A popular Afghan singer challenges the Taliban with song

Naghma is for her fans the embodiment of everything they hold dear: beauty, music and love for the homeland.

Now in her seventh decade, she is loved by generations of Afghans at home and abroad for sharing their pain and their longing through more than four decades of war.

That pain is hers, too, she said backstage during an interval in her London concert this summer.

“My life story is truly tragic,” she said. “We were five brothers and three sisters. All of my brothers were killed serving in the army. One sister was killed in Kabul. Only one sister is still alive.”

Yet in public, Naghma, who is vague about her age but is in her early 60s, is vivacious, with a ready laugh and a dazzling smile. She continues to tour and record folk and contemporary songs across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. But she no longer sings in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control of Kabul, the capital, in 2021 and once again outlawed music and barred women from the public sphere.

Some of her fans at the concert said they had little respect for Afghan politicians since the ignominious collapse of the US-backed government four years ago and the Taliban takeover. These fans said that artists like Naghma filled a role as champions for Afghans, raising money, as she has, for victims of a recent earthquake and calling on the Taliban to reopen girls’ schools.

In 2013, she first asked the Taliban, then an insurgent force fighting the U.S.-backed government, to stop burning schools, singing a cappella on video in deference to the Taliban ban on music. She sang:

“Please don’t destroy my school

I need to be educated

I am an Afghan girl.”

She has performed several more songs on the same topic since then and is preparing another, she said. “I have a lot of messages for my people through my singing,” she said.

Naghma has her critics. She was a member of the Interior Ministry musical troupe during the last years of the communist era in the early 1990s, and became a target of the anti-communist mujahedeen. There is a widely believed legend that she was abducted by a warlord during the civil war. Addressing the story for the first time, she said in the interview that it was untrue and was spread to denigrate her.

In the deeply conservative culture of Afghanistan, it has always been a challenge for a woman to pursue a singing career. Besides the religious bans, singers were looked down upon in society, despite the country’s vibrant musical tradition. And as war consumed Afghanistan after a communist coup d’état in 1978 and a Soviet occupation, singers and musicians became tools in ideological struggles between secular leftists and religious conservatives.

Naghma, whose father died when she was 7 or 8, recalled being beaten by her mother for persisting with her singing.

Born in the southern city of Kandahar, she grew up with the name Shah Pari, one of eight siblings from a mixed marriage. Her father was a Persian-speaking doctor from north of Kabul who married her mother, a Pashtun, after being sent to work in Kandahar.

Naghma discovered a love of poetry and song at an early age. She wrote her first poem at 13, and was among those selected at school to recite and sing at national day ceremonies.

At 16, she moved to Kabul to live with her uncle, and auditioned at Radio Afghanistan, the main center of musical creativity in the country, where she was accepted into a stable of performers and poets.

She adopted the stage name Naghma, which means melody, and formed a famous duo with a fellow musician and singer, Mangal, whom she later married. Both were known by their single stage names.

Her repertoire consisted of folk music and romantic songs written for her by contemporary songwriters, Naghma said.

“In those days, everything was about love,” she said.

Music was promoted and flourished under successive communist governments, but musicians were also used by the country’s leaders for propaganda and to play at government events and for Afghan army troops.

Naghma and Mangal came under threat from the mujahedeen, which began an assassination campaign against people connected to the government in Kabul.

Naghma’s 17-year-old sister, Gulpari, was killed at their home in the early 1990s, shot in the head through a pillow, in an attack that Naghma said was aimed at her.

“I believe they killed her because of me,” she said. “They went to our home.”

In the days after the killing, Naghma recorded one of her most famous songs, “Beloved Pilot,” while riding in the cockpit of an Afghan helicopter.

“Hawk of the blue sky, falcon of our mountains — fly, my beloved, fly,” she sang.

But in the video for the song, she looked miserable, still mourning her sister. The government had insisted she record the song to bolster morale in the failing Afghan army, she said.

“We were part of the Interior Ministry and we had to obey them,” she said. “If they told us to sing a song, we had to sing.”

Soon after that, she fled Kabul with her four children and began a life as a refugee in Dubai, Pakistan and, eventually, the United States. Along the way, she divorced Mangal and married Muhammad Sharif, the son of a famous Afghan mujahedeen commander, Muhammad Nabi. The couple later separated, and Naghma now lives with her sister in Sacramento, California.

She sang often for the refugee community in Pakistan and around the world. She made several feted returns to Afghanistan during the 20 years of the American intervention, although always under tight security, as she was a target of the Taliban.

“I actually feel hopeless about the future of Afghanistan,” she said in an interview a few days after the concert. She said she was mentoring a friend’s daughter in Afghanistan who, unable to go to school, had become depressed. “With leaders like the current ones, how can I give women a message when I’m sitting here and over there the girls are not able to go to school and the women have no rights?”

Yet she said she had fans among the former mujahedeen and the Taliban, despite their restrictions on music.

In concert in London, she appeared undaunted, tossing her lustrous black hair and blowing kisses to members of the audience.

“I want to sing for you songs that will take you back to Afghanistan and give you love for one another,” she told the gathering.

She sang:

“From these high mountains

I will fill your laps

With mulberries, pine nuts,

And blessings, poured freely.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.