AR Rahman the soft spoken genius says for him music is religion and he enjoys it every bit. His father was a musician and he is continuing the family tradition. Later he took to Islam and is enjoying every aspect of it.
Says Rahman “I don’t know. It’s more about convenience sometimes, you know… (silence) I don’t want to get into religious aspects and doctrines and all that stuff, but I’ll narrate a recent example. I recently went to Medina for a pilgrimage because my mother was ill. I had a mannat and I wanted to go. I have a friend (there) who invited me to his home. His mother’s from Medina, and his brother is an Imam. At his home, after we had food, the brother asked him, so what does your friend do? And he said, he’s into music.
The Imam instantly had a smile on his face, and said, oh, music is, in a way, the language to reach God. And he is from Medina, he’s an Imam in Medina. I was stunned, I was expecting him to frown, to change his expression or… (but) nothing like that happened. So when people look at things like that in black and white, they are perhaps just being safe in analysing something that is very complex. It is very complex, but it is also very beautiful.
But politics is not the artist’s zone. The duty of an artist is always to take people to another space, and music has the capacity to do that without drugs and vices. And that’s what we love about poets and musicians, and even movie stars and movies, and I’m a part of that. The more negative things happen, the more I want to just go into the zone and make people experience my world.
I come from a traditional music family – my father was a composer, so I’m following my family tradition. And the beauty of Sufism is, in a way, strangely connected to music. So for me the connection between these two was very fine said Rahman.
