Remember to turn on captions/CC for the English subtitles.

There are still a few lines that I wasn't able to make out so if anyone can do so I would really appreciate it.

¹ In Islamic belief, Nimrod had Abraham thrown into a fierce fire, which he walked out of unscathed due to Allah ordering the fire to cool for him
² This is the first line of the second poem in Iqbal's Bal-e-Jibril
³ "I am the truth"; the alleged blasphemous statement of 8th century Persian Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj, for which he was executed, although modern historians claim the execution was politically motivated. Sufis maintain that his statement was misinterpreted, and both al-Hallaj and his statement have come to be frequently referenced in Sufi poetry.
⁴ The black cloth of the Ka'bah, known as the kiswah, features intricate golden gilding
⁵ Majnun-Layla is a tragic romance with origins in 8th century Arabia but now well known across the Eastern world; Lord Byron called it the "Romeo and Juliet of the East"
⁶ Shireen-Farhad, or Khosrow-Shireen, is a story from Persia which has origins in the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"), but was developed into a tragic romance by Nizami in the 12th century
⁷ In Persian mythology, the cup of Jamshid is a powerful cup that contains an elixir of immortality, first mentioned in the Shahnameh
⁸ The Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, in which power struggles between the second generation of Muslims led to the massacre of many descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, including his grandson Husayn ibn 'Ali, and five of his great grandsons. The massacre is widely considered a historical tragedy by both Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, and referenced often in Sufi poetry.

This performance took place in England in 1991 as part of a performance for Channel 4, probably in Channel 4's London studios. If anyone has the complete original video and is willing to send it me digitally or physically I would really appreciate it.

As far as I know this qawwali was written by Aziz Mian himself, like many of those he performed.

My translation is loosely based on an anonymous translation by someone else which was too generic and missed out most of the references. My aim was to create a more literal and therefore more accurate translation of the original poetry, especially when it came to spelling out the many diverse references at the end.

Thanks to Aneela for helping with the lines that went over my head or that I couldn't make out.

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Second only to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in popularity but preceding him by about a decade, Aziz Mian was one of Pakistan's greatest qawwals (performers of qawwali), arguably the most intelligent, and inarguably the most irreverent. Once called the "Nietzschean qawwal", Aziz Mian became famous for his probing, philosophical qawwals that dealt with religious or Sufi paradoxes, often complaining about them to God directly. In this sense he can be thought of as the Allama Iqbal of qawwals.

In addition to having trained as a qawwal for 16 years, he also obtained a Bachelor's degree in Urdu literature, and was the only prominent qawwal of the era to write much of his own material in addition to performing those of other poets.

#Sufi
#Qawwali
#Philosophy
#AzizMian

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