Having had the honour of winning the President's Pride of Performance Medal, they are performing at the National Folk Music Festival of Pakistan 1988. Among the performers, the focus is on a bearer of a great tradition of qawwali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his group. In this report, Lok Virsa endeavours to give the reader a background to the origins and history of qawwali and the setting in the villages where it is performed. The medium of qawwali to present the deep mystical ,philosophy of Sufi Islam is generally known, but very little has been written about it to date. Under the Research Report Programme, preliminary work done on various elements of traditional culture is made available to the reader as soon as possible in order to ensure that the research work done by Lok Virsa does not remain only archival, but also can reach a wider readership. Lok Virsa (the National Iristitute of Folk and Traditional Heritage) has the mandate of collecting, documenting, archiving and projecting all aspects of our cultural traditions. By Adam Nayyar, Lok Virsa Research Centre, Islamabad.