Arshia Fatima Haq agrees. The LA-based visual artist, writer, and filmmaker has traveled extensively through Pakistan, collecting rare recordings at intimate Sufi gatherings for her album Ishq Ke Maare: Sufi Songs from Sindh and Punjab, Pakistan, capturing the ecstatic trance states that arise in performances at Sufi shrines.“Within Sufism, you have different schools—some in Pakistan and India are wilder and anarchic ,” she says. ”Sufism absorbs indigenous traditions, it blends with Hindu kirtan, for example, and while a lot of this devotional music is rooted in Islamic theology, it’s also very flexible, it absorbs a lot of influences.”  

“Most authentic cultures have their roots in mysticism, from Armenia to China,” Mehdi says. As the founder of Roots Revival, an organization that opens up a dialogue between different musical traditions across cultures, he has initiated several projects that bring musicians together to collaborate and find common themes. In Quieter than Silence, Mehdi sings and plays the ney and the setar with Syrian musician Mohamad Zatari, playing the oud—together they create haunting refrains, underscored by subtle rhythms from Persia and Aleppo.

“The essence of Sufism is about being free of any limitations, of any categories and boundaries you create for yourself,” Mehdi says. “It’s a practice that fulfills humans need for love; it goes against rigidity and responds to our human need to be in the moment. Rumi started this path of Sufism—the Mevlevi Order—based on the whirling dance, but there are different approaches in Pakistan, India and North Africa,” he says adding, “dancing is just the means, not the goal. The objective is to reach outside of yourself.” Mehdi is currently working on a documentary on Persian female carpet weavers and the songs they sing while weaving. “This is spirituality to me,” he explains, “this love of the moment that pushes people forward to create something, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or in music.”

The music is often inseparable from the devotional space within the shrine where it’s performed. “These shrines are not just physical space, but metaphysical space,” Arshia points out. “People come there seeking help and guidance, these are very inclusive spaces.” Describing the dynamics of the performance, she points to the lack of division between audience and performer as being key. “Everyone’s clapping and involved, people are seated at the same level and it’s circular, its not a stage, and the musicians will be in the middle.” She incorporates some of these concepts into her archival work, as well as her project Discostan, a global club night bringing together musical narratives from “Beirut to Bangkok via Bombay” that investigates the meeting point between the sacred and the secular.

Whether contemporary explorations of Sufism for the 21st century, or traditional forms of devotional song, love is the foundational concept underlying Sufi music. Describing the gathering she witnessed while in Pakistan, Arshia writes, “these songs unfold into an organic recursion of longing and despair, redeemed by an almost erotic promise of reunion with the divine entity. The singers themselves are ‘ishq ke maare’—in the throes of love.”