Project Description:

Cultural rights are an emerging space for discourses about equity and inclusion in diverse global contexts, and within the disciplines of music, this area is currently unexplored. My pioneering music ethnography is based on more than ten years of research work in Pakistan seeks to address this gap in the field. 

I have been a student of Professor Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, the honourable author of Qawwali: Sufi Music of India and Pakistan, since 2008. Our mentor-mentee relationship deepened over time. While I wrote my dissertation on the Sufi tradition of Sindh, Pakistan, called the Shah jo Raag, we had profound conversations about the tradition of qawwali and the Shah jo Raag that are paradigm shifters for the discipline of Ethnomusicology.

For the Routledge series on Islam and Human Rights edited by Professor Ahmed E. Souaiaia at Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa.  I bring an ethnomusicological dimension to study human rights in Islam. This study is based on the lived experiences of the Muslim Sufi singers I have worked with, including my teachers Ustad Hameed Ali Khan Sahib Gwalior, Faqir Jumman Shah, and others families and communities of hereditary singers who sing the poetry of Sufi mystic Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai.

This crowdfunding will help me dedicate the next 3-6 months to preparing my manuscript, getting it edited by a professional editor, and then re-writing the manuscript in light of reviews and revisions. I am currently hoping to raise $15k to write this book.