Sufi music is the devotional music of the Sufis, inspired by the works of Sufi poets, like Rumi, Hafiz, Bulleh Shah and Khwaja Ghulam Farid.

Qawwali is the most well known form of Sufi music, common in Pakistan and India. However, music is also central to the Sema ceremony of the whirling dervishes, which is set to a form of music called Ayin, a vocal and instrumental piece featuring Turkish classical instruments such as the ney (a reed flute). The West African gnawa is another form, and Sufis from Indonesia to Afghanistan to Morocco have made music central to their practises. Some of the Sufi orders have taken an approach more akin to puritan forms of Islam, declaring music to be unhelpful to the Sufi way.

Sufi love songs are often performed as ghazals and Kafi, a solo genre accompanied by percussion and harmonium, using a repertoire of songs by Sufi poets.

Shahram Nazeri (Persian:شهرام ناظری, Kurdish: Şehram Nazirî ) is a contemporary Iranian tenor of Kurdish ancestry who sings classical Kurdish music and Persian music from Kermanshah. He is one of Iran's most respected vocalists. He has been accompanied by some of the authorities of Persian traditional music such as Jalil Shahnaz, Alizadeh, Jalal Zolfonoun, Payvar.

He was the first vocalist to set Rumi's poetry to Iranian music thirty-five years ago, thus establishing a tradition of Sufi music within both Iranian classical music and his music was instrumental in introducing Western musical audiences to both Sufism and to the poetry of Rumi. The New York Times has dubbed him the Persian Nightingale and the Christian Science Monitor has called him Iran's Pavarotti.

Nazeri has released over forty recordings to date. His Gol-e Sadbarg (The One-hundred-petalled Rose) is among the best-selling albums of Persian classical music and Sufi music in the history.

His musical talents were first nurtured by his mother at a very young age. Throughout his childhood, he was under the tutelage of the most renowned masters of Persian music including Abdollah Davami, Nourali Boroumand, and Mahmood Karimi.

Anandmurti Gurumaa (Devnagari: आनन्दमूर्ति गुरुमाँ Punjabi: ਅਨੰਦ੍ਮੁਰਤੀ ਮਾਂ), also known as Gurumaa born in Amritsar, Punjab India, is a New Age spiritual guide. She is respected by followers of many faiths including Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Sufism. Her message transcends gender, religious, political, geographic and material boundaries. She claims to be well versed with varied subjects like Zen, Buddhism, Art, Upanishad, Yoga and fuses scientific aptitude with ancient wisdom which enables her to take a pragmatic approach to life and its varied shades.

Anandmurti means “an embodiment of Divine Bliss” and Gurumaa means “Master Mother” in Hindi. Gurumaa teaches the disciplines of meditation, yoga, present moment awareness and self realisation, using meditation techniques from yoga, zen, tantra, sufism, sikhism, buddhism and devised methods. Gurumaa's core teachings include meditation, self realisation, evolving consciousness and non-duality.

Gurumaa was born on the 8 April 1966 at Amritsar in Punjab, India. She was educated in a convent school and did graduation in arts. In her childhood she used to accompany her mother to spiritual discourses, gatherings, satsangs. She would also have assemblies of sadhus coming home. Some of the friendly mahatmas would pick her to speak to.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Punjabi: نصرت فتح علی خان (Shahmukhī)) (October 13, 1948 – August 16, 1997), a world-renowned Pakistani musician, was primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis (a mystical tradition within Islam). Considered one of the greatest singers ever recorded, he possessed a six-octave vocal range^{[citation needed]} and could perform at a high level of intensity for several hours. Extending the 600-year old Qawwali tradition of his family, Khan is widely credited with introducing Sufi music to international audiences. He was popularly known as "Shahenshah-e-Qawwali", meaning "The King of Kings of Qawwali".

Born in Faisalabad, Pakistan, Khan had his first public performance at age of 16, at his father's chelum. He officially became the head of the family qawwali party in 1971, and was signed by Oriental Star Agencies (OSA), Birmingham, U.K., in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, Khan released movie scores and albums for various labels in Pakistan, Europe, Japan and the U.S. He engaged in collaborations and experiments with Western artists, becoming a well-known world music artist in the process. He toured extensively, performing in over 40 countries.

Hajji Hazrat Ali bin Bahawal Sheir is a Politician in Afghanistan. He previously served as a military commander for the Northern Alliance in eastern Afghanistan.

Ali was born in 1964 in Kabul to an ethnic Pashai^{[citation needed]} family. He rose to prominence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As a commander for Hezb-e Islami Khalis he quickly became an important leader for the Pashai community. Hazrat Ali has also been described as an Afghan Army commander under the Soviet puppet regime. He fled Afghanistan to live in Mashad, Iran, where he is believed to have married an Iranian women.

During the war against the Taliban, Ali is said to have been aligned with Ahmad Shah Massoud. Following the fall of the Taliban Ali joined with two other leaders in the Jalalabad-Tora Bora region, Abdul Qadir and Mohammed Zaman to set up the Eastern Shura, a local provisional government. They were early backers of the first post-Taliban President Hamid Karzai.

The Asia Times reports that, after the fall of the Taliban, Ali's troops executed hundreds of captured Arab prisoners with the complicity of U.S. special forces.