The Tradition That Made Him the Father of Qawwali

Qawwali tradition credits Amir Khusrau with a central role in shaping the genre as it is performed today, crediting him with fusing Persian poetic and musical forms he knew from the court with North Indian musical elements to create a devotional style suited to Chishti sama, the practice of using music to induce spiritual ecstasy that Nizamuddin Auliya himself championed against the objections of more legalistic clerics of the period.

Regula Burckhardt Qureshi's study of qawwali performance describes Man Kunto Maula as the genre's traditional opening piece, the qaul, saying, from which qawwali takes its name, built on the words attributed to the Prophet Muhammad at Ghadir Khumm naming Ali as his spiritual heir, a text the qawwali repertoire still opens with at Sufi shrines across South Asia to establish the chain of spiritual authority the performance stands within. Popular tradition goes further still, crediting Khusrau with inventing or substantially shaping instruments including the sitar and the tabla, claims repeated constantly in general audience writing about Indian music but which specialist musicological and historical scholarship treats as unverified legend rather than established fact, no contemporary source from Khusrau's own lifetime or shortly after supports either claim, and the instruments' documented history points to later development. What is much better documented is Khusrau's standing, within his own lifetime and increasingly after it, as the central literary and musical figure of the emerging Indo-Persian Sufi devotional culture centered on Nizamuddin's shrine, a reputation solid enough that even the unverifiable legends attached themselves specifically to him rather than to any of his many contemporaries.