Qawwali Performances – Sufi Musical-Drama (Pakistan/India)

• Essence: Devotional storytelling of divine love through voice, rhythm, and ecstatic repetition in Sufi contexts, especially prominent at dargahs (Sufi shrines). Qawwali enacts spiritual transformation through poetic intensity, led by qawwals (singers) who serve as conduits between human desire and divine love.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Foucault’s later works, especially The Care of the Self, reoriented philosophy from institutions of repression toward modes of ethical self-cultivation. Qawwali, in this Foucauldian register, is not merely musical expression but a technology of spiritual self-transfiguration, rooted in the discursive performance of the self-as-lover.

Unlike Western rationalism’s preference for categorical control of desire, Qawwali affirms ishq (divine love) as ethical excess, where subjectivity dissolves in performative ecstasy. The performer enacts Foucault’s idea of an aesthetic existence, where the self is cultivated like a poetic artifact, not via repression, but through ritualized abandonment.

Qawwali’s central poetic themes—yearning, intoxication, unrequited love, martyrdom—mirror what Foucault calls a truth-telling practice (parrhesia) of the mystic subject. The qawwal, through vocal strain, rhythmic build-up, and lyrical repetition, produces a crisis of self: the boundaries between performer, audience, and the divine blur. This mirrors Foucault’s notion that care of the self is not internal solitude, but shared and enacted within a cultural ecology of aesthetic practices.

Importantly, Qawwali challenges institutional religion by foregrounding heterodox expressions of spirituality—embodying what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges. It affirms marginal truths, feminine metaphors, embodied affectivity, and Sufi metaphysics in defiance of juridical orthodoxy. Thus, it is both a sacred theatre of subjectivity and a political performance of mystical resistance.