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It is a source of great pride in seeing Fareed and Abu Mohammad ascend to the rank of the most famous of Qawwals. The years have made us witness to the ups and downs of the lives of the Qawwals, their solid belief in the destinies afforded them by the Almighty and their perseverance in staying true to their long and rich musical heritage. Those foundations have built a relationship that has endured over the years and spans three generations. Their relationship was not merely that of a musician and his audience, but that of a man of knowledge and an aesthete.
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Our family’s relationship with Fareed Ayyaz and Abu Mohammad goes back some fifty years, to when my father and Munshi Raziuddin, their father, established an instant bond of love and respect that would last the rest of their lives. The occasion was characterized by the bittersweet truth of the voyage of life, best captured in Khala’s words: We were blessed by the presences of my Phuppi (paternal aunt) Sayyeda Tayyaba Nayyar Raza and my Khala (maternal aunt) Sayyeda Abida Sarwar Ali Abidi, who at 97 and 83 years of age, are the last surviving elders that have a direct connection and memory of the ancestral home and the foundations of the extended family. Our common ancestor was my paternal great grandfather, Syed Ghulam Imam, hence the title of this blog. The male members of our family being a relatively rare species, until my grandfather's and father’s generation, us cousins are mostly related by maternal relationships and this gathering was somewhat of a celebration of matrilineal inheritance. My Khala’s (maternal aunt’s) eldest daughter, Shahbano and her husband, Nadeem Lodhi, played gracious and unflinching hosts to the occasion - a rambunctious, emotional, anarchic affair characterized by rowdiness borne from reliving younger and altogether innocent and carefree days, afforded by the solidity of familial bonds and connection with the roots that nurtured those bonds. In addition to the cousins that live in Karachi, some of us traveled to Karachi from Berlin, Dubai, Islamabad, Lahore, Toronto, Washington D.C.