[1] Its members are brother-and-sister Pakistani vocalists Sukhawat Ali Khan and Riffat Salamat, as well as Bay Area multi-instrumentalist/producer Richard Michos.
[2][1] Derk Richardson described Shabaz as an atypically successful attempt at combining world and dance music, writing that the band had "succeeded where countless others have faltered."
He further stated that there were two reasons the album was successful at achieving this crossover, namely: "The Khans sacrifice none of the emotional power of their singing in Shabaz's aggressively pop-crossover format, and Michos carefully complements their ecstatic stylings with his deftly programmed arrangements of traditional Asian and Middle Eastern acoustic instruments and modern Western electric guitars and synthesizers.
"[1] Robert Christgau gave the album a 3-star honorable mention, describing the band as "sister and brother qawwali singers with more spirit than shame and an American collaborator helping them take their bhangra and chela technopop".
[4] Silke Tudor wrote that on the album, "synthesizers and keyboards accent the ecstatic vocalizations of Sukhawat and Riffat, which is the opposite orientation of most exports from the Asian Underground.