ਅਬਰਾਰ-ਉਲ-ਹੱਕਅਬਰਾਰ-ਉਲ-ਹੱਕ

Abrar-ul-Haq (born 21 July 1969) is a Pakistani singer-songwriter from Punjab whose 1995 debut album Billo De Ghar sold over 16 million copies worldwide and made him the King of Pakistani pop and bhangra. He is also the founder of the Sahara for Life Trust, whose hospital and medical college serve his home district of Narowal, and a former politician who contested two national elections.

From a teacher's desk in Lahore

He was born in Faisalabad into a Punjabi Jat family of the Kahlon clan, the youngest of eight siblings, to a civil servant father; the family's roots are in Narowal, the district his career would keep returning to. He was schooled at Junior Model School in Gujrat and Sir Syed College in Rawalpindi, then took a master's degree in social sciences from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. In 1996 he was teaching geography at Aitchison College, Lahore, one of Pakistan's most famous schools, when he quit the faculty to gamble on music.

Billo De Ghar and the bhangra-pop wave

The gamble landed immediately. Billo De Ghar (1995) sold in the millions and its title song became the sound of Punjabi weddings on two continents. Majajani (1998), Bay Ja Cycle Te (1999) and Nach Punjaban (2002) followed, and his formula, folk idioms and village imagery over pop and bhangra beats, defined Pakistani pop for a decade. He recorded collaborations with Gurdas Maan and Sukshinder Shinda in 2006, and his Coke Studio turns, Ishq Di Booti, Pani Da Bulbula and Ballay Ballay with Aima Baig, carried the older hits to a new generation. The songs were not always smooth sailing: after objections that the word Punjaban in Nach Punjaban demeaned Punjabi women, he re-recorded the song as Majajan, and other songs drew court summonses and bans that he argued out in public rather than in silence.

Sahara for Life: the Narowal hospital

In 1998, at the height of his fame, Abrar founded the Sahara for Life Trust, named to stand for Services Aimed at Health and Awakening in Remote Areas. In 2003 the trust opened the Sughra Shafi Medical Hospital Complex in Narowal, a general hospital named after his mother, which cut the journey for critically ill patients who once had to reach big cities in time. A Sahara Medical College and years of relief and rehabilitation work followed. The state recognised the second career as well as the first: Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in 2005, Sitara-e-Eisaar in 2006 for his earthquake relief work, and appointment as a Humanitarian Ambassador of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 2011.

What did Abrar-ul-Haq do in politics?

He founded the Youth Parliament of Pakistan in 2006 and joined Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in December 2011, rising to lead its youth wing. He contested the National Assembly seat from Narowal in the 2013 and 2018 general elections and lost both times to the PML-N's Ahsan Iqbal. In 2019 he became chairman of the Pakistan Red Crescent Society. In 2023, after the May 9 riots and the controversy that followed them, he left the PTI and quit politics altogether, returning to music and the trust.

The singer today

The honours from music run parallel to the service awards: Lux Style Awards for best singer in 2002 and 2003, and PTV awards across six consecutive years. Singles have kept coming into the 2020s, from Paar with Bohemia to culture songs and anthems, while the Sahara hospital remains the centre of his public life. Few pop stars anywhere have built a second legacy as concrete as a working hospital: in Narowal, the King of Bhangra is measured less by album sales than by the queues outside Sughra Shafi on a weekday morning. The road there ran through a classroom: after a master's degree in social sciences from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he taught geography at Aitchison College in Lahore, writing songs on the side, until Billo De Ghar sold in the millions and the classroom gave way to the concert stage. Through the late 1990s and 2000s the hits kept their Punjabi centre, Preeto, Nach Punjaban and Ballay Ballay among them, and the Sahara for Life Trust, founded in 1998, turned record royalties into wards and classrooms in Narowal, the district his family comes from, where the Sughra Shafi Medical Hospital Complex opened in 2003 and still anchors the trust's work. Politics, which he joined with the PTI in 2011 and left in 2023 after two lost National Assembly races in Narowal, now sits behind him, and the music and the hospital are again the whole of the public record.