PESHAWAR: Amid a crackdown on artists and musicians at the height of military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in 80’s Pakistan, Sardar Ali Takkar sang lyrical poetry, called ghazals, to rooms packed full of ethnic Pashtun patrons in some of Peshawar city’s oldest mansions.
Earlier this year, the 62-year-old singer came to Pakistan to receive the country’s highest civilian award, the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, for services rendered for Pashto music. It was a long overdue homecoming. A decade ago, Takkar had migrated to Canada and the US with his family following a militant attack in 2009 in which his daughter was injured in Islamabad.
“I thought to myself, if something bad happens to a single member of my family, they will ask me why I left them at the mercy of terrorists,” Takkar said during an interview last month with Arab News at a hujra, a traditionally all-male guesthouse in his hometown of Mardan near Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, where men discuss social and political affairs through the day.
At least thirteen prominent artists, particularly women Pashtun singers, were killed by Pakistan’s indigenous Taliban between 2008 and 2017, the heyday of the insurgency, according to a report published by a major Pakistani newspaper, The News. Most of them were killed in or near Peshawar city, the capital of KP province near the Afghan border. 
In 2016, Amjad Sabri, one of Pakistan’s most famous singers, was gunned down by the Taliban in the southern city of Karachi. Although a non-Pashtun, he was a leading exponent of Sufi devotional music, known as Qawwali, and his message of tolerance was similar to Takker’s. Sufism, a tolerant, mystical form of Islam, has millions of followers in Pakistan but is opposed by the Taliban and militant factions as heretical. 
During the peak of violent militancy in Pakistan in 2010, a heartbroken Takkar left his home for Canada with his wife and three children. Soon, news of the famous Pashto singer’s arrival began making the rounds in Washington DC, where he was eventually offered a job with Voice of America’s Deewa Radio, a Pashto language service for which Takkar now hosts radio programs promoting music, tolerance and Sufi poetry. His audience are primarily Pashtuns living in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, who now hear his voice from half a world away, over the Internet.
“Music softens hearts,” Takkar said, quoting Imam Ghazali, one of Islam’s most influential philosophers, and added with a smile, that despite making music illegal in Afghanistan, even the Taliban would perform the traditional Attan folk dance to songs he had composed and sung. 
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Takker’s foray into Sufism and music began as a hobby. Ironically, his greatest hits came during the Zia regime of the 80’s and his ghazal, “Gila mai zaka okra,” (I make a complaint to you, O’ God), remains one of the most famous Pashto melodies of recent times.
Takkar often also sings the poetry of Khan Abdul Ghani Khan, a renowned Pashtun philosopher and poet of the 20th century, whose poetry declared clergymen as the culprits behind the spread of extremist Islamic ideology.
“He (Ghani) started writing poetry at the age of fifteen. Look at his vision,” Sher Alam Shinwari, a popular culture journalist from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, told Arab News, going on to quote some of Takkar’s most popular compositions of Ghani’s words.
“Che pe noor da Allah na ve ware daly,
No da Kaa’bay da shagu dak meenar bas a karham.”
“What really matters are the blessing of Allah Almighty, 
Without blessings, even the Holy Kaaba is a minaret of sands.”
At the hujra where Takkar stayed until his return to the US last month, hundreds of young people came every day to pay their respects to the native singer, many of them avid listeners of his radio shows.
“Look who are my visitors,” Takkar said proudly. “They are all young people under 30.”
Overcome with emotion at being back in Mardan among his own people, Takkar looked around him and told his guests: “Let’s give art and culture another chance. Let’s bury the past.” 
Then he sang for his audience a famous Sufi verse and the famed voice of one of Pashto’s most celebrated artists rose once more over a land he had fled ten years ago.