Ali Akbar Moradi

Kurdish-Iranian master of the tanbur, the sacred long-necked lute of the Yarsan, born in 1957 in Gahvareh in the Guran region near Kermanshah. The Yarsan, also called Ahl-e Haqq, are a Kurdish religious tradition of their own going back to the eleventh century, with their own cosmology and scriptures: close to Sufism in spirit, but not the same thing and not a branch of Islam. He appears here under Sufism because that is the nearest place this directory has, not because the two are one.

He holds the seventy-two ritual maqam of the Yarsan tradition, and with the permission of its spiritual authorities he was the first to write them down and publish them so that they would survive. He lives in Iranian Kurdistan and teaches the tanbur there. His records include Fire of Passion (2000, with Pejman Hadadi) and In the Mirror of the Sky (2004, with Kayhan Kalhor), and he tours internationally with the programme Sacred Music of Kurdistan.