LAHORE: Pakistanis got the treat of a lifetime on Friday night as Abida Parveen, Pakistan's most outstanding musician, sang qawwalis and kafis – variations of Pakistani folk and classical music – to a swooning audience at Lahore’s palatial Governor House.
The first of its kind Sufi Night, which started with traditional Sufi dances, was organised by Seed Out, Pakistan’s first interest-free crowdfunding platform, in an attempt to raise money to set up small businesses for underprivileged Pakistani entrepreneurs.
Since 2013, Seed Out has funded 600 small entrepreneurs and sent 1,600 child labourers to school. Friday’s event itself raised funds to micro-finance 150 small new businesses.
“Seed Out has always been committed to fight poverty,” president of the platform Zain Ashraf Mughal said. “However, we cannot do it alone. This year we wanted to bring all Pakistanis to come together and play their part to lift thousands of families out of poverty.”
Mughal, a graduate of the University of Miami, is the first Pakistani to receive the prestigious 2018 Commonwealth Youth Award. He was also shortlisted for the Forbes Asia 30 under 30 list for 2019 and has been ranked as Pakistan’s top 25 high achievers under 25 by Tech Juice.
Friday night's rare music performance by Parveen was attended by over 1,200 celebrities, cricket stars, politicians, diplomats and members of the who's who of Lahori society. Hundreds of hands waved overhead and the crowd sang along as Parveen serenaded the audience with songs whose message was ecstatic devotion and which praised saints, poets and philosophers revered by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.
Parveen is a master of the Sufi style of music called the kafi. Like the qawwali, which was popularized globally by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the kafi sets classical poems by poets like Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sachal Sarmast and Khwaja Ghulam Farid to visceral tunes that leave the singer and the audience clapping and swaying. The themes are the love of the divine and oneness with a larger being or spirit.
Parveen’s first US tour was back in 1993 and she has since travelled across the world to perform at sold-out venues. She was born into a long line of Sufi mystics and singers and her father, Ghulam Haider, the founder of a devotional music school in Sindh, trained her, rather than his two sons, to pursue music.
In recent years, Parveen’s career has also taken a commercial turn. She has performed on Coke Studio, Pakistan's biggest music show, and joined the judging panel of the hugely popular TV talent show Sur Kshetra, which is filmed in Dubai and pitted Indian and Pakistani musicians against one another. Her spiritual ghazals have also appeared in Bollywood films.
At Lahore’s palatial Governor House, queen of Sufi music sings praises to the saints
At Lahore’s palatial Governor House, queen of Sufi music sings praises to the saints
- Abida Parveen performed classic qawwalis, ghazals and kafis to a packed audience on Friday night
- Event was organised by Seed Out, Pakistan’s first interest-free crowdfunding platform, and raised funds to micro-finance 150 small businesses
Saja Kilani shines at BAFTAs 2026
DUBAI: Palestinian-Jordanian-Canadian actress Saja Kilani, one of the stars of “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” stepped onto the BAFTA Film Awards 2026 red carpet in a sculptural look from Bottega Veneta’s Spring 2026 collection.
Nominated for Best Film Not in the English Language, Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Voice of Hind Rajab” tells the story of Hind Rajab Hamada, who was fleeing the Israeli military in Gaza City with six relatives last year when their car came under fire.
The sole survivor of the Israeli attack, who was then shot and killed, her desperate calls recorded with the Red Crescent rescue service caused international outrage.
Kilani plays Rana Faqih, the real-life Palestine Red Crescent Society volunteer who spoke to Hamada in the final hours of her life as she waited, surrounded by the bodies of her family, for help to come.
Meanwhile, politically charged thriller “One Battle After Another” won six prizes, including Best Picture, at the British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, building momentum ahead of Hollywood’s Academy Awards next month.
Blues-steeped vampire epic “Sinners” and gothic horror story “Frankenstein” won three awards each, while Shakespearean family tragedy “Hamnet” won two, including Best British Film.
“One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s explosive film about a group of revolutionaries in chaotic conflict with the state, won awards for directing, adapted screenplay, cinematography and editing, as well as for Sean Penn’s supporting performance as an obsessed military officer.
“This is very overwhelming and wonderful,” Anderson said as he accepted the directing prize. He paid tribute to his longstanding assistant director, Adam Somner, who died of cancer in November 2024, a few weeks into production.
“We have a line from Nina Simone that we used in our film, ‘I know what freedom is: It’s no fear,’” the director said. “Let’s keep making things without fear. It’s a good idea.”
Bookies’ favorite Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress prize for her portrayal of grieving mother Agnes Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, in “Hamnet.” Buckley, 36, is the first Irish performer to win the Best Actress prize at the awards.
She dedicated her award “to the women past, present and future who taught me and continue to teach me how to do it differently.”
Horror film “Sinners” took home trophies for director Ryan Coogler’s original screenplay, the film’s musical score and for Wunmi Mosaku’s supporting actress performance as herbalist and healer Annie.
The British-Nigerian actor said that in the role she found “a part of my hopes, my ancestral power and my connection, parts I thought I had lost or tried to dim as an immigrant trying to fit in.”
