Taos, New Mexico evokes magic, mystery, art, multiculturalism and majesty.  Home to the Tiwa speaking Red Willow people of Taos Pueblo for more than a thousand years, home to Spanish settlers from 1600 and “Anglos” (which means everyone not Native American or Spanish) since shortly after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Taos offers not only breathtaking scenery, refreshing air and light and the magnificent smells of adobe earth, pinion and sagebrush, but also the social problems and triumphant collaborations that come from three distinct cultures living together in what is still in many ways the Wild West.  Taos inspired some of the 20th Century’s most creative artists and writers but also struggles with aching poverty in all three communities.  One of my friends exclaimed that Taos is like the Third World, with all of its accompanying wonders and struggles, but with delicious safe water and reliable electricity. 

For Anglos who move to Taos, locals say that Taos Mountain either spits them out or integrates them without prejudice.   I leave the truth of this to others and to The Mountain to decide.  This famous Mountain lies on the Taos Pueblo reservation, north of the historic Taos Pueblo buildings and north of the early Hispanic fortified village known originally as Don Fernando de Taos.  Fernando Chacón founded this Spanish village in 1795, eight or nine hundred years after the Tiwa people built their iconic homes at the Pueblo . 

The native Red Willow people, the Tiwa Indians in Taos, practice a hybrid religion, incorporating the conflicting tenants of their native religion with Roman Catholicism superimposed by the Spanish padres over hundreds of years.  If one askes a devout Tiwa friend about the conflicts, he or she may shrug and may comment that one can follow both truths.  This ability for people in Taos to incorporate disparate theologies and world views will help us understand the music on this recording. 

From an Anglo perspective, Mabel Dodge Lujan offers us an example of how this syncretism can function successfully within one person.  Mabel Ganson, a rich heiress and daughter of Buffalo New York banker Charles Ganson, attended Saint Margaret’s Episcopal School for girls before leaving for New York and Europe in an attempt to discover a life that would mean something to her.  Smart, energetic and eccentric, Mabel and her then husband Edwin Dodge founded a salon at their 15^th Century Medici home Villa Curonia outside of Florence, entertaining some of the great minds in modern art, literature and music.  Muriel Paget, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, André Gide, Lord and Lady Acton, Pen Browning, Arthur Rubinstein, Carl Van Vechten, and others. 

Mabel founded her next salon, at her home on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and worked hard behind the scenes as well as in public to attract her friends, the greatest European modernists to make the 1913 Armory Show a success in New York.  Mabel and the Armory Show shocked and inspired the US with its first dose of the European avant-garde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. 

Mabel moved to Taos in 1917 and shortly decided that Taos was an omphalos of the world, a place where modern and ancient, European and Native American cultures and thinking could and did coalesce into something more fundamental and truthful than one could experience elsewhere.  Mabel married Tony Lujan from the Taos Pueblo and despite a stormy relationship with him, this marriage lasted until Mabel’s death in 1962.  Tony supervised the major expansion of their home and soon Mabel invited, bribed or cajoled her friends to come to New Mexico and form a community that would bridge cultures and create a rejuvenating environment in which to live fully.  Not only did Mabel bring artists to Taos, but she also took Pueblo and Southwestern artists’ work to show in East Coast galleries. 

Most of Mabel’s illustrious guests came to visit her in Taos.  Many of them stayed, and some visited regularly.  Georgia O’Keefe, Rebecca and Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Andrew Dasburg, Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, John Collier, Robinson Jeffers, Spud Johnson and Nicholai Fechin might never have considered Taos important if Mable had not invited or dragged them to New Mexico. 

Partially thanks to Mabel’s vision, building on the syncretism that already thrived in the community, Taos became world-renowned, not only as an art colony, but as a microcosm and as a beacon for this synthesis of ideas.  Taos Mountain itself serves as the anchor for the diverse cultures, religions and perspectives in the area.  Some consider Taos Mountain to be the navel of the world and the spiritual force attracting the various communities to live and worship and create under its auspices.  Taos Mountain unifies and glues the community together. 

Dennis Hopper bought Mabel’s and Tony’s house in 1970 after filming Easy Rider.  Hopper nicknamed it the “Mud Palace” and during the seven years he lived at Mabel’s, Dennis hosted wild drug-fueled parties and created a commune of hippies including our young friend Patrick Arthur Lee, also known as Habib Chishti.  Habib learned to be a jeweler and watch maker apprenticing at Mabel’s and was affectionately nicknamed “The Poodle” because of his beautiful curly hair.  Habib regrets the deaths of so many of his friends from that era, often to drug overdoses, and considers his survival miraculous. 

When one meets Habib Chishti today, one meets a huggable bear of a man sharing the infectious twinkle in his eye.  He looks like a wandering ascetic on a Himalayan path, yet well fed.  His all-encompassing affection for humanity and the world helps one appreciate Habib’s multiple religious backgrounds and current thinking.  

Habib Chishti (Patrick Arthur Lee) was born into a Jewish and Catholic home thanks to parents from both traditions.  After a series of family misfortunes, Patrick and his mother wound up living at Lama Foundation, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains north of Taos.  This ecumenical spiritual retreat center overlooks magnificent desert landscape and according to its website “… embraces all spiritual traditions…  it has strong ties to Taos Pueblo, the Hanuman Temple in Taos, NM, Sufi Ruhaniat International, Dervish Healing Order, The Church of Conscious Harmony, St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO, and dozens of other communities, spiritual teachers, and thousands of pilgrims from nearly all religious heritages who call Lama their home.” Richard Alpert, also known as Ram Dass, wrote Be Here Now, which Lama Foundation published in its first edition in 1971, arguably Lama Foundation’s widest international claim to fame. 

Patrick’s mother mysteriously left Lama without warning when Patrick was 13 years old.  The Lama community looked after Patrick until he was informally adopted by a Tiwa family at the Taos Pueblo, further enriching his spiritual and cultural environment.  Patrick entered a Sufi Order that same year. 

I met Habib at the Hanuman Mandir in Taos, one of the few Hanuman temples in North America.  I had been drafted by my friend Karen Thibodeau, a children’s theater director working in New York and Taos, to play the part of Lord Dasarath, father of the god Ram. This was for the annual kids’ production of the Ramlila, a highly shortened child-friendly version of the Ramayana presented every summer at the Hanuman temple.  Habib was there soaking in the atmosphere and meditating under a tree near the outdoor tent set up for the production.  Habib and I met again through one of Habib’s sons, and we started thinking about making this recording.  Habib has been practicing Hinduism and Sufism for over forty years, and was recognized as a Shaykh, or teacher, in the Chishti Sufi lineage.  He is one of the first American Sufis to earn this teaching designation.   Part of Habib’s mission as a teacher and Shaykh is identifying and sharing the core similarities between religious traditions such that people can use differing religious traditions to encourage friendships and collaboration rather than fight over details and differences.  At present, Habib is in the middle of two-year pilgrimage, studying the teachings, history, culture and music of venerated Sufi teachers and saints in India, Pakistan and other parts of the world.  Habib is studying and absorbing more of this rich tradition to incorporate into his own spiritual, musical and practice.  He looks forward to sharing these traditions and the experience of universal unity they inspire more fully with the world in coming years.  Here he is, a traveler and seeker of truth, no matter whether he is a Jewish, Catholic, Hindu, Agnostic, Shaman, Muslim Shaykh with abundant love and generosity to share with others in an inclusive embrace. 

In Taos, one learns to digest disparate ideologies quickly as a way of getting along with the people here.  But if we look deeper at the multiple paths Habib embodies, this synthesis begins to feel less bizarre.  After a bit more study, and if one ignores hundreds of years of human conflict, bloodshed and domination of one group over the other, the beauty and ultimate marriage of these paths, initially different prisms through which one can hope to glimpse the divine, begin to make sense as one crashes through flimsy barriers of history and conflict into metaphors that reveal deep connection and a spiritual unity.  

I am a record producer, not a religious scholar.  I am neither a practicing Hindu nor a practicing Muslim.  And Habib, my best source, is out of touch on retreat in Asia as I write these notes.  So this brief discussion in only a few pages will over-simplify this complex evolution of two religious systems in probably unforgivable ways.  Yet I hope to give you a sense of the joy Habib feels and shares as he sings this magnificent music designed to help performers and listeners access and reveal inner connection with divine love. 

We know less about early Hinduism than we do about later religious developments for the “people across the Indus.”  In the Vedic era, the Aryan religious tradition as it moved from Central Asia into the Indian Subcontinent from about 2,000 to 1,000 BC focused on fire sacrifice and the correct performance of religious ritual in the hope that the gods, including anthropomorphized versions of Fire, Wind, Rain, etc., would be pleased and maintain the order of the universe such that the world would survive.  This was an external religious practice.  One had to do the right things at the right times.  The goal of this religious practice, if I may be crass for a moment, was to ensure the outward survival of oneself, one’s family and one’s wider community.   The gods were not personal, and the gods were less concerned with individual behavior and individual state of mind than they were in maintaining their happy equilibrium in exchange for prescribed worship by human beings.  The divine realm and the human realm had a contract which people would ignore to their peril. 

Then, in what is known as the Axial Age, from about 600 BC onward, this contractual agreement between human and divine began to evolve.  In another gross oversimplification, instead of focusing on Vedic performance of correct ritual and external behavior, new religious ideas suggested that mankind should focus on personal experience of divine wisdom and love and focus on what psychologists today would call the Inner World.  Isolated wandering ascetics, hermits and teachers both, sometimes spending months and years alone, and in extended periods of meditation, introduced revolutionary ideas about the structure of reality and about the relationship between all things and the divine.  By about 500 BC, the texts we know in Hinduism as the Upanishads began to take form.  These texts encouraged the attainment of knowledge: knowledge of the interrelationships between all things and consequent knowledge of oneself.  It is now thought that the historical person who became the Buddha, Gautama Siddhartha, was born around 600 BC, earlier than previously thought.  By 500 BC, Buddhism and Jainism were emerging forces in the religious and psychological landscape of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. 

With these advents came a new concept.  The Buddhists called it the nature of “dependent arising.”  Because of the interdependence of all things and all actions, individual motivation and action had profound effects on the present and the future and that these happenings had effects for good or ill that ricocheted around the cosmos like the ripples in a pond when one disturbs the surface of the water by casting in a stone.  Individual responsibility, to oneself and to the rest of the universe became critically important.  In this Axial Age, this new focus on internal reality instead of external actuality blurred the boundaries of birth and death such that this “dependent arising” transcended individual lifetimes.  The newly emerged idea of cyclical rebirth increased the importance of individual responsibility since motivations and actions affected the individual and the universe for eons, not just during a single human lifespan. 

To step back for just a moment, Hinduism during the Vedic era required a literalness of understanding and worship.  In this new age, at least by contrast, the dive into the internal world required people to think and experience the world and the internal state with more powerful metaphors.  Life itself and its external and internal realities were in fact metaphors for something greater, deeper and more fundamental.  The Axial age encouraged people to absorb the wisdom of wandering ascetics to enable a direct intellectual and emotional connection to the divine, combining subtle intuition and understanding within a traditional religious framework. 

On the surface, Hinduism in the Vedic period and after the Axial age looked polytheistic.  Indeed temples to multiple deities sprang up all over the Indian subcontinent before and especially during the era scholars call “Classical Hinduism” which peaked starting about 400 AD.  But we must remember the power of metaphor to transform and enlighten religious experience and understanding and acknowledge that deeper religious thought during and after the Axial age identified the various deities in the Hindu pantheon as aspects of divine power and love rather than as exclusively separate gods. 

Let us return to our singer Habib Chishti for a moment and the sacred trance music of worship on this album. 

Early Hanuman temples in India include the beautiful Karmanghat Hanuman Temple in Hyderabad, built in the mid 12^th Century AD, and the Hanuman Mandir on busy Connaught Place in Delhi was completed in the 17^th Century. 

While evidence of a monkey god comes to us from the Dravidian inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent before the Aryan migration before 1,500 BC, devotion to Hanuman as a god himself, and dedication to his service began in earnest in India under Islamic rule almost 3,000 years later.  Dedication to Hanuman came to its full flowering, therefore, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries AD. 

The Hanuman 40-verse hymn of praise, or chālīsā (meaning 40 verses) which Habib sings for us on this album, dates from the 16^th century.  It is believed the chant was composed by Goswami Tulsidas, who was believed to be a reincarnation of Valmiki, the composer of the original Ramayana in Sanskrit, which includes the story of Hanuman. 

With this in mind, let us look briefly at the history and trajectory of Sufism before and during the Islamic era. 

It is not easy to offer you a good definition of Sufism.  One major Sufi scholar in the 20^th Century began his magnum opus with the many-page declaration that Sufism is not possible to explain or describe in words.  I shall nevertheless brazenly attempt a thumbnail sketch for you to help us understand the beauty and majesty of Habib’s chant. 

Most religious traditions claim ancient lineage.  The Bible attributes the Christian gospels in the New Testament to four of Jesus’ immediate disciples when scholarship clearly demonstrates that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were in fact written and assembled one or more centuries after the life of these same disciples.  Tibetan Buddhists following the Diamond Path sometimes attribute Tantrism to hidden teachings of the historical Buddha, though they arose over 1,500 years later.  Traditional Sufis give the Prophet Mohammed credit as the first Sufi and attribute their practice to the Founder of Islam.  In fact, recent religious scholars, including some Sufis, identify the Sufi movement with the much earlier Gnostics.  Early Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities coexisted in Arabia in the early years of Islamic expansion and ideas cross pollinated freely.  Some Sufi research suggests that the basic ideas of Sufism arose in the ascetic Essene communities.  More traditional Sufi scholars, such as Dr. Nahid Angha, writing for the International Association of Sufism, attribute the tradition directly to “spiritual knowledge based on self cognition as the door toward understanding the realities of being, born out of Islam and is the heir to the treasures of knowledge from the sacred heart of the Prophet Mohammed.” More on this later.  My quotation is moderately condensed.

What matters for our album is that the Sufi path flowered beginning in the 12^th Century AD.  The great poet Rumi lived in the 13^th Century and Hafez lived and wrote in the 14^th Century.  Please notice the coincidence of the flourishing of Hanuman worship in India in the 12^th and 13^th Centuries.  This coincidence may just be a coincidence, but it is fun to note as these dates relate to Habib’s music on this album. 

Essentially, Sufism is a practice and perspective that heightens direct worshipful experience and enjoyment of the divine.  God in Sufism has no gender.  Habib’s description of Sufi worship as in the dhikrs chanted on this album, can be likened to spending the night making love with God. 

A dhikr (which literally means “to remember”) is a meditational chant, sung or recited individually or in a group, made sacred by its text, which is the repetition of the name or attributes of God.  This chant heightens communion with divine love.  One can chant the dhikr using prayer beads to chart the repetitions, or a leader can assume the role of principal singer and guide for fellow congregants from just a few to hundreds of people chanting and dancing in communal worship. 

The sentence above “spending the night making love with God” suggests one of the reasons Sufi communities experienced repression or merciless persecution in various countries and periods in history.  The Sufi experience may involve less visual sexual imagery in contrast with other ecstatic practices (such as Tantrism in Tibetan Buddhism), but the emotional experience provides devotees with the perception of deep physical, psychological and spiritual union with God. 

Let us look at one “simple” quatrain by the great Rumi to illuminate the experience Habib wishes to share with us in his dhikr. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was born on September 30^th, 1207, in the ancient Buddhist stronghold of Balkh, just north of Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan, or just across the border in what is now Tajikistan.  Rumi reveals the sacred power of dance and of music:

One day in your wineshop, I drank a little wine,
And threw off this robe of my body,
And knew, drunk on you, the world is harmony,
Creation, destruction, I am dancing for them both. 

As Andrew Harvey expands on his interpretation of Rumi’s words, in the mystical wineshop “where the wine of gnosis, bliss, and peace is sold, I, your disciple, drank just two sips of the sacred wine, went into ecstasy, and ‘threw off this robe of my body.’ This robe is the source of much ignorance, separation, banality, and closure, so I threw it off.  I threw off the robe of my body in which I could only hear the sounds of the ego, the sounds of my own desires, the sounds of the banality of the world.  These are the sounds of the ordinary, dispassionate mind.  But because I was completely inspired, and filled with you, and because I was drunk on you, I came to understand the sacred secret; that the entire universe is harmony.  This harmony is so extraordinary, so complex, and so vast that it is infinitely unknowable to the ordinary mind, but knowable to the mind steeped in gnostic ecstasy.  I ‘knew, drunk on you, the world is harmony.’ To know that the world is harmony, you have to become drunk with the sacred wine.  To know, not to think, suspect, believe, or imagine, but to know beyond any doubt that the world, this experience, life—the entire manifestation—is nothing but music, you have to be drunk on gnostic ecstasy and bliss.” (Andrew Harvey, The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, 1994  Rumi’s quatrain is Harvey’s translation as well.)

Harvey remains a controversial writer and has annoyed a fair number of religious scholars, but he touches on how the disciple can abandon the seemingly authentic world as perceived by normal senses in exchange for God’s offer of overflowingly joyous physical and intellectual union with divine love. 

Sufism aims to help us erode our mental boundaries, giving up our preconceptions in favor of open mutual loving exchange with God.  Let us look at two poems by Hafez, born in Shiraz in 1315.  Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāz lived in the century following Rumi.  Let us enjoy two poems as translated and presented by Daniel Ladinsky in The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master, 1999

Stop Being So Religious

What
Do sad people have in
Common?

In seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past

And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.

What is the beginning of
Happiness?

It is to stop being
So religious.

Like

That.

And here is another:

The God Who Only Knows Four Words

Every

Child

Has known God,

Not the God of names,

Not the God of don’ts,

Not the God who ever does

Anything weird,

But the God who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying:

“Come dance with Me.”

Come

Dance.

These poems reveal that Sufism wants us to “do” rather than tells us what not to do.  Sufism is not about correct behavior in society and punishments for infractions.  Sufism invites us to “make love with God” and let God transform us through that communion.

Deep knowledge, meaningful knowledge that comes hand in hand with joy, comes from the obliteration of the normal world in favor of emotional knowledge that comes from God.  But to accept this gift, one must be willing to cast off what seems to be real. 

I offer one final tongue-in-cheek passage to illuminate our path.  “Mr. Continental” says these words to Gabrielle in Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse:

“Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend.  Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can.  That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident.  And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”

Our grasp on “reality” is vague at best, so as Rumi and Hafez suggest, why not take our chances with Habib and invite mystical union with God instead?

Our wonderful executive producer Lucile Grieder joins the Yarlung family in underwriting this project.  Lucile lives in Taos and loves Taos, and her musical and cultural interests take her all over the world.  Lucile is a practicing Episcopalian, not a Sufi mystic or devotee of Hanuman.  She wholeheartedly embraced this recording and Habib’s mission, and I think I know why.  Not only does Lucile respond to the power of Habib’s singing, but she embodies the definition of Episcopalian in the fundamental sense.  Episkopos (ἐπίσκοπος) from which we derive the English word “bishop,” comes from ἐπί  meaning “upon” and the verb σκοπεῖν meaning “to behold,” “to consider,” or “to examine deeply.”  It is this flavor of a deep examination that interests me most in the context of this music and this album.  The Anglican tradition prides itself in respecting and pursuing the richness of metaphor in religious contexts and this perspective does Lucile well as she relishes the ecumenical nature of Habib’s singing and teaching. Thank you, Lucile, for being our thoughtful and generous executive producer.

Notes on the Music

In support of Habib’s mission to share this devotional trance music with the world, and to share the ecumenical joy he feels in singing music from the Hindu and Islamic traditions, and in the “Taos spirit,” Lucile, Habib and I decided to make this entire album available for free on Yarlung’s YouTube Channel.  The YouTube audio files are 320 Kbps MP3 files, so depending on your internet speed, the album on YouTube will sound almost as good as CD audio playing through your computer.  We recorded the album using the Merging Technologies HAPI analog to digital converter, using Pyramix software to capture 256fs DSD stereo and 4.0 surround sound files.  Available at NativeDSD.  HDTracks offers the album in 88/24 stereo. 

The full album is about one hour of music in nine tracks:

1. Hanuman Chalisa cycles 1 and 2 (Habib’s son Salman Hanuman Lee joins Habib Chishti in cycle 2)
2. Hanuman Chalisa cycle 3 in E Flat (with Salman Hanuman Lee)
3. Frame Drum Trance (Habib Chishti)
4. Opening verses of the Quran (Habib Chishti)
5. Call from the Minaret (Habib Chishti)
6. Second Song, poetry by Shaykh Ibn Al Habib (arranged and sung by Habib Chishti)
7. First Sufi Dhikr
8. Second Sufi Dhikr
9. Third Sufi Dhikr

For all three Dhikrs, Habib leads and is joined by Salman Hanuman Lee, Shawnina Good Road Woman and Mike Rosell.

The two tracks in high resolution:

1. Hanuman Chalisa cycles 2 and 3 (Habib Chishti and Salman Hanuman Lee)
2. Second and Third Sufi Dhikr (Habib leads and is joined by Salman Hanuman Lee, Shawnina Good Road Woman and Michael Carl Rosell)

Our album opens with cycles of the famous Hanuman Chalisa, the 40-verse devotional hymn to the god Hanuman, originally written by the 16th-century poet Tulsidas in the Awadhi language.  Habib sings the chalisa in  a dialect of Hindi.  One version of this popular chant has now reached over a billion views on YouTube.  Habib follows in hot pursuit!

Habib Chishti and his son Salman Hanuman Lee offer three versions of the Hanuman Chalisa on our full album, the second and third of which are included in the high resolution DSD, PCM and 4.0 surround sound download versions of this album.  The first version is what Habib describes as a more traditional chant, and he chants alone.  Habib’s son Salman joins Habib in the second version (our first in the high resolution downloads) and in the third version, they chant Habib’s inventive less-traditional arrangement in the key of E Flat. 

If you would like to study the chalisa in more detail, or follow along with Habib, here are transliterations and translations of the Hanuman Chalisa.  Here is another.

Next follows Habib playing the frame drum in trance as he prepares for the Sufi material. 

To introduce the dhikrs on our full album, Habib sings the opening verses of the Quran, followed by a call to prayer from the minaret.

Section One:

In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate
Praise be to the Lord of the worlds
The most merciful, the most compassionate (repeat)
The king of the Day of Judgement.
Only you do we worship and only from you do we ask help.
Keep us on the Straight Path (repeated three times)
The path that you have made clear for us
Not the path of those who have gone astray and are miserable.

Section Two:

Trusting The Lord who is the mighty god.
In our hearts is nothing but Allah, the god. 
The light of Mohammed, peace be upon Him.
The peace of God…
There is no god but The God.

Second Three:

The singular God without association or partner
The God of Creation and the God of Praise
And who is above and beyond anything which is created or anything humans beings can conceive.

Shaykh Ibn Al Habib was a North African Sufi master of the Darqawi Shazali order.  He was born in Morocco in 1876 in Fes, and died in 1972 on his way to a third Haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.  He wrote a poem called “Another Song,” translated below by Habib Chishti, which Habib set to music here titled Second Song.

Second Song

I am absorbed in Oneness
In the remembrance of the Lord,
The remembrance of the Lord is cure for any malady or situation.
I am in love with The Lord
Upon whom I can count in any situation

And for every love for anything other than The Lord
In this love is pain and anguish
Triumph to the one who has experienced
Annihilation in The Lord (union with The God).  They have pure life and
Eternally deeper and deeper union (traveling into the essence) of The Lord.

Bless Mohammed and may his light expand endlessly.

And His family and righteous companions,
They are ones on whom we can count
They guard and disseminate the teachings.  

The dhikr cycles

Sufi dhikrs are meditative devotional trance experiences, designed to glorify God and remind the singer or reciter of his or her mystical union with God and rekindle this intimate connection.  Interestingly, not all dhikrs are Islamic.  One of our good friends belongs to a Buddhism-inspired Reiki meditation group in London that uses dhikrs as part of its regular healing practice. 

The opening sections of Habib’s first dhikr includes a longer narration

Section One (The Opening: Al Fatiha):

In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate
Praise be to the Lord of the worlds
The most merciful, the most compassionate (repeat)
The king of the Day of Judgement.
Only you do we worship and only from you do we ask help.
Keep us on the Straight Path (repeated three times)
The path that you have made clear for us
Not the path of those who have gone astray and are miserable.

(Note: Habib made clear to me that “Allah” is not a name.  “Allah” means simply “The God,” a description of the supreme and only power in the universe and a constant reminder of the monotheistic Islamic tradition.) 

Section Two:

Trusting The Lord who is the mighty God.
In our hearts is nothing but Allah, the God. 
The light of Mohammed, peace be upon Him.
The peace of God…
There is no god but the God.

Section Three:

The singular God without association or partner
The God of Creation and the God of Praise
And who is above and beyond anything which is created or anything human beings can conceive.

Once the dhikrs enter their trance phase, words and the holy name of God repeat. 

Here is an example from our third dhikr cycle:

First section: La illaha ill Allah
(There is no deity except for the Divine One)

Second section: il-Allah
(except the Divine One)

Third Section: Allah
(the supreme description, literally “the God.”)

Fourth Section: Hayy
(one of the 99 most beautiful names of God: “The Living,” “The Life,” “The Life Giver,” “Source of Life,” “The Only Life,” “All Life”)

Fifth Section: Al Hayy– Qayum
(two of the 99 most beautiful names of God: “The Living,” “The Eternal, The Everlasting”)

Sixth Section: Allah

Then section 1 begins again (Allah)

Al Haqq
(one of the most beautiful names of God: “The Truth”)

Then follows an invocation:  Mohammed ur Rasullahla (Mohammed the Messenger of the God)

Following our final dhikr cycle on the album, Habib wants us to let the body and spirit reintegrate as we gently come out of trance as we listen to a chapter of the Quran.  He holds the frame drum at an angle to his mouth, using the drum to echo and sweeten Habib’s voice as the reciter of the chapter.  The recital Habib chose is the first part of the chapter known as “Friday,” (Al-Jum’a).  It ends “Such is the overwhelming generosity of The Lord, and The God (Allah) is the most generous giver.”

Thank you, Habib, for giving us so much as well.  May your pilgrimage to the Sufi shrines and your learning of their songs go well.  I am sure Taos misses you.

Dedication

The US government seized Blue Lake and many square miles of surrounding mountainside by presidential order in 1906.  When Theodore Roosevelt created the National Forest Service, the administration confiscated hundreds of thousands of acres from Native American pueblos, including some from Taos Pueblo.  Blue Lake and surrounding territory became part of Carson National Forest.  Blue Lake was not just another pretty body of clean water, however, but a sacred place of origin and return for the Tiwa people and fundamental to the practice of their religion and initiation ceremonies. 

After a lengthy campaign, championed by Mabel Dodge Lujan and many others over the decades, President Nixon signed HR471 on Dec. 15, 1970, returning Blue Lake and the 48,000-acre surrounding area to Taos Pueblo.  2020 marks the 50^th Anniversary of the return of Blue Lake.  Habib, Lucile and I want to dedicate this album in honor of this happy anniversary. 

–Bob Attiyeh, producer