Our Nusrat

To millions he was ustad, or master. To others he was the Singing Buddha or the Pavarotti of the East. In London’s clubs he might have been the trippiest sample they’d ever heard, and to Jeff Buckley (who sang covers of his songs in concert) Nusrat was Elvis. To Indians like the composer A. R. Rahman (who recorded a pop number with him called “Gurus of Peace”) he was an emissary across history’s most painful fissures.

The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1997 at forty-eight, was and remains the world’s most famous performer of qawwali, a kind of Islamic devotional music originating in the thirteenth century and performed in various parts of South Asia, conventionally at the shrines of Sufi saints. At its core Sufism is a mystical mode of Islamic belief and practice that emphasizes a direct relationship with God through the idea of sacred love. Traditional qawwali (the name derives from the Arabic word for “utterance”) is performed by a lead singer or a pair of singers, always men; a chorus duplicates their musical phrases, builds harmonies, and supports the many vocal ripples with a rhythmic, hypnotic clapping. Today qawwali is nearly always sung alongside a harmonium and tabla that both anticipate and follow the singers’ improvisations. Large crowds gather for concerts, which can sometimes last the night.

The lyrics—typically in languages such as Urdu, Punjabi, and Farsi—are drawn from Sufi poetry of the region and seek God through exalted declarations of love. At times they can have a disarming intimacy—the speaker takes on the persona of a female lover flirting with a male beloved, who stands in for the supreme being. “Come, my love, let me behold you. I will not look at another, nor will I let you.”

But it isn’t simply these words that are meant to bring one closer to God; it is their repetition. In an archetypal composition, “Allah, Muhammad, Chaar Yaar” (“Allah, Muhammad, and their Four Companions”), Nusrat—as is he fondly called by Anglophone audiences—rehearses certain phrases, mixing them with the names of God and his loyal servants. The chorus mimics these sounds over and over, louder and louder, as his words start to change texture, becoming the stippled sediment of a riverbed, then relentless rain, then, as the rhythm quickens, frenzied horses bursting across an open field. Finally his voice shatters into euphoric syllables calling out to the heavens.

One of my earliest memories is of hearing Nusrat in concert with my parents in New Delhi during his 1996 tour of India. I remember sitting on my father’s shoulders, swaying almost uncontrollably as Nusrat’s voice rose like a wail, higher and wider, as if to rip open the sky with his benediction. In qawwali audiences are invited to take part in sama, a Sufi practice that seeks a close connection with the divine through music and dance. To appreciate qawwali is not just to marvel at the vocal agility of its performers but to relinquish one’s body and surrender to a place beyond language.

Nusrat perfected this form. The devotion of his cult following cannot be overstated. During his lifetime and after it, his music has found fans of all persuasions—from the Bollywood dance enthusiast to the European hippie to the pious, classically trained South Asian listener—who seem to make him their object of worship. Across the board, whether or not they understand the lyrics, whether or not they believe in God, they find themselves inexplicably—spiritually—moved.

Nusrat was born in 1948 in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), Pakistan, to a family of traditional qawwali singers who had mastered their art over generations. His father, Fateh Ali Khan, was skilled in both classical music and devotional qawwali, a combination that would influence Nusrat’s singing style. He used improvised riffs called sargam liberally and punctuated poetry with classical forms like the tarana, a scat-like syllabic arrangement of notes developed in the thirteenth century.

Fateh Ali Khan hoped his son would forsake his legacy and pursue a more lucrative and socially respectable career in medicine, but Nusrat was adamant about staying with the family art. He made his debut at a mourning ceremony for his father in 1964, at sixteen. A few days after the funeral Nusrat dreamed that his father took him to Ajmer Sharif, one of the holiest Sufi shrines in the Indian subcontinent, and commanded him to sing. Nusrat woke from the dream mid-song. Until then, he would later say, he hadn’t truly known what singing was.

After his father’s death Nusrat continued his training with his uncles, Salamat Ali Khan and Mubarak Ali Khan, eventually becoming the family troupe’s leader in 1971. He started to bring his own flavor to traditional compositions, speeding them up slightly to suit contemporary tastes. He also included lighter folk songs among the exacting classical structures that typified his family’s style. Some found a path to God in these more playful verses, Nusrat said, and others found solace amid heartbreak.

By the late 1970s Nusrat’s music had reached the diaspora in Birmingham, England. Oriental Star Agencies—a young record label committed to promoting South Asian music—released his first albums overseas, catapulting him to stardom among Pakistanis, Indians, and their émigré communities. In 1981 he made his first foray into Bollywood, contributing an incantation, “Haq Ali” (“Truth Is Ali”), to the film Nakhuda, about the relationship between a Muslim inn owner and his Hindu tenant and mentee. This undulating, meditative praise song to Ali (a venerated figure in Islam) was a world away from the up-tempo Bollywood numbers that would characterize his later career.

A few years after Oriental Star discovered Nusrat, Peter Gabriel—once the zany lead singer of the rock band Genesis—caught wind of his talents. In 1985 he invited Nusrat to perform at the now-historic World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival (WOMAD) on the eastern coast of England. Nusrat opened with an invocation, “Allah Hoo.” For several minutes he sang a series of slow, high-pitched declarations in praise of God while his vocal accompanist accented the melody in higher and lower registers. Nusrat’s voice kept grasping above itself, almost reaching a shriek, before it dropped to a weightier chant: “Allah hoo hoo hoo, Allah hoo hoo hoo.” The harmonium and tabla charged in, and the chorus joined the recitation, clapping along. By the end these jubilant calls had left the air dizzy, and Nusrat’s seemingly endless voice lingered even after it had gone quiet.

This was the first time an average, festival-going Western audience had heard qawwali. Most of the concertgoers couldn’t understand the spiritual message of the lyrics. But they were enchanted. Throughout the set, which lasted two and a half hours, the crowd screamed and whistled, clearly overwhelmed. For Nusrat, too, this was a revelation. He had found a whole new world of listeners.

Nusrat produced six studio albums with Gabriel’s label, Real World Records, beginning with Shahen-Shah (1989) and Mustt-Mustt (1990). The latter, a collaboration with the Canadian experimental musician Michael Brook, features a remix of the title song—a traditional exaltation of the Sindhi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar—by the British trip-hop group Massive Attack. Since Nusrat’s death Real World has released three more albums of his music.

In Shahen-Shah Nusrat sings as he would have in a live concert, tag-teaming with his accompanists between verse and chorus. But by the second album he has embraced the sultriness of a bass guitar and begun layering long, wordless calls over a chorus of poetry that persists softly underneath. In Massive Attack’s concluding remix he transports a chant that might, at a shrine, have induced fits of godly ecstasy to the urban dance floor. He had evidently begun to delight both in foreign sounds and in the technological possibilities of audio recording itself. Years later Gabriel said that unlike most singers of devotional music at the time, Nusrat was “willing to try anything with anyone who was enthusiastic.”

As Nusrat brought qawwali out of South Asia and into cutting-edge recording studios, he repackaged it for nontraditional audiences. He pared down compositions that were conventionally improvised on for more than an hour to a cassette-friendly twenty-five minutes at most. He also became a more adventurous musician, finding new forms for his art—from live fusion to cinema. Behind the scenes he listened to Western classical music and became a jazz enthusiast. “Jazz is something like our music,” he said. “They didn’t write it down; they played with the soul.”

In 1988 Nusrat teamed up with Gabriel again and sang a haunting alap—a slow, wordless introductory movement—for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Then, in 1994, he tried his hand at scoring a film himself, with Shekhar Gupta’s Bandit Queen. The eclectic soundtrack meanders between atmospheric distortions of Nusrat’s voice, arhythmic tabla expositions, and abstract orchestral arrangements.

The following year Nusrat produced perhaps his most memorable work for cinema—a pair of laments that he made with Pearl Jam’s lead singer, Eddie Vedder, for the Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon film Dead Man Walking. In “The Long Road,” Vedder sings about lovers parting in his signature bristly voice, while an acoustic guitar, harmonium, and tabla gingerly keep pace. Then, without warning, Nusrat arrives with free-form keening. His voice moves slowly, at a lower octave than Vedder’s. It coils and bends, and the effect is at once romantic and inescapably painful.

Closer to home, too, Nusrat continued to challenge the definition of a qawwali singer. In 1996, the same year he toured India, he recorded an album in collaboration with the Indian poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar. Together they produced the superhit “Afreen Afreen” (“Praise the Creator!”), which retained some elements of Nusrat’s more orthodox style, like vocal flurries in classical keys and recursive choric chanting. But this decisively poppy song became a craze because its velvet melody rides on the kind of infectious electronic groove that was a mainstay of late-Nineties Bollywood.

The music video that accompanied the track, too, was shockingly racy for a singer of religious music. Shots of Nusrat singing behind a veil of fire are intercut with sequences of women in bikini tops and sarongs, writhing seductively amid desert sands. Although Nusrat himself criticized the video, it was evidence of  just how far he dared to venture from his long-established musical form. Ruminating to Jeff Buckley in a 1996 interview on how his music differed from his father’s, Nusrat said, “As times change, people change, and so do their tastes, so I try to understand what the public wants, what they require. I have tried to make the music a bit easier for them to understand.”

Not everyone was enthused. As Nusrat marched further into rock, pop, and eventually Bollywood territory, older South Asian fans accused him of pandering to Western and commercial palates. The rigor and piety of night-long qawwali performances, they felt, had been traded in for the facile allure of the pithy radio single. But although he admitted that he played differently for East and West, Nusrat maintained that his music had never drifted too far from qawwali’s prescriptions and Sufism’s tenets of love and peace. He claimed that in concert he always adhered to the religious sequencing of songs, and also implied that his recorded experiments were distinct from his traditional qawwali practice. When “Allah, Muhammad, Chaar Yaar” was used in the 1994 film Natural Born Killers to frame a prison riot sequence, he was famously upset that his “religious music” had been used to depict violence.  With its congregation now stretching from Lahore to Los Angeles, the church of Nusrat was firmly established, but so were the were the terms of the cultural debate over what he meant.

By the time of his death, Nusrat’s health had been in shambles for a while. He was diabetic, weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and needed regular dialysis to keep his body going. He was on his way to Los Angeles for a kidney transplant but made it only as far as London after falling ill en route. A week later, in hospital, he succumbed to a heart attack. It is said he worked relentlessly until the very end.

As obituaries and tributes sprang up around the world, a young Pakistani filmmaker named Farjad Nabi—who would go on in 2013 to make the wacky, well-received comedy Zinda Bhaag—took a contrarian stance. That year he released his debut short film, Nusrat Has Left the Building…But When?, a whimsical, sometimes cloying “docu-dreama” that levels an unapologetic critique of Nusrat’s career. The jacket of the DVD reads:

The film departs from the popular version of Nusrat and goes back to his early roots in pure Sufi music, before and after he exploded on the international scene. Nusrat’s metamorphosis from a genuine popular artiste to mass produced exotica of the east left behind many disillusioned listeners and devotees in its wake. Perhaps for the first time this film gives voice to the other side of the song.

The movie follows an anxious young painter who lives in a ramshackle flat where he practices his arts (drawing with a smattering of music). We first find him shirtless and brooding over cups of chai. Then we wander the streets of Lahore with him, seeing the city through his eyes. As the camera navigates labyrinthine alleys between tightly fitted, bare-brick walls, it lingers occasionally on the city’s inhabitants—food vendors, children, couples, crowds jostling in the market. A handful of Nusrat’s most famous qawwalis play behind all these images, suggesting that common people are his music’s truest connoisseurs: the soundtrack begins when a taxi driver loads a Nusrat tape into his car’s player. Between bouts of flânerie, the angsty protagonist draws a portrait of Nusrat on a wall under the words NO GRAFFITI ALLOWED.

The climax arrives in the form of a stop-motion sequence based on a pencil sketch of Nusrat performing before a Pakistani crowd. As he sits cross-legged, singing, the scene of the concert falls away, and he begins to writhe as if in pain. Cue the diatribe: a garish sequence of visuals—mostly snippets of Nusrat’s Bollywood-style music videos—showing skimpily clad women with trite expressions and oafish bros with jet-black sunglasses. As clips of Nusrat performing with electric guitars and keyboards in glitzy TV studios flash by, Nabi interjects lurid shots of white circus performers. It’s hard to miss the point.

Perhaps there’s merit to the accusation that Nusrat sold out. In 1996 “Mustt Mustt” appeared in an Indian Coca-Cola commercial for the cricket World Cup, which was hosted in South Asia that year. At the time India’s economy was rapidly liberalizing, and many labor organizations and political parties, especially on the left, saw foreign corporations as threats to economic independence. Many die-hard fans felt that Nusrat had watered down his music long ago. Now he seemed to be peddling Western capitalism itself.

But what Nabi’s film gets wrong is that Nusrat was never a saint—even if he is revered as one. He didn’t exactly move in a linear fashion from sacred to profane or from authentic to adulterated. Rather, over the course of his career, he dabbled in all kinds of musical endeavors, from the funky record to the MTV-friendly tidbit, making himself over many times in the process. Sometimes the point was clearly to test his own artistry; at other times he may have been caving to a market that worked him into the ground, or simply trying to make a quick buck. Even as Nusrat gathered critics with each reinvention, he also acquired new listeners who continued to celebrate their version of him, into his afterlife.

In June 2021, twenty-four years after Nusrat’s death, a project manager at Real World Records was poking around the company’s archives in Wiltshire. In the stacks where he often went after lunch, he found a tape whose cover read “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—Trad album,” presumably indicating a “traditional” compilation. Immediately he knew this wasn’t an ordinary find.

Soon the staffer’s suspicion was confirmed: here was a new Nusrat album, an unprecedented addition to the hundred-odd he had released in his lifetime. The team at Real World treaded carefully, hiring experts to restore the tape before they dared to play it. When they finally did, what they found was marvelous—four pristine tracks recorded in 1990, each about beckoning and then surrendering to God. More surprisingly, since it was at Real World that Nusrat had first begun to break away from his traditional sound, the arrangements feature only the basics: Nusrat’s voice, his accompanists’ voices, a harmonium, a tabla, and clapping.

Real World released the album as Chain of Light in the fall of 2024. It transports us to the moment when Nusrat’s vocal abilities were at their peak and he was on the cusp of becoming a full-blown genre-bending sensation in the Western world. The first track, “Ya Allah Ya Rehman” (“Oh Allah, Most Gracious”), is a hamd, a prayer to God that commences any qawwali performance. Starting with a soft intonation, Nusrat progressively introduces quatrains that profess undying faith in Allah. In between, he and his vocal accompanists digress into runs of increasing complexity. By the end his voice seems to have doubled in size. It soars effortlessly, calling out, “Allah, Allah, Allah”—the desperation is overwhelming.

Then he drops into a different register. The second track, “Aaj Sik Mitran Di” (“Today, This Longing for My Beloved”), a Punjabi composition written by Pir Meher Ali Shah, is about pining for an earthly love who has a moonlike face and black hair. The beat is slower, and the vocals meander languidly as the speaker of the lyrics ponders his sadness. Soon a revelation comes: the elusive beloved of these verses is none other than Muhammad himself. And it must be so. In the traditional qawwali repertoire a hamd to Allah is always followed by a naat, a tribute to his Prophet.

The final track, “Khabram Raseed Imshab” (“Tonight I Received News”), is a coquettish Farsi ghazal (a poetic form originating in the Arabic tradition) by the thirteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau, who is hailed as one of qawwali’s forefathers. But the real gem and discovery is the penultimate track, “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran” (“Oh Helper, Oh Exalted One”), an Urdu song in praise of the twelfth-century Sufi preacher Abdul Qadir Jilani, who lived in Baghdad. Nusrat is known to have sung the other three pieces on various occasions, but Chain of Light’s is the only known performance—let alone recording—of this original composition.

Even to the most dedicated Nusrat afficionados, the song is striking for its somber tone and unpredictable melodic turns. Throughout the recording his voice makes lithe, incredibly difficult jumps from clipped bass chanting to open-lunged supplication. The changes of rhythm are equally intricate. From a consistent sixteen-beat cycle, the song switches to a spritely six-beat sequence and back again. Then, as the incantation builds to a climax, the rhythm changes once more, now to a fast, buoyant eight-beat cycle that propels the chant almost compulsively until it tapers off, gathering itself in a chilling, single low note.

The album’s title comes from the lyrics of this sumptuous hymn: “Every breath is related like a chain of light.” “Chain” here refers to genealogy, how each believer’s faith is tied to the saints and masters who came before. “A hundred thanks,” Nusrat sings, “that my connection to them is eternal.” Read another way, these words might be ours, too, as we rediscover Nusrat decades after he left our world.

Two winters ago, more than two years after my father died, I was sifting through the detritus of his life. Among his old canvases and decades-outdated calendars, I came across a DVD labeled Aarzoo-e-Mohabbat (A Desire for Love), after a Nusrat song. This was the title my father had given a somewhat tacky—though narratively wild—short film he had made as an unknown, struggling artist in 1999. It turned out to be a potpourri of indulgent recitations of left-leaning Hindi poetry and various impressions of Mumbai’s street life, sustained for nearly all of its seventeen minutes by Nusrat’s voice. At one point the actor Irrfan Khan (who would later achieve international acclaim in The Namesake) makes an appearance as a troubled painter who draws a large portrait of Nusrat and then lies beside it.

Despite its many disjointed gestures and its uncanny resonances with Nabi’s film, my father’s strange project seems to have been, above all else, a love letter to Nusrat, who is addressed as a “friend from Pakistan.” Completed during India and Pakistan’s last major war, the film features handwritten notes addressed to Nusrat in Hindi and English from his Indian fans: “You will live forever in our hearts…everywhere, around the world.… Long live Nusrat!”

Shortly after, the camera hovers over an assemblage of newspaper clippings, showing headlines about the unfolding militarized conflict interspersed with Nusrat’s obituaries. As we scan news of fired bullets and slain soldiers, a version of Nusrat’s “Teri Yaad” (“I Remember You”), a synth-powered, disco-like number from the Bollywood thriller Kartoos (1999), pulses on the soundtrack. Later, the film’s anchoring song, “Tumhe Dillagi Bhool Jani Padegi” (“You Must Forget Your Dalliances”), supports a montage of canoodling lovers, street performers, children, and homeless people. Within the film’s broader conceit, the lyrics—“Why don’t you give your heart to someone and see what happens”—seem to instruct Indians and Pakistanis to look beyond the borders that separate their countries. Nusrat, in effect, becomes an antiwar messenger.

“Our Sufi music is a bridge to other nations,” Nusrat once said. “It is a way to bring people closer in love and brotherhood.” It’s fitting to remember that iteration of him now that India and Pakistan find themselves in the early days of another cease-fire, during which, as one of its many diplomatic hostilities, India has banned Nusrat’s Spotify page along with those of several other Pakistani artists. But if Nusrat is to remain our patron saint, perhaps embracing his missteps along with his triumphs would help us find still more of ourselves in his voice. There will always be room there.