‘The Taliban found music on my computer and destroyed it’
Afghan composers talk to Richard Morrison about the horror at home as their works are played in London
Arson Fahim
Monday July 04 2022, 12.01am BST, The Times
Many musicians around the world are struggling to keep body and soul together. Few of them face as much peril and hardship as the Afghan composer Zalai Pakta. Trapped in Kabul, inside a country where the Taliban have banned all music and where half of the population of 39 million are said to be starving, he tells me over WhatsApp of the latest setback in his life.
“I don’t even have my computer any more,” he says. “I took it to be repaired in a shop. The Taliban were watching. They seized it and found it had music on it. So they destroyed it.”
Before August 15 last year, the fateful day when British and US troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban swept to power again, Pakta had been teaching in the flourishing music department at Kabul University. It’s now shut, indefinitely. So is every other music organisation in the country.
Zalai Pakta
“The Taliban consider music to be ‘haram’, which means ‘a sin’,” explains Arson Fahim, another Afghan composer who managed to leave Kabul for an American music college two weeks before the city fell. “So there is no way for musicians to make a living.”
For Pakta, a renowned virtuoso on the Afghan flute for 30 years, that has been emotionally as well as economically devastating. “I am not in a great mental state,” he says. “My heart is not good. It is almost impossible for me to think about music because I worry about so many other things. I am looking for any chance to leave Afghanistan, but for me there seems no way out.”
If he is trapped, however, at least his music isn’t. The Spitalfields Music Festival in London is about to mount a concert of new orchestral music by Afghan composers in exile or hiding. Both Pakta and Fahim are among the nine composers featured. To judge from their descriptions of their pieces, the audience should be in for an extraordinarily intense evening.
“My piece is called Heart that Burns,” Pakta says. “It doesn’t have any words. It is for Afghan flute and western orchestra [the Oxford Philharmonic], but the music will speak of all the tragedies that my country has gone through.”
Conductor and academic Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey
As will Fahim’s piece, it seems. “I have called mine Dance of Terror, and it’s weird because it’s almost a fun piece,” he says. “You know, sometimes when you feel really depressed, hopeless, numb, you start laughing. However, the piece is really about how tragic the last 20 years have been. All the billions of dollars wasted. All the lies we were told. And in the end, nothing changed. Thousands of lives lost or ruined. Families broken for ever. The pain that Afghans are feeling now, regardless of where they are, is unimaginable to anyone else.”
He knows of what he speaks. Now 22, he may have been a “lucky” exile this time around, finding a safe berth in America, but his early life was traumatic. His parents met in Pakistan, where both had fled in the 1990s to escape the Taliban’s first reign of terror. Fahim was born a refugee, his first home a mud hut in a camp for displaced Afghans.
When he was three his parents sent him to an orphanage 150 miles away, hoping he would get the education he couldn’t get in the camp. It was only when they all returned to Kabul, nine years later, that his musical potential was recognised. He was given a place at the pioneering National Institute of Music founded by Ahmad Sarmast.
This remarkable, almost Dickensian upbringing has left Fahim thinking of music as a sacred force in his life. “If I had a choice of not playing music or not being alive, I would rather not be alive,” he says. “I think that goes for a lot of Afghan musicians.”
What does the future hold for them? All the composers featured in the concert, apart from Pakta, have managed to get out of the country, and the same goes for the students and teachers of the National Institute of Music who (as I reported here last October) have been happily relocated to Portugal.
“However, to be brutally honest, it’s only a relatively small proportion of Afghan musicians — the ones with western connections — who have found their way to safety,” says Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, the conductor and academic who is the driving force behind the Spitalfields concert. “Thousands of professional and amateur musicians are still in Afghanistan. They have had their instruments destroyed, or have buried them, or hidden them in basements.