Allah gives light in darkness,
  Allah gives rest in pain,
Cheeks that are white with weeping
  Allah paints red again.

The flowers and the blossoms wither,
Years vanish with flying fleet;
But my heart will live on forever,
  That here in sadness beat.

Gladly to Allah's dwelling
  Yonder would I take flight;
There will the darkness vanish,
  There will my eyes have sight.

by: Siegfried August Mahlmann - [1771to 1826] (tr. H.W. Longfellow)

Original German

Allah gibt Licht in Nächten,
Allah gibt Trost in Not!
Und bleich gehärmte Wange
Färbt Allah wieder rot!

Blumen und Blüten welken,
Jahre verschwinden im Flug;
Doch ach! mein Herz wird bleiben,
Das hier voll Schwermut schlug!

Fröhlich zu Allah's Wohnung
Werd' ich hinüber gehn,
Dort wird die Nacht verschwinden,
Dort wird mein Aug' ihn sehn.

Muhammad Abdul Quddus Muwakil is the quintessential Trini: a mélange of cultures, histories, and genes. Although he often wears the colours and emblems of Rastafari, he is a practising Muslim, fluent in Arabic. His father named him after the Prophet, and Abdul Quddus translates as “slave of the Most High.”

“Islam has influenced the core of my being, the way I live,” Muwakil says. “It has taught me to be respectful to others, to be truthful, and to give to the less fortunate.” This doesn’t prevent him from having questions, though. He challenges the Muslim belief that music is haram (forbidden). After all, he plays the guitar, flute, harmonica, and African djembe drums, and music reaches the audience that he most wants to reach: the youth.

A poem on Ramadan by the esteemed Khalim Ali Principal of Trinidad's Warrenville TIA Primary school

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Aashiq al-Rasul - Every Beat - Acapella - Official Music Video, Voice Only, No Instruments used.

'Khusrau penned the 'kalams' (verses) and instructed three child vocalists to reply to the south Indian scholar with 'taans' - classical music notations. The poet wrote a code of musical conduct for the 'kalams' to be sung and it became the first qawwali musical verse sung for the common man,' Ayaz said.

In his memoirs Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, has named several leading musicians of his time including Sheikh Ghuran, Sheikh Adhan, Khawaja Abdullah Marwareed, Sheikh Nai, Sheikh Quli, Ghulam Saadi, Meer Anju and many others. It is believed that the renowned musician Baiju Bawra was among the musicians in Humayun’s court.

"Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. It has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely resemble one of Islam's best-known refrains. Like the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the adhan. A nasal intonation is evident in both. Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now. Coincidence or not, this traditional AfroAmerican folk music possesses features that are found in Islamic African music and hardly at all in other styles. Grehart Kubik, a musicologist who specializes in African rain-forest music, concludes: "Many traits that have been considered unusual, strange and difficult to interpret by earlier blues researchers can now be better understood as a thoroughly processed and transformed Arabic-Islamic stylistic component. What makes the blues different from African American music in the Caribbean and in South America is, after all, its Arabic-Islamic stylistic ingredients."