One of my great fortunes was being introduced early with the music of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. That encounter made me believe that progress and transformation were possible in Afghanistan — a belief I have never lost.
After I left traditional village school and enrolled in the modern school system, I was introduced to Afghanistan’s classical and pop music.
The voices of Ahmad Zahir, Ustad Sarahang, Ustad Mahwash, Nashenas, Sarban, and their peers flowed through the background of our daily life. Our teachers and mentors carried the culture of a crisis-stricken Kabul with them to Pakistan’s refugee camps.
It took some time for my ears — accustomed to Quranic recitation and the solo local singing — to grow used to the clamour of professional orchestral music. Ahmad Zahir’s songs, however, settled into me almost immediately.
A mind familiar with the Quran melody, Hafez, the dambura, Hazara didoy, and, to some extent, rural Pashto songs seemed like a tilled soil ready for Ahmad Zahir’s voice. I struggled to grow accustomed to Ustad Sarahang. The voices of Nashenas, Mahwash, Sarban, and others sometimes appealed to me and sometimes not. My ears’ relationship with them had its highs and lows. Some they embraced tightly; some they turned over and examined out of curiosity; others they let go after a brief touch and encounter.
Why was Ahmad Zahir’s voice both familiar and intimate to ears like mine — ears accustomed to traditional melodies — and to thousands of other village boys, just as it was to those who had grown up in the city?
At the time, I did not think too deeply about such things. Music was not my profession, nor was it my main concern. I listened to it as one breathes air, out of an instinctive need of the soul. But I was aware of Ahmad Zahir’s difference from his peers. Now, looking back, I see a reason for that special attachment to Ahmad Zahir — one that is worth sharing with you as we’ve just passed June 14, the anniversary of the birth and death of that great artist.
Ahmad Zahir was a legend. His short life unfolded at the height of Afghanistan’s encounter with the modern world. By the time he was in high school, Afghanistan had already endured a long and painful encounter with modernity — across politics, economics, culture, music, literature, and governance — and had begun to make its own gains.
For most of his life, the country had a constitutional monarchy, freedom of association, literature and poetry in ferment, mature classical and modern music, new forms of urban planning and administration, and a bourgeois economy. The middle class, literacy, factories, and machines had become the prized blossoms of society that occupied people’s minds everywhere — in both cities and villages. Some were making plans to stop that current; others were preparing to join it and move along with it.
Society had undergone a serious and active split along three main paths:
a) the path of preserving tradition;
b) the path of revolutionary departure from tradition;
c) the path of synthesizing tradition and progress.
Ahmad Zahir blossomed on the third path — the path of synthesizing tradition and progress. And what a blossoming it was.
Ahmad Zahir was born in 1946 and died in 1979. He lived for 33 years, during three decades that formed one of the most beautiful chapters in Afghanistan’s contemporary history. Ahmad Zahir seemed to be a symbol of radiance and wonder.
In May 1946, the 17-year authoritarian rule of Hashim Khan came to an end. Under pressure from constitutionalist struggles, international developments, and Afghanistan’s internal realities, the government accepted a relative opening of the political space and economic reforms. Shah Mahmud Khan, another brother from that family, became prime minister to manage the new era.
One month later, in June 1946, Ahmad Zahir was born. From then until Ahmad Zahir’s death, the constitutionalists and the advocates of change dominated the political scene. The ball of politics, culture, and economy was rolling toward change. The king and cabinet, the state and the opposition, all spoke of change and progress. Opponents of change had been pushed to the margins, and the main competition was among the supporters of transformation. Some said change should come gradually, step by step; others argued that it had to happen immediately and through revolution.
Statecraft and politics were caught in successive tensions and endured many earthquakes. Culture, economy, and family life were also highly dynamic, but unlike the state and politics, they did not experience repeated rupture and crisis. During those 30 years, there was a continuous upward movement in culture, economy, and family life — at least in Kabul and its urban satellites.
Traditional underground water channels functioned alongside modern canals; dirt roads beside asphalted streets; manufacturing workshops and handicraft industries beside industrial factories; and traditional and classical literature and art alongside modern literature and art. Together, these combinations gave energy to a society emerging from the stagnation of centuries of immobility.
Ahmad Zahir was the most beautiful artistic product of this energizing synthesis. He had one hand in tradition and the other in progressivism. He had gone to India to study music, yet he also learned from Western pop music. He sang the ghazals of Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi, but not Bedil. He sang the works of contemporaries such as Forugh Farrokhzad, Khalilullah Khalili, Abolqasem Lahouti, and Simin Behbahani, but not Nima, Shamloo, or Wasef Bakhtari. He picked the flowers that grew between the classical and the modern.
He did not confine himself to formal ghazals or aristocratic taste. He also selected local and folkloric songs. His compositions were also a selection of the indigenous, the classical, and the modern. He sang compositions by Western and Indian rock and pop singers, as well as indigenous compositions by Afghan artists such as Nainawaz.
His instruments were neither entirely Western nor purely Eastern, neither wholly indigenous nor all Indian, but a combination of them all. The guitar, trumpet, saxophone, accordion, and piano; the tabla and harmonium; the rubab, tanbur, and a number of other Eastern and Western instruments created a magical blend. It had listeners everywhere — from the apartments of Kabul’s Beatles generation and the villas of ministers and merchants to the huts of workers, shopkeepers, and peasants’ sons.
Everyone was stirred and delighted by the sound of Ahmad Zahir’s voice, from those who were accustomed to classical Indian ghazals, to those who listened to Western jazz and rock, to those whose ears had grown used to Quranic recitation and rural melodies.
Ahmad Zahir was not alone in this work, but he was its finest figure. Just as he had opened his eyes to the world one month after the end of Hashim Khan’s authoritarian rule, and had spent his childhood and youth amid the efforts of constitutionalism and the gradual opening of Afghanistan’s political, economic, and cultural space, he closed his eyes to the world in June 1979, a few months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He tasted the brief tyranny of Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, but he did not witness the fire of the Soviet invasion, nor the rockets, bombs, and suicide attacks of the jihadists or the Taliban years. With his captivating voice, he sang songs that carried deep joy and sorrow, alongside philosophical bitterness and sweetness, to both elite and ordinary ears in the most comprehensible way possible. With his smiling face, he left a rare beauty and freshness in memory. And his short life and tragic death cast a piercing sorrow over his entire artistic legacy.
Ahmad Zahir was a symbol of life: beautiful and fragile. More importantly, he is a compelling example for studying the successful synthesis of tradition and progress in Afghanistan. Now that 47 years have passed since the lamp of Ahmad Zahir’s life was extinguished, and in these decades we have experienced religious and non-religious extremism, an all-out war against tradition, and a bloody jihad against progress and change — and have, in the end, sunk into the swamp of Talibanism — learning from those three decades and from successful examples of the synthesis of progress and tradition is a necessity.
