February 20, 2026
By Rehan Piracha
LAHORE
When around 108 Afghan artists recently moved the Peshawar High Court seeking protection from deportation to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, it laid bare a grim reality that Pashto musicians have long known: for those who make music in the Pashtun belt, survival is their biggest challenge and has rarely been guaranteed.
The petition, filed by Afghan singers and performers fearing persecution if returned home, is the latest chapter in a decades-long assault on musical expression that has played out with striking similarity on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border.
For generations, the Dabgari neighbourhood in Peshawar’s old city was the beating heart of Pashto music. Musicians lived and worked there, their homes doubling as studios and rehearsal spaces. That world began to unravel in the early 2000s, when conservative religious parties sympathetic to the Taliban swept to power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — the northwestern Pakistani province of which Peshawar is the capital.
The Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which governed the former North West Frontier Province from 2002 to 2007, moved quickly against what it considered a source of moral corruption. Music was banned on public transportation. Concerts at Nishtar Hall — Peshawar’s only dedicated theatre venue — were prohibited. Landlords, under pressure, evicted musicians from Dabgari. Attacks on music shops went unpunished. In many areas of Peshawar, musicians and drum beaters were arrested through police.
What followed the MMA years was far bloodier. As the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) gained territorial influence across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and into Peshawar itself, the silencing of musicians became systematic and violent. Streets that had once echoed with qawwali, folk songs and contemporary music fell quiet. Artisans who crafted traditional instruments shuttered their workshops. Musicians were threatened, and then killed.
At least thirteen prominent artists — among them several women Pashtun singers — were murdered between 2008 and 2017, the peak years of the insurgency, according to a report by newspaper The News. Most were killed in or near Peshawar.
Many who survived fled. Sardar Ali Takkar, one of the most celebrated Pashto singers of his generation, had performed ghazals to packed audiences in Peshawar’s historic havelis even during the repressive years of General Zia-ul-Haq’s military rule in the 1980s.
But in 2009, a militant attack in Islamabad injured his daughter. He left for Canada and the United States, and did not return to Pakistan for a decade — and only then to receive the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz, the country’s highest civilian honour, for his services to Pashto music. Fellow singer Haroon Bacha similarly sought asylum abroad.
Music scholars warn that the pattern unfolding in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not a relic of the past but an ongoing and deepening crisis.
“Music and peace coexist; where there is music, there is harmony, and where it is absent, chaos prevails,” said Dr. Rashid Khan, a Pashto music scholar who has spent his career working to preserve the tradition. “Those in power do not profit from peace. Their business thrives on conflict — which is why their first target is always the cessation of music. You can see for yourselves the dire situation currently unfolding in Afghanistan.”
Dr. Khan draws a direct line between what is happening in Afghanistan under the Taliban and what he sees emerging in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“A similar environment has been brewing here over the last four or five years,” he said. “It feels as though the eras of Zia-ul-Haq or the MMA are returning. Security officers in various districts are actively campaigning against musical expression. Recently, an official stationed in Swabi issued an open challenge — that if music is played at a wedding, or even if someone plays a tabla inside their own home, he would drag them out, regardless of whether they are male or female.”
“This isn’t just about a ban on music,” he added. “It is an assault on our entire social system, our culture, and our identity.”
The roots of this crisis, Dr. Khan argues, stretch back further still. “During British rule, when anti-monarchy wars were waged, court musicians were displaced. Later, the jihadist era and the rise of Talibanization further dismantled the vibrant essence of Pashto music.”
The cumulative toll has been severe. Classical Pashto music has all but vanished. Folk music, he says, is now on the verge of extinction. The rabab, tabla, mangay and sitar — instruments once central to the communal life of the hujra, the traditional Pashtun guesthouse — are disappearing.
Hyat Roghani, chairman of the Mafkura Research and Development Center, agrees that violent ideology has left lasting scars. “Even today, extremism casts a shadow over music and singing, which are often viewed with disdain and hatred,” he said. Over the past century, he notes, Pashto music has endured challenge after challenge — and each wave has left the tradition weaker than before.
For Dr. Khan, revival will require more than goodwill — it demands structural change. Artists do not need charity, he insists; they need work, platforms and security. The monopoly within government institutions, where a small circle of favoured performers are booked for every official event, must be broken. Dedicated spaces for music — equivalent, he suggests, to the gymnasiums built for sports — must be created. And instruments like the rabab need to be promoted internationally, with a clear export strategy to sustain the craftspeople who make them.
“We need a proper roadmap,” he said. “Only through such concrete steps can our music and musicians truly rise again.”
For the 108 Afghan artists now waiting on a court’s decision in Peshawar, the stakes could not be more immediate. But their petition is also a mirror — held up to a society that has, for decades, been asked to choose between its culture and its safety, and has too often been given no choice at all.