The Dream Journey: Coming to terms with music in Pakistan's Indo-Islamic culture

The problem with Islam, a Hindu classical musician in India once quipped, was "that it has downgraded music”. 

Devout Muslim and maestro of the north Indian oboe, Ustad Bismillah Khan, responded with a twinkle in his eye. 

“As you know, most of the best classical musicians of north India are Muslims," Khan said. "Can you imagine what would have happened if Islam had upgraded music?”

All of those present, Hindu and Muslim alike, roared with laughter.

Islam’s complex relationship with music has greatly influenced the art form in South Asia. It helped shape the music industry in India, but in neighbouring Pakistan it has had a definitive footprint. There, debate over music has simmered for decades as part of a profound struggle over Pakistan’s national identity. 

It was in the midst of these debates over a decade ago that a small group of Pakistani music enthusiasts, some living overseas, met and became friends online.

In 2014 they decided to travel around their home country together to document its long-neglected musical traditions.

The resulting project, named The Dream Journey, saw the group publish videos on YouTube (with English subtitles) of musicians and musical families performing, unusually, in their own homes. They play lesser-known pieces of music, often family specialities.

The group made five trips around Pakistan, lasting two weeks each, between 2014 and 2019, then stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

They have continued uploading videos over the years , and the YouTube channel has not stopped growing since.

In fact, not long after they launched, audiences worldwide were entranced – videos received millions of views and a huge online fan community developed.

Today, the channel has more than 225,000 subscribers, an impressive figure for a self-funded project focused on what is decidedly non-pop music.

Some of the recordings on the channel feature north Indian classical music; many depict qawwali, the musical performance of mystical Islamic poetry - usually in Urdu, Persian or Punjabi.

“We never dreamt that the project would be so successful,” Asif Hasnain, 76, one of The Dream Journey’s co-founders and a resident of Vienna, tells Middle East Eye.

'The first time we reached 200,000 views, we were all saying "Good God". And then it just took off'

– Asif Hasnain

“The first time we reached 200,000 views, we were all turning around and saying, 'Good God'. And then it just took off.”

Some types of music struggle in Pakistan, Hasnain explains, amid conflict over religion and national identity.

“The eternal debate in Pakistan is whether you are a 'Middle Eastern' Muslim or an 'Indian' Muslim. And the Indo-Islamic part of Pakistani identity is systematically being eroded.”

This, he argues, has had a tremendous impact on the development of music in the country.

Islam and music

The status of music in Islam has always been the subject of vigorous debate. Jurists have typically advocated restrictions on music, ranging from outright prohibition to a ban on non-devotional music, to bans on particular instruments. 

Throughout history, however, music has played a prominent role in Muslim societies. This is the paradox that oboe master Bismillah Khan pointed to. 

The great medieval poet-philosopher Amir Khusraw – widely considered the “foundational figure in the musical tradition of South Asian Muslims” – was not an exception in his conviction that music could be a means to attain closeness to God. 

Khusraw is widely regarded as the inventor not just of the tablah (Indian drum) and sitar (a stringed instrument), but also key in the development of raag, which is the melodic framework central to khayal, north Indian classical music.

Its name deriving from the Arabic word for imagination, Khayal developed out of an ancient Indian musical form called dhrupad.

It entered the Mughal empire’s courtly circles in the early 17th century through qawwals, performers of qawwali.

“Qawwali evolved from Sufi practice,” Hasnain says, “and it took on the colours and musical forms of the ambient Indian environment. Khayal and qawwali were twins, and then they grew in their own directions.”

But they have always been intertwined, as exemplified in the legacy of the legendary classical musician and qawwal Ustad Munshi Raziuddin Khan (ustad means master), who died in 2003. 

Raziuddin, whom Hasnain knew personally, traced his ancestry to a disciple of Khusraw. His grandfather, Taan Rus Khan, was the court musician of the last Mughal emperor in the 19th century.

After Mughal Delhi’s destruction at the hands of the British in 1857, the family moved to the southern princely state of Hyderabad. As a young man Raziuddin performed for the nizam, Hyderabad’s wealthy ruler. 

“All musicians needed patronage,” Hasnain notes, “whether from princes or wealthy landowners or goodness knows whom.”

Then came Partition in 1947, which spelt the creation of modern India and Pakistan and the destruction of the princely states. Many of Hyderabad’s Muslim musicians, Raziuddin among them, fled to Pakistan. 

Life was hard and Raziuddin had little money.

“He was in pretty difficult circumstances,” Hasnain says, “but there was a certain density to the man – a confidence in himself and God, and an enormous knowledge of music and philosophy that I haven’t seen since.”

'The last of the great classical qawwals'

Hasnain points to a collection of recordings of Raziuddin and other qawwals from 1969. Listening to these performances – the soaring voices, the ecstatic choruses, the mellow notes of the harmoniums, the intricate Persian and Urdu poetry – is like entering a lost world. 

“This, to my mind, is the most beautiful form of qawwali because it is rooted in the classical form,” Hasnain says.

“Philosophically, poetically and musically, it’s very deep. It’s not sung any more. I haven’t heard anything like it. 

“They were the last of the great classical qawwals,” he reflects. 

This sort of music may have been lost, but The Dream Journey has significantly amplified the work of Raziuddin’s students.

'Sound is the beginning of the universe itself… Allah said "Be" and the universe came into being'

- Ustad Naseeruddin Saami

Among them is his nephew Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, one of the last living exponents of the microtonal scale. 

Saami can sing no fewer than 49 notes (the western musical mode consists of only seven).

“Sound is the beginning of the universe itself,” Saami believes. “Allah said ‘Be’ and the universe came into being. That is its power.”

Many of the channel’s biggest hits have featured the Qawwali party of Ustads Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad, Raziuddin’s sons. 

As a young man, Abu Muhammad briefly became fed up with qawwali and looked to do something else in music.

“Whatever you decide,” his father told him solemnly, “do not contribute to the destruction of this great legacy.” He decided to stay.

“They’ve increased the tempo and they’ve innovated,” Hasnain says, “but they can always go back to the classical form. They’ve been given very deep training.

“Fareed is brilliantly experimental within the framework of their tradition. Of the living qawwals, to my mind, he’s the best.”

'Hard to find listeners worthy of my training'

One 2016 video on The Dream Journey channel depicts Ayaz and Muhammad with 10 other singers, the younger generation of the family, performing a poem by the 19th-century poet Mirza Ghalib.

One singer is playing the tablah and Ayaz and Muhammad sound their harmoniums.

“Do not bury me in your street after having annihilated me,” Ayaz sings in Urdu.

The other qawwals repeat the line in an almost deafening chorus, building anticipation for the second line, which elicits audible appreciation from the audience:

“Why should my grave serve as a landmark for others to locate your home?” 

The singers constantly interact with the audience. At one point Ayaz spontaneously recites a verse from a 20th-century Urdu poet, Shakeel Ahmad Ziya.

"Either your name should be on everyone’s lips,” he sings with a smile, “or no one should ever converse with me again.”

The audience erupts.

Another 2016 video of the qawwals, depicting a rendition of a poem praising the Prophet Muhammad, has 2.6m views.

At one point the chorus pauses. Ayaz raises his right hand. He starts to sing, his eyes glistening with tears. Suddenly, he drops his hand.

“My father and my elders have trained me in such a manner,” he says mournfully in Urdu, “that in this day and age, I have grown worried. They trained me with such effort and integrity that I find it hard to find listeners worthy of my training.”

He raises his hand again and sings carefully in Persian: “O personification of the beauty of the Undying God.”

He pauses. “The verses I’m singing, nobody even sings them any more, let alone understands them.”

Ayaz repeats the verse more slowly, savouring every syllable.

“In post-independence India,” Hasnain explains, “the state and the capitalist class, and the film industry in Bombay [Mumbai], stepped in as an economic resource and source of patronage for musicians. And therefore there was an element of continuity.

“But in Pakistan, because of the sheer volatility and confusion of the earlier years, there was a tremendous discontinuity.

"There was no princely or capitalist class to provide patronage, and musicians who migrated had to try and make their way through.”

Khayal was associated with refugees from north India and had limited popular appeal, but a different genre thrived instead: Ghazals (Urdu love lyrics). 

The great ghazal singers of the 1960s and 1970s – Farida Khanum, Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali and others – rose to prominence as television brought them to a mass audience.

Hassan in particular was “by temperament a classical musician”, according to music critic Amit Chaudhuri, and “he brought something of the khayal’s tonal depth and expansiveness to the ghazal".

Arab Islam and Indo-Islam

The religiously tinged military dictatorship of Pakistani General Zia-ul-Haq changed everything for the artists in the 1980s.

Zia banned classical music from the airwaves and urged Pakistanis to emulate “authentic Islamic culture” and “cast Hindu influences aside”. 

“Ghazal music still survived,” Hasnain reflects, “but it was very suppressed, especially in the media". Qawwali, by contrast, escaped the repression.

“Zia had a very austere concept of Islam. But he couldn’t attack qawwali head on because it was so tied up with the dargahs [sufi shrines at which qawwali was traditionally performed], which were extremely powerful.”

Ironically, it was during the latter end of Zia’s tenure that Pakistan’s "Golden Age" of pop, rock and other western-influenced forms of music came to fruition.

Qawwali was given a new lease of life in the 1970s through the extraordinary commercial success of the Sabri brothers, who gained nationwide fame, and then by the meteoric rise of the world’s most famous qawwal, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Khan, who died in 1997 aged only 48, was a global sensation who sang for Bollywood films in India and collaborated with western musicians, including Massive Attack.

He repackaged qawwali for a modern, global audience and put Pakistani music on the map. 

“There were no boundaries to what Nusrat could do,” Hasnain says.

“Qawwali defines its own boundaries. Now you’ve got Coke Studio, which has modernised it and made it into some absolutely brilliant fusion music.”

While it was never systematically attacked, however, qawwali remains controversial. In 2016 the renowned qawwal Amjad Sabri, the son of Ghulam Farid Sabri (one half of the Sabri brothers), was shot dead by the Pakistani branch of the Taliban, which claimed his music was blasphemous.

Then, in February 2017, a suicide attack at the shrine of a revered saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, in the southern province of Sindh, killed at least 75 people. The saint is the subject of one of the most popular qawwalis in the world, Dam Mast Qalandar.

Far removed from the militants, meanwhile, are unnumbered Islamic scholars who also oppose qawwali and ghazal singing.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan once lamented that Pakistanis “are morally confused about music. Those who want to learn or have learnt are always confused and feel guilt. 

“But to tell you the truth," he insisted, “classical music… is not against Islam. It is not haram [forbidden]. After listening to [classical music], a man does not go astray.”

A related issue, Hasnain argues, is that many people in Pakistan believe that “Islamic identity is Arab identity” and so they reject the subcontinent’s musical traditions in quest of a purer Islam. 

“If you say we are an Indo-Islamic culture in Pakistan, people will hurl abuse at you now,” he says. 

“But what are you then? You’re not an Arab. These ignorant people talk about the glory that was Islam. Well, when you look at that glory, it was rich and it was multifaceted, and it drew upon cultural traditions from all over. It didn’t cloister itself into some austere nonsense.”

But all is clearly not lost. Numerous great musicians who would otherwise have lived and performed in obscurity have been made famous by The Dream Journey.

“My brother and I used to go around begging music producers to give us a chance,” said Tuqeer Ali Khan, one of Pakistan’s most talented classical vocalists, in 2023.

“It was only when we were featured on The Dream Journey’s YouTube channel that our careers began to flourish.” 

Other musicians gained unprecedented exposure and fame on the channel before they died.

Ustad Ameer Ali Khan was one. Few had heard of him, even in Pakistan, before The Dream Journey. But his gentle, soulful singing and masterful presentation of the most sophisticated Urdu poetry was viewed millions of times on the channel before he died in June 2020.

Another was Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan, a devoted classical singer who died in 2021 and is now recognised as one of the greats.

Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale, another fan favourite on the channel, died of a heart attack in 2019. “His family was a powerhouse,” Hasnain recalls fondly. 

“We would sit with them in a relatively small room and the power of the music was so much, it literally blew my stomach out.

"It was overwhelming, that much power and energy. And there was a great deal in Haider Hassan particularly, a great deal of spirituality. He was a real maulvi [religious scholar].

“What surprised me,” Hasnain says, "is that the longevity of these singers is not very great. They get exhausted. They're very stressed.” 

But The Dream Journey brought their music to the world before they died.

One of the most unique features of the channel is the quality of the English translations, which are precise and unfailingly elegant.

They are produced by Musab bin Noor, one of the group’s members. “He conveys the sense of the poetry, the nuance,” Hasnain says. “It is a very refined translation.” 

The whole project, Hasnain recalls, laughing, came together completely unexpectedly. “Everybody sort of pitched in in the way they could.” 

Ultimately, The Dream Journey has uncovered and documented a magnificently rich world of music and poetry, preserving it for the historical record and for a global audience. 

Many of its videos stand as testaments to the extremes of musical endeavour and genius. The channel has saved great feats of artistry from oblivion. 

The friends hope to travel again to Pakistan later this year to film more musicians.

“It really is a blessed project,” Hasnain reflects with a smile.