Finding peace in Latif’s music

The music of the Lower Indus Valley is mesmerising and there’s no better place than the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif to witness its power. Since 1740, when Latif settled on the mound of Bhit Shah and started training his group of musicians to perform his unique form of music, a concert has been held every Thursday night at the shrine between Isha and Fajr prayers.

Many musicians from interior Sindh started out their musical careers from this mound and achieved widespread fame by singing the Waees and Kafis of Latif. Allan Faqir, the Sindhi folk legend who sang the massive hit “Humma Humma” with popstar Mohammad Ali Shaiki in the 1980s, was first introduced to the general public at Bhit Shah in 1967. Other stars, including Faqir Ghafoor, Dhol Faqir and Hussain Bakhsh Khadim, spread the Sufi saint’s message of love and peace through music from this mound. One of the Waee wizards of today is Faqir Jumman Saeen, who recently performed at a Sufi festival in New York along with Abida Parveen. He paid his respects to the revered saint immediately on his return.

Before the musical night began, musicians said a prayer for the revered saint while sitting on the courtyard facing the grave. Faqir Jumma and his band of 11 performers started the musical night with a prayer. As soon as Jumman began plucking the first notes on his five-stringed Damboor, women seated in front of him let their hair loose and started swirling their bodies to the rhythm of his music. Latif had devised a Damboor instrument that is unique to Sindh; the Arab and Persian version had only four strings before the saint’s innovation in the 18th century.

When the tempo of the music rose and the high notes resonated throughout the courtyard, the captive audience gathered around Jumma began to whisper among themselves, “Look, the women are being possessed by jinns!”

Women, some as young as 16 and some old as 45, twirled their bodies, banged their bangle-filled hands on the floor and splashed their hair on the courtyard to the sound of music as if in a trance. The spellbinding performance of both the musicians and the audience left everyone awestruck.

Muharram Raaz, a local journalist who moonlights as a pir in the area, says that there are many tales of women being possessed by supernatural forces in this part of the world. “But not all of them are true,” he says. He went on to give an example of one 14-year-old girl, whose father sought his help in exorcising his daughter, who was supposedly possessed by a jinn.

“When I reached the house, I found the girl walking around a tree and screaming hysterically,” Raaz recalled. He said he recited verses from the Holy Quran and gave the girl a glass of water, which she threw at his face and said “the jinn has made a home in my body, go away.”

Raaz sensed that the girl acted more strangely in the presence of her family members. He asked her father and brothers to stand at a distance. He then told the girl that he knew she was lying to him and urged her to tell her the truth as he might be able to solve her problem. “It was then that she broke down and told me that her father wanted to marry her off, when all she wanted was to go to school,” he said.

At a time when even shrines are under militant attack, people like the middle-aged Maula Bux come every Thursday to the shrine to enjoy music in Bhit Shah along with his entire family. “I find peace of mind here,” he says. “We come here to listen to the best music in the world,” he added.

The shrine’s Sajjada Nasheen Nisar Hussain Shah said he was aware of the new realities resulting out of the recent attack on shrines, such as the one on Lahore’s Data Darbar. “One must understand that it has always been the culture of shrines to welcome people from all races, religions and beliefs. No one, including sinners, can be stopped from entering the dargahs of saints,” he said.

However, the security at the shrine is lax. There’s no security guard manning the gates. The walk-through bomb scanners too were not working. Shah said it was the state’s responsibility to provide adequate security and nothing could be done if it didn’t bother with the arrangements at the shrine. He agreed that extremists might try to target the shrine, especially because of its unique culture of music. But he insisted that “the state must ensure that nothing untoward happens at Latif’s shrine.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2010.