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The Story Behind Mein Sufi Hoon
Abida Parveen and the sitar maestro Ustaad Raees Khan open Coke Studio's seventh season with a ten and a half minute Sufi kalam, which is not the safe way to start a season. Season 7 was the first produced by Strings, the pop duo of Bilal Maqsood and Faisal Kapadia, who had just taken the show over from Rohail Hyatt, and this was their opening episode.
Raees Khan sings none of it. He is billed first because the sitar is the second voice here, answering Abida phrase for phrase across stretches long enough that the arrangement stops behaving like a song and starts behaving like a mehfil. He died in 2017, which leaves this among the last widely seen recordings of one of the subcontinent's great sitar players.
Meaning & Translation
Mein Sufi Hoon means simply I am a Sufi, and in this idiom that is a claim about allegiance rather than about piety. To say it is to place yourself on the path of love rather than on the side of doctrine, ritual or the sect you were born into, which is why the line can read as a confession and as a quiet act of defiance at the same time.
Abida Parveen treats it as a refrain to return to rather than a point to argue, letting the phrase stretch and bend until the assertion sounds less like an identity and more like a surrender. In the gaps between her lines, the sitar carries the same argument without words.
Details
- Artist
- Ustaad Raees Khan, Abida Parveen
- Category
- Coke Studio
- Collection
- Coke Studio Season 7
- Released
- 2014
- Language
- Urdu
- Genre
- Classical, Devotional
- Mood
- Devotional
- YouTube Views
- 1.86M
Artists & Credits
- Ustaad Raees Khan singer
- Abida Parveen singer
- Ustaad Raees Khan musician
- Strings producer