Religion does not often feature on this blog, not with peaceful stories anyway, so it is probably appropriate to be writing about my Easter Sunday …… It ended with two hours of magical Sufi singing in a Delhi park by a Qawwali group from Pakistan that defied fundamentalist Islam and bound together the peoples of the two neighboring countries who have more in common than their quarrelsome leaders let on.

…the strands of my day came together when, in an audience of some 4,000 people, I listened to Bhakti (devotional) music at an open-air concert organised by Seher, a Delhi-based cultural organisation.

The high spot was two hours of Qawwali – a popular form of Muslim music that goes back nearly seven centuries – performed by three famous brothers (Sher Miandad, Faiz Fareed Ali Raza and Fakhar-uz-Zaman) from the Pakistani province of Punjab. Sung in a chanting and often raucous style, Qawwali is immensely popular in India and Pakistan. It reflects the Sufi mystical side of Islam and binds the two countries together, though it is shunned by the fundamentalists who are gaining ground in Pakistan.
The songs told how the human soul is greater than the hypocritical lessons of many religious preachers – “When you fly on from this world, no-one will ask your religion or community”. The archbishop and Sai Baba would agree.