After the July uprising unseated Sheikh Hasina’s autocratic regime in Bangladesh, the country’s university campuses erupted into a brief, ecstatic frenzy of Qawwali mehfils. For a few months, the traditional devotional music of South Asian Sufi shrines resounded through academic halls and public squares. The resurgence was deeply political.
In early 2024, activists from the Bangladesh Chhatra League had broken up a Qawwali concert at Dhaka University, alleging that its Urdu lyrics were antithetical to Bengali nationhood. By framing Muslim identity as inherently foreign, the fallen ethnonationalist regime had turned the music into a symbol of cultural resistance.
Consequently, performing Qawwali after August 2024 became a potent declaration of anti-regime defiance. Young students and the urban middle class flocked to these gatherings, eagerly reclaiming what they perceived as a suppressed inheritance.
Yet the enthusiasm was a fleeting phenomenon. While the crowds were genuine, the musical art was absent. Almost none of the performers in these newly formed ensembles had undertaken the rigorous training demands of classical South Asian music.
They possessed no masters, belonged to no recognized musical lineages, and had served no long apprenticeships. The gatherings relied entirely on raw political energy and collective fervor to compensate for an underlying lack of artistic competence. Predictably, as quickly as the revival emerged, it evaporated.
Today, the campus mehfil has virtually disappeared from Dhaka and beyond, leaving behind an empty echo where a cultural revolution was promised.
This rapid collapse was structural rather than accidental. The primary organizing impulse behind the movement came from student Islamist organizations, most notably Islami Chhatra Shibir. The musical groups that emerged during this period, such as Qaseeda, were formed in the immediate aftermath of the regime's fall, explicitly created by student activists with direct ties to party machinery.
These troupes were not the continuation of an enduring musical tradition; they were temporary vehicles raised for political utility. Those who orchestrated the revival deployed Qawwali as a sharp polemical weapon against the Awami League rather than preserving it as an art form they cherished.
This instrumental approach exposed a fundamental contradiction. Qawwali is rooted in Sufi mysticism, shrine culture, and the devotional veneration of saints. In contrast, the reformist ideology championed by Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliate organizations has long maintained a deep theological skepticism toward these exact practices.
Ecstatic musical performance and the veneration of holy figures sit uncomfortably alongside a puritanical creed focused on textual literalism and moral discipline. The alliance between Islamism and Qawwali was purely tactical. Once the music had fulfilled its purpose in discrediting the old political order, the Islamist movement had neither the desire nor the ideological capacity to sustain it.
Sustaining a living tradition demands far more than mobilizing a crowd for a political rally. It requires a permanent infrastructure of cultural transmission: recognized teachers, patron networks, and performance circuits that reproduce artistic skills across generations.
Islamism in Bangladesh has constructed no such infrastructure for Qawwali, nor can it. Its broader cultural apparatus remains entirely subordinate to ideological proselytization and disciplined political organization. For these movements, culture exists solely as an instrument to broadcast a message rather than an autonomous human endeavor with intrinsic value.
The limited scope of this cultural vision is evident in the movement's permanent artistic institutions. Groups like Saimum Shilpigoshthi produce a steady stream of politically compliant nasheeds and ghazals tailored specifically for party cadre. This represents the upper limit of the Islamist cultural imagination.
Performers within these troupes act as political activists first and artists second. They routinely mistake internal propaganda for genuine artistic expression, retreating into insular creative output whenever broader public interest wanes.
The demise of the campus mehfil cannot be blamed on public apathy. The middle class demonstrated an eager appetite for the music and filled the venues to capacity. Had the initiative been sustained with genuine artistic integrity, the audience would have remained.
The failure rests entirely with the organizers. Incapable of valuing art beyond its immediate utility, the Islamist student leadership abandoned the form as soon as its political utility diminished.
This episode illustrates a broader truth about the relationship between ideological movements and traditional art forms. Islamism can effectively weaponize cultural symbols to rally opposition, but it lacks the institutional depth and intellectual sympathy required to nurture living traditions.
It flattens artistic heritage into partisan propaganda or simply allows it to wither once the political moment passes. The Qawwali revival did not fade away because the public lost interest; it died because the hands that raised it never intended to keep it alive.
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Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is academically trained across Thailand, England, and Qatar, bringing together political, philosophical, and theological perspectives. He writes on the intersection of politics, society, gender, religion, and culture in Bangladesh and beyond