Mapping NYC's South Asian Sufi Renaissance

El Atigh Abba walks into Barkzakh Cafe in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, and immediately blasts the music of Pakistani singer Abida Parveen. Parveen is one of the most famous South Asian musicians, and a beloved Sufi music icon, and her bellowing, velveteen vocals jolt the bookshelves and ornate, overlapping rugs awake. The bartender who was supposed to work tonight is sick so Abba is assuming their duties, greeting the Hindustani classical musicians as they file into the cafe’s performance area to tune their instruments ahead of the show—which starts in an hour.

El Atigh Abba came to New York City in 2013 as a political refugee. He was forced to leave Mauritania because of his involvement in the Arab Spring uprisings taking place against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s. There is an ongoing fatwa out against him. Upon moving to New York, he quickly made friends with other immigrants and refugees from places like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. All of them felt the distance from their homelands, and were searching for a meeting place that felt familiar—that eased the sense of longing they carried with them. Abba wanted to offer them room for quiet contemplation, political organizing, and more intimate conversation than the average noisy bar in the city could. After curating some shows in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he launched Barzakh Cafe at the start of 2024. Inspired in part by a cafe called Cafe Tunisie where leftists would gather in Muratania, Barzakh Cafe functions as a vibrant venue where patrons can peruse books on spirituality; eat Moroccan soups and cakes; and catch a show.

Over the last year, Barzakh Cafe has hosted and curated a wide variety of musical and cultural events: performances by qawwali icons like The Saami Brothers and psychedelic cumbia artist Milagro Verde; Arabic language classes; writing workshops; and canvassing groups for NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. They have been especially integral to bolstering a Sufi music scene in the city. People travel from all over the East Coast—Philadelphia, Connecticut, New Jersey and beyond—to listen to artists perform at the cafe. The demand has gotten so high that Abba has started hosting some of the shows at bigger venues, like The Sound Mind Center and St. Luke in the Fields Church.

Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes tolerance, peace, and oneness among all people. The philosophy encourages spiritual purification, forsaking material items, and meditative self-inquiry as ways to feel closer to God. It has informed the work of Iranian poets like Rumi and Hafez; singers like Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn; and the Turkish tradition of whirling dervish dancing. In South Asia, the philosophy has led to a number of related music practices, including qawwali and kafi, as well as ghazal, a stylized poetry format often used to express Sufi themes. Much of this tradition fixates on a sense of longing that comes from a separation with God. When sung by artists in the diaspora, it takes on new meanings: it is religious music that often doubles as a way of expressing and communing around the poignant sadness that accompanies immigration and displacement.

“People don’t come here to be entertained,” Abba tells me about the qawwali and Sufi performances at Barzakh Cafe. “They come to heal something.” That healing requires the kind of honesty and vulnerability that a smaller venue like Barzakh provides. “Many of our performers tell us that they prefer the small stage here, even when the AC isn’t working and when they earn less money than at bigger stages elsewhere,” he says. “It allows for more intimate performances where they can make eye contact and have no buffer from the audience.”

Umer Piracha, the lead singer of the Sufi band Falsa, attributes Sufism’s newfound resonance to the way it provides a sense of direction in a politically and existentially tumultuous era. “When times are unstable, people look towards wisdom traditions like Sufism,” he says. “Sufi music doesn’t just provide comfort, it provides a way to process your feelings, to literally relax into the chaos itself without negating that it is happening. Its focus on reverence, devotion, and love provides listeners with a way to feel at home within themselves rather than to constantly feel in exile. It offers a certain kind of acceptance and rootedness and a roadmap for connection and for living in devotion to each other. People are hungry for that, given the general level of instability in the world right now.”

Sonny Singh has been making music in New York City for 20 years with a number of bands, including political rock band Outernational and the popular group Red Baraat, which blends the Punjabi tradition of bhangra with New Orleans brass music. He has also pursued numerous other collaborations and solo projects that are often rooted in trumpet playing and inspired by Sikh devotional music and Sufi culture. He sees the new interest in Sufi music as evidence of this burgeoning community of progressive people of color from the South Western Asian and North African regions of the world.

“People have been playing this music all along, but when I was in my 20s, there wasn’t such a scene around it,” he says. “In the last few years, there’s a hip, young, progressive activist community forming, which is really beautiful. It’s South Asian but also Arab, Middle Eastern, and beyond. There’s been so much passive engagement with spiritual music in our communities, but if you actually listen to the words and interrogate what they mean, it’s very action-oriented. Sufi music is all about humility, devotion, love, and tearing down boundaries. This younger generation is embodying that more in terms of the kind of communities they’re building.”

It’s a scene that has flourished over the last few years, but has been decades in the making—both in New York City, and more broadly in the West. Artists like Nustrat Fateh Ali Khan brought Sufi music to the West in the ‘90s via collaborations with artists like Jeff Buckley and Peter Gabriel. Abida Parveen came to New York City in 2010 as part of the Asia Society’s New York Sufi Music Festival, and spaces like The World Music Institute have brought artists like Riyaaz Qawwali to the city for years.

Ria Modak says that the increased infrastructure and opportunity created by venues like Barzakh, as well as the presence of a new generation of musicians who help bring their South Asian teachers to perform in the U.S., is accelerating the shape and popularity of the scene. They also feel that a new generation of New York City-based artists view their relationship to the West in different terms than the South Asian artists who came before them: They are part of both worlds and want to express that multivalence in their work. It leads to music that is rich in association and sonic influence.

“Fusion back in the day was coming from American hippies’ early encounters with South Asia,” they say. “The latest generation of Sufi-adjacent musicians have a different relationship with the West. To reference Frantz Fanon, they are in but not of it. The music they make is not just an aesthetic experience. It is not presenting the East to the West. It’s a practice that is striving for reciprocal communication.”

No album exemplifies that reciprocal communication better than Arooj Aftab’s 2022 record Vulture Prince: a curious, emotionally profound re-imagining of Sufi poetry filtered through myriad musical traditions—among them jazz, reggae, and metal. The record was a breakout success, earning Aftab a Grammy, making numerous year-end lists, and introducing Sufi poetry to new audience of Western listeners. “Vulture Prince is an album that answers the question, ‘What comes next for artists like me?’” Aftab says. “It provided a roadmap for musicians who have spent time in different idioms and have found common threads between American folk guitar music and John Cage and Terry Riley’s minimalism, and jazz and mystical, surrealist approaches to music.”

Here is an array of artists who, like Aftab, push the boundaries on what South Asian Sufi music can be, while also using its profound philosophical roots to express their diasporic longing, their racialized identity, and their personal experiences of heartache.

AROOJ AFTAB Though her newer music primarily combines jazz and electronic music, Aftab turned to ghazals and centuries-old Sufi poetry for her 2022 album Vulture Prince. The genre of poetry and accompanying song is especially dramatic, often used to express feelings of unbearable sadness. She used the words to document the grief of losing both her brother and a close friend within a short period of time, and to grapple with romantic yearning and the feeling of placelessness that accompanies migration.

While rooted in Sufi poetry, the music she composed on Vulture Prince also pulled from myriad sonic traditions: The patience of minimalist music, the curiosity of jazz—even, fleetingly, the funk and groove of reggae. The humid, slowly crescendoing songs on the record sound entirely new and singular. Whereas traditional recordings of songs like “Mohabbat” are boisterous, driven by tabla and harmonium, there is very little percussion on Vulture Prince. Instead, Aftab weaves together harp, piano, and guitar into a sparse yet heart-wrenching composition that is cinematic and poignant, gentle yet haunting, a perfect complement to the lyrics, which declare the pain of the singer’s heartache as the greatest pain in the world.

SONNY SINGH AND QAIS ESSAR

Afghan-American musician Qais Essar plays the rabab, a 2500-year-old instrument from his home country, with poise and verve. On the forthcoming Sangat, he has joined forces with Sikh American trumpet player and singer Sonny Singh. The record is a mix of musical traditions from various South Asian religions—Sikh shabads, Hindu bhakti music, and Sufi qawwali—and is meant to function as a sonic bridge between these practices and cultures.

The first single from the project is an interpretation of the classic qawwali “Lal Meri Pat,” which pays homage to Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, a famous Sufi saint. Singh also covered the track in 2013 with his bhangra-and-New Orleans-brass band Red Baraat. Both versions are raucous, eclectic, and glimmering with brass flourishes. “Lal Meri Pat” foregrounds Singh’s voice, and is rooted in the gentle earthiness of the rubab and the meandering notes of the dilruba, a melancholy bowed instrument from South Asia. That tension between exuberance and introspection imbues the music with depth and intrigue.

FALSA

The members of Falsa each bring a distinct musical approach to American Sufi. Umer Piracha sings uninhibited qawwali vocals; Siddharth Ashokkumar’s Carnatic violin swoops, pirouettes, and smolders; Paul Arendt’s Spanish guitar adds folksy texture to the compositions; and Adam Hershberger’s trumpet imbues the music with a sense of lonesome wandering. Together, they create a sound that’s at once classical and modern: A trumpet will chit-chat with a violin before a guitar interrupts, shimmering in the spotlight.

As the title suggests, American Sufi is Falsa’s attempt to bring the ancient Sufi tradition to Western audiences by employing a wide array of instrumentation and by translating the song titles, which they also contextualize for audiences during their shows. But it’s Piracha’s voice that propels the music, and that needs neither explanation nor translation. On American Sufi, he wields his voice as both an instrument and a vessel to something unpredictable and divine—a single note blossoming into a revelation.

SLOWSPIN

A few years ago, in the midst of intense physical and emotional pain, Zeerak Ahmed found solace in a line of Sufi poetry that she compulsively spoke aloud while playing music at producer and musician Shahzad Ismaily’s house in Brooklyn. The line translates to “Do you have any memory of us?” This most Sufi of sentiments—a glowing, haunted memory delivered by a speaker overwhelmed with grief—became a guiding light for TALISMAN, which she describes as “a balm for the pilgrim traversing the abyss of love, loss, and longing.” It’s a record focused on sadness, but one which also uses the expression of that emotion as a way forward. Ahmed’s cascading, delicate vocals refract through a prism of gauzy shoegaze synths, fingerpicked guitar, and bansuri flute melodies, sounding introspective and dreamy, but also charged and invigorated as she ruminates on memories of lost love and then grapples with how to move forward, too.

APOORVA MUDGAL

“Dasht-e-tanhai” is a poem by well-known Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz that was popularly sung as a ghazal by semi-classical Pakistani singer Iqbal Bano. The lyrics equate a lover’s heartache with the experience of being alone in a desert as memories of their beloved flicker past them like a mirage. Bano sang the song at an event in 1986—a controversial move given that Faiz’s work was banned by the Pakistani government because of his leftist politics. Her version of the song generally foregrounds her voice, which is mellifluous but lonesome. The rootsy folk arrangement of harmonium and tabla also carry an air of defiance, fitting for the context in which it was popularized.

In her version of the song, the Brooklyn-based Hindustani classical singer Apoorva Mudgal swaps the percussion of the earlier version for a pensive, unhurried guitar, soft clarinet, and cascading kora notes. This new arrangement, crafted with Ria Modak and Rameez Anwar, slows the song down, allowing space for silence, contemplation, and imagination. The tender arrangement supplements Mudgal’s honeyed, poised vocal performance, while simultaneously simplifying the longing and heartbreak; emotional nuance that lingers with you long after the confession ends.