by SHAHEEN BUNERI
Since their rise in the late 1990s, the Taliban and likeminded groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region have launched an aggressive campaign against liberal ways of life, bombing music shops, destroying schools, and murdering musicians, singers, and female dancers.
According to Khadim Hussain, a Pashtun cultural expert and managing director of the Peshawar-based Baacha Khan Trust Education Foundation, the Taliban strategically deprive people of secular outlets in order to accelerate the spread of religious extremism.
But the Taliban’s secular-nationalist opponents are fighting back using some of the very arts that religious fundamentalists seeks to destroy—poems adapted to traditional Pashto music. In Taliban-heavy areas such as Kurram, Orakzi, Waziristan, Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, and Dir, literary gatherings, including mushairas (poetry recitals), have become a refuge for traumatized communities. Hussain argues, “Poetry is the collective creative expression of the secular, liberal, and democratic ideals of the estimated 70 million Pashtuns.” (Most counts place the population closer to 40–50 million.)
I could not care less if it’s a mosque or a temple filled with idols
Where my beloved lives, that is my Ka’aba
You religious fundamentalists stop this bloodshed
Humanity is the best religion; love, the best worship
Because of this war I despise the “dear mullah”
Love is my religion; unity is my faith
Zarin Pareshan (a Pashtun poet)
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)