Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Pop Prophets and Religious Pluralism

Pop Prophets and Religious Pluralism

Last updated on: April 22, 2014 at 9:18 pm by Jim Burklo

131 Comments

Pop Prophets and Religious Pluralism 2014-04-22T21:18:49+00:00 Jim Burklo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

SOULJOURN: The Book and the Journey

Pop Prophets and Religious Pluralism

A review by Jim Burklo of NATURAL MYSTICS: The Prophetic Lives of Bob Marley and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by Varun Soni (Figueroa Press: 2014)

Waves of wailing falsetto lifted Rama’s holy name above the reedy voice of the harmonium and the steady beat of hands clapping and palms sliding on the tabla. “Sanson Ki Mala Pe” sounded like the very stereotype of Indian spiritual music, to ears untrained like mine. But the song was a powerful expression of religious pluralism in a part of the world where it remains in short supply. The Urdu lyrics praise Rama, an Indian manifestation of God, and were performed by the world-renowned “qawwali” musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani Sufi Muslim who died in 1997. “Someone’s beloved lives in a temple while another’s lover is in a mosque… I am incapable of anything else but to love the name of love…” It’s a haunting love song to the Name known by many names.

Khan’s popularization of the song was prophetic, an expression of divine truth to human power. India and Pakistan are locked in an ongoing blood feud. “Hindutva” radical religious nationalism animates millions on one side and an increasingly hyper-orthodox Islam feeds xenophobia on the other. In this context, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a brave man for singing praise to Sri Ram.

Bob Marley sang truth to power, and took a bullet for it in 1976. He sang one love while two rival political parties, which were more like gangs, struggled for control of Jamaica. He survived to keep singing a Biblical vision of Exodus from oppression. His countercultural lyrics and lifestyle turned heads around the world, invigorating the souls of American blacks seeking equality, of Africans throwing off the chains of colonialism, and of freedom-yearning young people everywhere – then and now.

My boss, Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California, wrote about these two icons of world music in his doctoral thesis in religion a few years ago. Since then, he was awarded his PhD by the University of Capetown, and now his work has taken the form of an engaging new book: Natural Mystics.

Varun Soni argues that Khan and Marley, among other artists at present and in the recent past, situate themselves in long lineages of religious prophecy while expressing prophetic traditions in distinct ways that reflect cultural globalization and technological advances. Music is a more powerful medium for prophecy than ever before, now that it has the potential for instantaneous global reach. Varun names this phenomenon “pop-propheticism”, characterized by canonical recitation (referencing ancient lines of prophetic utterance), mystical intoxication with the Divine (whether through spiritual practices or by ingesting mind-altering substances), musical fusion (stretching traditional musical boundaries to reach new audiences), media proliferation (taking advantage of new and emerging communication channels), economic commodification (making the most of the global musical marketplace), and political appropriation (putting music consciously in the service of social change).

Pop-propheticism, by its very nature, presses ahead for religious pluralism. Musical fusion is both cause and consequence of an inner theo-dynamic fusion that makes light of the boundaries between traditional faiths – even as its spiritual validity is drawn from old faith traditions.

In 1977, when I was in seminary, I worked in a church in San Rafael, CA. There I befriended a new member. His name was Ben Burtt, and he’d just moved from the Midwest to take the job as the sound designer for a filmmaker named George Lucas who was making a movie called Star Wars. I asked Ben to tell me the plot of the film, and when he did, I felt sorry for him. “Poor fellow,” I thought, “he’s been recruited all the way to California to make a grade-C sci fi flick!” He asked me to help him record some sounds for the film, and also for his collection of noises, by getting him in to the seminary’s big stone chapel and bell tower. (In the echoing chapel, he recorded me saying “Main launch tubes open, sir!” – and I can’t be sure if it’s my voice, but those words are spoken in the movie toward the end when the fighters take off to blow up the Death Star.) Ben collected noises of all kinds on his fancy Swiss reel-to-reel tape recorder. He filed the reels in boxes lined up neatly in his apartment. “All the sounds in the movie have to be from the real-world environment,” he told me. “I speed them up, run them in reverse, alter them in all sorts of ways. But the basic sound has to be real in order for your ear to believe it.”

So it may also be with the mash-ups of religious traditions that pop-prophets compose. They don’t start from scratch. Their mysticism makes them heretics, but not of the sort that create religions out of thin air. Bob Marley was outrageous in his sound, his lyrics, and his presentation – but he was believable because it was all rooted deeply in the familiar language of the Bible. (See more about this in my “musing” from several years ago, The Bible and Bob Marley.) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang the classical qawwali music handed down through generations in the land now known as Pakistan. That made his musical contributions to Indian Bollywood scores believable, even as he bent all the expectations of his religious culture. Pop prophets make the amazing credible, because they compose it from elements heard before.

Pop-prophetic musicians take religious pluralism beyond tolerance and even beyond mutual exploration and admiration. They take it to the place that the Sufi poet, Rumi, described in one of his verses:

O**ut beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See a video interview about my new novel, SOULJOURN
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Associate Dean of Religious Life , University of Southern California

Previous Post

April 22, 2014

Monday Meditation: Resurrection

Next Post

April 22, 2014 Two Kinds of Christianity (A Conversation Between Mother and Son)

Recent Comments

131 Comments | Leave a Comment

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Author Interviews Battle Over the Body and Blood of Christ Bearing Beauty Book Reviews Christian Education christian spirituallity christianity Christmas Church Church Leadership Contemplation Creation Care Death and Dying Death Penalty Disruptive Change Disruptors Series Easter Education Evolution and Faith Future of Progressive Christianity Gun Violence Health & Wellness Holy Week Interfaith Israel-Palestine Leading Differently Lent LGBTQ Living with Cancer Meditations on the Cross Mental Illness millennials Mimetic Mondays Monday Meditations Movie Reviews New Monasticism Pando Populus Parenting Patheos 10+1 Q&A Series PC(USA) Politics Pop Culture Practical Theology Series Prayer progressive christian Race Relations Reformation religion Religion and Politics Religion in America Rethink Church Social Justice Spirituality Spirituality of the Body Stump a Scholar Technology and Faith Thanksgiving Theodicy Trust Me Church Uncategorized Why I'm Still Christian Youth Ministry

Select a Month December 2025 April 2025 January 2025 September 2023 September 2022 May 2022 February 2022 January 2022 November 2021 October 2021 May 2021 February 2021 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 June 2020 May 2020 March 2020 June 2019 March 2019 January 2019 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What church leader is called "the Bishop of Rome"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

The Archbishop of Canterbury The Pope The Patriarch The General Superintendent