The Country That Outlawed Sound
In Herat, a craftsman named Sakhi still shapes rubabs out of dried mulberry wood, working with a hatchet in a workshop that shouldn't exist. The rubab is Afghanistan's national instrument. In today's Afghanistan, making one is close to a crime.
When the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, one of the first things they came for was music. Not a specific song or a genre. All of it. Radio Afghanistan, the national station, was renamed Voice of Sharia, and music vanished from the airwaves, replaced by religious chanting. Weddings went silent. Cars, restaurants, gatherings — anywhere a song might play became a place you could be arrested. The stated reason, drawn from their reading of Islamic law, is that music causes moral corruption.
The numbers are staggering. By the Taliban's own Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, more than 21,000 instruments were destroyed in a single year — tablas, harmoniums, guitars, and rubabs, seized from homes and wedding halls and burned in open fields. In Herat, thousands of dollars of equipment went up in one bonfire. The ministry publicized it. The point was to be seen.
And it works the way that kind of thing always works. In May 2025, Taliban police in northern Takhar province arrested 14 people who'd gathered at night in a private house to play instruments and sing. The official complaint: they'd caused a disturbance. Fourteen people, in a home, at night, for singing.
Here's what I keep landing on. You don't spend that kind of effort — 21,000 instruments, a dedicated ministry, televised bonfires, night raids on private homes — to stamp out something trivial. You burn a thing that scares you. The scale of the crackdown is a backhanded compliment to what music can do. If a wedding song were harmless, nobody would need to arrest anyone for it.
Afghanistan is the extreme case, not the only one. Governments have long understood that music organizes people and carries ideas past the reach of censors — which is why regimes keep trying to control it. Iran restricts women from singing solo in public. The UK has used the courts to suppress drill artists, treating their lyrics as evidence and their videos as incitement, banning specific performers from making certain songs. The severity ranges wildly. The instinct is the same: this is powerful enough to be dangerous.
What the Taliban may not have counted on is how badly music survives being banned. Afghan musicians buried their instruments in gardens before fleeing — one singer said it felt like burying his own children. The Afghanistan National Institute of Music, the country's only music school, didn't close so much as relocate; it now runs in exile from Portugal, still teaching, still training the next generation outside the reach of the ban. Inside the country, a younger generation records in basements and windowless rooms, in locked apartments, passing songs quietly the way people always have when the state decides sound is a threat.
You can burn 21,000 instruments. You cannot burn the thing that makes people want to build the 21,001st.
Sakhi is still in Herat, still cutting mulberry wood into the shape of a rubab. Somebody is going to want to play it.
Sources: https://www.rferl.org/a/taliban-intensifies-crackdown-music-afghanistan/32551971.html · https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2025/02/afghanistan-taliban-music-banned-musicians-exile-silent/ · https://www.malaymail.com/news/world/2025/05/11/taliban-arrest-14-for-playing-music-and-singing-in-afghanistan/176375
