Noor Mohammad Shah
Noor Mohammad Shah (Kashmiri: نور محمد شاہ, born in 1961) is a traditional Sufi music performer and songwriter, from "Baki-Aker" village in Handwara town of North Kashmir's Kupwara District (Kupwara district is sharing its border with Pakistan). Background. Shah is a traditional Sufi music performer and songwriter and a virtuoso of the rabab. When a boy, in 1970, he was noticed for his talent with the idiophone-style Kashmiri percussion instrument of nout (clay pot) by the local singer Mohammad Yousuf Shah who then invited him to his troup for training and work. Having become  a musician in his own right, for three decades Shah played and sang for the Sufi saint Ahad Sahib of Sopore (1930-2010), beginning at the turn of the 1980s Career. In 2016, the posh Rawalpora (Colony) section of Srinagar (or the administrative capital of Jammu and Kashmir, a group of young men for whom he performed filmed Shah on a mobile phone and uploaded the video to the internet. The musician sang for them a famous elegy by a 16th-century Muslim poet and ascetic Habba Khatoon (who was also Empress Consort of the last Emperor of Kashmir). Without  the humble and God-fearing musician's knowledge, this video went viral on the web and unexpectedly made him into a celebrity. Previously, he performed in mehfils (Dervish gatherings) and for weddings, while at present his songs are listened to online around the world. In 2018 the Kashmiri- and Urdu-language poet and musician Mohammad Muneer Nazir and his band Alif, invited Shah to produce a Kashmiri-language single 'Ride Home'. It proved a great success, watched online by over 3 million viewers.