A Happy New Year for Afghans

It was the kind of festival the Taliban would never allow: All-night parties. Spontaneous drumming, singing and dancing in restaurants. Picnics, high jinks, gambling and merrymaking that had little to do with religion.

Afghans on Thursday celebrated Nowruz, the first day of spring and the traditional start of the Persian new year, by discarding the puritanical and indulging in their new life of freedom, music, movies, games and laughter.

Millions of Afghans took part in the revelry. In Kabul, the capital, and other large cities, they flooded parks and stadiums to see shows and concerts, climbed hillsides to visit medieval shrines, paid visits to family and friends, and planted trees. They sampled holiday fare such as haft miwa, a cocktail made from seven dried fruits, and samanu, a sweet wheat-sprout pudding that takes up to 12 hours to cook. (Women traditionally stay up all night singing and telling stories while it boils and simmers away.)

“This is the best of my life so far,” a Kabul vendor called Rahimuddin shouted over his shoulder about the holiday. He struggled to keep up with the customers crowding on all sides, stretching out their hands for his cherry juice, ladled into glasses already dusted with fine sugar, or eager to buy one of his plates of honeyed nuts and seeds.

Near Kabul’s stadium, which until last year was the scene of public stonings and executions by the Taliban authorities, children flew kites or rode on cheerily jangling donkey carts and some women drew aside their robin’s-egg-blue burkas to expose their faces to the warming sun.

“We are very happy on this New Year’s Day,” said Fazlei Khuda, a 27-year-old university student in literature. “Our people have been freed from the dark period of the Taliban. It was a black reign that did not want Afghans to be happy and free.”

An ancient holiday--believed to date back more than 2,000 years--Nowruz came to Afghanistan and several other countries in Central Asia by way of Persia, today’s Iran. It coincides with the vernal equinox and is associated with new life, the cultivation of trees and flowers and the sowing of crops.

It was the most festive time of the year until the Taliban came to power in most of Afghanistan between 1994 and 1996. Disliking Nowruz’s un-Islamic origins and its emphasis on joyful indulgence rather than piety and prayer, the radical regime lost no time removing it from the roster of official holidays.

But telling Afghans to ignore Nowruz was a bit like asking Americans to treat Thanksgiving as just another Thursday. People celebrated anyway--just keeping it discreet and within the family circle, said Izumarai, a 49-year-old accounting manager.

“The things we could do at home, we did,” he said with a conspiratorial smile. “Now that we are free, we are very lucky.”

This year, Nowruz again was an official day off work, part of a festive three-day weekend. The new school year begins Saturday--the first day that girls will be allowed back into classrooms. And on Tuesday, the country’s former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, is to make a triumphal return, the first since his exile in 1973.

A government helicopter circled over Kabul on Thursday, dropping leaflets with a poetic New Year’s greeting to inhabitants: “A thousand thanks that the spring has come and the fall is gone. As with the grace of a flower, may young and old prosper.”

In the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, residents had been splashing blue paint on buildings, fixing windows and planting almond trees for weeks before the holiday, sprucing up the town for the first visit by interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

Cannons boomed, children belted out songs, and tens of thousands of pilgrims swarmed the bright blue mosque in the center of town, hurling clouds of nearly worthless money into the air--confetti, Afghan-style.

As Karzai watched with an amused smile, a crowd of young men acted like an Afghan mosh pit, rushing toward the podium, getting beaten back by baton-wielding police and then throwing themselves into the sweaty crush again.

“Happy New Year!” Karzai shouted. “Our future, though not without sacrifice, is going to be bright!”

For hundreds of years, it was the custom for Afghanistan’s head of state to come to Mazar-i-Sharif for Nowruz and visit the mosque and its Tomb of Ali, said to be the burial site of the fourth Caliph of Islam, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.

Dressed in his signature silk cape and fur hat, Karzai stood at the mosque’s entrance shoulder to shoulder with Northern Alliance commanders who haven’t always seen eye to eye with him or one another. On Thursday, however, they pledged cooperation, and forgiveness.

“We have agreed to release war prisoners soon,” Karzai said, referring to the thousands of captured Taliban fighters who have been held prisoner in the north since November. “I’m sure they won’t repeat their mistakes.”

When the speeches ended, a near riot broke out while a huge pink-and-green flag was hoisted to the top of the mosque. Ali is beloved by Shiite Muslims, and hundreds of blind and disabled people squeezed inside the mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, convinced that God would heal them while the flag was being raised.

“I am cured!” a few cried out. Gangs of men then jumped on them, ripping away their shirts and turbans, saying the clothing itself now carried divine blessings.