Poetry of the Taliban

At your Christmas, Bagram is alit and bright;

On my Eid, even the rays of the sun are dead.

Suddenly at midnight, your bombs bring the light;

In our houses, even the oil lamps are turned off.

Khepulwaak, On Eid

The contrast drawn in the lines above between Americans celebrating Christmas in the Bagram Air Base and Afghans commemorating the Muslim festival of Eid outside is so simple as to be unanswerable. However slanted it might otherwise be, this brief description represents a truth beyond the politics of good intentions that characterises the international community’s actions in Afghanistan. Ultimately it is likely to be such descriptions that come to define the war in that country, and not the complicated arguments of those who would rescue it from the depredations of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Now that coalition forces are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan without achieving any of their goals, such arguments are about to fall silent in any case, and a new society will have to be built from the kind of consciousness that is on display in this and other poems that may be said to constitute the literature of the Taliban.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the ever-increasing archive of studies on the Taliban only a minuscule number have attended to the movement’s aesthetic dimension, including the work of James Caron and Michael Semple. For whether scholars and indeed experts of all kinds view them as being products either of some Western modernity, in the form of the US-backed jihad against the Soviets, for example, or on the contrary of an Islamic tradition, the Taliban are invariably defined in terms of tribal regulation and religious law. But however important such juridical and political factors have been in the making of their movement, surely it is the human element, represented in what turns out to be a prolific culture of versification, that goes some way towards accounting for the Taliban’s self-consciousness, to say nothing about their resilience and appeal. For this body of verse is part of a greater world of poetic production in which Afghans belonging to every shade of political opinion participate.

Even when the large store of poetry produced by the Taliban or their supporters has been noticed, which is more often than not by American military analysts, it tends to be seen merely as propaganda and thus folded back into the instrumentality of politics. Yet it might well be the autonomy of this aesthetic, or rather its general and broadly human character, that links the Taliban to a wider world outside their ethnic and doctrinal limits. And such a link, of course, is as capable of diluting the movement’s integrity as of reinforcing it. So apart from engaging with a subject that has received scant attention until now, this book is remarkable for attending to the expansive and therefore richly ambiguous nature of Taliban verse. And this is hardly surprising given the linguistic and historical situation of the Pashto language, which has for centuries now been in a state of constant engagement with the literary traditions of languages like Persian and Urdu that link the Pashtuns to Iran on the one hand and India on the other.

Now the Taliban are known not only in the West, but in much of the Muslim world, too, for their strict conservatism rather than for any delicate feelings of humanity, yet the poetry associated with them is replete with such fine emotions. Drawing upon the long tradition of Persian or Urdu verse as much as Afghan legend and recent history, it is an aesthetic form that includes unrequited love, powerful women for whose illicit favours competitors vie, and descriptions of natural beauty among its themes, as the following quatrains from a poetess with the pen name Nasrat (Victory) illustrate:

My competitor cut my heart;

Tears streamed from my eyes.

O relentless one, your heart is harder than stone;

I weep for you and you laugh at me.

We love these dusty and muddy houses;

We love the dusty deserts of this country.

But the enemy has stolen their light;

We love these wounded black mountains.

Indeed a common claim in this poetry is that the simple humanity of rural Afghans, nourished by the loveliness of their mountains, meadows and streams, is under attack by coalition forces with their drones, air strikes and heavily armed soldiers. This is of course a literary trope, whose distance from reality does not, however, mean that Taliban poets and their audiences have no genuine feeling for such things as natural beauty. Indeed the contrary is probably true, with the Taliban’s aesthetic doing as much to heighten an Afghan’s appreciation of flowers, birds and the landscape as of turning him against American troops. But the concern in this literature for humanity is more complex, with some writers sorrowfully acknowledging its loss among the Afghans themselves, as in the following lines from a poem by Samiullah Khalid Sahak entitled Humanity:

Everything has gone from the world,

The world has become empty again.

Human animal.

Humanity animality.

Everything has gone from the world,

I don’t see anything now.

All that I see is

My imagination.

They don’t accept us as humans,

They don’t accept us as animals either.

And, as they would say,

Humans have two dimensions.

Humanity and animality,

We are out of both of them today.

We are not animals,

I say this with certainty.

But,

Humanity has been forgotten by us,

And I don’t know when it will come back.

May Allah give it to us,

And decorate us with this jewellery.

The jewellery of humanity,

For now it’s only in our imagination.

If their pastoral idyll strikes us as being so familiar as to be almost universal, the same holds true for the Taliban’s aesthetic more generally, which eschews any of the factors that otherwise distinguish the movement, whether it be religious restrictions, sanguinary punishment or the suppression of women. Neither Mullah Mohammad Omar, moreover, nor the regime he led in Afghanistan before 9/11, receives much mention in this poetic cornucopia, though there are references to a longed-for revolution and the establishment of an Islamic moral order. But why should the Taliban’s aesthetic be so removed from the opinions and practices that define them both religiously and politically? To account for such a division by invoking ideas about hypocrisy or propaganda is unsatisfactory, because their very possibility would have made Taliban verse controversial and perhaps even impossible. Instead of which it both draws upon and finds acceptance within a poetic tradition that links the movement to a world outside its own. The Taliban’s aesthetic, as I have already suggested, is marked by a consciousness external to their movement, one that moves beyond the limits of ideology to make for a thoroughly individual sense of freedom which can manifest itself in obedience as much as defiance, fidelity to a cause as much as its betrayal.

From its origins in the Soviet invasion of 1979, the war that continues to wreck Afghanistan has also given rise to an extraordinary aesthetic consciousness. By weaving it into carpets, photographing it in secret studios and commemorating it in song and verse distributed by way of CDs and cell phones, Afghans across the political spectrum have struggled to humanise a long and destructive war in an effort that bears comparison to the cultural productivity of the First World War in Europe. Poetry, which was probably the most important aesthetic medium of traditional Afghan society, has played a crucial role in this effort, and the Taliban verse collected in this volume represents the melancholy beauty of the old lyric as well as the moral outrage and call to action that is characteristic of modern literature. Unlike the unabashed propaganda that characterises the official audio CDs and other products of the Cultural Committee of the Islamic Emirate, this material by individual members or sympathisers of the Taliban is not only more spontaneous in nature, but also serves to link the movement with a much larger world of aesthetic experience and literary reference outside.

While it is the tarana or ballad that seems to be the favourite genre of the Cultural Committee’s propaganda, a primarily oral form of literature that has also received most attention from those who study the Taliban, it appears to be the ghazal or love lyric whose themes if not always form dominate the movement’s unofficial literature. Made up of interlinked couplets that do not have to possess any continuity of narrative or even mood, the ghazal is by far the most popular genre of poetry in the region, which can be sung and recited, but also dominates the written literature that was previously composed primarily by court poets and mystics. Indeed the traditional element in the Taliban’s aesthetic derives precisely from mystical and courtly or profane works that might not otherwise meet with the movement’s approval. Ambiguity lies at the heart of this lyrical tradition, in which emotions, ideas and worlds of reference can change radically from one couplet to another in the same poem, and whose stock characters include despondent lovers, cruel and beautiful mistresses, and a great deal of wine. And it is because such lovers may also be identified with seekers after divine union or courtiers pledged to their prince; such mistresses with God, kings or even beautiful young men; and such wine with spiritual as much as material intoxication, that this poetic tradition is so ambiguous. Indeed the rules of the genre require the ghazal to be read at as many different levels as possible. The combination of such levels is clear in the following couplets from a ghazal called “Injured” by a poet with the pen name Khairkhwa (Well-wisher):

I stoned him with the stones of light tears

Then I hung my sorrow on the gallows like Mansour.

Like those who have been killed by the infidels,

I counted my heart as one of the martyrs.

It might have been the wine of your memory

That made my heart drunk five times.

While the lyric’s ambiguity may have allowed it to escape the strictures of the devout in the past, it also permitted the profane imagery of wine, women and song to be inserted into the language of devotion itself. But to describe this as a repressed or vicarious enjoyment of immoral practices is to miss the point, since what I think is most important about this situation is the establishment of freedom as an internal quality. The limitations of the external world, in other words, are matched by the creation of a liberated consciousness, one that can uphold the moral order while at the same time being detached from it. Rather than separating the profane world from the sacred, then, the aesthetic tradition of which the Taliban’s poetry is a part joins them together while dividing the individual’s consciousness. Looking at the moral order from outside its own demesne, the individual presupposed by this aesthetic can both uphold and escape it, which also means that he cannot be confined within the precincts of any ideology.

The divided consciousness of this aesthetic subject has in the past been described almost exclusively in terms of mysticism, with the outer world’s prohibited pleasures coming to represent the moral order’s inner truth. So Islam’s masculine God can in this literary tradition be portrayed as a woman of easy virtue, and a figure like Mansour al-Hallaj, who was executed for heresy in medieval Baghdad, praised as a martyr to love. Such a mystical interpretation of the lyric’s aesthetic is, for instance, perfectly appropriate where the poetry of a Shia thinker like the Ayatollah Khomeini is concerned. But given the Taliban’s professed distaste of such an overtly esoteric approach, their use of its aesthetic suggests that it has become an autonomous and highly flexible mode of consciousness, one that is capable of transforming all outward forms into their opposites in the realm of inner pleasures. Thus the veil that is officially described as a garment representing women’s modesty and virtue comes in this poetic tradition to stand for coquetry and sexual desire. This is how the inner value of all things is determined by the converse of their outer meaning.

Of course the Taliban were not the first to dissociate the double consciousness of traditional aesthetics from the practice of mysticism. That privilege belongs to the nationalists and Marxists of the twentieth century, who would often identify the lyric’s beloved with the state or revolution they longed to lead. But deployed by these secular ideologies, the ghazal’s themes tended to lose their transgressive appeal and become bland symbols. And though the Taliban’s religious character saves their poetry from such impoverishment, it is no less modern than the literature of the communists and nationalists. For it is probably from these latter groups that the non-traditional elements of the Taliban’s aesthetic derive, including as they do rousing calls to action and astute analyses of industrial society that give the lie to any notion of the movement’s folkish character. Here, for example, are some lines from a poem called “London Life”, by Sa’eed:

There are clouds and rain but it doesn’t have any character;

Life has little joy or happiness here.

Its bazaars and shops are full of goods,

These kinds of goods don’t have a value.

Life here is so much lost in individuals that,

Brother to brother and father to son, there is no affection.

Their knowledge is so great that they drill for oil in the depths of the oceans,

But even this knowledge doesn’t give them a good reputation.

I see their many faults and virtues with my own eyes; but what can I say?

O Sa’eed, my heart doesn’t have the patience to bear this.

Far from being a remote place untouched until recently by the contemporary world, Afghanistan, as the cliché would have it, has been at the crossroads of history for many centuries, and the Pashtuns who populate the ranks of the Taliban are among the most mobile of its citizens. They constitute, in fact, one of the great trading and service communities of the region, established in large numbers all over India from medieval times and as far afield as South Africa since the nineteenth century. Today the members of this cosmopolitan population may be found between Moscow and London in Europe, all over North America and in the great migrant cities of the Persian Gulf. In fact it is even possible to say that such reality as pertains to the tribal and rural image of the Pashtuns was fostered during the nineteenth century, by the British policy of constituting so much of their homeland into a set of protected jurisdictions as part of the Great Game, in which Afghanistan became a buffer state between British India and imperial or later Soviet Russia. The strange intimacy that exists between the Taliban’s remote homeland on the one hand and the heart of global politics on the other is made evident in this poem by Faizani called ‘Pamir’, that brings together the silent beauty of this mountainous region with the clamour of a very modern war:

I know the black, black mountains;

I know the desert and its problems.

My home is the mountain, my village is the mountain and I live in the mountains;

I know the black ditches.

I always carry a rocket-launcher on my shoulder;

I know the hot trenches.

I always ambush the enemy;

I know war, conflict and disputes.

I will tell the truth even if I am hung on the gallows;

I know the gallows and hanging.

I don’t care about being hot or cold;

I know all kinds of trouble.

I am the eagle of Spin Ghar’s high peaks;

I know Pamir’s canyons.

I walk through it day and night;

I know the bends of Tor Ghar.

Bangles are joyful on the girls’ hands;

I know swords.

Those who make sacrifices for religion;

Faizani, I am familiar with such young men.

What is remarkable about the poetry represented in this volume is the deeply historical consciousness it exhibits. Rather than seeing the war in Afghanistan as one example of an endless conflict between Islam and its enemies, however, which is how much of the literature associated with Al-Qaeda describes it, this body of material possesses a far more nuanced appreciation of the past. References to the struggles of biblical prophets against ancient tyrants abound, whether it is Moses and Pharaoh or Abraham and Nimrod, and Muhammad’s battles with those among his own tribe who wanted to destroy him, are also mentioned. While such religious figures have always played an important role in traditional poetry, they often appear in a very different light in Taliban verse. Muhammad, for instance, was never seen as a warrior in the old aesthetics, and figures like Abraham, Moses or Joseph were more often known for their dreams, miracles and, in the case of the last, beauty, than for any struggle against tyranny. The Taliban poets, in other words, are very likely drawing upon the modern perspectives on these luminaries that were pioneered by nationalist and socialist writers in the twentieth century. But of course more traditional views continue to survive in their verse, which is thus a complex form detached from any purely ideological consciousness, as illustrated in these lines on Joseph’s enchantment of Potiphar’s wife, as well as on Abraham’s love, by a writer with the pen name Majbur (Helpless) from the poem “Abraham’s love”:

Not only Zuleikha wanted him, but Worlds were astonished by Joseph’s charm.

When he passed from the world, The sky and earth were astonished by my beloved.

However much Nimrod tried to throw him to the fire, But by the love of Abraham, the fires were astonished.

The wisdom of foreigners were shocked by his love, Majbur! Words are astonished by your imagination.

Far more important in Taliban poetry than such religious eminences, however, are the military heroes of the Afghan past, men like the great medieval conqueror Mahmud of Ghazni, the eighteenth-century empire builder Ahmad Shah Durrani and the nineteenth-century tribal leaders Akbar and Ayub Khan, who fought against the British during the Anglo-Afghan Wars. A striking absence from this list is Alexander the Great, a frequently mentioned hero in the poetic tradition, and one who had actually campaigned in what is today Afghanistan. Perhaps Alexander’s foreign origins now disqualify him from Taliban praise, though interestingly he is simply left out of the dramatis personae in their aesthetic and not viewed as an alien invader like Genghis Khan, another great conqueror from the distant past. The patriotic nature of this literature might also explain the importance in it of two women, the seventeenth-century poetess and warrior-queen Nazo, and Malalai, who fought against the British at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. Both women are Afghan folk heroines, and have been lauded in the past by the nationalists and communists who provide so much of the Taliban’s aesthetic with its origins. Needless to say, the behaviour of these courageous women, even as described by Taliban writers, departs in a striking fashion from that officially expected of their Afghan descendants by the movement. And the recent history of Afghan struggles against Soviet or American invasion has produced no more heroines of this kind, though the bravery and fortitude of unnamed women who typify the country’s indomitable spirit continues being praised in the Taliban’s poetry. There do however exist poetesses among the Taliban who take on the personae of Nazo and Malalai, as Nasrat does in the lyric entitled “Give me your turban”, which begins with the couplet:

Seen to date from the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, today’s war in Afghanistan stands front and centre in Taliban verse. Yet its importance pales in comparison with the Anglo-Afghan Wars, which are seen as the truest test of Afghan endurance and the surest proof of their victory. Unlike the globalised rhetoric of those associated with Al-Qaeda, it is not the defeat of a superpower like the Soviet Union that becomes the chief example of Muslim heroism here, though this is by no means ignored, but instead a colonial war of the nineteenth century that had a strictly regional significance. Apart from demonstrating the patriotic rather than planetary dimension of the Taliban’s struggle, therefore, the role played by the Anglo-Afghan Wars in this literature makes of the British an enemy so obdurate as to reduce both Russians and Americans into the palest of their imitators. So if Britain could be vanquished, the reasoning goes, neither Russia nor America ever had much chance of victory. Entailed in this story, of course, is the view that the British in our own time are of no consequence, as the Taliban authors do not make the mistake of confusing their imperial glory during the Raj with today’s politics, in which the United Kingdom is seen merely as an adjunct of the United States. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon in this literature for all Westerners to be referred to as Englishmen, thus demonstrating the great hold that colonial narratives still have in the region.

If Mullah Mohammad Omar and the Taliban regime he leads find little mention in the movement’s literature, neither do Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, to say nothing of the Arab and other foreign fighters who made Afghanistan their home. And though Taliban verse owes something to the poetry and song associated with globalised Islamic militancy, as seen, for instance, in the description of coalition forces as Crusaders, or in references to Muslim suffering the world over, it is overwhelmingly Afghan in its emphasis, and dispenses with the desert scenes, tents, charging horses and other themes popular with such militants. Also absent from this corpus of verse is the purely religious element, with prayer, pilgrimage or even sharia law seen as being part of a broader cultural landscape and in any case linked to Afghanistan in particular. Here, for instance, is the loving description of a destroyed mosque, its congregation and muezzin by Khalid Haidari in a poem with the title “Traveller Friend”:

While there are numerous references in the body of Taliban poetry not only to foreign countries like Britain, America, Israel or Russia, but also to particular sites like the White House and the prison of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Afghanistan dominates the whole. Even influential neighbouring countries like Iran and Pakistan play little part in the poet’s imagination, being viewed with suspicion for the most part or seen as places of bitter exile. Afghanistan is, however, a resolutely Pashtun land for the Taliban poet, with the country’s other ethnicities receiving cursory acknowledgement, even as their literary traditions, and the cosmopolitan world of Persian most of all, are on full display in his or her verse. Yet the fundamental ambiguity and double consciousness of this aesthetic makes for a remarkably diverse set of voices in Taliban poetry, capable of expressing everything from bloody vengeance and the thrill of battle to a desire for non-violence so complete that Mohammad Hanif, with the pen name Hairan (Amazed) asks God to forbid violence altogether in a poem titled “Oh God! These People!”

No traveller will be bitten by someone else’s dog, And nobody’s dog will be killed by someone else’s hand.

How are the Americans and their allies seen in this literature? As we know, they represent only the most recent of many invaders, of whom the British in the nineteenth century take pride of place. But this enemy also changes shape a great deal, sometimes described as a dragon from ancient lore and sometimes as a guest who ends up occupying one’s home. Here, for example, are some lines from Najibullah Akrami’s Poem:

Whatever form he takes, the enemy is always cruel, and his immense power only shows up this inhuman cruelty, as in the following description of a very real and even commonplace incident, the mistaken air strike (possibly by a drone) on a wedding party. Complete with an ironic reference to the human rights that coalition forces are meant to be defending in Afghanistan, the poem is anonymous and entitled “The Young Bride was Killed Here”:

Just as important as the foreign enemy, however, is the countryman who collaborates with him, and whose betrayal of Afghanistan serves as a sign of the occupation’s vast powers of corruption. And it is in describing this facet of the war that the Taliban poet adopts a comic or bitterly satirical tone, condemning in particular the creation of ill-gotten wealth amid overwhelming poverty, while describing the new society it produces with some care. Here for example is a poem by Matiullah Sarachawal called “How Many are the NGOs!” Anyone who has worked in Kabul, or for that matter in other post-conflict zones, will recognise the extraordinary accuracy and closely observed detail of this piece. Whatever good work they might otherwise do, NGOs here are accountable to their foreign sponsors, Western governments and international organisations who want to create a “civil society” in such places, rather than to the people they are meant to serve. They routinely hire the friends and relatives of local elites, create a new class of consumers paid in dollars who are disconnected from the local economy, and try to introduce Western norms including letters of reference and women’s empowerment in a situation where poverty and disempowerment are the norm for all categories of person:

And here are some lines from another comic piece, titled “Condolences of Karzai and Bush”, by an anonymous Taliban poet. This is a dialogue describing the parting of Hamid Karzai and George W. Bush, once the latter ceased being President, as if it were the separation of lovers, a theme very popular in the traditional literature of the region:

Although the verse presented in this volume is concerned by war above all, the diversity of its themes prevents it from being defined as war poetry in any conventional sense. Indeed I have tried to argue that if anything, Taliban verse represents a reaching out to the larger aesthetic tradition of Persian and Urdu, and thus serves to link the Afghan war to a world beyond that conflict, one that we have seen includes not only the mystical and erotic literature of the past, but also the more recent ideologies of nationalism and socialism. And this makes of it an important bridge, both cultural and political, to people and places beyond the ideological realm of the Taliban. Yet nor does this connection entail an attitude of openness to all things. Rather than Islamic law or social conservatism erecting the obstacles to any engagement with other ways of thinking about peace and social order, what is striking about this material is its fervent and very modern criticism of human rights, which is after all the slogan under which coalition forces operate in Afghanistan.

Taliban verse, as I have noted, is full of statements decrying as hypocrisy all invocations of human rights by coalition armies. And the violation of such rights by the Americans or British is viewed as being so egregious as to empty the category itself of any meaning. The accusation of hypocrisy, in other words, is not matched by any desire among Taliban poets to recuperate some authentic form of human rights, and in this way they diverge fundamentally from the rhetoric of international politics. Yet we have seen that these men and women are also capable of expressing their utmost horror at the exercise of cruelty, even when it is perpetrated by their own side, and regularly sing about the virtues of peace, love and harmony in the name of humanity. The great question as well as opportunity sounding out from this literature is how to establish such virtues in a post-war Afghan society without enclosing them in the legalistic carapace of human rights that has been marred from its origins by an association with imperialism. For in the absence of rule by consent, it was often humanitarian considerations that gave Europe’s colonial empires their legitimacy in the past.

Nor is it Islamic law so much as the pastoral utopia of some vanished tradition that provides these poets with a way of envisioning a humane society of the future. Naturally this does not amount to much as far as the establishment of a new society is concerned, but it is surely not insignificant that the feeling for humanity pervading Taliban verse is not defined in terms of life. While these poets rue the taking of innocent lives and are outraged by human suffering, in other words, unlike their enemies, they do not hold life as such to constitute some absolute value. Rather it is the exercise of virtues like courage, tenderness and yes, even vengeance, that serves to manifest humanity in their eyes. This way of thinking is certainly traditional, for the Christian West as much as the Muslim East, but throughout the Afghan war it has also become a resolutely modern view, having been linked to the critique and rejection of human rights at a conceptual level. Will the humanity that pervades Taliban poetry be able to instantiate itself in society without the aid of human rights legislation? Or will it eventually have to annul itself in the latter?