Sheikh Hamza Shakkur

Sheikh Hamza Shakkur's voice emanates spiritual power that draws listeners into the mystical tradition of Sufism. Born in Damascus in 1947, Sheikh Shakkur is a quranic reader and hymnist. He is also the choirmaster of the Munshiddin (reciters) of the Great Mosque in Damascus and serves at official religious ceremonies in Syria, where he is immensely popular. His bass voice with its richly rounded timbre has made him one of the foremost Arab vocalists. Shakkur is the disciple of Said Farhat and Tawfiq al-Munajjid and feels the responsibility to assure the continuity of the repertoire in the Mawlawiyya (Mevlevi in Turkish) order.

Damascus was the capital of the Ummayyad dynasty and a principal stage in the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Sufi mystical brotherhood known as Mawlawiyya met in places known as zawiya and adopted the original chants grouped in suites (waslat) in particular modes (maqamat) and rhythms (iqaat). The Great Ummayyad Mosque of Damascus possesses a specific vocal repertoire, where sacred suites are known as a nawbat, a term originally used for the secular songs developed in Arab Andalusia known as muwashshat. Typically accompanied by a choir, a vocalist such as Sheikh Hamza Shakkur extracts from the repertoire of the mosque the naming of God (dhikr) and the birth of the prophet (mawlid) in a serene expression that has a rigorously organized rhythm. Thus the vocalist progressively leads the assembly into a trance or a state of meditation (ta'ammul).

In the early ninth century, when the Muslim mystics organized their Sufi brotherhoods, they adopted music for their meditation as a way of reaching the state of ecstasy, a source of new vigor to the body and soul. In Sufism, sama' denotes the tradition of listening in a spiritual fashion to music of all forms. This suggests that the act of listening is spiritual, without the music or poetry being necessarily religious in content. The major preoccupation of the mystics was to give the ecstasy real content and the music true meaning.

The Mawlawiyya order was founded in Konya, Anatolia, by the Persian poet Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (1207-1273). Although the ritual is primarily associated with Turkey, local traditions have existed in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq since the 16th century. The Mawlawiyya of Damascus are very few and have been threatened with closure on many occasions. The personal prestige of Sheikh Hamza Shakkur has rescued them, for he has reached celebrity status that has allowed him to generate support for the small group.

Abida Parveen

Abida Parveen (Urdu: عابدہ پروین), a Pakistani singer, is one of the foremost exponents of Sufi music. Her forte is the kafi and the ghazal, though she has also ventured into traditional male territory and sung qawwalis. She is known for her particularly stunning voice, as well as her vivid musical imagination. She has attained legendary status in the Indian Sub-Continent, especially within her home province of Sindh, Pakistan.
Abida was born in Larkana (Sindh province, Pakistan) in 1954. She received her musical training initially from her father, Ghulam Haider, and subsequently from Ustad Salamat Ali Khan.
She embarked upon her professional career from Radio Pakistan, Hyderabad, in 1973. Her first hit was the Sindhi song “Tuhinje zulfan jay band kamand widha”. This song had been sung by many other Sindhi singers before her, but Abida brought her own unique style to it, rooted in classical music.
Although she is associated most closely with the verses of the Sufi saint Shah Abdul Latif, she has also sung the verses of other Sufi saints, including Amir Khusrau, Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Sultan Bahu, and others such as Kabir and Waris Shah.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to call Abida the true inheritor of the mantle of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a giant of Sufi music who died in 1997. While such judgements are necessarily subjective, there is certainly much that Abida has in common with Nusrat. Like him, she possesses a truly magnificent voice, is unassuming despite her superstar status, and her music is informed by a deep commitment to the ideals of Sufism. For both, the act of singing is a passionate offering to God, and for both the deepest part of their magic lies in the fact that they are able to bring the listener’s heart to resonate with the music, so deeply that we ourselves become full partners in that offering.