Man Kunto Maula

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.

Qawwali takes its name from the qaul, the saying of the Prophet, and Man Kunto Maula is the qaul, the piece with which the tradition identifies its own origin. The Chishti order's memory attributes the founding of qawwali's repertoire to Amir Khusrau, the fourteenth century poet, courtier and musician of Delhi and devoted disciple of the saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and by convention a full performance in the Chishti shrines opens with the qaul, establishing the chain of spiritual authority before anything else is sung. At the great dargahs of the order, Nizamuddin in Delhi and Ajmer Sharif among them, hereditary qawwal families have transmitted the piece for generations, and its performance at the annual urs festivals of the saints remains the genre's ceremonial core.

The structure is classic qawwali, the Arabic refrain stated, elaborated, and driven through rising repetitions in which the party's voices and handclaps build toward ecstasy, with Persian and Hindavi verses interleaved in praise of Ali and the masters of the path. The twentieth century carried it from the shrine courtyard to the world, through recordings by the Sabri Brothers, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen among many, and through film and fusion versions beyond counting, yet its function is unchanged wherever qawwals still sit before a saint's tomb, the genre saluting its founder, its saint, and the first master of them all.