SULAIMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan — Age has not stopped Mazhar Khaliqi, the legendary Iranian Kurdish singer who heads the Sulaimaniyah-based Kurdish Heritage Institute, a nongovernmental institute for preserving Kurdish national heritage and music.

The 81-year-old folk singer, poet, composer and folklorist, hails from the city of Sanandaj, the capital of the western Iranian province of Kurdistan. But it was only last year, in July 2019, that he had been able to go back to his hometown to receive an honorary award from the Kurdish Elites Congress (KEC), organized by the University of Kurdistan. He had left Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because he could no longer sing under the ban on broadcast music.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Khaliqi told Al-Monitor that singing has been part of his life from the age of nine. His strong voice was recognized by his teacher in the second year of primary school in Sanandaj, who offered to give him extra lessons. “We had only one hour of music, so my teacher asked me to stay back on Wednesdays so he could teach me the Kurdish and Persian maqams,” he told Al-Monitor. (Maqam is the system of melodic modes used in traditional Middle Eastern music, often used interchangeably as a music genre.)

Khaliqi was invited to sing on the radio when he was merely 12, and he continued the half-hour broadcast on the Sanandaj radio station throughout the 1950s. His fame grew locally but no records of those broadcasts remain today.