Taliban murdered singer after banning music because it was unclean

Andarabi paid for it with his life: he was forcibly abducted from his home in the Andarabi Valley, a hundred kilometers north of Kabul, in the province of Baghlan, and killed in front of his family in a fierce execution. , according to Fawad, the singer’s son.

The news reached the media through the mouth of the former interior minister of Ashraf Ghani’s government, Masoud Andarabi, coming from the same tribal area of ​​the murdered musician. Fawad Andarabi appears in a video circulating on social networks, sitting on an outdoor carpet against a backdrop of mountains, wearing the “pakol”, the traditional northern headdress, while singing and playing the gichhak, a bowed violin, accompanied by other musicians.

“There is no place in the world like my country, a proud nation”, “our beautiful valley, homeland of our ancestors”, he sings, according to his son.

Baghlan province has been one of the most difficult for Taliban fighters to put down, and it is no coincidence that it borders the Panshir valley, which still resists the control of “Koranic students”. But the Taliban, despite the tribal pride, did not like the old singer so much, if it is true that some time ago they went to look for him at his home, chatting and drinking tea with him after breaking into the house. the House.

But then, his son said on Friday, something changed: “He was innocent, just a musician who made people happy. But he was shot in the head on his farm.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said an investigation would be carried out into the episode, suggesting the order to kill him may have come from a local activist’s initiative, not a directive “from the top”.

The same thing that happened, apparently, in the controlled episode of comedian Nazar Mohammad, called “Khasha”, who were taken from his home in Kandahar at the end of last July by Taliban fighters and seen in a video around the world as they slapped him in the backseat of a car, possibly to end the irreverent jokes that he kept telling his jailers.

During the last hours, doubts have arisen about his fate: the actor had apparently previously been a police officer, and therefore also an alleged perpetrator of brutalities, some wanted to justify himself.

But the episode was shown as a clear example of the intolerance and spirit of vengeance of the new “owners” of Afghanistan, despite conciliatory proclamations and guarantees on women’s civil rights.

However, if women were allowed to work and study – albeit in separate classes from men – their voices were forbidden in the ether.

For example, in a train station radio of Kandahar, now called “Radio Voice of Sharia”. No more music or female voices: the radio should now broadcast only information, analyzes and recitations of the Koran.

Music, the nature of which has been debated for centuries by Muslim theologians, is only considered “haram” (impure) by the Salafist and Wahhabi currents, to which Al-Qaeda and the Taliban refer, with the exception of of the sung accompaniment of prayers and sacred verses.

As for the precept of not reproducing images, the Taliban twenty years later still did not ban televisions, books or magazines of images, as they ruthlessly did when they were in power in the 1990s. .