© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Sufi Mystics Get A Modern Soundtrack

Riad Abdel-Gawad creates new Sufi music by translating sacred chants to the violin.
Courtesy of the artist
Riad Abdel-Gawad creates new Sufi music by translating sacred chants to the violin.

Sufism is the mystical path of Islam. It is the inner, meditative branch of the religion that's found in many different forms, in many different countries, and seldom makes news like its Sunni and Shiite counterparts. The ancient spiritual practice of Sufism incorporates all kinds of activities to achieve a state in which the practitioner loses the ego and experiences God through singing, chanting, reciting, whirling — as in dervishes — and music.

Riad Abdel-Gawad, a noted Egyptian-American Sufi violinist who has come to Studio B at NPR West to play some of his compositions, lifts his violin to his chin, closes his eyes and inclines toward the microphone. The music that comes out of his instrument is insistent, exotic and transporting.

With a Harvard Ph.D. in composition, the Cairo-born virtuoso has played and taught his music around the world. Abdel-Gawad's compositions embrace Egypt's multihued, 7,000-year musical history, which he's updated with a New World sensibility.

He plays a fast, repetitive figure.

"We call this zikra lela," Abdel-Gawad says. "It means the remembrance of God. So you can use the music as a means to transport yourself to different stages and closeness to Allah, or God."

Sufism in America became popular in the 1970s, when it migrated here from the Middle East. People gather in small groups, in homes or lodges, to inquire, meditate and listen as they approach the disciplined life of a Sufi. The sect does not advertise or proselytize.

Kabir Helminski is a 65-year-old American Sufi author, lecturer and spiritual leader who runs sufism.org. He's also a whirler in the Turkish Mevlevi Order.

"Sufism is a spiritual path that people choose to have an experience of the divine," Helminski says in a phone interview from his home in Louisville, Ky. "There's quite a variety of music, but the important thing is that it happens within a sacred context, and music is there to take people to a very sublime and transcendent state."

Riad Abdel-Gawad is best known for his made-in-the-USA compositions that expand Egyptian classical music. Along the way, he creates new Sufi music by translating sacred chants to the violin.

"This is religious or sacred music," says Abdel-Gawad, "a little bit like Bach's time when he had music for the church. Similarly, now we have concert music that's growing out of this sacred Islamic music."

Through this work, he's ensuring that the ancient practice of Sufism has a modern soundtrack.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

As NPR's Southwest correspondent based in Austin, Texas, John Burnett covers immigration, border affairs, Texas news and other national assignments. In 2018, 2019 and again in 2020, he won national Edward R. Murrow Awards from the Radio-Television News Directors Association for continuing coverage of the immigration beat. In 2020, Burnett along with other NPR journalists, were finalists for a duPont-Columbia Award for their coverage of the Trump Administration's Remain in Mexico program. In December 2018, Burnett was invited to participate in a workshop on Refugees, Immigration and Border Security in Western Europe, sponsored by the RIAS Berlin Commission.
Related Content
  • In the cloistered world of classical music recordings, there is great interest in choral music by Catholic nuns these days. On Mater Eucharistiae, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, are "able to bring other people into that space of prayer when we're singing."
  • Part of understanding African sacred music means thinking about its colonial context. It's the music of oppressed people combined with the music of their oppressors. For decades, Fred Onovwerosuoke has collected and arranged this music for choral groups.
  • In the Bible, Psalm 150 tells the faithful to praise the Lord with trumpet, harp, tambourine, stringed instrument and cymbal. In the United House of Prayer for All People, it's all about the trombones. No one knows exactly how trombones ended up in church, but it's an intensely vocal sound.