CONTRABANDA

 

10 BTExM (Best Tunes Ever x Me)

#6 - (Manqabat) Sultanul Arafin Haq Bahu (various performers)

 

 

I am starting to see everything connected: from reincarnation to conceptual tools suited to reading today's twisted reality, such as Deleuze and Guattari's 'assemblages' [apparently unconnected heterogeneous entities that generate practical results], or Bruno Latour's "Actor-networks" (see Martin Müller: Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics and Space).

 

My very modest 'assemblage' today includes an obscure child prodigy born a certain year in the 17th century in Qalai Shorkot, on the banks of the Chenab River, 300 km from Lahore, Pakistan: the future 'sultan' Bahu. And, indeed, reincarnation.

 

And qawaali, which is a blend of classical and popular music of Indian, Persian, Arabic and Turkish origin. And another holy man, who is said to have invented tablas and qawaali, Amir Khusrau Dehlavi (also spelled Khusro) of the Chishti Sufi order. And the theory of altered states of sensory perception comes into play, because of that process of estrangement that drives Sufis to play for hours (in Mohammedan exhortation, or dhikr) rather than enter into the ecstasy (fana) that absorbs you in spiritual space: even a moment of it seems to be worth a lifetime.

 

The life of the (“perfect saint” of the Sufis) Hazrat Sultanul Arafin Haq Bahu Rematullah is shrouded in legend. Before he was even born, they say his mother had already realized that her son would become a saint. Seeing him, the Hindu infidels apparently began to recite the beginning of the Muslim creed, the Kalima Tayyiba (“Laa Ilaha Illallah Muhammad ur-Rasulullah.”)

 

But in the 124 books that Bahu wrote, he insisted on two principles, even before faith in the Shariah: obscurity and desistance. And he said: “let me be clear: truth leads to redemption, falsehood to destruction,” preaching a Sufism that prized the power of the immaterial, of that thought that made him fall into ecstasy.

 

I can say that qawaali is my favorite style of music. The name means “sound” (and “affirmation”, meaning “of Mohammed”) and the resonances are atavistic: it is lost in the mists of time together with the history of the Sufis, which only recently intertwines with Muslims, perhaps (it is my theory) because the Sufi purity of the Spirit had already been lost to Christians, from Constantine onwards. [However, it is known that St. Francis was in Egypt and there are those who want him to be a Sufi.]

 

The Sufis are already in themselves an apparently extemporaneous assemblage: a sect that is not a sect; without a holy city; without temporal organization; without religious dogmas; without a history. And perhaps, as in the case of Bahu, without a fixed abode for life.

 

In their petty centuries-old crusade against religiosity, Bollywood and Mumbai have bastardized and transformed qawaali into a local X Factor phenomenon. Hollywood (Holy-Wood = holy wood: the magic wand to conquer our imagination) had already done it with Oliver Stone, using the most famous qawaal of the late 20th century (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) for scenes of decapitations in the prison of “Natural Born Killers”. And here reincarnation comes into play, because instead of severed heads,

 

In this ecstatic music, I lose myself and feel a contact with the deepest nature of my being. Perhaps it's about the melodic improvisations, swirling in the air and quarter tones make you feel as if you just left the South of the Italian South and started sailing the Mare Nostrum towards the Maghreb and the Middle East.

 

This trip includes an aural metamorphosis: an octave from Italy to Lebanon grows from twelve notes to twenty-two. Qawaals are not living monuments of vocal technique, but rather - in the best examples - great popular improvisers who express in fifteen or twenty minutes (or an hour) their relationship with the essence of the Universe.

 

Rather than technique, this is a magical assemblage which produces altered states of perception thanks to the supporting chorus who accompany the singer in hypnotic repetitions. Also the harmonium appears, a relic of Western colonization to use only 12 “well-tempered” notes.

 

All performers show a simplicity that would have pleased Pasolini: chosen people, in search of transcendence, through reiteration.