Qawwali is traditionally traced to the thirteenth and fourteenth century Chishti Sufi order of South Asia, with the poet, musician and scholar Amir Khusrau frequently credited in popular and much scholarly tradition with shaping the genre's early musical form by fusing Persian, Arabic, Turkic and Indian musical elements into a style suited to Chishti devotional practice, though the precise historical details of this founding attribution are less firmly documented than the tradition's later, well recorded development.
The genre developed specifically to support sama, the Sufi practice of spiritual listening, a state in which devotional music is understood as capable of inducing an ecstatic, absorbed awareness of the divine, so qawwali's performance context, historically and today centered on the shrines, dargahs, of Sufi saints, is inseparable from this devotional and mystical purpose rather than being incidental entertainment layered onto a shrine visit. Performance traditionally centers on a lead singer supported by a chorus of secondary vocalists who repeat and reinforce key lines, harmonium providing melodic accompaniment and tabla driving the rhythm, a format that has remained recognizably stable even as individual qawwali ensembles, gharanas, have developed their own distinctive performance styles and repertoires passed down within specific families and lineages over many generations.