The man who invented Pashto rap

Born in Peshawar, raised across KP

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Mustafa Kamal Khan as a financial analyst who is also a rapper from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — a combination, Muzamil notes, he has not encountered before on the show. Mustafa traces his early life quickly: born in Peshawar, originally from Tordher in Swabi district, but never actually settled there. His father worked in the irrigation department and was posted frequently across the north — Swat, Kalam, the surrounding hill areas — so Mustafa spent his childhood moving between Army Public School campuses before the family eventually returned to Peshawar. He completed his FSC from PF (Pakistan Air Force) College, then moved to Bahria University Islamabad in 2009 for a BBA.

That move from Peshawar to Islamabad was, by his own account, the first major inflection point in his life. He expected a culture shock but found that his Peshawar upbringing had already prepared him more than people assumed. “They used to tell me, Mustafa tum Peshawar se ho, tumhare action mein woh kyun nahin hai?” — the implication being that he should have seemed more provincial. He didn’t. Peshawar, he explains, is not the monolithic Pashtun city outsiders imagine. Its older families speak Hindko, not Pashto, and the city has always been more cosmopolitan than its media image suggests.

How Fortitude started — and why it started in Pashto

Fortitude began as a school friendship. Shumail Alam Khan started producing beats in 2007 after downloading music software — Orchard, Reverbnation, the early tools of that era. His brother Shahkar was the rapper. Mustafa came in through a different door: he played piano, and began contributing melodic ideas to what the brothers were already building. The three of them cycled through several band names before settling on Fortitude.

The early material was entirely in English. That was the default for the small rap scene that existed in Pakistan at the time — a scene heavily influenced by East Coast and West Coast American hip-hop, Eminem in particular. The pivot to Pashto was Mustafa’s idea, floated around 2008 or 2009, and it was not immediately welcomed. “My brothers, they told me, Mustafa thoda sa na cheesy hai, hai na? Pashtoon mein kaun karega.” The concern was that Pashto rap would not be taken seriously.

What changed their minds was an accidental proof of concept. Mustafa and Shahkar were on the phone, killing time, and started trading rhymes in Pashto without planning to. “We didn’t realize ke humne almost koi kuch aath nau bars likh liye hain, bol diye humne.” If it could happen that naturally in conversation, it could be made into a song.

The first video, the first crowd, and 10,000 views that felt like a million

Fortitude shot their first music video in Margalla Hills with a small camera and a portable speaker. The recording method was entirely live — the beat played through the speaker, they rapped over it, and the camera captured everything in one take. Back home, they layered the audio slightly and uploaded it. The result was, as Mustafa puts it, “very live and not live” — an ambiguous quality that somehow worked.

The song spread through Peshawar faster than they anticipated. When they were invited to perform at Nishtar Hall — the largest concert venue in Peshawar — they were placed just before the headline act, the worst slot in any lineup because the crowd is already chanting for the main event. What happened instead was the moment Mustafa identifies as the turning point. Mid-performance, he paused at a gap in the lyrics, and the entire packed hall filled it in. “Poora crowd bolta hai more more. That’s when I realized ke accha, thing has — it’s gone out of hands. Matlab everyone knows this song.”

Ten thousand YouTube views, at that time and in that community, was not a small number. “That 10,000 views were way — that was like a million now.” Every view was coming from within the Pashto-speaking world, which meant the penetration within that community was total.

Why KP should have produced rap — and why it didn’t

Later in the discussion, Muzamil makes an argument that Mustafa finds worth engaging with seriously. Muzamil points out that KP — devastated by the war on terror, carrying deep collective grievances, with more than enough reason for anger — should, by the logic of how rap has emerged everywhere else in the world, have been the natural home of the genre in Pakistan. African Americans built hip-hop out of subjugation. Karachi’s rap scene grew out of Lyari and the lower-income frustration of a city that had been through enormous violence. KP had all of those ingredients.

Mustafa’s answer is layered. The first problem is cultural conservatism. “Puktoons culturally, their attitude is scar — they’re very resistant to change.” Anyone who deviated from the established folk tradition was not accepted. The folk tradition itself, he notes, has no aggression in it. “It’s all sweet — roses, gulab, shal — woh us sense mein woh cheez wahin par rahi jaati hai.” The music that was safe was the music that stayed soft.

The second problem is linguistic. Pashto grammar is genuinely difficult to rap in. Urdu is flexible, full of borrowings, easy to play with rhythmically. Pashto is rigid. “It took us, like, four, five years to actually get a grasp on Pashto rap because we created it. We were the first ones who actually made that rhyme and, you know, fast bolna hai, tez bolna hai.” There was no template to follow, no existing body of Pashto rap to learn from. They were writing the bible as they went.

The Islamabad-versus-Karachi question

Muzamil raises a pattern he has noticed across industries, not just music: Islamabad tends to pioneer new formats but fails to scale them, while Karachi takes the same raw material and brings it to mass audiences. Mustafa agrees and extends the analysis.

Islamabad’s rap scene in 2009 and 2010 was actually the most active in Pakistan. The concerts were there, the early artists were there, and some of them were reaching international collaborations. But the content was, as Mustafa puts it, “thoda wannabeesh” — aspirational in a way that was disconnected from the majority of Pakistani listeners. Karachi’s artists solved a different problem. “They brought it to a local level — matlab ek riksha wala bhi sunega, woh bhi relate kar sakta tha us feel ke saath.” A rickshaw driver could hear it and feel something. That is the difference between a scene and a movement.

Muzamil frames it as a structural issue: Islamabad’s creative class grows up on Western media, localises it innovatively, gets early traction in a specific bubble, and then stalls. Karachi takes the same influence and Bollywood-ises it, TikTok-ises it, brings it down to street level. Both men agree that in a country like Pakistan, you have to start from the bottom of the income and cultural pyramid and work upward, because the top will accept almost anything eventually.

Leaving at the wrong moment — and the gap that followed

In 2015, Mustafa moved to Australia, initially to complete a master’s degree. The timing was, by his own assessment, the worst possible moment to leave. “2012 was a point where we were actually spreading out everywhere.” Fortitude had performed in Faisalabad and Multan — cities with no obvious Pashto-speaking concentration — and found audiences who knew their verses. The momentum was real.

When he left, it stopped. “Once you vanish from music industry for like a year or so, you’re gone.” The generation that had grown up with Fortitude moved on — marriages, jobs, the ordinary passage of life. A new generation of rappers filled the space. When Mustafa returned after graduating in 2017, the artists who had been following Fortitude had themselves become well known. He describes calling his bandmates and saying it was time to get back in. “Dus saal ko ab halal karne” — ten years of struggle needed to be made to count.

The Peshawar Zalmi project and what it proved

The clearest evidence that Pashto rap had arrived came through an unexpected channel: a PSL franchise. Peshawar Zalmi’s management reached out to Fortitude wanting something new for their campaign — specifically, Pashto rap. The brief came with a two-day deadline. Mustafa was in his office in Australia when the call came. He rang his bandmates in Peshawar and Islamabad, and they built the entire track remotely.

His instinct was to resist the pressure to do it in Urdu. “Let’s give it, put it completely in Pashto taake hum aaram se relate kar sakein, log sun sakein, samajh sakein.” He also pushed back against the references to international brands that the team was sending over. “Let’s bring some originality to it. Let’s put rabab in it.” The track was recorded across two cities in two days, sent to the Zalmi team, and the response was immediate. “They were blown away.”

What the Zalmi collaboration did, in Mustafa’s reading, was give Pashto rap national legitimacy through institutional weight. “Unhone apna brand ka weight lagakar Pashto ko national acceptance di.” The fear — that a fully Pashto-language anthem for a national franchise was too risky — turned out to be unfounded. Reactions came in from India. People who had never engaged with Pashto culture were asking what they were hearing.

Finance, Australia, and the thirty-year question

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Mustafa about his parallel life as a financial analyst in Canberra — a city he describes as almost identical to Islamabad in layout, designed by the same architects, with the same valley geography and the same government-town energy. He started with Apple after completing his master’s, moved into banking, and is now focused on the home lending and investment side of a bank, a sector that has been booming in Australia for several years. He is also watching the shift toward digital and mobile banking and positioning himself to move into that space.

He admits, with some amusement, that he spent his university years running from accounting. “I hated accounting. Guts.” The rote-learning approach at Bahria made the subject feel mechanical rather than logical. It was only in Australia, where the course load was lighter and the teaching more conceptual, that finance started to make sense to him.

Muzamil closes with his standard question: where does Pakistan end up in thirty years? Mustafa’s answer is cautiously optimistic. “On a human level, people are changing now. Unka mindset change ho raha hai.” He points to Peshawar specifically — having just driven there with friends — as evidence that the gap between KP and the rest of urban Pakistan is closing faster than outsiders realise. “There’s no difference between Peshawar and Lahore. It’s completely advanced.” Whether that trajectory holds, he says, depends on which political forces shape the next decade. But the direction, for now, feels right.