At Lahore’s palatial Governor House, queen of Sufi music sings praises to the saints

Abida Parveen, Pakistan's most outstanding musician, sings qawwalis and kafis – variations of Pakistani folk and classical music – to a swooning audience at Lahore’s palatial Governor House on Friday. (Photo courtesy: Verve event planners)

The first of its kind Sufi Night held at Lahore's palatial Governor House on Friday started with traditional Sufi dances. The crown jewel of the evening was a rare performance by Abida Parveen. (Photo courtesy: Verve event planners)

• Abida Parveen performed classic qawwalis, ghazals and kafis to a packed audience on Friday night
• Event was organised by Seed Out, Pakistan’s first interest-free crowdfunding platform, and raised funds to micro-finance 150 small businesses

LAHORE: Pakistanis got the treat of a lifetime on Friday night as Abida Parveen, Pakistan's most outstanding musician, sang qawwalis and kafis – variations of Pakistani folk and classical music – to a swooning audience at Lahore’s palatial Governor House.
The first of its kind Sufi Night, which started with traditional Sufi dances, was organised by Seed Out, Pakistan’s first interest-free crowdfunding platform, in an attempt to raise money to set up small businesses for underprivileged Pakistani entrepreneurs.
Since 2013, Seed Out has funded 600 small entrepreneurs and sent 1,600 child labourers to school. Friday’s event itself raised funds to micro-finance 150 small new businesses.
“Seed Out has always been committed to fight poverty,” president of the platform Zain Ashraf Mughal said. “However, we cannot do it alone. This year we wanted to bring all Pakistanis to come together and play their part to lift thousands of families out of poverty.”
Mughal, a graduate of the University of Miami, is the first Pakistani to receive the prestigious 2018 Commonwealth Youth Award. He was also shortlisted for the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list for 2019 and has been ranked as Pakistan’s top 25 high achievers under 25 by Tech Juice.
Friday night's rare music performance by Parveen was attended by over 1,200 celebrities, cricket stars, politicians, diplomats and members of the who's who of Lahori society. Hundreds of hands waved overhead and the crowd sang along as Parveen serenaded the audience with songs whose message was ecstatic devotion and which praised saints, poets and philosophers revered by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.
Parveen is a master of the Sufi style of music called the kafi. Like the qawwali, which was popularized globally by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the kafi sets classical poems by poets like Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sachal Sarmast and Khwaja Ghulam Farid to visceral tunes that leave the singer and the audience clapping and swaying. The themes are the love of the divine and oneness with a larger being or spirit.
Parveen’s first US tour was back in 1993 and she has since travelled across the world to perform at sold-out venues. She was born into a long line of Sufi mystics and singers and her father, Ghulam Haider, the founder of a devotional music school in Sindh, trained her, rather than his two sons, to pursue music.
In recent years, Parveen’s career has also taken a commercial turn. She has performed on Coke Studio, Pakistan's biggest music show, and joined the judging panel of the hugely popular TV talent show Sur Kshetra, which is filmed in Dubai and pitted Indian and Pakistani musicians against one another. Her spiritual ghazals have also appeared in Bollywood films.