Taliban poetry, long overlooked by analysts as mere propaganda, is a prominent part of how the movement presents itself to Afghans and to the wider world. Using work published on the Taliban website during the last decade, with a few older specimens of Afghan poetry dating from the 1980s and 90s, we’ve put together a collection of over 200 poems.
These voices from within the Taliban draw on Afghan legend and recent history as much as upon the long tradition of Persian, Urdu and Pashto verse, and are also influenced by the equally rich Farsi (Dari) and Arabic traditions. While these older poems mostly cannot be characterised as being ‘Taliban poetry’ themselves, the genres, metres, themes, metaphors and emotional appeals used in these contemporary works are often similar or the same.
Poetry is used in all spheres of life: on political occasions, for social change, for religious purposes, in the home, for weddings and funerals, for festivals and even – as we shall see – on the battlefield. Talk to any fighter from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s and they will tell you stories of poetry and song. In contemporary Afghanistan, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, occasionally hosted sessions of music and poetry in Kandahar in which the performers – just as they might have done at court in the Elizabethan age in England – offered their praises to their host.
There is a sharp contrast between the severity of the Taliban’s professed ideology and the licence of the movement’s aesthetic sensibilities. In the latter, unrequited love, bloody vengeance and the thrill of battle, religion and nationalism, and even a desire for non-violence are expressed through images of wine, powerful women, song, legend and pastoral beauty. This contrast provides a fascinating insight into the interior lives of those fighting against foreign forces in Afghanistan as well as those who support their cause.
The verse is fervent, and very modern in its criticism of human rights abuses by all parties involved in the war in Afghanistan. Whether in describing an air strike on a wedding party, the loss of a loved one (“My heart took leave of this world today/Because my competitor took my beloved from me by force”) or lamenting their current situation (“We did all of this to ourselves”), the poetry is concerned not with politics, but with identity, and a full, textured, deeply conflicted humanity.
As you might expect from a collection of over 200 poems, there is a diversity of themes covered. The book is split into five individual sections, incorporating love and pastoral themes, religion, politics and social discontent, the battlefield and the human cost of war. You will probably find all the things you might expect to be here, but sometimes not in the form you had imagined. In ‘Hunter’, for example, the poet imagines that he is being chased by foreign soldiers like a deer in a forest, and draws a parallel between the soldiers trying to kill him and hunters hoping to bag a deer. Then there is the poem written by a woman chastising the men around her for failing to fight properly.
A certain narrative of the war in Afghanistan, or of the country itself, has existed for a few years now. The groundwork was laid long before the September 11 attacks, in part by journalists who travelled in the country during the 1980s. But the main themes became very clear from 9/11 onwards. As part of this, the focus of the poetry has been on the foreign involvement in Afghanistan, rather than on Afghanistan itself.
The literature and the cultural heritage of the country have always been a hard sell to editors of mainstream media outlets in the United States or Europe, especially when these more marginal stories have had to compete with events that strike closer to home, such as killed or injured servicemen and women. That said, there have been people working in this field for many years, regardless of whether their findings have been covered in the Western media or not. Their efforts are available online to browse through, from Afghan women’s short story writing and poetry to paintings and music.
Poetry of the Taliban was not compiled to garner sympathy for the Taliban. What this collection offers is a new window on an amorphous group, possibly allowing one to empathise (as opposed to sympathise) with the particular author of a poem, letting one see the world through their eyes, should one want to do so. We hope that anyone who is interested in learning more about the Taliban beyond a first-glance impression garnered from the news headlines will read this book. We feel these poems bring something fresh to the discussion, and add a perspective on where those who align themselves with the Taliban are coming from.
From our own experience, we know how important and resonant this verse is for people living in Afghanistan, and we thought it would be useful to present it to a broader community of scholars, poets and the general public. It is such impassioned descriptions – sorrowfully defeated, triumphant and enraged, bitterly powerless or bitingly satirical – and not the austere arguments of myriad analysts, that will finally come to define the war and endure as a record of the conflict.
