Growing up, many of my closest friends were Shia. I never sought them out for that reason; it simply kept happening—in college, at university, at work, and later among the musicians and friends who became part of my grown-up life. And every one of them, at some point, without being asked, could sing.
They knew where a note sat before they opened their mouths. During Muharram, some of them would disappear into marsiya khwani, soz khwani, noha reciting, reciting for hours in gatherings. I was invited to these gatherings, but never quite belonged to them.
I filed it away for years as a curious coincidence. It wasn't until a teacher of mine, Syeda Arooj Zehra Rizvi, sent me an Instagram post mentioning something called "Hussaini Raag" that I sat down to find out whether the pattern I'd been noticing my whole life had a name, a history, and any truth to it. Some of that investigation confirms what I suspected.
Some of it complicates it in ways I didn't expect and one claim, the one that sent me down this road in the first place, turned out to be more interesting, and less tidy, than the Instagram post suggested. Let's be honest about what this is. Pakistan's Sunni majority has, broadly, a more ambivalent relationship with music as a devotional or even a public practice, a discomfort with music-as-worship that doesn't map onto Shia liturgical culture in the same way, because Shia mourning practice has, for centuries, built specific, sanctioned vocal forms directly into its ritual calendar.
That's not a value judgement about either tradition; it's a structural difference in how each accommodates the act of singing. And when you look at the roll call of Pakistan's classical and semi-classical greats, recorded marsiyas and nohay for Karbala, the Muharram connection is impossible to miss. But here's the complication I owe upfront, not every one of those names was Shia by formal sect.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came from a Sunni Sufi qawwali lineage that has always sung in praise of the whole Ahl al-Bayt, Hussain included a devotional inheritance that sits alongside Shia Azadari rather than inside it. His own sectarian identity is, to this day, genuinely disputed among his listeners. So the more accurate claim isn't "Pakistan's classical musicians are mostly Shia." It's narrower and, I think, more useful, wherever Muharram liturgical practice built …
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