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Did the Taliban’s Interdiction of Music in Afghanistan Ironically Set a Positive Model for Further Exploration into Contemporary Islam’s Interaction with Music of the Western World?

21st century Islam is complex and multi-faceted, and it would be impertinent of me to speak of a single, one-dimensional Islam; first, it is a worldwide religion, and can be seen anywhere from Kabul in Afghanistan to Bradford in Yorkshire, with varying degrees of fanaticism, and using different interpretations of the Koran, which is essentially a deeply ambiguous text. The ambiguous nature of the Koran has led to significant problems regarding its interpretation, most notably in its alleged declaration of popular music as “Haram” (literally meaning “forbidden”). Importantly, from a Western paradigm, the suppression of music and the arts seems to set Islam up in direct contradiction with liberal pluralism and secular governmental organisations divorced from the overt bias of religion. The Taliban professed to be deeply traditionalist in their views on women, on individual powers, and on the state suppression of the arts – however, this has its origins in Egypt just a century earlier, with Islamic modernists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani who, ironically, was first in stating that Islam needed to wake up and address the issue that contemporary Western values were essentially usurping the values of Islam. The Brethren, a radical group of Islamists in Egypt at the turn of the century believed in the harmony of state and religion. Of course, in discussing the Islamic interpretation of music, it is necessary to determine to what degree a fundamentalist Islamic regime was willing to reject Western ideals.

Afghani himself is problematic in his appreciation of Western culture. Although he was a fervent supporter of Islamic autonomy, which involved the traditional “fundamentalist” dogma of jihads and the quasi-fascistic combination of religious and political matters as regards state hegemony, he also greatly admired the work of certain Westerners, namely Camus and Sartre. His politics are defined like this:

“Islam […] is considered by the Brethren as at once creed and worship, fatherland and nation, religion and state, politics in all its forms is an integral part of Islam and of the Brethren’s program and doctrine. To their critics who often ask them what business they have playing politics and whether they are men of religion or of politics, the Brethren answer by asking: If Islam is something other than politics, social affairs, economics, law, and culture, then what is it? Is it merely genuflections and incantations?” (Rejwan, 1998, p. 62)

Thus, a major distinction is drawn between Islamic “fundamentalism”, which is a system where the social, cultural and economic means are controlled by a rigorous governmental framework based on tenets of the Islamic faith, as postulated by the above description, and of a secular Western socio-economic environment where politics and religion are divorced from each other, and religion is indeed, simply a series of genuflections and incantations, divorced from direct political action. However, as Kramer (1996) suggests: “On the one hand, it [, Islamic fundamentalism,] manifests itself as a new religiosity, reaffirming faith in a transcendent God. On the other hand, it appears as a militant ideology, demanding political action now. Here it takes the form of a populist party, asking for ballots. There it surges forth as an armed phalanx, spraying bullets.” Afghani seems to epitomize this difficulty between admiration and resentment of the West, although Afghani could also quite easily be seen as a progenitor for the Taliban government, as well as other highly religious and oppressive Islamic states. Rejwan continues by saying:

“[The Brethren formulated] [t]he Ten Duties, the Ten Sins, and the Ten Deliverances – imperialism, foreign companies, and imitation of the West are featured among the sins, while encroachment of national enterprises and respect for nationalism are among the deliverances.” (Rejwan, 1998, p. 62)

So again, the Taliban take their influence from the 19th century “proto-fundamentalist”, Afghani, citing this as being the origin of the Islamic faith. The anti-Western trend in the doctrinal politics of Islamic fundamentalism only serves however, to fuel further dissent and disillusionment among the people of Afghanistan. Rejwan also reads the fundamental difficulty with Islam in a different way:

“There was a period – a rather long one – in which the Arabs along with other peoples that found themselves under European dominance, used to have a slightly ambivalent attitude toward the West and its ways. This attitude, by no means uncommon, was one of great admiration coupled with a good deal of resentment, frustration, envy, and even hatred.” (Rejwan, 1998, p. 139)

This ambivalence that Rejwan suggests can ideally sum up the relationship of cultural subservience that Islam currently bears the inscrutable burden of. Namely that, in terms of music, it is impossible to extricate Western music entirely from modern Islamic life, yet the anti-Western viewpoint of a number of regimes demands this. The suppression of music therefore seems an inevitability, especially of a doctrine as “traditional” and as dogmatic as the Taliban. Modern Islam therefore faces a crisis. If one is not to secularise the religion and divorce its practices from religious, cultural and socio-political contexts, then how does one protect it from the corrosive cultural encroachment of capitalistic Western culture? This is exemplified to some extent with the manner in which the suppression of music, in line with certain tenets of Islamic fundamentalist dogma, has in turn created a backlash in the Western media against this. In Towards the Light, by Hasan Al-Banna, it is suggested that:

“…we may arrive at the conclusion that Western civilisation, which for a certain time has, through it science, been in a position to dominate and subjugate the whole world, has at the present time reached a stage of complete decadence: its organisation, its bases, its systems are crumbling. Its political systems are dictatorships, its economic systems are threatened by crises – as its millions of discontented, of unemployed, of the starving – bear witness. Its countries are threatened by revolutions which break out everywhere; its nations find no remedy to that situation. Its alliances lead nowhere, its treaties are violated, its charters are mocked at and its strength is no more than a myth.” (Rejwan, 1998, p. 69)

Ironically enough, this description of western society in inexorable decline provides a more detailed description of Islamic fundamentalism, primarily the state of Afghanistan during the attempted Soviet occupation and its subsequent escalation.

Hopefully all of this helps to explain the extraordinary reaction to the Taliban’s suppression of music in the Western press, which involved a number of documentaries, substantial news coverage, and innumerable column inches written on the matter – simply that the event represented a collision of identities – that of the Taliban; masked, secretive and tyrannical; and of the liberated West; open, transparent and democratic; The Taliban certainly dominated, or attempted to dominate “politics, social affairs, economics, law and culture”, and it is the cultural aspect of the Taliban, namely its impact on Western interpretation of culture that I will be primarily focussing on in this dissertation.

The Taliban and the West

It could be argued that the Western world, by investigating the history of music in Islam, invariably ended up Westernising the music, seeing what was relevant about music in a Western context. I argue that this rift with Islamic modernism has continued to this day, and is epitomized by the distinction that the Western capitalist media has made between the people of Afghanistan, violently held captive, and the Taliban regime that they apparently cowered beneath. This has a particular impact with their non-acceptance of music. The lack of acceptance of music has provoked outrage among liberals and progressives in the West. Nadya Labi (Time Magazine) gives us an anecdote:

“‘God, everyone in this world has a lover except me,’ sings a woman. ‘Why is it so?’ Her lament, in Persian, throbs over the speakers of a cab heading for Kabul, Afghanistan. An hour into the six-hour journey from neighbouring Pakistan, the taxi driver abruptly switches cassettes, and chants of Koranic verse replace the pop song. Moments later, the car stops at a checkpoint. The wooden poles of the barrier are entwined with strips of confiscated audiotape and film, the loose ends flapping in the wind. A guard peers into the car and inspects the four passengers and driver before allowing them to proceed. ‘We are lucky,’ says the driver. ‘They could have beaten us all if they had found us listening to the music.’”

Before the Taliban managed to gain power, and thus instigated a certain sense of stability in Afghanistan, being as it was beforehand, racked with civil war and bombing as a fall out from the Soviet invasion, music was a big influence. John Baily, in Music from Afghanistan, explains in detail that popular music was played over there, and was also played illicitly under the Taliban; in fact, music of all forms is an intrinsic part of the Afghani lifestyle:

“Western popular music enjoyed a certain degree of exposure on Radio Afghanistan; one night in Kabul in 1973 I recorded a set of Chuck Berry songs off air. Amongst students in Kabul there was certainly a following for music of this kind, and I heard of various rock bands amongst the younger generation of the westernised elite.” (Baily, 2001, p. 25)

It is therefore wrong to assume that all Islamic people reject capitalism and its culture, and this was stressed implicitly by the coverage received of Taliban regime in the popular Western media. Despite the barbarity of the Taliban, they had also managed to bring together a fragmented and dissolute nation racked with civil war and bloodshed. Griffin suggests that:

“The focus of the world’s press was inevitably the Taliban’s brutal eccentricities, but quantifiable benefits did accrue from the first day of their rule in Kabul. After four years of bombardment, fighting became a thing of the past; food and fuel prices plummeted as roads were re-opened to districts previously in enemy hands; and the few sharia judgements carried out in the capital transformed the security climate overnight – even as they inflamed human rights activists abroad.” (Griffin, 2001, p. 8)

The persuasion in the popular press was of Afghanistan being victim to the terrors of the Taliban regime, epitomized by the suppression of beauty and of the arts. But that the people of Kabul actually benefited in some way from the imposition of the Taliban regime strikes one, considering the widespread disdain for the Taliban regime, as absurd. Stephen Moss (2001) writes in the Guardian newspaper:

“To stifle music – ‘the food of love’, ‘the greatest good that mortals know’, with ‘charms to soothe a savage breast’ - seems to westerners the vilest of acts. Don't just imagine no possessions; imagine no Imagine. Imagine no Beethoven, no Mozart, no Bach, no Scarlatti (either of them); OK, there would be no Britney or Bryan either, but even that is not enough to make one side with the Taliban. The banning of music - just like the destruction of the great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan - seems reprehensible to those in the west who see music as the purest art form, the attempt to ‘express the inexpressible’, as the composer Janacek said.”

This view echoes the view of many others in the press at the time, which I will look at in greater detail later – also, that documentaries have been made on the suppression, books and articles have disseminated the press, and that the issue of Islamic suppression of music has been pushed to the forefront in the Western media by the cultural brutalities of the Taliban regime. This, ironically, has the opposite effects of highlighting the Western tenets of Islamic music, of which, as I will describe later, there are many. The Taliban regime stood in stark opposition to the views of the liberal West which, combined with the atrocity of September 11th and the subsequent war on terror, helped to publicise the eccentricities of the regime, and highlight the opposition to the tenets of this regime, particularly in the field of music suppression. Griffin suggests that: “[under the Taliban regime] women undoubtedly bore the brunt of this new Puritanism, but men were also forced to conform – replacing their Western clothing with the shalwar kamees; growing long beards; being forced to go to the mosque five times a day to worship; and abandoning toothpaste in favour of the natural root which the Prophet favoured for dental hygiene.” It is this level of social, economic and cultural control by the state that stands in such opposition to the liberated, freedom-seeking West’s way of living. So, from the quote from the Guardian it is easy to determine the impact on Western audiences the suppression of music by the Taliban had. First, “the food of love” is a quote from Sufism, a more liberal form of Islam that uses music as a central inspiration. Also, that the suppression of art itself is, in Western minds, deplorable. John Lennon’s Imagine is cited, along with Britney Spears and Bryan Adams, both of whom, at least according to Baily’s account of Kabul and Hamat, were undoubtedly popular in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized the reins of power. There are many accounts of musicians hiding their equipment, or else fleeing the country entirely.

The suppression of music, Baily argues in his analysis of the music of Afghanistan, has a long tradition both in Eastern and Western religion. But now it is primarily associated with the more “fundamentalist” arms of Islam. They declare music, tenuously citing the Koran, as Haram, or forbidden. An online extract from Muslim Creed says:

“Allaah said, what translated means, ‘And of mankind he who purchases idle talks to mislead (people) from the Path of Allaah without knowledge, and takes it (the Path of Allaah) by way of mockery, For such there will be a humiliating torment.’ [31:6].

Al-Wahidi , along with other scholars of Tafsir (explaining the Qur'aan), said that ‘Idle Talk’ in this Ayah is singing. The following companions gave this Tafsir: Ibn Abbas, Ibn Masud, Mujahid and Ikrimah . Ibn Masud said, "By Allaah, whom there is no God except Him, idle talk is singing." (Islamic Creed)

Of course it would be absurd to suggest that everybody who is Islamic harbours this particularly extreme view on the illicit nature of music, but it is nevertheless interesting to see how opposite these views stand when compared to the paradigm of the liberal, post-modern West. The Taliban were, in many ways representative of this fundamentalist paradigm, and provoked a great deal of interest among liberal progressives in the occident. Baily is quick to defend the peoples of Afghanistan, suggesting that “since the early part of the twentieth century, music had been dominated by figures who were amateur by origin, where Western staff notation had been adopted, and a Western style conservatoire teaching Persian art had been set up.” (Baily, 1988, p. 161) Indeed, the Western influence in Islamic music has been around for some time, at least according to Baily, and that separatist ideals regarding Islam simply cannot be applied without causing significant duress, as experienced under the Taliban regime.

The ideology behind banning music in Islam bears some similarities to our views. Often, the frivolities of dance and music are cited as reasons for suppressing music – this has a familiar air about it when, for instance, rap music is blamed for a murder in secular Western society – I will look in detail at how certain tenets of the Islamic faith suppress music and why they do it.

Addressing the question directly, I argue that it is very difficult to ascertain whether the Taliban have provided a “positive model for further exploration”. Certainly, the Taliban’s suppression of music, coupled with their mystery and their secretiveness – in fact, their position as everything that the secularised governments and alienated rituals of religious institutions aren’t have definitely led to a reinvigoration of the question of music in Islam. And, judging that Afghanistan has always been a particularly musical nation, according to John Baily, actually drawn together as a nation by music, the total suppression of music is seen as especially tragic a thing to happen to the people. In the post 9/11 climate, of course it was necessary to paint the Taliban in a cruel light. But despite their obvious cruelties, it still has to be argued that under the Taliban the civil war was put to an end, and the strong leadership and suppression of music was a necessary step in maintaining this fragile order. Michael Griffin (2001, p. 3) says:

“In the West, they disdained the Taliban’s policies on women and criminals, and tut-tutted that Muslim peasants could cause such ferment in international capitals. But there was something splendid in the movement’s infallible sense of direction while its rejection of all things Western touched some deep even chord even in these remote spectators who, while holding opinions on every conceivable aspect of human behaviour, still did not know how to act. […] They tapped both a romance with the esoteric and an equally widespread phobia of the hypnotised warriors of the Mahdist uprising which, in the nineteenth century, had sent a supra-personal dust devil careering through Britain’s colonial ambitions in the Sudan.”

In this dissertation I will look at how music is played in Islamic states, and whether the mainstream fundamentalist line of haram is really upheld at all by the majority of Islamic people, especially those of Afghanistan. I will also look at how Western, secular states proliferate Islam; indeed, that the appreciation of western music, and culture in general, denotes a split in Islam, between consideration for Western practices, and outright rejection. I will also look in detail at Western interpretations of the Taliban, especially its suppression of music. And I will look more generally at the history of musical suppression, and how this has affected the American export of musical and ideological values, especially as regards modernist music and popular music.


Music in Afghanistan

Islam remains problematic about the concept of music in its teachings. Some prophets advocate music, suggesting that it cleanses the soul. This is most prevalent in Sufism, which suggests that music is “food for the spirit. When the spirit obtains its food, it attains its proper station and turns aside from the subordination of the body; then appears in the listener a commotion and a movement” (Baily, 1988, p. 152). Other forms of Islam, however, state that it is forbidden (haram) to listen to music. The justification for this attitude toward music are varied. Some state the words of certain other Prophets, who simply declare that it is illegal, often peppering their dogmatic and ill-founded prose with tenuous association with some extract or other from the Koran, whereas others state more explicitly that it dissuades one from attending prayers. Others say that music is a force of evil. The unique interpretation of the Taliban was to say that, if you listened to music then on judgement day you will have boiling led poured into your ears as punishment. It was ironic that this anti-musical statement was actually put to the form of music, by means of a cassette tape disseminated by the government and force-fed to the hapless Afghanis. Of course, with all regimes that seek to dominate the individual, the banning of music has obvious political and power-related machinations. Without a divergent voice, often expressed through music, the Taliban could keep a firmer grip on an otherwise fragile and ethnically fragmented country. Also, because of the nature of the political struggle in previous years; the violent and bloody civil war between Hekmatyar, Rabbini and Massoud, where thousands perished, the violent suppression of music, of women and of numerous personal freedoms wasn’t really particularly important to a war-torn population. Compared to the brutalities of a civil war that had previously torn the nation apart, silence was nothing. Music was, however, a central part of the culture of Afghanistan and, to some extent, still was under the rule of the Taliban government. The history of music in Afghanistan is varied and diverse. But, importantly, before the instigation of the ban by the Taliban, music was fundamentally a part of the nation’s culture:

“Music had become more a part of everyday life, most obviously through radio broadcasting, the theatres of Herat, and the cinema with its Indian films. […] Secondly, there was increased contact with the outside world. The visits of Afghans abroad had shown that music was part of everyday life in most countries. This went along with pointing out that the times had changed and that Afghanistan had become more modern.” (Baily, 1988, p. 151)

So, Afghanistan’s musical heritage is innately linked with our own. The increased contact with the outside world suggests that Afghani’s and that Islamic music doesn’t exist in complete isolation to Western music. The Western interpretation of music from Islam as different seems to break down when it is put under any kind of serious scrutiny. Shiloah (1995) goes on to talk about where the origins of Western music in Afghanistan reside. He says: “At first, as might be expected, Western music made inroads via the military bands that were now becoming an integral part of the fighting forces being recognized in accordance with European models.” So, originally, the influence was militaristic. He goes on to say: “These bands were drilled by European composers and musicians summoned by the rulers to instruct local musicians in the handling of European instruments and to acquaint them with the basics of Western music.” It is clear from this that the influence of Western music and culture on Islam goes back a long way. The Taliban, despite their best efforts to eradicate Western influence, have only served to publicise this occidental influence in Islamic popular music.

“Wettl and Foltin recorded performances of the daramad and charargah from a number of musicians in Mashrad […]. They also performed Iranian film and popular songs, Indian film songs and some Western dance music such as tango, waltz and ‘jerk’. […] Western staff notation, formed an important medium for learning and teaching […] they had an aura of middle-class respectability, and the musicians in these ensembles enjoyed a considerably greater social status.” (Baily, 1988, p. 161)

The Taliban banned most forms of music, but not all forms of music. As is frequently lambasted in the press (which I will discuss later), they had recitals from the Koran; a highly traditional form of vocal only “music”, that in turn added a further layer of hypocrisy to the Taliban’s regime, certainly in terms of the Western secularised opinion of it. Ian Bedford (2001, p. 6), in his essay on the interdiction of music in Islam, suggests however that “Qur'anic recitation is not conceptualised by believers as music.” He goes on to say:

“If tajwid is called music, the God-given text is yoked to a power which fuses with the eloquence of the text but has a character of its own and is man-made, not God-given. The impasse is solved by an ontological statement, a statement about the being of divine revelation. The Qur'an is ijaz', inimitable. It is a book and it persists as a book, highly synchronous and interlinked, with a mosaic rather than a linear structure, and with much cross-stitching of phrase and motif. But it is more than a book: it is also an event and it persists as an event in the form of its proper recitation.”

So because of the inimitable power of the Koran as a gift from Allah, the Taliban and other advocates of declaring music as haram can escape the notion that a “musical” enunciation of the Koran makes the Koran an event; something which allows the Koran to transcend its limitations as a mere document, and actually live as a relevant statement from God. However, the interdiction of music in Islam is highly inconsistent. In the case of Marcel Khalifa, who was put on trial for singing a song with a Koran reference in it:

“In the terms stated by the Dar ul-Fatwa in Beirut, the charge was clear: it was one thing to quote the Qur'an, but to set its words to music--even when they were embedded in a poem--and to accompany them with instruments was 'to go beyond the respect due to God on earth' […] But a deliberated sentence, voiced by the Grand Mufti, as in this case, is unusual. Its logic, if systematically applied, would have grave effect all over the Muslim world, including India and Pakistan, where an 'alim could be put to work weeding the Qur'anic quotations and references out of the endless accumulation of devotional songs performed with instruments in the Punjabi language and in Urdu, Persian, Sindhi and Seraiki, just to begin with.” (Bedford, 2001, p. 3)

So the Taliban, by Western standards, did not wholeheartedly ban music, but that depends entirely on the definition of music that you offer. Certainly, in Western terms, the holy recitals definitely sound like music, and are disseminated through the same channels as music, i.e. through the cassette players and the speakers, and the words are sung, but the lack of instrumentation may provide a tenuous solution to this hypocrisy. In the eyes of the West though, this is highlighted as another example of the Taliban’s innate tyranny; and of its opposition to Western values of free speech and the democratic ideal. This tenet of the Taliban is exploited to some extent by the Western press.

The Taliban, therefore, banned instrumental music, allowing the holy recitals of the Koran on grounds that it was sacred, and therefore exempt from the charges of polluting the minds of the populous. This music was openly encouraged. In fact, Islamic faith has a double standard as regards the music of Koranic recital.

So, the Islam of the Taliban draws a distinction between different types of music. Certain, legitimate forms of music are allowed, whereas others aren’t. Bedford goes on to suggest:

“Besides all these attributes, Qur'anic recitation has a quality of its own which is not to be found in other kinds of musical performance. It has the recognised function, not only of carrying the divine message, but of showing, or representing that message in its sensuous character as it was conveyed by the Angel Jibrail to Muhammad at the time of revelation. In fact, terms like 'represent' are too weak. Qur'anic recitation, according to the rules of tajwid does not merely represent or recall that message; it is that message in its character as experience. In this it has the force, not so much of commemorative ritual, but rather of those rituals in which a presence appears, for example, the Catholic Eucharist.” (Bedford, 2001, p. 5)

Indeed, the popularity of music in Afghanistan was only cemented by the increasingly liberal attitudes displayed toward the people who produced the music. Thus, stories about professional musicians in Afghanistan being persecuted and exiled from their own country, being forced to earn a living in nearby Pakistan, was only made more poignant and newsworthy. Nadya Labi (Time) reports that “Zar Wali smiles broadly as he begins to play the harmonium. ‘My beloved country,’ he sings in his native Pashto, ‘this Afghanistan, is very dear to me.’ The anthem is sweet—sweet enough to make him briefly forget that he is in Pakistan.” So, the battle lines are drawn in the Western media between the evil regime and the poor artists and musicians suppressed and attacked by it. Ironically enough, the Taliban have provoked more articles to be written about Islamic, specifically Afghani music, and the suppression of music has drawn especial attention to the ways in which Western modes and values have entered the mainstream of Afghani music against these apparently irreconcilable odds.


Western Interpretations of The Taliban’s Haram on Music

To analyse the article by Nadja Labi from Time magazine more closely, it is apparent that the concept of Western interaction in music assumes more precedence, and is even seen as a redemptive quality in Afghani music, than actually keeping hold of the so-called Islamic traditions that have been suppressed by the regime does. Labi opens the article by quoting from the song, which says “God, everyone in the world has a lover except me. […] Why is it so?” Of course, the lyrics are imbued with Western connotations; they have a vaguely blasphemous, or at least, a flippant reference to God; they mention the attainment of a lover, itself a practice not approved by fundamentalist Islam; and also, the general tone of the music is Western. Also, cassettes, with their obvious Western connotations are mentioned, and subsequently, the image of these cassettes being burned, destroyed, “executed”, has more significant weight as an anchor for representing the Taliban as harbouring an anti-Western viewpoint; of challenging the freedoms of the West against the will of the people.

Labi goes on to mention that “even Western pop made its way to Kabul in the 1970s, when the capital was host to an international rock festival sponsored by a cigarette company.” The musician plays a harmonium, a instrument invented in the West, and such values, leaden as they are with Western connotations, as self-expression are heralded above anything else: “When music is muzzled, an outlet for self-expression is lost.” She suggests. Coupled with this is a negative portrayal of the songs that the Taliban force upon the innocents of Kabul: “Religious songs with no instrumentation are exempted, as well as patriotic chants such as ‘Taliban, O Taliban, you're creating facilities, you're defeating enemies’—a bit of nationalistic verse that has received heavy play on Radio Shariat, the state-run station.” Thus, the question as to whether the Taliban instigated further investigation into the interaction between Islamic music, is confirmed. The negativity with which the Taliban is treated, specifically regarding their suppression of music, is feverous when music is regarded in a populist, Western light; the American standard of popular music providing pleasure, as opposed to being a tool for enlightenment, wins through.

Also, it is important that, by regarding the Taliban’s own music as “a bit of nationalistic verse”, Labi stresses that, not only is the Taliban hypocritical, by playing only their own verses, yet banning all other forms of music, but also, by equating this to the term “nationalistic”, is also condemning the modernist interpretation of Islam – undermining the principle of politics and culture being innately tied to religion; in itself a practice of “fundamentalist” Islamic states. Thus, the attention is drawn immediately to the Islamic regime of the Taliban as a portal of difference from Western hegemony, which immediately draws a distinction between American and Islamic fundamentalist music. Sayeed (1995) suggests that “[t]he West is dominating the Islamic and Arab Middle East not only through political and military means. Its dominance through ideas and political, economic, and cultural systems has turned out to be more penetrating.” Thus, as an example of this cultural dominance in action, the West, the ideals of a Western musical heritage is superimposed here onto Islam, using weighted language and anchorage against the Taliban regime, and against the eccentricities of this form of “modernistic” Islam, as propagated by Afghani and other Islamists of fundamentalist persuasion.

“The BBC soon broadcast several programmes about conditions in the capital. In one, a middle-aged tabla player from the musicians quarter was shown buying his drums. […] The image of ‘executed’ audio and video tapes was also a favourite topic for the press.” (Baily, 2001, p. 36)

The “executed” images; the symbol of opposition to Western culture and Western political and cultural dominance was one that would undoubtedly provide the media with columns of material to work with. But it is easy to be overly sympathetic toward the Taliban regime in this respect. But the notoriety and the mystery of the Taliban essentially put them, and Afghanistan back on the cultural map. Their mysterious leader, the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar, in many ways epitomised the notion of otherness. He is reclusive, almost absent completely from the affairs of politics, yet he assumes an almost mythical status as head of the state. Also, Griffin suggests:

“Denied any significant funding during the Soviet war, Harakat was largely dormant by the time the Taliban made their debut. But the political naivety that the latter when on the display and the quantity of Harakat commanders drawn to their ranks would fuel speculation that the movement was not seeking power solely for itself, but was more of an inspirational police force. […] [This] added another dimension to the Taliban’s undeniable air of mystery.” (Griffin, 2001, p. 35)

He later describes them as having a mythical, “‘Robin Hood’ quality”. The amusing irony is that the Taliban, through their bizarre and idiosyncratic extremism, in many ways brought to attention a number of prejudices at the heart of Islam, notably regarding their crude and intimidating radicalism as regards the treatment of women, of homosexuality, of divergent tastes, of individuality, of freedom; such values that are heralded as bastions of civilization in the West. The stifling of cultural freedoms the Western ideology of free trade and globalisation herald above anything else is epitomised in many respects by the suppression, but also the selective (at least in Western terms) suppression of music that doesn’t tune into a specific and blatantly expressed ideology. This insinuates a problem with the notion of Islamic fundamentalism when opposed by capitalism. Manji, in her polemical assault on traditional Islam, The Trouble with Islam, states:

“So thoroughly immersed are we in our spiritual narcissism that most Muslims don’t think twice, or once, about the damage this attitude [of fundamentalism] can inflict on the world. We instinctively accept it, sliding our heads out of the sand every so often to notice the ‘extremists.’ And sometimes not even then.” (Manji, 2003, p. 45)

The impossibility of reconciling the grotesquery of certain human rights abuses conducted under the name of Allah, coupled with the doctrinally corrupt, male dominated, artistically corroded, joyless administration of the Islamic faith, is what has led to a radical reappraisal of Islam in the light of the September 11th atrocity. Manji argues that the oppressive tendencies of Islam run back into the grain of Islam, right into the institutions that separate it and glorify it and ultimately render it capable of the atrocities against women, Jews and homosexuals that the more moderate Islamic people separate themselves from. She further suggests that this is not what Islam should be about, and sets about asserting her secular position for Islam.

“A few months before Sept. 11, I joined a panel of Muslims on national TV to ‘discuss images of the Islamic world.’ Taking this politely worded invitation as a euphemism for ‘let’s complain about the West’, my fellow panellists indulged in the usual castigating of North American pop culture: Hollywood casts us all as fanatics, the fanatics look swarthy, and every other standard line in the victims’ canon. Bored with an argument-on-autopilot, I proposed a different line: that we Muslims don’t give people much incentive to see us as anything but monolithic.” (Manji, 2003, p. 45)

The problem with fundamentalist Islam, according to Menji, could be easily cured if Islam learnt tolerance toward others. This is highlighted in terms of musical suppression. The west view the Taliban with suspicion because it doesn’t fit into an established moralistic framework – because it conducts heinous crimes against the Afghani people in the name of the Islamic faith, and because it suppresses, rather than promotes culture. The fact that music as Harem runs so deeply into the fabric of Islam, maintains Islam’s position. A tolerance of Western music is therefore seen as a positive step in the approach to reconciling Islam with the west. Although the Taliban sought to distance themselves from this, the coverage, which largely concentrated on the plight of the musicians, and the general misery of the music-free world of Afghanistan, worked in entirely the opposite way, highlighting how the West had effectively entered the undercurrent of the Islamic population.

To go back to the ideology of the Brethren, Rejwan (1998, p. 73) states that:

“The failure of the Brethren […] can be ascribed to several factors. […] One of these was their indiscriminate anti-Westernism. Concentrating on the evils, real and imagined, of the Western way of life, they condemned Western civilization as materialistic and essentially non-religious.”

So, the Taliban, as does much of Islamic fundamentalist government, suffers from failing to incorporate Western ideals into their governmental and cultural regime. In terms of the music, it has only served to lessen the boundaries between the musical worlds of East and West which, ironically enough, are the very things that the more extremist factions of government tend to veer away from.


Conclusion

The Islamic view of Haram in music is a difficult ambiguity as regards an Islamic interpretation of music, but the interdiction of music in the Taliban state still strikes the Western mindset, enamoured as it generally is with notions of music as an expression of the soul, as something profoundly heinous, and, above anything else, completely opposite to our ways and means of thinking about culture and art. While other facets of Islam, such as Sufism and the more moderate majority of Islam believe music to be the “food of the soul”, there still exists the sceptre of Islamic fundamentalism that, by instigating these sacred bans on such things as music and other cultural practices, only serve to highlight the quagmire and the malaise that contemporary Islam faces if it is to iron out its significant ideological problems when faced up against the encroaching materialism and the consumerism of the West.

Ironically enough, the silent rebellion of the Afghan people against the crueller aspects of the Taliban regime found voice in the West, regarding the numerous issues concerning women and gender in Islamic discourse, as well as the suppression of basic cultural tools for discourse. The image was painted of the suffering musician, exiled from the nation that he loves, driven only by his love of music and the happiness that it gives to others. The image of the man beaten for listening to music he loves, or of Taliban officials smashing up cassette tapes and closing down wedding ceremonies, or the image of the women beaten for accidentally showing her ankle. Ironically, because of their suppression in Afghanistan, and thanks partly due to the innate and macabre intrigue of the nuances and eccentricities of the Taliban regime, these people are given a voice in Western discourse instead, and thus become political tools for ousting these factions of Islam that, at least when seen through the paradigm of Westernised, liberal society, seem not only ridiculous, but dangerous as well.

The title of John Baily’s book sums up the Taliban, their goals, namely, Can You Stop the Birds Singing? Afghanistan is a musical nation; in fact, Baily even argues that music provides a central means for establishing a sense of national identity in a fragmented and divided state, with a plethora of ethnicities and beliefs all struggling to find a place. This made the image of the Taliban; the evil fundamentalists, in Western eyes at least, even more appealing to the journalist with an eye for a good story.

So, the unruly, inconsistent and unusual hybrid of fundamentalist beliefs that comprised of the Taliban only served to highlight the connections between West and East, as the impoverished and culturally desolated individuals of Afghanistan either hid themselves away, or else fled the country entirely, to become stories of betrayal to be picked up by opportunistic Western journalists. This highlights a central problem with Islam; namely, its inconsistency. Martin Kramer (1996) suggests that “One day its[, Islamic fundamentalism’s] spokesmen call for a jihad (sacred war) against the West, evoking the deepest historic resentments. Another day, its leaders appeal for reconciliation with the West, emphasizing shared values. Its economic theorists reject capitalist materialism in the name of social justice, yet they rise to the defence of private property. Its moralists pour scorn on Western consumer culture as debilitating to Islam, yet its strategists avidly seek to buy the West’s latest technologies in order to strengthen Islam.” Indeed the difficulty with Islam occurs in its simultaneous hatred for Western ideals, but also in the corruptibility of certain regimes. Also, the issue was raised frequently in the Western press, that music was suppressed in the free market, yet it was disseminated in the form of Koranic and propagandistic chants by the Taliban regime. This only served to highlight further the difficulties of reconciling fundamentalist Islam with the West, being as they are, fundamentally opposed on so many levels.

Overall, the interdiction of music in Afghanistan has provided an interesting shift in the framework within which the West, and specifically the more popular outlets, outside of ethnomusicology departments and obscure critical journals, regard Islamic interaction with music and other facets of Western culture. This has provided Islam with an interesting framework from which to launch a more liberated ideal, and to perhaps put away the disastrous human rights records, the bigotry, the stiflingly narrow and hypocritical world views that some of the more extreme factions of the Islamic fundamentalist world tend to propagate and harbour against all others.

Judging from the innumerable reports concerned with the Taliban’s suppression of music, coupled with the distinct air of mysteriousness that the Taliban created, with their eccentric ideology and their brutal regime, and also the relatively remote locale, their rural location and their general position outside of the framework of Afghani politics up until their eventual seizure of the political reins, the general trend among Western journalists, documentary makers, film makers and academics has been that the Afghanis despised every minute of their political dominance.

Overall, I would argue that the Taliban, despite their best efforts to return to a golden age of political and religious wonderment, via their total suppression of culture and of individuality, only served to place the disillusioned mortals of their crushing cultural, social and economical programme into the spotlight of the Western media. Coupled with the attention from the war on terror, where Afghanistan was cited as being the home of Islamic bogeyman Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime, through the unusual totality of its programme, allowed the individuals of Afghanistan to get their individual voices back in the safety net of the Western media. The portrayal of the Taliban in the West was as wholly, fundamentally Islamist. Yet their extreme views allowed in some respects a dichotomy to emerge where the people of Afghanistan, robbed and starved of their culture and heritage, would be seen as interacting with the Western world in a manner that highlighted their disillusionment with this particularly unique perversion of Islam. The press were generous in offering stories of the people whose culture had been suppressed, but only insofar as it appealed to a western audience.

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