Qawwali beyond the Shrine

While qawwali's primary devotional setting remains the urs, the death anniversary observance held at a Sufi saint's shrine, at which qawwali performance is often the central public event drawing large crowds of devotees across religious lines, the genre also reached a much wider audience over the twentieth century through recordings, film soundtracks and international concert touring, most famously through the performances and recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose international career brought qawwali to listeners with no direct connection to South Asian Sufi shrine culture. This broader circulation has produced a genuine tension within the tradition between qawwali understood strictly as devotional practice bound to specific religious and ritual context and qawwali performed as concert or recorded music primarily for its musical qualities, a tension performers, audiences and Sufi communities themselves navigate differently depending on setting and intention rather than resolving in any single, universally agreed way. Despite this broader popularization, qawwali's core textual repertoire continues to draw on classical and devotional Sufi poetry in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi and other regional languages, praising God, the Prophet Muhammad and revered Sufi saints, and hereditary qawwali families associated with particular shrines continue to perform in the traditional devotional context alongside whatever wider concert career individual musicians may also pursue.