Cricket & Qawwali
Members of the Pakistani cricket team following their triumph at the 1992 Cricket World Cup. From left to right: Zahid Fazal, Wasim Akram and Aamir Sohail.
With a summer of cricket on the cards, Osman Samiuddin explores the unique relationship between Pakistani cricket and Qawwali:
“Briefly – and dryly – Qawwali is a form of devotional music, originating centuries ago but in the form that we now know it in around the 13th century by one order of the Sufis. (Sufism is a practice of Islam but, with its modern puritanism belt much loosened, it asks for a more personalised relationship with God.) Generally but not exclusively, the lyrics will be the work of great Sufi poets, rendered in soaring, shrieking voices but to bare music: a tabla or dhol for a beat, a wheezing harmonium for rhythm, and the clapping of an entourage. The voice, the clapping, the chanting: these are the structural planks. But the spiritual base is the most important because Qawwali is not just music. To those versed, it is a call to prayer, to ritual, to contemplation, to faith, to hope, to despair, to love, to mourning, to celebration. Other music, especially modern music, asks you primarily to listen. Qawwali asks that you submit, that you immerse yourself. Otherwise it asks – and gives – you nothing.
Taken casually, it can be a mood thing. Sometimes it’s left me flat, a mish-mash of voice and noise that, to an ear attuned to Western music, is too disparate and incoherent. But sometimes – live especially and, thus, raw – it catches. Maybe it’s the right lyric or the force of repetition but then – forget mind, body and soul – it can set fire to eternity.
The more I thought about it, the more apparent Qawwali became as a revelatory point of reference for Pakistan’s cricket in those spells. Is it too crazy? I spoke to Abu Mohammad, one of the country’s leading Qawwals (better known alongside his brother Fareed Ayaz) about it. I’m not sure that the argument struck him immediately but, by the end of our conversation, as he promised to send me articles from 2005 (when former President Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistan cricket team and Mohammad and his troupe were all in Delhi together) linking Qawwali and cricket, I thought he might have warmed to it.
There were two questions I really wanted to put to him. Could it be said, I asked, that to the uninitiated, a Qawwali can sometimes feel like a living, breathing but random collection of voice and sound until, suddenly at one moment, it surges together. And then transformed, it becomes momentarily a single, powerful force. (Take also, I thought but didn’t ask, the alaap, that sudden vocal burst in a Qawwali. Is that not exactly like a riff of wickets by one bowler from out of nowhere, at odds with everything that has gone before?)
He thought about it a little. “Yes, completely. When Qawwali is being read it takes a little time for it to get warm, to get into line and get going. But there comes a time when a Qawwal and his audience both become like one, they both come to one side together.”
But it was the next question, about haal, that had really gnawed away in my head. The literal meaning of haal is state, as in a state of being, and it can refer to a number of different states. But it has come to be interpreted, more often than not, as one ultimate state of ecstasy, much sought after but rarely achieved, in man’s journey to get closer to God. “In the ecstatic state,” explains Idries Shah in his book Oriental Magic, “Sufis are believed to be able to overcome all barriers of time, space and thought. They are able to cause apparently impossible things to happen merely because they are no longer confined by the barriers which exist for more ordinary people.”
One of the primary objectives of Qawwali is to attempt to bring the performer as well as the listener to haal. Mohammad recites a Sufi poem and then says: “The state of haal is such that if you, God willing, get there in a gathering, after coming back from haal, you will not be able to describe or explain the feeling. This is just that state that only he knows who has experienced it. Haal or wajd [the literal translation for ecstasy] is such a state that comes to that man and takes him to the goal that he has been in search of all his life. Then he is not with himself, he has reached somewhere else.”
Is there a moment in live performances when you can identify that haal has been achieved? “No, no, no. You cannot identify this moment [haal ultimately can only be granted to you, you have no control over its arrival]. Sometimes it is the traditional chant Allah hu and it happens, sometimes a verse like Dam a dam mast qalandar and it’s there. This is dependent on the individual and their state of existence, the mood of the moment, where their point of thinking is taken from.”
“The entire tournament was, for Pakistan, like a Qawwali itself: disparate, floating aimlessly initially before suddenly coming together with such force that they became the best in the world”
As a relevant aside, Pakistan’s 1992 World Cup triumph was soundtracked by the Qawwali of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The players listened to him obsessively (on a stereo picked up by Ijaz Ahmed in Singapore on the way there) every day during practice, during lunch breaks, after games, before games. The entire tournament was, for Pakistan, like a Qawwali itself: disparate, floating aimlessly initially before suddenly coming together with such force that they became the best in the world.
Mohammad likes cricket and so I put to him that what Pakistan do when they do a Pakistan, when that tamasha erupts, could it be that they have come to haal? “The thing you have said about a team or group spirit, that happens directly, automatically, but not because of them. It happens naturally that they link together as one. You cannot understand how it happens. It happens to you.”
This isn’t so radical a connection because, from the off, the concept of haal struck me as a familiar one. In a way it’s what all athletes strive towards. Only in sports they call it “the zone”, that state of supreme focus which sees athletes perform for periods at the very peak of their potential. How similar is it? Well. Dr Roberta Antonini Phillipe, a sports psychologist at the Institute of Movement Sciences and Sports Medicine, University of Geneva, says that when a player is in the zone, it is like being in a trance.
“The zone is when your mind fully connects with achieving a goal,” she explains. “When you’re in the zone your mind only processes the thoughts and images that help you execute your task successfully. In that state of mind the athlete explains that he has positive thoughts, positive images and sometimes also music in his head.”
The trope that the zone has spiritual components and implications is not unexplored. The psychologist Andrew Cooper did so in his 1998 book Playing in the Zone: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Sports. Cooper is a devout student of Zen. “The zone is the essence and pinnacle of the athletic experience, for it reveals that, at their root, sports are a theatre for enacting the drama of self-transcendence,” he writes. “Athletes and fans alike, focused as we so often are on the game of winning and losing, miss the deeper significance that is right before our eyes. But in the zone, the extraordinary capacities that lie within each individual are made manifest. To grasp this hidden dimension is to transform the very meaning of athletic play.”
“Net practice and training – the rehearsed recordings of sport – are generally imprisonment for Pakistani players”
Where haal deviates from the zone is in the idea that the latter can be sought, that through a series of steps or rigorous preparation and practice it can be achieved. Many sports psychologists – but not all – believe that using different techniques of visualisation, goal-setting and self-motivation can help athletes to achieve and stay in the zone. Pakistan employs no such techniques and never has done. Just as Abu Mohammad says that Qawwali rehearsed and recorded in a studio is the imprisonment of the form, so it is with Pakistan. Net practice and training – the rehearsed recordings of sport – are generally imprisonment for Pakistani players. That is not where they shine. For them, as with Qawwali, it happens live and it happens unprepared. Enlightenment, goes one saying of Zen, is an accident, as it could be in haal and as it is in Pakistan cricket.
There are other points to consider in Pakistan’s deviation. How often, for example, do you hear of a group of athletes going into the zone collectively? It can and does happen. According to Ed Smith, Mike Brearley recently described a team in a zone: “Each player breathes in the others at their best, is strengthened by that identification, and gives off similar vibes to the rest of the team.” Choking, almost an opposite of the zone, does spread through teams. But the most striking aspect of Pakistan’s haal is the effect it has on the spectator. When Pakistan achieve haal, to be there live is to almost achieve haal yourself, in unison, as is the hope of every performance of Qawwali.
The Abu Dhabi Test win over England in January 2012, to pull out just one instance, managed this. I wrote a piece in which briefly I wondered about haal and Sufism. One spectator, part of the English travelling support, read it and wrote in. “As part of the visiting England fan base we sat yesterday in awe of what unfolded. Seldom do you see a side in any form of cricket dismantled in two hours of play. What struck many of us – and we have all played the game throughout our lives – was the seeming inevitability of what was about to unfold. From the very start of the England second innings one could sense a quiet but definite shift in ownership of the moment, something beyond the playing conditions and the participants solely. It was like karma, strange as that may sound. Your article summed up the sense of ‘other worldliness’ some of us felt.”
In other words, submission. Because, finally, what Pakistan are doing in these moments is asking you to submit. They are asking you, opponent and spectator, to submit to their reality, their chaos, their unplanning, their spur of the moment, their pox, their talent, their wretchedness, their beauty, their spirit. They are inviting you to dance with them. Except that it isn’t just a dance. It is the dance of that great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi:
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
This excerpt was taken from ‘The Haal of Pakistan: Osman Samiuddin dissects the chaos of Pakistan cricket’ which featured in Wisden’s Cricket Quarterly, The Nightwatchman. Another good read by Samiuddin on the haal of Pakistan cricket: ‘Exploring the soul of Pakistan's cricket team: lazy, impatient and brilliant’ (also originally featured in The Nightwatchman).