An Afghan cultural association in Canada has held what organizers described as the first formal tribute dedicated to Ustad Sayed Shah Ewaz, the Bamyan-born singer and dambura player whose music remains widely remembered among Hazara and Afghan Ismaili communities.
The Sayed Nadir Shah Al-Hussaini Cultural and Social Association, also known as the Sayed Kayan Association, organized the program, titled “Art and Memory,” on Sunday, July 26, 2026.
The event centered on a documentary based on interviews with Shah Ewaz’s family, contemporaries and admirers, alongside live and recorded performances by musicians in Canada and other countries. Khairuddin Haidari was recognized for digitizing, publishing and sharing recordings of Shah Ewaz’s music.
In a recorded message, his son, Sayed Aziz Hashimi, described his father as an influential figure in traditional Hazara and Afghan Ismaili music. He said programs of this kind help preserve cultural memory among Afghan communities abroad.
The tribute highlighted a repertoire rooted in Persian poetry, the folk verses of central Afghanistan, devotional material and songs connected to the seasons and community life.
Shah Ewaz was born in 1935 in Tay-e Siasang, a place in Shunbol village, Shibar Disrict of Bamyan province. He lost his parents at an early age and was raised by his grandfather, who taught him to read and write.
His father had been a skilled dambura player, and Shah Ewaz became familiar with the two-stringed, long-necked instrument during childhood. He received no formal musical education and developed his singing and playing largely through independent practice, later performing at private events and community gatherings.
According to accounts preserved by his family, he once performed before Sayed Nadir Shah Al-Hussaini Kayani, a leader of Afghanistan’s Ismaili community, who encouraged him to continue his music and presented him with a dambura.
His reputation grew across Bamyan and the wider Hazarajat region, particularly among Hazara and Afghan Ismaili listeners. His family has said that some of his work was recorded by Radio Afghanistan during the reign of King Mohammad Zahir Shah.
Liner notes published in the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music describe Shah Ewaz as a professional musician from a hereditary musical tradition who played in the orchestra of Radio Kabul, later known as Radio Afghanistan.
According to the organizers’ biographical account, Shah Ewaz’s repertoire included Persian poetry, local folk verses, religious and devotional songs, seasonal music and pieces performed at social and cultural gatherings.
His choice of material brought together written poetry and an oral tradition carried through memory and performance. Local verses gained a wider and more lasting form when joined with melody and the sound of the dambura.
The themes were closely tied to the lives of his listeners, including faith, love, longing, celebration and the changing seasons. His songs drew on language, imagery and musical forms familiar to communities in Bamyan and other parts of Hazarajat.
In communities where poetry often travels by voice, music can also serve as a form of preservation. Melody makes verses easier to remember, while repeated performance allows them to pass from one gathering and generation to another.
Shah Ewaz’s recordings therefore preserve more than individual performances. They also carry examples of regional poetry, local Dari expression and the musical memory of the communities in which he performed.
This helps explain why his work remained especially meaningful among Hazara and Afghan Ismaili audiences. The instrument, words and melodies were linked to places and experiences they recognized, while devotional and community songs reflected parts of their shared cultural and religious life.
Shah Ewaz was also known for adapting Indian melodies and performing them in Dari. His use of familiar outside melodies showed how a musical tradition could absorb new influences while remaining rooted in local language and expression.
Shah Ewaz’s music was documented during a period when public musical performance was severely restricted in much of Afghanistan.
Musicologist Jan van Belle, from the Netherlands, recorded Shah Ewaz in Kayan, Baghlan province, singing “Saram qurbanat, ay mah-e yagana,” translated as “I give up everything for you, my one and only moon.” Shah Ewaz accompanied himself on the dambura.
The Smithsonian liner notes identify the piece as a Hazara dubayti about unrequited love. The recording appears on Afghanistan: Music During the Civil War (1979–2001), released by Smithsonian Folkways in 2015 as part of the UNESCO Collection of Traditional Music.
A photograph of Shah Ewaz taken in Kayan on August 6, 1998, was selected as the album’s cover image.
Van Belle’s notes state that Sayed Mansoor Naderi, the local Ismaili spiritual leader, arranged his visit to Kayan. They also describe music as integrated into the beliefs of Ismailis in the area, allowing musicians there to be recorded while musical activity was dangerous or restricted elsewhere.
The civil war of the 1990s forced Shah Ewaz and his family to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan. He settled in the United Kingdom in 2001 and later performed for Afghan audiences there and in Canada.
He died on February 13, 2019, at the age of 84.
Although he did not formally train students, organizers say his style influenced other musicians. His recordings continue to circulate among older listeners and younger Afghans born long after many of the songs were first performed.
For Afghans displaced by decades of conflict, those recordings can provide a connection to the language, poetry and sounds of central Afghanistan. Their continuing circulation has also turned them into an informal archive of musical traditions that might otherwise have been lost.
The Sayed Kayan Association said documenting and digitizing the work of Afghan musicians is necessary to preserve parts of the country’s cultural history.
The tribute showed why Shah Ewaz’s work continues to matter, not only as music from another era, but as a record of the poetry, language and community life of Bamyan and the wider Hazarajat region.
