Even the Taliban Can’t Stop the Music

In this storied frontier town, a clutch of musicians works to keep the soul of a nation alive.

About 300 Afghan musical performers live and work in exile here, banished from their country by an extremist Islamic government that has made playing and listening to music a criminal offense.

Many of the dancers, singers, musicians and composers fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, during a war against the Soviet Union. Others arrived after 1996, when the ultra-orthodox religious movement known as the Taliban swept into Kabul, the capital, and imposed its fevered brand of Islam on Afghanistan.

Although millions of Afghan refugees have returned to their country and more head back every day, the artists stay behind. They are convinced that, as long as the Taliban remains in charge, home can only be where their music can thrive.

“I have been a musician since I was a young boy--my ancestors were musicians,” said Abdur Rashid, a tabla player who fled the Afghan city of Jalalabad in 1996 after the Taliban started busting up his friends’ musical instruments. “We want to go home, but we can’t go back if we can’t play our music.”

The banishment of music stands as a sad symbol for Afghanistan’s collapse into civil war and tyranny. Scholars say music played a crucial role in the unification of Afghanistan, an amalgam of cultures sandwiched between the former empires of Russia and Britain.

“It was within music that all these disparate groups could come together,” said John Baily, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of London. “Under the Taliban, that tradition is being lost.”

Take a turn in Peshawar’s bazaar and the clamorous commercial sounds that date to the time of Alexander the Great turn suddenly to music. Most of the musicians who fled Afghanistan came here to Dagbari, a tightly packed quarter of the old city.

Dagbari is a swirling mix of the centuries, of women clad in head-to-toe burkas walking alongside horse-drawn carts, of three-wheeled taxis motoring past movie theaters and minarets. On the second floor of a crumbling brick building, a five-member exile band called Ambrullah practices for an upcoming wedding.

Ambrullah--named for the band’s leader, Ambrullah Amingul--plays the classic instruments of Afghan music: an accordion-like keyboard called a harmonium; a pear-shaped instrument called a rabab, which resembles a mandolin; and the tabla, a set of two drums slung together.

The group begins with a ghazal, a standard form of Afghan music, a poem carried on rolling riffs. Many of the ghazals vibrate with the intense passion of courtship, which in Islamic countries is often constrained by social convention. Amingul sings in Pushtu, one of Afghanistan’s languages:

You tell me to forget the red lips of

my beloved,

Yet everything compels me to love

her. . . .

I am not afraid of love’s shackles;

Let me kiss them

And put them on.

The members of Ambrullah all hail from Surkhrud, a neighborhood in Jalalabad where many of the city’s musicians once lived. Kabul also had a musicians’ quarter, called Karabat, but most of its performers also are in exile.

Most of the Musicians Touched by Tragedies

Before they came to Peshawar, Ambrullah’s five members were friends but did not play together. Four fled Afghanistan in the early 1980s, shortly after Soviet troops invaded to reimpose Communist rule. The fifth member, Rashid, came in 1996.

Like most Afghan refugees, the musicians in Peshawar have been touched by the tragedies of war. Saidajan, the group’s 40-year-old harmonium player, left his elderly mother behind in Afghanistan and doesn’t feel that it is safe enough yet to see her. Amingul lost two brothers in the jihad, or Muslim holy war, against the Soviets.

“I was once a very famous musician, and I entertained many high officials,” said Saidajan, a father of seven. “Now I am happy if I am able to feed my children.”

After playing the ghazal, Ambrullah begins a tappa, another standard musical form. Amingul belts out the lyrics of the short, rhythmic ballad as his band joins in:

First love turns a man into a king, And then it turns him into a beggar.

After a pause, Amingul launches into another tappa:

It is good that you have refused my love.

Now you have given a purpose to my life.

Amingul, a quiet man despite his life as a performer, takes his hands from his harmonium and offers a small smile.

“The Afghans love to hear the poems,” he says.

Many of the songs played by Ambrullah and other bands in Peshawar have been passed down through the generations, and many have no name. The music derives from a fusion of the country’s many ethnic groups: Pushtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Persians and others. Many of the songs--undulating, melodic, repetitive--have been influenced by Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam.

In the two decades since Peshawar began filling with refugees, new songs have been born, many reflecting Afghanistan’s destruction.

Amingul picks up a recent song known throughout the city:

I love you, oh my Afghanistan. . . .

Your freedom is the cry of my heart.

Our country is in ruins.

Our country is on fire.

Everything has been destroyed.

I will never see my country again.

To the musicians, the pain suffered by the Afghan people makes the Taliban’s ban on music especially hard to take.

“All our people are facing the troubles and sorrows of life,” Rashid says. “Music is food for the spirit.”

Invoking Muhammad to Justify Ban

Just across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s chief moral police officer scowled at the idea of mixing music and Islam.

Mullah Mohammed Wali, the Taliban’s minister for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, said the clearest admonition against playing music can be found in the life of Muhammad, Islam’s prophet.

Wali, sitting in a bare room and dressed in a turban and robe, explained that the prophet entered his home one day and shuddered at the sounds of his family singing.

“When the holy prophet walked into the room and heard the music, he stuck his thumbs into his ears,” Wali said. “And whatever the holy prophet did, we have to follow.”

The Taliban’s controversial readings of the Koran, the Islamic holy book, and the hadiths, stories and sayings from the life of Muhammad, have made Afghanistan’s leaders pariahs throughout much of the world. The Taliban’s prohibition on music has set the group apart from fellow Muslims in other nations, many of which boast important musical traditions. Even the fundamentalist regime in Iran, which prohibited the playing of music after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, has allowed music to return.

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, an Islamic scholar and ethnic Afghan living in New Delhi, believes that the Taliban is misreading a passage from the hadiths.

“The holy prophet did not like the music, but he did not stop it,” Khan said. “This is very clear.”

Khan said the Koran and the hadiths contain several passages suggesting that Islam embraces music, particularly if it inspires religious feeling. The cadence of the Koran itself, Khan said, is musical.

“Every Muslim reads the Koran like a song,” he said.

The most popular Afghan musician is a woman from Kabul who goes by the name of Naghma. The tall, black-haired singer has recorded about 200 cassettes and performed live for Afghans in Los Angeles, New York and Washington. On the few occasions that Naghma tried to perform in the Peshawar refugee camps, the crowds became so enthusiastic that she had to leave.

Like many Afghan musicians, Naghma flourished during the Communist era. When moujahedeen warriors threw out the Soviets in 1989 and took control of the country, she lost her favored perch in Afghan society.

“They thought I was a Communist,” Naghma said of the moujahedeen. “They were going to arrest me.”

She fled the country in 1992. Naghma figures that she might go back to Afghanistan one day, but with the Taliban enforcing its ban on music and imposing tight controls over women, she cannot say when that will be.

Standing in a recording studio, Naghma picked up a microphone and began to sing:

I will never forget you, oh my country.

I was born in your lap and I played with your beauty. . . .

I want my country, oh my country.

While Naghma keeps the traditional strains of Afghan music alive, a new generation searches for a more modern sound.

At a recent wedding of Afghans here, a band called Akbar Sarush rose to play. Its four young members’ instruments included drums, a Yamaha keyboard and an electric guitar. The Persian music began hammering its way through the loudspeakers as hard and fast as rock is played in the West.

“This is a great occasion for us--it comes only once in a life,” roared Mohammed Asif, the father of the groom, about the wedding. Asif brought his family to Peshawar 20 years ago.

Before long, the men walked out onto the dance floor. The women sat in a separate room, as is Afghan custom.

Soon the men were dancing, twirling and clapping to the quickened pace of their traditional music. After a time, a winded 23-year-old Mohammed Shaheer stepped outside for some air.

“We are Muslims,” he said, catching his breath. “But we still want to have a good time.”