Rahab player

When I saw this photograph, I was floored. The woodcarver is playing a rabab, an ancient instrument found in present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Iran. It has been used almost exclusively for Sufi music for at least three centuries.

Allyn Miner has written a book about this instrument and its relationship to the modern sarod of India, of which it is probably a predecessor. I happen to own two, one of them at least 200 years old, which I acquired from a carpet-dealer in San Francisco in the 1970s: he was allowed to take two out of Afghanistan. In my travels, I have found only a dozen in the United States, and good recordings of this instrument are few in number (I probably have all the ones available, due to constant searching).

I was very fortunate to have a teacher for rabab in the person of Ustad Hashim Chishti of the CHishti Sufi teaching lineage. He had been brought to America by Zuleikha and her then-partner Yusuf. When I showed him mine, he looked through a tiny hole in the goatskin soundboard and said to his interpreter, "Tell him there are eggs inside". I thought he was making a joke, and he was very insulted I did not look. Eventually, I did look, and surely enough, there were four little emptied-out partridge eggs glued inside, facing up like little espresso cups. As the weeks went by, I gradually learned that the eggs symbolize transformation on the Sufi path, insofar as a bird is born twice: once when the egg is laid, and then when it breaks out of the shell. There is usually a bird-head motif to the pegbox of the Afghan rabab, and the string holders at the end are usually also carved in the shape of a bird's head.

The odd thing is, when I play mine, I usually also drink tea from a small blue-and-white Chinese porcelain bowl, just like in your photograph!

- Daniel O'Donnell