Sufis favoured paradoxical and perplexing statements and symbols in poetry and music to encourage listeners to transcend the norms and conventions.ДЄlso read: Why is great philosopher Kautilya not part of PakistanвЂ™s historical consciousness? In the Sufi tradition, however, such symbols were often inverted to evoke the highest form of love, ishq-i-haqiqi. In the popular Muslim imagination, Hindu beliefs and symbols have sometimes served to illustrate 'inferior' forms of belief. It corresponds roughly, in terms of spiritual symbolism, poetic beauty, and literary influence, with the Layla-Majnun trope in Persian poetic tradition. Metaphorically, the epic narrates the yearning of the devotee to achieve union with the beloved. It describes the seeker's longing for the divine through the idiom of human love and courtship. Radha-Krishna as the archetype of spiritual love is based on the 12th century lyrical epic, Gita Govinda (Love Song of the Dark Lord), composed by the saint-poet Shri Jayadeva of Bengal, and is considered a religious work in the Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism. The qawwal sings of his love for Krishna and relates a heart-wrenching account of the afflictions he endures through separation with his beloved. Such a pluralistic approach is evident in a representative qawwali, Kanhayya (Krishna), composed by Nawab Sadiq Jung Bahadur Hilm and performed by Abu Muhammad and Fareed Ayaz. Sufi repertoire traditionally includes non-Islamic, particularly Hindu, religious leitmotifs. The religious landscape of north India and Pakistan provides a literary context of diverse religious motifs, metaphors and symbols. Qawwali also has a long history of engaging with multiple religious traditions.

The Chishti order, the most prominent Sufi brotherhood in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, has long celebrated the normativity of qawwali as an expression of divine love.ДЄnnemarie Schimmel has noted the phenomenon in the Mystical Dimensions of Islam as 'the most widely known expression of mystical life in Islam.'ДЄmerican author Leonard Lewisohn, in his article The Sacred Music of Islam: Sama in the Persian Sufi Tradition, points out that qawwali is stressed upon by some South Asian Sufis not only as legally permissible ( halal), but as a required religious practice ( wajib).

Read next: When the man who wrote Pakistan's national anthem saw the divine in Hindu god Krishna Such a secular understanding of qawwali is anachronistic to the pre-modern progenitors of the art form. The recent secularisation of qawwali - the shift away from Sufi dargahs to concert halls and recording labels - has led to a re-imagining of qawwali as expressive of the cultural traditions of Pakistan and (north) India, related only marginally and incidentally to the religion in whose cradle it developed. Islam, and Islam in Pakistan, doesn't escape this bifurcation either. In Sufism a seeker abandons all notions of dualism and pursues nonndualism to ultimately reach a stage of 'un-al-haq', I am God, meaning that a drop of ocean is a drop as well as the ocean,but the very moment its drop conciousness falls apart to realise its oneness with the vastness of ocean, it becomes the ocean, and the drop is no where to be found.One of the characteristics of the modern weltanschauung (worldview) is to identify religion as distinct from culture. The word sufi may also have originated from the Greek word Sophia meaning 'wisdom'. Sufism preaches the pursuit of 'pure colourless wool' or 'suf ' state of mind as opposed to the materilistic, never ending pursuit of colour, texture and design, which is nothing more than an illusion or 'maya'. SufismвЂ™s greatest message is that we may be woven in different patterns, designs, textures or colors of our physical existence, but peace lies in never forgetting that deep down at the level of our souls we all are pure wool and that purity is worthy of all pursuit, hence sufism stresses on universal brotherhood and tolerance.

The lexical root of Sufi is rooted in soof or ' wool ', referring to safДЃ or 'purity'.

Meaning of tum ek gorakh dhanda ho