In the twenty first century, both in North American and Western Europe, Sufism as expressed in music and film, on DVDs and the World Wide Web, seems destined to remain a niche industry, capturing the hearts of new audiences who gravitate to spaces of meditation, where the spirit is revived, the self reinvented.
The wedding of spiritualism and commercialism is not unique to Sufism but it has afiected the latest phase of mystical Islam. Music is a case in point. It is integral to Sufi practice, except for the most austere orders. Yet contempo rary Sufi musical production does not emanate from the traditional Sufi brotherhoods. It is, instead, a reconfiguration of cultural products for resale on the mass distribution market; it is a dimension of pop culture.
In recent years, Sufi music has been the subject of a new appropriation that may be called 'remix’. In World Music albums, international festivals and fusion performances, Sufi music has been performed in contexts never before envisioned. To take but a single example, the qawwdll music of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fatali 'Al’i Khan ('Must Must Qalandar’) was remixed by the British hip hop group Massive Attack in 1990 to become an international dance hit with a strongly reggae flavour. At the same time, performers who were once low status service professionals catering to the spiritual experience of elite listeners have made the shift to become box office superstars who are regarded as spiritual personalities in their own right. A glance at the top twenty five recordings listed under Sufi music by online bookseller amazon. com indicates the remarkable variety and profusion available to the world of consumers today. But this is best described as a cultural and commercial appropriation of Sufism rather than as the dissemination of Sufi teaching and authority.
34 Constant Hames, 'L’Europe occidentale contemporaine’, in Popovic and Veinstein (eds.), Les voies d’AHah, pp. 442 7.
World History
