The refrain of Man Kunto Maula is older than any music attached to it. Returning from his farewell pilgrimage in the last year of his life, the Prophet Muhammad halted the caravan at the pool of Ghadir Khumm and, taking his cousin and son in law Ali by the hand, declared, whoever accepts me as maula, Ali is his maula too. The word maula carries senses of master, patron and friend, and the declaration's interpretation became one of the hinges of Islamic history, for Shia Islam it designates Ali as the Prophet's appointed successor, while Sunni tradition honours it as a declaration of Ali's excellence, and the hadith itself is transmitted in canonical collections including that of al-Tirmidhi.
Sufism took a third inheritance from the same words. In the orders' understanding, the Prophet's spiritual authority, his wilaya, passed through Ali down the chains of masters and disciples that structure the Sufi path, so that the Ghadir declaration is the first link of every silsila. That is what the qawwali celebrates, the Persian verses attributed to Amir Khusrau surrounding the Arabic refrain with the ecstatic homage of a disciple, the tradition's memory of the moment when discipleship itself was founded, sung by musicians whose own art descends master to pupil in exactly the manner the song describes.