On Persian As A Transnational Language

While Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society, this article's singular focus on Dari elucidates the language's important historical role in mass communications and points to the various cultural functions it affords in the Afghan context. At varying times in Afghanistan's modern history, as Aria Fani discusses, the state attempted to create a monolingual society by advancing Pashto as the national language. However, given the primacy of Persian as the language of education and bureaucracy, such attempts were curtailed.Footnote ⁴ This resulted in recognizing both Dari and Pashto as the national languages of Afghanistan in the 1964 Constitution.Footnote ⁵ While radio began broadcasting in these official languages, other regional languages—including Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashayi, and Nuristani—also received airtime, particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the arrival of a leftist regime that promoted Afghanistan's regional cultures and traditions on radio and television. Nonetheless, Persian remained the cohesive cultural force throughout the country.Footnote ⁶ Parallel to regional and local languages within a given cultural setting, Persian operated as a lingua franca and often adopted elements of local cultures and modes of expression, leading to the existence of various Persian dialects, including Herati, Hazaragi, Badakhshani, and others. The wide dissemination of Persian poetry and song capture this linguistic versatility and adaptability.

In this regard, the element of language as a category of analysis in the Persianate performs an important historical and aesthetic function that demands critical attention. In the twentieth century, even as its global reach had significantly waned, Persian served as a medium of transnational communication and international prestige for Afghan artists, as historical and contemporary literary authorities were summoned in order to frame and comment on local issues of cultural and political import.Footnote ⁷ Their use of Persian amounts to leveraging linguistic authority and prestige in order to challenge the state's power and build cultural capital. In other words, it is the eminence of Persian as a vernacular language that directly concerns my analysis here. As such, the examples in this article showcase the diversity and multiplicity of linguistic modernity in various zones of Persianate lands. Wali Ahmadi's reminder of Persian's polycentric history is particularly apt here:

In this sense, detaching Persian from a specific national imaginary allows for its transregional performance and function to be critically examined, even in the era of intersecting nationalisms. Indeed, many states and nations (and nation-states) can claim and contest a common literary and cultural heritage rooted in Persian. By then considering the diverse linguistic usages of Persian— in this case, through mass media in Afghanistan—what comes to the surface is the language's variegated socio-historical reception and the complexity and intimacy of Persian literary and cultural dynamics from within and without.

Towards this end, to distill how mass media technologies allowed for expressions of social and cultural resistance through Persianate literary cultural production, I begin with a brief discussion of regional connections that showcase the longue durée history that precedes and informs these twentieth-century sonic collaborations. If literary radio programs and music from Afghanistan resonated with diverse communities spanning the Middle East, Central and South Asia, it is precisely due to centuries of vernacular cultural practices that entwined millions of inhabitants across regions.Footnote ⁹ Poetry, performance, song, and sonic collaborations recall and rewrite more than a thousand years of textual history, and even more years of cultural memory. Against this backdrop, I then provide the historical journey of Afghanistan's modern political formations through sound—in other words, through the aural landscape that imparted meaning on Afghan identities. Attuned to sound, content, and context, this article is a starting point for further reconstructions of Afghan history and its enduring importance as a central producer of Persianate culture.

Persianate Poetic Soundscapes

Thinking about poetic soundscapes in twentieth-century Afghanistan requires a historical understanding of Persian as a shared language that linked diverse peoples across regions and polities. Recently, historians of the Persianate world have examined conceptions of place and movement through languages, literature, customs, and cultural imaginations. These formations spanned a broad geography and existed outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalism.Footnote ¹⁰ Up through the early nineteenth century, Persian was the language of power and knowledge across the Middle East, Central and South Asia. As the lingua franca of literature, poetry, storytelling, and spirituality, Persian encompassed multiplicity, relationality, and similitude.Footnote ¹¹ As Kevin Schwartz writes, “Turks, Arabs, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Persians, and many others used the language with little thought that doing so would define them in strict ethnic or territorial terms.”Footnote ¹² Proximities and similarities constituted a framework that distinguished people while simultaneously accommodating plurality.

This growth in vernacular culture was not limited to a written tradition. It combined orality, practice, and daily rituals where various strands of spiritual knowledge were found in new forms, including songs. From the seminal masnawī (rhymed couplets) of Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (d. 1273) to the poetry of the scholar-singer Amīr Khusraw (d. 1325) and the ghazals (lyric poems) of ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (d. 1720), a diverse literary culture translated sacral and mystical sentiments into music that was shared among communities across space and time.Footnote ¹³ These songs and texts served as the soundtrack of everyday life across the vast plains of the Persian-speaking world. Melodies, lyrics, and rhythms were preserved and disseminated through generations via oral traditions. The bā-sawād (literate) read, translated, and transported poetry to the bī-sawād (illiterate) of their communities. Songs preserved poems and people. Embedded in music are idioms, imagery, metaphors, and stories that recall a deeper past and have been reinterpreted by different cultures over time. Even in the prevalent tradition of tadhkira writing (biographical anthology), it was often hearing poetry in tea/coffee houses or recitation circles that allowed for its recording and preservation.Footnote ¹⁴ Reading against this long history compels us to recognize the everyday soundscapes of the diverse societies and peoples of the Persianate world as a reflection of centuries of transregional coexistence and cultural memory.

In the 1960s and 1970s, we hear the reverberations of these transcultural connections through sonic collaborations broadcast on the radio. A lesser known, yet prevalent example comes from the duet sung in 1965 between renowned Afghan female singer Khānum Zhīlā (1943–2009) and Muḥammad Rafīʿ (1924–1980), the famous Indian playback singer of Bollywood films. Together, they sang in Persian. Using the poetry of Bāriq Shafīʿī, an Afghan contemporary, sacral and mystical imagery conveyed the theme of love.Footnote ¹⁵ Khānum Zhīlā and Muḥammad Rafīʿ took turns singing each line of the chorus:

For Afghans, Indians, Iranians, and many others with shared Persianate culture and tradition, the imagery of the beloved, the songbird, and the garden are as familiar as the instrumental sounds of the tabla (drum) and accompanying harmonium. Part of this is due to the fact that Persian, particularly its literary form, has remained relatively accessible to a contemporary speaker of the language. As Dick Davis notes, a modern Persian speaker can read the works of a tenth-century poet with relative ease due to the continuity of poetic rhetoric from the earliest poems to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, Afghan classical music as a sub-branch of North Indian classical music shares instruments, ragas (melodies), and rhythms that resonate across borders and, like poetry, have a deep, connected history.Footnote ¹⁸ Song in the realm of Bollywood films combines various genres and linguistic registers, yet speaks in a cultural vernacular that continues to hold valence across South and Central Asia and the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁹ Along these lines, to imagine a community of listeners across a diverse ethnolinguistic terrain responding to the Zhīlā-Rafīʿ duet is to recognize a pre-existing cultural space where textual, oral, and aural translation flowed across and between diverse communities. To situate how these cultural connections persisted well into the twentieth century, the remainder of this article turns to three sonic vignettes—radio, performance, and cassettes—that explore the historical and affective ramifications of Persian poetry in Afghanistan.

Radio

As communication technologies like the radio became a staple of twentieth-century commerce and industrialization, the Afghan state's ability to operate the technology became critical to managing the nation and demonstrating its fitness as a modern state. To this end, the state began purchasing radio technology almost immediately after its global commodification in the 1920s. After winning diplomatic independence from Britain in the victory of the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, Afghan officials were deeply invested in proving they were worthy of sitting at the international policy table. Incorporating the latest global communication technology would bolster Afghan desires to appear competitive on an international scale alongside other nation-states emerging out of decolonization.

From the time the radio transmitter was first introduced, the state relied on international support to build its broadcasting infrastructure. This began with sending Afghans abroad to gain the technical knowledge required to operate radio. In 1926, King Amān Allāh Khān (r. 1919–1929), the royal architect of Afghan modernism, sent engineer ʿAtāʾAllāh to Germany for the training necessary to establishing and installing radio in Afghanistan.Footnote ²⁰ After a year of dedicated learning, he returned to Kabul with German technicians and two radio transmitters. In 1927, for the first time, radio was broadcast from Afghanistan. The official radio station—Rādīyū Kābul—was housed in a small room of the Kūtī Landanī building near Artal Bridge in Kabul.Footnote ²¹ Literally meaning “London Box,” the building's name was inspired by its British colonial architecture. Some accounts indicate that Kūtī Landanī was originally a café that was later appropriated for the radio station.Footnote ²² However, transmissions were limited to only a few people in Kabul who could afford the broadcasting set.

By the 1960s, radio broadcasting in Afghanistan had expanded to the entire country.Footnote ²³ Once again, German technicians helped the Afghans acquire advanced Siemens transmitters that allowed radio waves to reach longer distances. King Ẓāhir Shāh (1933–1973) and Prime Minister

Muḥammad Dāʾūd Khān (1953–1963) revived Amān Allāh's vision for modernization, placing a premium on radio as the prime instrument to educate the population, create a unified nation, and propel it into the future. In 1964, with the construction of seven recording studios, two concert studios, and a large auditorium, the Ministry of Information and Culture changed the station's name from Rādīyū Kābul to Rādīyū Afghānistān. Footnote ²⁴ It also became the center for the patronage and promotion of new popular music suitable for radio broadcasting. In addition to Persian and Pashto, daily radio programs of one hour to an hour-and-a-half were available in English, German, Russian, and Urdu.Footnote ²⁵ The state's support for these languages reflected Afghanistan's bilateral relationships in the Cold War era, during which it remained non-aligned.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, the state invested in casting bilingualism as a vital survival skill in a twentieth-century world defined by international trade and business.

In 1964, like national broadcasting, the Afghan constitutional monarchy was new. King Ẓāhir Shāh's (r. 1933–1973) experiments with democratic values coincided with his modernizing agenda for Afghanistan, as he sought to integrate the population outside Kabul into the national communication system through the creation of the Mūdīrīyat-i kunfirāns-hā (Department of Conferences) in 1964. This bureaucratic arm of the state was responsible for organizing meetings at provincial centers and in villages with the objective of increasing the level of information circulating among local populations. These efforts were part of the plan to integrate Afghanistan into the international information system and showcase a “progressive” nation where the press reflected differences of opinion.Footnote ²⁷ By the mid-1970s, the plan had worked. Afghanistan had 70 different dailies, weeklies, trade publications, tabloids, and 16 daily newspapers. Many of these publications were anti-establishment periodicals produced mainly by leftist intellectuals, some of which were later banned, including Kumak, Parcham, Khalq, Waḥdat, Mardum, Payām-i Wijdān, and Afghān Millat, among others.Footnote ²⁸

Broadcasting followed the subversive tide of print media. Although the government was keen to use radio technology as a propaganda machine to keep the public informed of its programs, edicts, and policies, the radio's social side effects were sometimes unpredictable and unintended. Programs that began as poetry readings and folktale recitations turned into platforms for conversations around issues of language, nationalism, and identity.Footnote ²⁹ At the forefront of these programs were Afghan women. They served as the producers, creative directors, and announcers whose voices were broadcast on the airwaves. Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī is one such example. As an intellectual, she used her voice as an art form to celebrate and popularize the poetry of the Persianate world's most enduring poets, most notably of Mawlānā. As a celebrated journalist, announcer, and reciter of poetry, Anwarī's aural and literary imprint suggests new ways to think about sound and mass media during this period.

Anwarī began her broadcasting career in 1966 while still studying as an undergraduate in journalism at Kabul University. Radio administrators—including her professor, Ḥusayn Rīyāżī, who oversaw the radio's Prugrām-i maʿārif (the Education Program), and Karīm Ruhīnā, the General Manager of Radio Programs—recognized her talent for public speaking and recruited her to work for the station.Footnote ³⁰ Inspired by the examples of the earlier generation of trail-blazing women and radio announcers—including Laṭīfa Kabīr Sirāj, Shafīqa Ḥabībī, Shukrīya Raʿd, Nafīsa ʿAbbāsī, Fahīma Amīn, and Nūrjān Farhānī—Anwarī took the job, with her first assignment being to manage Prugrām-i maʿārif. Soon thereafter, she produced other popular radio programs, including Az har chaman samanī (Flowers from Every Garden), Surūd-i hastī (The Song of Being), Tarāzū-yi ṭilāʿī (Golden Scales), Naqd-i adabī (Literary Criticism), and Bāz-shināsī-yi khabragān-i hunar va adab (Getting Reacquainted with Experts of Arts and Literature). She co-hosted one of her most popular radio programs, Zamzama-ʾhā-yi shabhangām (Nocturnal Whispers), with noted Afghan writer and novelist Akram ʿUsmān.

Farīda Anwarī's broadcasting career coincided with the fluid and experimental moment of radio's transition from a local station to a national one. This presented Anwarī with the space to test the boundaries of radio speech and create new spaces for women's voices on the airwaves. Following the adoption of the 1964 Constitution, state-led modernization programs encouraged more women to join the workforce. As in other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, there was also an attempt, if modest, to eliminate gender inequality through state action.Footnote ³¹

In 1975, during a week-long seminar on the life and work of Mawlānā, Radio Afghanistan featured songs, music, and poetry recitations in his honor.Footnote ³² Anwarī's recitation of Mawlānā's poems became so widely popular that events honoring the poet's life and work became a regular part Radio Afghanistan's programming. Not only did these programs have the positive effect of raising awareness and literary appreciation among both the intelligentsia and general public with access to radio, but they also exemplified the ways in which Afghans were using global technology and refashioning it to reflect local image-making practices. Indeed, the strategic use of global radio technology affected the programming the producers created and, ultimately, their relationship to their listening communities.

Poetry has played a lasting and important role in the Persian language's expression of social critique and political discontent. In her discussion of evolving forms of poetic protests in Persian, Nahid Siamdoust describes how some classical poets of the Persian canon openly criticized their social and political milieus.Footnote ³³ Siamdoust contends that, in the Iranian context, it was not until the creation of the popular Gulhā radio programs in the 1950s that classical Persian poetry and music was disseminated via broadcasting technology to a wider public.Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, in the 1940s, radio in Afghanistan helped reintroduce and circulate classical Persian poetry and music to an Afghan audience, particularly through the introduction of the Kabuli ghazal, a song form that uses Persian texts from a variety of sources. In musical terms, the Kabuli ghazal style is related to ghazal singing in India and Pakistan, but the setting of the texts to music is distinctly Afghan, with interpolated couplets sung in free rhythm, fast instrumental sections, and dramatic rhythmic cadences.Footnote ³⁵

By the 1960s, Anwarī's literary radio programs were reaching a broad audience and gaining in popularity due to her ability to embody poetic forms that were simultaneously both old and new—old in their lyrics, new in their performance. As I explain below, while Anwarī's programs did not formally serve as a channel for political opposition, as their content was artistic rather than political, the choice of declamation based on the texts of classical Persianate poets allowed her to offer subversive political commentary while retaining an air of deniability.Footnote ³⁶ This careful, albeit deliberate, meditation of dissent followed the changing pulse of all major political, social, and cultural developments of the period. While political magazines used novel tools like the publication of cartoons and caricatures—largely absent from print media in Afghanistan before 1964—to express political criticism, in the space of the mass media recording industry, Anwarī's use of Persian poetry took full advantage of the social and political context; she was able to employ this medium to voice dissent without censorship.Footnote ³⁷ The new era ushered in by the 1964 Constitution needed new media, and poetry provided an ideal means for new ideas and new ways of engagement.Footnote ³⁸ In addition, being the producer of her own show allowed Anwarī to control its content and strategy.

Anwarī deployed selected texts from the repertoire of classical Persian poets to suit her audience's situations and reflect their moods. Specifically, while Afghanistan's political experiments continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s—a constitutional monarchy in 1964, a republic in 1973, and a leftist government in 1978—the Sufi poetry of the classical period helped Anwarī frame the challenges of everyday life. Marī Wāḥīdī (b.1950), Anwarī's contemporary and a teacher of Dari in the 1970s, recalls her illiterate mother being moved to tears while listening to recitations of the opening lines of Mawlānā's masnawī:

At a very young age, Wāḥidī's mother, Bībī Lāl, had to leave her home in Badakhshan, a northern province of Afghanistan, to join her husband's family in Kabul. Mawlānā's verses provided comfort in a world that had separated her from her family. Bībī Lāl imagined these verses were written precisely for her. “Mīguft, īn az man hast” (this is mine), Bībī Lāl would say.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, metaphor enables multiple layers of meaning, especially around the crucial theme of love and separation, particularly from the beloved. As Breyley contends, in the works of classical Persian poets, the beloved may represent many ideas, including romantic partners, a spiritual companion, the divine, or “an ideal such as justice or freedom.”Footnote ⁴¹

Anwarī, as the performer, was guided by Mawlānā's words and works to create new meanings and relevance for a contemporary audience by playing with the multiple layers of meaning and allegorical references expected by readers and listeners of Persian poetry.Footnote ⁴² Bībī Lāl's reception of Mawlānā's poetry illustrates how the timeless quality of verse could be interpreted by a listener in twentieth-century Afghanistan; in this case, the separation from one's family home demanded by societal gender norms. Moreover, one did not need to know how to read in order to understand the sorrows of Mawlānā's reed. Before literacy became widespread, the performance of poetic texts was central to cultural and social life. That these recitations occurred over the radio and reached thousands of listeners not only allowed for its dissemination, but also its multivarious interpretations. Melodic recitation and music were the primary means of transmitting poetry across social classes, including to people without access to books or other inscribed art, making it a major medium for all types of listeners to find relevance and meaning for their everyday lives. Poetry here stands for both composition and affect. In Afghan culture, there is a profound connection between poetry and experience, to the extent that many Afghans, like Bībī Lāl, consider poetry to define the essence of their identity.Footnote ⁴³ Centuries of rich poetic tradition in Persian became an axis through which a national discourse was articulated and resonated with personal experiences.

Anwarī's recitation over the airwaves represented an alternate space wherein a community of listeners interested in intonations of Persian poetry and the possibility for diverse usage in the context of daily life existed. When Anwarī recited Mawlānā's poems, fused in her voice were not only a thousand years of a poetic tradition, but also the long arc of a modern political struggle for freedom and identity. Anwarī's attraction to and performance of the rich tradition of classical Persian poetry circulated as currency in the symbolic market of the Afghan search for a contemporary identity, whether in the case of Bībī Lāl and her attachments to notions of a home or in the case of a broad Afghan audience struggling to express its self-conception as a community while grappling with the contradictions inherent in it.

Anwarī capitalized on a shared language and literary heritage to create a forum for dialogue about life, spirituality, belonging, unbelonging, and love. If the state was invested in creating a national culture based on the work of these poets, that goal was inconsequential to the larger work of Anwarī's recitations: giving people comfort in the face of political and social turmoil. Drawing on the canon of classical Persian poets afforded Anwari protection from an increasingly authoritative state in the 1970s and, despite its restrictions, allowed her to embody indigenous literary traditions that carried and fueled shared sentiments and the variegated experiences of her Afghan audience. For centuries, palaces, teahouses, and private courtyards served as venues for the dissemination of poetry in the Persianate world.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the 1960s, radio was serving as one such venue for taking pleasure in the sounds and semantics of classical Persian poetry and music, while continuing to entertain and inspire.

Alongside the important role broadcast radio played in connecting classical Persian poetry to the experiences of daily life, popular music aired on the radio contributed to the era's growing sense of dissent. As seen further below, it was once again a Persian literary heritage that amplified this “revolution in sound.” Perhaps no other musician from the 1960s and 1970s is better remembered for his imprint on pop music than Aḥmad Ẓāhir. Born on June 14, 1946 in Kabul, Aḥmad Ẓāhir established himself as a singer in the 1960s. His popularity swelled over this decade and the next as he took advantage of the burgeoning radio and recording industries and developed a broad repertoire of romantic, self-reflective, and politically charged songs. As the son of a court doctor, minister of health, and influential politician, valuable social connections enhanced Ẓāhir's artistic success. He forged long-lasting relationships with cultural leaders, including musicians, composers, and poets across the region and world. He socialized among a diverse spectrum of people, from elites to everyday Afghans, and was extremely charitable to the poor. Distinguished musically by his vocal stamina and new compositions, he sustained his career by producing an immense corpus of songs totaling over 20 albums, surpassing what many singers produce in a lifetime.Footnote ⁴⁵

Like Anwarī, Aḥmad Ẓāhir's rise to stardom corresponded with the political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s. When, while still in high school, he began his musical career, the constitutional monarchy formed under King Ẓāhir Shāh in 1964 provided some civil liberties, including freedom of speech. This provision impacted musicians, specifically, by protecting recording artists like Ẓāhir from censorship. With President Dāʾūd Khān's coup in 1973, Aḥmad Ẓāhir recorded songs that celebrated the change in guard and establishment of the Afghan republic.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, as the political climate between 1973 and 1978 became increasingly autocratic, Aḥmad Ẓāhir once again took to the airwaves to sing of society's social ills, including the famine of 1977 and the general poverty of the nation.Footnote ⁴⁷ When Dāʾūd Khān and his family were brutally murdered inside the Presidential Palace and another regime change inaugurated the arrival of communism in Afghanistan in 1978, Aḥmad Ẓāhir again took to music to record songs of liberation and critique hegemonic power. The increasingly political tone of his songs now received pushback from state censors, who did not allow their broadcast on radio. However, these songs were circulated through cassettes and underground channels across Afghanistan and the broader region. In 1979, Aḥmad Ẓāhir died in what is officially reported as a car accident, although his father—a doctor—confirmed a bullet was shot in the back of his head.Footnote ⁴⁸ His funeral was televised and drew thousands of Afghans, who followed his hearse through the streets of Kabul.

Radio in the 1960s and 1970s in Afghanistan, whether broadcasting the poetry of Mawlānā or the songs of Ẓāhir, provided a medium for political expression and social commentary that often outweighed verbal communication and behavior. While poetry and song can be analyzed for the weight of their content, their significance also lies in their reception as political acts. Indeed, the reception of radio extends well beyond the technology's determining function to address transformations that occur in listener perceptions of the sounds broadcast, altering the soundscape.Footnote ⁴⁹ Figures like Anwarī and Ẓāhir captured the sentiments of their milieus not just through their subversive critiques of society, but also through literature that allowed some to imagine an alternate present and future. These figures also illustrate how producers and musicians in Afghanistan shaped national broadcasting culture as much as geopolitics did throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As material and sonic limits were imposed on radio by successive Afghan regimes, the state did not anticipate how radio's producers and musicians would circumvent censors and use the technology to sound dissent.

Performance

While radio as a site of state control is important to understanding the state's performativity of its professed values, principles, and aesthetic and acoustic expressions (in short, its identity), it is also pertinent to locate the artists’ position within this spectrum. “Performativity,” as Nahid Siamdoust argued in the context of Iran, “relies on citationality, referencing fragments of traditions, cultures, discourses, and communal memories.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, in Afghanistan, to the extent that Afghans validated the state's existence and authority through the expression of their discontent, they also resisted it through artistic mediums, including the performing arts. To perform alternative subjectivities, Afghan artists like Anwarī and Ẓāhir drew on various traditions and repertoires of contention. In doing so, they challenged ideas surrounding issues of gender, freedom, religion, and politics. Anwarī and Ẓāhir's examples of literary and aural performativity allowed for diverse interpretations of the past and engagement in a national discourse about the future. In other words, their poetic and musical performances were simultaneous expressions of identity and political or social dissent.

While Anwarī was not a self-proclaimed feminist, her on-air personality certainly rubbed against traditional gender norms that relegated women to the private sphere and did not value the amplification of female voices on the radio. In her poetry recitations, she relayed strong emotions, changed the pitch of her voice to cater to the tone of the poem she was reciting, and used her voice to connect with her listeners. She was a self-identified artist, and she imagined her audience to understand this, declaring in a 1973 interview:

Anwarī's talent—as a gripping orator capable of drawing in her audience—transformed radio in Afghanistan into a medium of (re)introducing and performing classical Persianate literature for the nation. By combining poetry with music and declamation, she not only encouraged contemplation of the poetry itself, but also extended and amplified localized traditions of performance and artistic expression. In this sense, her programs helped solidify her reputation as a purveyor of Afghanistan's linguistic and literary cultural heritage. At a time when various global musical and poetic influences infiltrated Afghanistan, figures like Anwarī helped deploy the popularity of Afghan arts and local cultural practices that celebrated the rich cultural tradition of reciting and reflecting on classical poetry. For Afghans, the arts embodied a unique form of cultural expression and possible space for autonomy, especially as the state attempted to enforce its legitimacy through ideological and disciplinary apparatuses that included mass media. Reproducing the legitimacy of the Afghan state, particularly in the 1970s, was often enacted performatively through discourse and practice, as evidenced by the political speeches, new forms of governance (including constitutions), edicts, and proclamations following the coups of 1973 and 1978. Citizens embodied and replicated these signifiers of state legitimacy through their choice of clothing, recitation of national anthems, and participation in national events and rituals. Nonetheless, while many accepted the state's attempts to infringe on its citizens’ daily lives and activities, others resisted through subversive acts. Here, poetry and music afforded a great sense of freedom and often functioned as means of offering discreet dissent and social criticism.

In the case of Aḥmad Ẓāhir, his public performances and concerts allowed for a communal sharing of critical views not available elsewhere, particularly for what they allowed in terms of the spontaneity of live action. The concert space enabled the deliberate coming together of strangers who engaged with each other through certain texts via songs and became involved in a conscious act of intentionality, awareness, and an interest in imagining the ways in which the world could be. Inherent in this process was the unconscious human impulse to build the world from social conditioning, scientific rationality, artistic traditions, and the individual struggle for survival.Footnote ⁵² Gatherings around music were also important because they were based on local and long-standing engagements with the embodied sense of sound, rooted in poetry as the master sonic form. Both the concert atmosphere and poetry and song as artforms and image-making practices allowed the space of public performance to turn into a national conversation outside official parameters.

In May 1978 in Kabul, only weeks after a coup brought a Soviet-aligned government to power in Afghanistan, Aḥmad Ẓāhir performed a concert in one of the city's main movie theaters, Dā mīrmanu tulāna. At the time, Ẓāhir's relations with the new government were increasingly hostile, mainly due to years of tension and his refusal to publicly support Afghan leftist parties. As they began to take on political undertones, his songs were increasingly censored on Radio Afghanistan. He had already been the victim of a Soviet smear campaign that accused him of murdering his second wife, Khālida.Footnote ⁵³ This confluence of events inspired a marked shift in Aḥmad Ẓāhir's lyrical focus. He became even more political and partisan in his song choices and more provocative in his live performances. A concert attendee, Malālī Mūsī Niẓām, recalls, “As hundreds of spectators watched, the singer with the golden voice and unique humble disposition came out onto the stage alone and took the microphone to his hand and his eternal, magical voice resonated through the entire hall, singing”Footnote ⁵⁴:

The lyrics of Zindagī ākhir sar āyad (Life will eventually end) belong to renowned Iranian poet Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887–1957), who spent much of his life in exile in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.Footnote ⁵⁶ Originally written in 1930, the chain of transmission by which Lāhūtī's ghazal passed through West and Central Asia is a testament to the enduring relevance of the work. Samuel Hodgkin notes that Zindagī ākhir sar āyad was formally published as a song in 1942, which coincided with World War II and thus permitted Soviet publishers and critics to read it as a rejection of fascism. As Soviet cultural influence accelerated in Afghanistan over the course of the 1970s, Lāhūtī's works were sold in Kabul bookstores and recited over the airwaves on Persian-language Radio Moscow. Given the spread and circulation of his poetry, it is no coincidence that Ẓāhir was singing Lāhūtī's love ghazals over the airwaves and in his concerts well before the Soviet invasion. It is when Ẓāhir's songs took on an increasingly political tone in the final years of his life that he drew from Lāhūtī's more revolutionary verses, such as Zindagī ākhir sar āyad. Footnote ⁵⁷ The groundedness and musicality of Lāhūtī's poem, its depiction of oppression and freedom, and, most crucially, its avoidance of historical or geographic specificity all contributed to its successful circulation and adaptation to a variety of contexts, including Ẓāhir's popular song.

At a time when a strict code of conduct emanated from the established Afghan political authority, the lyrics and feelings associated with this song, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir's performance of it, allowed for political and cultural dissent through music. Using the poetry of a leftist sympathizer (and poet laureate) enabled Aḥmad Ẓāhir to initially pass through the radio censors. Indeed, it was through the usage of the state's official register (i.e., radio) that the creation of an alternative space was born, where dissent became possible in a discreet yet clever way. In his performance of this song, Aḥmad Ẓāhir succeeded further by traversing the space between what James C. Scott termed the “public transcript” (authorized by the dominant power) and the “hidden transcript” (the critique of power spoken behind its back) to create new meanings through an act of musical subversion and defiance.Footnote ⁵⁸ According to Scott, the “public transcript” is used to invoke what is permitted by the state. The enforcement of censorship, including on the radio, is one way the Afghan state exercised its official authoritative culture and promotion of a “public transcript.” The disciplinary nature of this act reinforced the state's relationship to its subjects by intruding into a very personal sphere via monitoring lyrics and sounds that evoked feelings and various emotions.

In the realm of cultural production and music, musicians like Aḥmad Ẓāhir had to submit to official regulations to obtain clearance for lyrics and permits for performances. The lyrics of Zindagī ākhir sar āyad, however, provided a pointed depiction of Afghanistan as captive to an oppressive state. Ẓāhir's performance of the song was intended to embody the people's sentiments and, in this way, helped promote the “hidden transcript,” or that which was not officially approved. Ẓāhir used his medium—music—to widen the parameters of the “public transcript” through this subtle, subversive act. Persian poetry transformed into popular song, and connecting concert attendees in collective performance, augmented the possibility of its circulation. Sung anthems encouraged simultaneous and collective vocal articulation in ways that poetry alone typically did not. In doing so, music then had the power to generate senses of alliance, cohesion, and solidarity.Footnote ⁵⁹ Music became the message and medium for political action.

The 1978 concert attendee concludes her recollection with thoughts on the poem's significance. She imagined that Lāhūtī produced his ghazal “in loathing for the suffocation and dependence that he too had experienced under similar conditions of Soviet occupation and subjugation in a country like Afghanistan, in Tajikistan.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Whether or not Lāhūtī's intention was to be subversive in his prose is inconsequential. More importantly, the poem's ability to traverse space and time and attract collective experiences of oppression gave new power to its declaration of defiance. The poem's lives are a testament to the continued durability and portability of traditional Persianate poetry, which can be repurposed for new occasions, new ideologies, and new revolutions.Footnote ⁶¹ The concert attendee and Aḥmad Ẓāhir's shared reading of Lāhūtī's poem indicates the poet's literary relevance to the political moment, when a despotic leftist government took shape in Afghanistan, and the power of musical performance to connect like-minded citizens in opposition to the state.

As Farzaneh Hemmasi contends, song—particularly popular songs and political anthems—augments the possibilities of poetry's circulation and collective performance.Footnote ⁶² The effect of one of Aḥmad Ẓāhir's politically and socially charged songs reveals how Persianate poetry played a strong role in connecting a diverse community of listeners. As a celebrity-type figure who embodied “freedom of expression,” he broke through the constraints of the dominant culture to experiment with new ways of being, using his voice and selected poetry as his source of cultural resistance. For many, Aḥmad Ẓāhir's lyrical voice, music, and performances became a focal point for imagining an alternative world and longing for political and social change. He attracted audiences that perceived him as a symbol of change and the embodiment of their aspirations. In his quest to challenge the predominant social-political order through song choice and lyrics, he represented the aspirations of those who wanted to change the status quo, becoming an icon of dissent. But Ẓāhir's deployment of Persian poetry as an act of dissent was also one of cultural preservation: he relied on a body of literature familiar to the listener, one which could withstand the test of time. Recently, with Afghanistan's seizure by the Taliban in August 2021, Zindagī ākhir sar āyad served as a clarion call, as people repeated Lāhūtī's words: “Bahr-i āzādī jadal kun, bandagī dar kār nīst” (Fight for freedom, for submission is not an option).

As the United States ended its twenty-year “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, paving the way for the return of the Taliban, Afghans faced a confluence of multiple crises. Beyond the Covid-19 pandemic, drought, and dire economy, they confronted a resurgent Taliban movement that quickly mobilized to seize power. Many scrambled to leave the country, fearful that living under despotic rule would destroy any aspirations for a better future. As Afghans—particularly women—are determined to fight and deny the Taliban the opportunity to reimpose their rule, slogans of freedom, justice, and peace are bolstered by the poetry and songs of the Lāhūtī/Ẓāhir variety, particularly Dawood Sarkhosh's Sarzamīn Man (My homeland).Footnote ⁶³ The circulation of this song signals a sense of collective participation in what has become an informal anthem of resistance and the struggle for survival.

Cassettes

The audiocassette was another form of mass media that proliferated during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s and profoundly affected the dissemination of sound and sonic experiences. Radio recording significantly improved with the advent of the tape recorder and magnetic tape, as such allowed sound to be recorded, erased, and re-recorded on the same tape multiple times. Indeed, the small, portable, and plastic audio cassette was conducive to creative energies that flowed through and beyond it, making it a highly malleable product that could be distributed on a mass scale. In Afghanistan, the production and mass distribution of commercial audio cassettes of Afghan music began in Kabul in the early 1970s. Outside the official radio station, the three major recording studios of the time were Afghan Music, Music Center, and Āriānā Music. These businesses were registered with the Ministry of Information and Culture and subject to governmental approval for printing labels, distribution, and censorship.Footnote ⁶⁴

In recent decades, the term “cassette culture” has been frequently employed by scholars engaged with media and communications to describe the variety of social practices generated by audiocassette hardware. In their infancy, cassettes represented what Peter Manuel described as “an emancipatory use of media,” as it was decentralized, provided space for signal feedback, and enabled collective and self-organized production, unlike one-way transmissions of mass media like the radio.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a living archive that engages people in social habits, and through which culture might be accessed, cassettes served as a vehicle for meaning, offering a secure space to create a sense of autonomy and self-determination. Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi's study of the important role small media—including leaflets and audio cassettes—played in the revolution that deposed the Shah of Iran reveals how deeply embedded cultural modes of communication, alongside media technologies, helped mobilize a population within a repressive political context.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, well before the technology of recorded sound, singing devotional poetry and scripture marked the soundscape of religious life across the Islamic world. Charles Hirschkind's study of cassette-sermons in Cairo's popular neighborhoods shows how small-time preachers, whose voices were suppressed by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East in the 1970s, could reach large audiences through the physical (hand-to hand) dissemination of tapes. While many believe that the clandestine transfer of Islamic sermons is associated with militancy, when they first appeared, their messages were rarely about inciting violence; instead, they were primarily used as instruments of promoting ethical self-improvement and pious living. Hirschkind situates cassette sermons in relation to Egypt's Islamic revival and sheds light on the ethical labor undertaken by Cairo's Muslim listeners in the mid-1990s. In short, the cassette-sermon contributed to the Islamic revival in various ways, manufacturing its own success through addressing counterpublics.Footnote ⁶⁷

Access to audio hardware and the societal impact of literacy were closely connected in the context of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to usher its own type of counterpublic. In 1978, Anwarī recorded three cassettes of her poetry recitations with the Āriānā Music recording studio. This marked the first time that a recording of poetry was in high demand and sold in the market in Afghanistan. The cassettes featured poems by Mawlānā, Hāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī, and Ḥamīd Muṣaddiq (1940–1998).Footnote ⁶⁸ Recordings of Anwarī's recitations reveal a warm and invitingly pitched voice that inflects the anxiety or calmness of the poetry. Her delivery is measured and professional, speaking at a natural, if not soft, pace while clearly articulating all the words. The new circulatory potential of cassette tapes allowed Anwarī's recitation of classical Persian poetry to reach a broad audience, creating cultural literacy and an affect that attracted listeners. Furthermore, the new objectlike quality of poetry recorded on tapes transformed Anwarī's speech into individual assertions, and oral mnemonics into analytical memory.Footnote ⁶⁹ Equipped with these newfound abilities and the autonomous reasoning they facilitated, Persian-speaking listeners were able to reconnect with aspects of their literary cultures as well as reflect and revise their meanings within daily life.

Instrumental music served as another important aspect of both literary programs and cassette recordings featuring poetry. As popular foreign styles began exerting influence on Afghan music and performance art in general, there was growing interest to preserve the native classical “art music” of Afghanistan; music that featured eastern instrumentation including the rubab, harmonium, tabla, and sitar. This, however, does not mean that western music was altogether absent from these programs. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Madadī, a former Radio Afghanistan Director, recalls that in radio programs featuring European and western music, Anwarī was the only person familiar with the appropriate languages and capable of pronouncing the associated technical words correctly when explaining song choices.Footnote ⁷⁰ The distinction here is that when the programs featured poetry, the choice of eastern music complimented the recitations in an effort to garner listener appreciation for both poetry and music.

In an interview published in 1974, Anwarī commented on the importance of poetry in contemporary society, stating:

Anwarī's assertion of the multivalent significance of Persian poetry and its ability to transcend meanings across space and time points to the medium's diverse contestations and instantiations. Anwarī would argue that it is the declamation of Persian poetry that gives it power and preserves its longevity. Cassette tapes and literary programming amplified this power by deploying speech and sensory modes of understanding as public practice and participation. The mass distribution of cassettes aided figures like Anwarī in the ongoing task of preserving language and Persian literature in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷² Via cassettes, the acoustic modulation of emotion through the declamation of classical Persian poetry was rebirthed, providing another space where the concerns and characters of the Afghan public could be elaborated and understood.

Cassettes were also increasingly important for circulating otherwise censored sounds and lyrics. Indeed, some of Aḥmad Ẓāhir's songs circulated via informal cassette recordings. Here, cassettes represented a particular advantage in the transmission of sound. In addition to the technology's immense mobility and low price point, cassettes also allowed citizens of diverse backgrounds to play a part in disseminating Afghan culture in ways other devices could not.Footnote ⁷³ In this regard, the informal circulation of cassettes was particularly key to bypassing state censors and enabling the proliferation of evolving forms of artistic and poetic protest to a mass audience.

One of the last songs performed by Aḥmad Ẓāhir borrowed from the poetry of celebrated Persian poet Sīmīn Bihbahānī (1927–2014). Although this song was never formally released, it gained popularity through its informal, underground circulation via cassette tape. This speaks to the longevity and efficacy of this technology, as it allowed people to build vibrant cultures under the thumb of repressive institutions. In this sense, cassettes played an important role in the construction of such spaces. While it would be easy to dismiss the informal circulation of cassettes as a channel of mass media distribution, such a view overlooks the fact that it was actually a rich site in which people constructed and enacted ambivalent subjectivities in relation to the state.

As a purveyor of political poetry, Bihbahānī's verse lent itself to transnational mobilizations across the Persian-speaking world. An interesting aspect of her treatment of the ghazal is that while she retained its poetic structure, she also expanded its subject matter to include a woman's experience of romantic love, desire, and disappointment, as well as increasingly took on political and social issues.Footnote ⁷⁴ While Aḥmad Ẓāhir's repertoire included a broad range of poets from across the Persianate canon, his selection of a contemporary feminist poet from Iran had as much to do with his cosmopolitan sensibilities as it did the political climate of the time.Footnote ⁷⁵ The chosen lines (turned into lyrics) borrowed from the poetry of Sīmīn Bihbahānī were as follows:

Sung in 1979 in the shadow of the increasingly authoritative atmosphere created by the rule of President Nūr Muḥammad Tarakī (1978-1979) and the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), these lyrics can be read as a response to the state's oppressive, bullying, and stringent policies. Cold War sentiments of disillusionment and loss of meaning are captured in the song: “The gardener is lonely, alone, surrounded by thorns.” Those elements of nature and life that used to sparkle like the “moon” or grow like a “flower” no longer existed. The “empty skies” demonstrated the fear and desolate environment left in the wake of the morally bankrupt regime that rose to power through a bloody coup.Footnote ⁷⁷ The rhetorical questions scattered throughout the ghazal also serve the purpose of confronting power, speaking back to it. While Bihbahānī's avoidance of historical specificity allows for the poem's malleability in different contexts, Ẓāhir's adoption of her poetry presents an alternative iteration of the nation and call to engage Afghanistan's problems through questioning the identity of the perpetrators. The refrain “Who took them?” reveals a callous and complacent political system and the unfortunate stifled truth of despotism.

As Afghanistan experienced political changes in yet another coup in 1978 and entered a new era of repression, Ẓāhir positioned himself as an agent willing to both articulate and question the country's transformation. Here, informal cassette circulation played a key role in distributing Ẓāhir's message and also raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of censorship. Despite the broad bans imposed by state authorities, the distribution of cassettes on the informal black market allowed for the extensive, illicit enjoyment of prohibited music. Banned music and songs—like Ẓāhir's Āsmān khālīst and Zindagī ākhir sar āyad—were able to bypass censors and circulate among the general populace. The widespread popularity of Ẓāhir's songs is indicative of his ability to capture the Afghan popular imagination during a specific moment of political and social change, as well as the search for an alternative world. While the censorship of music reflected a profound and persistent concern about the fate of national culture, alongside freedom of speech, the state was also testing official boundaries and the limits to which artistic and creative work could be controlled and suppressed. At best, oppression through sound entailed recalibrating calls to action into something discreet to bypass censors. At worst, reducing creativity to the production of state-controlled propaganda created an emboldened public, leading impregnable violence, not change.

Recorded music became a weapon in the cultural war advanced by successive Afghan leaders, including the PDPA. Such leaders used recorded music as a medium to persuade people how to behave and act, a “soft power” to be wielded in larger cultural battles around religion, tradition, modernity, and freedom. Musical styles and content were carefully considered before being broadcast or circulated to the world, but the gap between what the state sought to promote and the realities of everyday life for a typical Afghan is evident in the popularity of Aḥmad Ẓāhir's songs, despite the fact that such songs had to bypass censorship and circulate informally. While the state enforced different criteria around the production and selection of appropriate cultural work, musicians like Ẓāhir were not as easy to manipulate. These performing artists were not without agency in the messages they produced and embraced through their lyrics. As increasingly autocratic regimes took strong measures to ban freedom of speech, thought, and creativity, Afghans engaged in cultural dissonance through music, poetry, and protest, ultimately forging their own revolutions. Informal cassette circulation triggered significant anxiety, as it decentralized the state-controlled Afghan media. Entangled within this anxiety was a struggle over what constituted Afghan culture and who had the right to create it. Indeed, circumventing censors enabled the success of that deemed forbidden and prohibited; that which would ultimately make its way into Afghanistan's historical record.