Mustt Mustt was not planned as a record. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had spent an exhausting night at Real World Studios recording vocals for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and when the session finally wound down, Peter Gabriel, who ran the studio, suggested he try improvising something with the Western instruments sitting idle around him. Nusrat sat at a harmonium and played a simple scale, almost offhand, the kind of warm-up a qawwal might run through before a real performance began.
That fragment became the foundation of the track. Gabriel called in producer Michael Brook along with musicians Darryl Johnson, James Pinker and Guo Yue to build a full arrangement around Nusrat's voice and the scale he had played, setting his qawwali vocal technique inside a contemporary, electronically inflected production rather than the traditional harmonium-and-tabla ensemble a qawwali performance ordinarily uses. The title, Mustt Mustt, takes its word from the Sufi devotional vocabulary Nusrat had built his whole career on: mustt describes a state of ecstatic intoxication in love of God, the same term at the heart of the older, traditional qawwali sung in honor of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
Released November 12, 1990, the track carried that borrowed vocabulary into an audience that had never encountered qawwali at all, an audience the traditional devotional gathering the music comes from was never built to address.