"Allahu akhbar!" The man in the centre of the stage sings loud and clear, and 11 more follow in unison. "Allahu akhbar!" They hold their notes simultaneously in the air for an unfeasibly long period of time. We are hearing the Umayyad Mosque azan, or call to prayer - one unlike any other in the Muslim world. But we aren't in Damascus, or even in Syria. We're in the Al Dhafra Hall of the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, on the opening night of Nafahat Ramadania, a sacred music festival which translates into English as Blossoms of Ramadan.
The man at centre stage is Sheikh Hamza Shakour, whose fine, soft, Sufi voice has made him not only the choir master of the Munshiddin (reciters) at the Great Mosque, one of the oldest mosques in Islamic history, but one of the best-known bass vocalists in the field of classical Arab religious music. The composer and producer of dozens of albums, including the Fartek Album, Samtan wa Daani, Indassaf Al-Lail and Al-Kudsu Tunadina, Sheikh Shakour is equally at home singing solo as alongside his group, the Religious Singers Association of Damascus.
Shakour's performance was the first of five evenings of religious chanting arranged by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, as the first ever religious music festival held in the city during Ramadan. The evening saw the Ibn Arabi Religious Chanting Troupe from Morocco; Thursday will see a performance from the Religious and Heritage Chanting Ensemble from Lebanon and next week will welcome the Sham Troupe from Damascus and the Emirati singer Ahmad Bukhatir.
For 90 minutes last Thursday, Shakour, dressed in a traditional striped Damascene thobe, shawl and red fez, leading a group including five percussionists (playing the oud, kanoon, ney, riqq and mezar, the latter two types of drum), held his audience by singing to God. "You are a world that is both internal and external," he chanted, semi-hypnotically. "Ramadan is a month that has more majesty than the other months. Fasting to Islam is a privilege, and in it all the heavens become crowded with goodness." Even to one who doesn't understand the language, or perhaps because of it, the rhythm of Shakour's group was intensely compelling.
Despite leading a 300-year-old Sufi tradition in the Syrian capital, offstage Shakour is an impressively large, personable and unaffected character. His father was a muezzin, and taught him to recite the call to prayer when he was 10. His mother began to sing religious muwashaat, or rhyming verse, to him when he was three. But what exactly is Sufi music, and where does it originate from? The type followed by Shakour comes under the Rifaeya school of Islamic jurisprudence and is characterised by a form of asceticism known as zuhd.
"Our way is a gain for the soul through the love of God," Shakour says. "The ascetic becomes detached from this world and his soul and thoughts become orientated toward the next life. He leaves the pleasures of this life, its glory and its money, and he celebrates his soul instead and raises it to God. The Sufi way is refined and pure; it's the core of faith." And faith, or a belief in benevolent goodness, seems to be one of the essential elements in devotional music. Without prompting, Shakour launches into poetry.
"If faith is lost ? and the human accepts a world without faith, then he makes annihilation its twin," he says. Yet although there is faith, it's a peculiarly selfless, open-ended and supplicatory form, as the second verse of a poem he sings to God shows: "If I ask to see You and be with You then please do not make your answer, 'It shall not be'." "As well as religious muwashaat, there's madeeh (praise) and ibtihal (supplication)," Shakour explains. "You talk to God, and you say, 'Oh Thou who can see me and whom I cannot see' and you pray that way."
Yet there is nothing prescriptive or dogmatic about the music or its delivery. The muwashaat, which English translations give, somewhat confusingly, as the Italian terza rima, or rhyming verse, is chanting that likens itself to the singing of poetry, with its own metre, harmony and melody.
"First of all the word is the most important thing, then the composition and then the good delivery," Shakour says. "Our duty and commitment is to put the Sufi compositions within the context of high artistic delivery and give it to our audience."
This is exactly what Abdulla al Amri, the Cultural Foundation's director of arts and culture, had in mind when he planned Nafahat Ramadania earlier this year.
"We see this as an extension to the Sounds of Arabia festival which we started in May," he says. "We thought of having something with a religious base which was unique and new, because usually it's quiet during Ramadan, and a little bit boring. We thought we'd have something rich that people would enjoy."
Laypersons and westerners, too, can enjoy devotional religious music, even if they don't understand the language, Shakour says. "All that comes from the heart can be delivered straight to the heart. I must admit that there are true western Sufis who feel the word even without knowing what it means linguistically."
For Shakour, all that matters is that a person is honest. "In our way, there is truth, and without truth, the way is a failure," he said. "Without integrity there is no way to deliver it [the music] to someone's heart."
Yet precisely how important is -asceticism for a Sufi, and is it possible to be attached to worldly things and still be one? "Over-attachment to worldly things ruins the Sufi, -ruins his heart, ruins his mind and spoils his essence," Shakour says. "The human being should only have an attachment to the worldly things he needs to get by, to meet his needs without being greedy."
The link between fasting and religious music has long been made, perhaps nowhere better than the poet Rumi's 13th-century poem Fasting: "There's hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness / we are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox / is stuffed full of anything, no music / If the brain and belly are burning clean / with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire? / When you're full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should? / When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help."
It's a concept that Shakour feels deeply. "Rumi is saying that when the stomach is empty, the voice has raneen - it has tune and it's pure without," says Shakour. "Take an empty glass and it will produce a pure ring, as opposed to a full glass. For the human being it's the same concept."
Shakour says that ideally, food should be taken five hours before a performance. "I broke my fast today with a very light meal, soup, and by the time I get on stage it will be about three hours since I've eaten," he says.
Shakour is both spiritually and commercially savvy. When asked if he could recommend any books on how to appreciate Sufi music, the Sheikh swiftly transitions to his own highly successful collaboration with the Al-Kindi Ensemble, named after the ninth-century Iraqi philosopher and musician.
"The best thing to do is to listen to CD albums of Sufi music," he says. "I have five albums that are world famous." Shakour himself is extremely well-travelled, and has performed in India, China, Spain, France and Morocco. Next week he travels to the United States for the sixth time; two months ago he performed in Atlanta and has previously sung at the Kennedy Centre in Washington and in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami.
Yet Shakour has also worked tirelessly to promote cross-cultural and cross-religious co-operation in his own country, merging his Association of Religious Chanters with a Christian choir and delivering songs together, sometimes on Christian holidays. Last Christmas, they performed together at the Opera House in Damascus.
"I sang about Jesus and the Virgin Mary," he says. "I composed words from Ahmad Shawqi's poetry to sing about Jesus, because rifq, or mercy, compassion, was born the day Jesus was born."
And music, for Shakour, is the tie that binds love, mercy and compassion together in a unified and pure form.
"The Sufi must love other humans because those who love are also loved. He who loves all people is loved because he calls for unity: we all love and we all pray to God."
* Translation by Rasha Elass
As well as the five evenings of music, Nafahat Ramadan is presenting a series of six lectures on Islam, in Arabic only. All performances and lectures at the Cultural Foundation begin at 9.30pm. To listen to music samples or buy Sufi albums, including those by Sheikh Shakour, visit @email:www.alkindi.com