity that she knows is achievable but can’t always experience.
In Parveen’s voice, these heady lyrics move from the realm of the intellect to the heart. The emotional range she shows on “Zahid Ne” alone is astounding: She repeats the same melody over and over but changes her delivery every time she returns to a phrase. She is alternately patient, nostalgic, all-knowing, and desperate. The reverb on her voice adds a sense of resonant fullness and poignancy that is buoyed by a gentle tabla beat that progresses steadily and patiently, like the footsteps of a hiker who has found their rhythm halfway through their ascent. Listening to words bloom from Parveen’s voice, I’m reminded of the concept of sonder: the realization that every person you pass on the street has as full a life as your own. Similarly, each word Parveen sings evokes entire universes. Within the span of a single word, it’s easy to imagine the spark of first love, or birth and death of a cosmos.
Parveen generally takes an anti-identitarian stance. She is one of very few professionally singing Sufi women, but she sees herself less as an icon or a source of inspiration than a vessel through which God’s words can be heard. And yet, some of the 21st century’s most innovative artists find inspiration in her work. Pakistani American musician Arooj Aftab reverently cites an encounter with her and Björk lists her as one of her favorite musicians, having recently played her music at a DJ set in Brooklyn. Trans artist Lyra Pramuk relates to her quote about how Parveen feels when she performs: “I’m not a man or a woman, I’m a vehicle for passion.”
Perhaps what these experimental musicians admire about Parveen is less her acclaim or any particular skill she has as a singer, but rather the patience and tenacity she exhibits in her pursuit of transcendence. Going for something greater than yourself is a motivation to keep honing your craft, refining your spiritual practice, tempering your ego. It is the most human desire. In art-making and spiritual practice, perfection is impossible: It’s the act of reaching that is so inspiring.
