Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s 78th birth anniversary: remembering the king of qawwali who took a Sufi tradition to the world
FAISALABAD: He would have turned 78 this week. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad on 13 October 1948 and died in London on 16 August 1997, aged just 48 — and yet, on his birth anniversary, the striking thing is how little his voice has aged. New listeners still find it every day, often through a clip or a cover, and stay.
His father had hoped for a doctor or an engineer. Khan chose the family’s centuries-old art instead, and then did something nobody had quite done with it: he carried qawwali, the devotional music of Sufi gatherings, into the concert halls and festivals of the world, fusing Eastern and Western sounds without sanding down what made the form powerful. The title that followed him everywhere — Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, the king of qawwali — was earned on stages from Lahore to London.
The record books noticed. His 125 recorded albums entered the Guinness records as the most by any qawwali artist. Pakistan gave him the Pride of Performance in 1987; UNESCO gave him its music prize; one of his albums reached a Grammy nomination in the traditional folk category in the year of his death.
Western musicians queued up to work with him. Peter Gabriel featured his voice in film music that reached global audiences, and his albums with Canadian musician Michael Brook, Mustt Mustt and Night Song among them, remain reference points for what a cross-cultural collaboration can sound like when neither side condescends. His nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan now carries the family tradition to a generation that never saw Nusrat live.
That, in the end, is the anniversary story: a singer from Faisalabad whose language millions of his listeners do not speak, and who moves them anyway, 29 years after his death.
