6 Mar 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
The beauty and power of Iran’s music is being strangled, with many musicians jailed and tortured purely for raising their voices against the regime’s viciousness and in harmony with those protesting against it.
The case of rapper and Index Freedom of Expression award-winner Toomaj Salehi has been the highest profile case of Iran cracking down on freedom of expression among the country’s musicians but he is not alone. Index was at the heart of the campaign to get Salehi’s sentence commuted and he was eventually released but the country’s other musicians still face persecution.
Musicians like Salehi are regularly thrown in jail for highlighting the brutality and hypocrisy of Iran’s government. Even after release from prison, if they are lucky, these musicians still face surveillance and control.
Singer Mehdi Yarrahi, whose song Roosarito (Your Headscarf) gained widespread attention and became an anthem of resistance, was jailed in early 2024 for challenging “the morals and customs of Islamic society”. After his release on medical grounds, he was forced to wear an ankle tag to track his movements. A source told Index that this has only recently been removed. This week, it was reported that Yarrahi had been sentenced to the inhumane torture of 74 lashes to end the criminal case against him.
In May last year, rappers Vafa Ahmadpour and Danial Moghaddam were sentenced to prison for “propaganda against the regime”. Our source tells us they are serving their sentences under house arrest and must wear ankle tags to restrict movement away from their homes.
These sentences and treatment, for simply writing songs of protest, are unjust.
Another recent case involves musician and activist Khosrow Azarbeig who was arrested in Tehran on 17 February for “insulting” former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad following a protest performance in Tehran’s metro.
The lawyer Amir Raesian shared the news on X: “Mr. Khosrow Azarbeig, a daf player, was arrested on Monday evening on a street in Tehran. His family has been informed that his charge is ‘insulting Bashar al-Assad’.”
It follows a string of other actions against musicians and singers in the country.
Last July, Zara Esmaeili was arrested by Iranian security forces at her home in Karaj. Her arrest came after online footage emerged of her on the streets of Tehran singing the Amy Winehouse hit Back To Black without wearing a hijab.
According to a friend, just one day before her arrest, she tried to prevent the security police from detaining one of her friends in Tehran. This escalated into a confrontation with security forces, ultimately resulting in her violent arrest.
The exiled Iranian filmmaker Vahid Zarezadeh, now in Germany, told Index: “Zara Esmaeili was not widely known in the media, which meant that her voice remained largely unheard. She has been in detention for several months now, yet her family has received no information about her whereabouts or the reason for her arrest – a scenario all too familiar for many detainees in Iran.”
“Since then, there has been no official information about the charges against her, her legal status, or even where she is being held. Meanwhile, her Instagram account was suspended by order of the Iranian judiciary – a common tactic used to silence activists and dissidents.”
He added: “Our best assumption is that she is being held in solitary confinement in Ward 209 of Evin Prison, as no one inside the prison has seen or heard from her. Her situation remains shrouded in uncertainty, and, like many others, the complete silence surrounding her case could indicate that she is under severe pressure in detention.”
In December, the singer Parastoo Ahmadi was arrested along with two band members for performing a livestream concert in the symbolic venue of an old caravanserai (an inn which provided lodging for travellers) without wearing a hijab, violating Iran’s strict rules on dress for women.
Posting the concert on her channel, she wrote: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately. Here, in this part of our beloved Iran, where history and our myths intertwine, hear my voice in this imaginary concert and imagine this beautiful homeland… I am grateful to all those who have supported me in these difficult and special circumstances.”
The other members arrested were Iranian composer Ehsan Beyraghdar and guitarist Soheil Faghih Nasiri.
The Iranian authorities issued a statement saying that the concert took place “without legal authorisation and adherence to Sharia principles” and that appropriate action would be taken against the singer and production team. Since it was posted, the video has attracted 2.5 million views and was widely shared on Iranian social media, despite YouTube being banned in the country.
Ahmadi and the others have since been released on bail pending a trial.
Meanwhile, the controversial Iranian rapper Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo (better known as Amir Tataloo) is facing up to 15 years in prison.
The singer, known for being completely covered in tattoos, fled to Istanbul, Turkey in 2018 following repeated arrests by the Iranian authorities. In December 2023, he was deported by Turkish authorities, seemingly for visa violations although some reports say that his return to Iran was of his own volition. On crossing into Iran at the Bazargan border crossing, he was arrested.
While he was in Turkey, controversy swirled around Tataloo including allegations of attempts to groom young girls.
In 2020, Tataloo’s Instagram profile was suspended after he was accused of inviting young girls to join his “harem”. He later allegedly posted an audio file on Telegram justifying his position in which he said: “What I discussed was legitimate by the laws of our country and our religion. It is in our religion that you can have… four wives and 40 concubines. Also, marriage above the age of nine is allowed in Islam. But I said 15 to 16 years of age. Then I said with the consent of the parents, so that there would be no controversy.”
Since his return to Iran, he has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for “promoting corruption and prostitution”, a sentence upheld by the Court of Appeal. He faces a further five years for “insulting religious sanctities” but this is currently under review by the Supreme Court.
Some reports have claimed that Tataloo has been sentenced to death for blasphemy against the Prophet (“Sabb al-Nabi”). However, the Iranian judiciary’s media centre has denied this, stating that his final sentence has not yet been issued.
“Many individuals and social groups hesitate to support him due to his unpredictable character,” said Zarezadeh. “His supporters and critics alike constantly anticipate his next move – one day he performs a concert on the deck of an Iranian military vessel, another day he poses alongside President Ebrahim Raisi, and then at another moment, he positions himself as an opposition figure. All of these contradictions have made his case even more ambiguous.”
Despite the controversy surrounding Tataloo and his alleged crimes, the fact is that Iran has a problem with the freedom of expression of its musicians. Music was never intended to be silenced but heard. This systemic persecution has to stop.
6 Feb 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, they soon began searching people’s homes for items they deemed to be immoral. Waheedullah Saghar, the head of the music department at Kabul University, had to destroy all of his musical instruments before they were found. Among his collection were special items he’d bought during his time in India, such as a tanpura – a traditional folk stringed instrument.
“It was too risky to keep instruments at home,” he told Index. “Many of my colleagues also felt forced to destroy their instruments, and we disposed of the broken pieces in the garbage to protect ourselves.”
He was denied access to his university and received an official notice from the Taliban that all musical activities in Afghanistan would be prohibited in future.
“It’s very strange, because one day we were honourable, respectable people of our city,” he said. “Then just one day later we became victims and as if we should be punished, because we were musicians. It was very painful and very difficult.”
Saghar and his colleagues were granted asylum in Germany in 2021, and he is currently based in New York on a year-long placement, where he is keeping the culture of his home country alive by teaching university students about Afghan and Indian classical music.
“We had to find a solution for our situation,” he said. “Staying in Afghanistan in that critical moment was not an option because our lives were in danger.”
His story is similar to those of many musicians who have been either forced to leave or forced to abandon their livelihoods. Musicians in the country live in fear of discrimination, humiliation, torture, imprisonment, sexual violence in the case of women and even death. According to the Associated Press, the family of folk singer Fawad Andarabi accused the Taliban of executing him near his home in a mountain province north of Kabul in 2021.
Since their return in 2021, the Taliban have waged a war on music, claiming that it causes “moral corruption”. This approach mirrors their reign between 1996 and 2001, when music was also strictly prohibited. According to figures from its own Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the group has destroyed more than 21,000 musical instruments over the past year, including traditional items such as tabla drums and rubabs, a type of lute which is Afghanistan’s national instrument.
After their takeover of Kabul, the country’s public radio station, Radio Afghanistan, was swiftly rebranded Voice of Sharia, and music was removed from radio and TV stations, replaced with religious chanting.
Afghans play the dambora at a music festival in Bamyan province in 2017. Photo by Xinhua / Alamy
The Taliban’s use of chanting shows that there is hypocrisy in their extremism, Saghar says. They are sung without instruments, to inspire patriotism and instil their ideology.
“The Taliban don’t seem to understand what music truly represents or its role in society,” he said. “They claim that music is haram (“forbidden”) in Islam, without considering its broader meaning and significance. Music is an inseparable part of human life and is even integrated into aspects of Islamic practice.
“For example, the Quran is recited using musical scales, known as maqams in Arabic, and the Taliban themselves sing taranas – songs composed in Afghan musical scales. However, they overlook these nuances, and they are mainly opposed to musical instruments.”
Since the Taliban’s return, the move towards cultural censorship has gradually worsened, said Ahmad Sarmast, who is the founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, an exiled music school now based in Portugal.
Three years after their takeover, the Taliban announced their “vice and virtue laws”, which have been internationally condemned by human rights groups and the UN. These put in writing the banning of music, said Sarmast, as well as the restriction of women singing or reading aloud in public. This is in addition to the chilling stipulation that women must not speak or show their faces outside their homes.
Cultural bans have since been extended to the wider creative industries, such as filming and photography. The new morality laws prescribe that news media cannot publish images of living things, and TV stations across the country are gradually being closed and converted to radio stations as a result, according to a report from the London-based news site Afghanistan International.
“It’s not just the ban of music or the destruction of musical instruments – it’s a direct attack on the cultural heritage of Afghanistan, and on the freedom of expression of the Afghan people,” said Sarmast.
His orchestral school, which teaches classical Afghan as well as classical and modern Western music, has been “on the Taliban’s hit list” for a decade, he told Index, and endured suicide bombing attempts and targeted attacks even before the group came back into power. Despite the international “whitewashing” of Taliban 2.0, he knew the organisation was “not capable of being changed”.
“We knew that when the Taliban came, our days would be over,” he said.
In a similar way to Saghar’s university department, his music school was “treated like a military barracks” when the Taliban returned. The campus was vandalised, students and faculty were denied entry, property was removed and its bank account was seized.
“Afghanistan was suddenly turned into a silenced nation,” said Sarmast.
Musicians who have been granted asylum tend to be those with a public profile and strong international connections, or those from wealthier backgrounds. Others sold everything they could and took up low-paid jobs, such as selling street food, to survive, Sarmast explained.
One female violinist spoke to Index anonymously about her experiences. She was previously a music teacher but now cannot get a job because she doesn’t have legitimate qualifications beyond her musical education, which is now worthless.
She is currently in hiding and has had to move house several times to avoid being found out as a former musician. She has applied for asylum in Europe, but hasn’t yet been accepted.
“We don’t have a peaceful life. We have to be hidden,” she said. “No one should know that we used to make music. If the Taliban find out, they will kill us.”
Life is particularly treacherous for female musicians. This didn’t start when the Taliban came back into power, but it has worsened, says London-based Afghan singer Elaha Soroor. She told Index that gender discrimination from the fallout from the Taliban’s previous reign made her situation untenable.
“There was a patriarchy, this system, this way of looking at women’s lives – it’s always been there,” she said. “But the Taliban is the worst form of patriarchy. The foundation was there, but people were changing slowly [after their earlier fall], and things were becoming more normal.”
Singer-songwriter Elaha Soroor left Afghanistan in 2010, and now lives in the UK. Photo by Elaha Soroor. Photo by Elaha Soroor
Soroor, who is of the persecuted Hazara ethnic group, was one of the first female musicians to perform in public after the fall of the Taliban in 2000, and appeared on the reality TV show Afghan Star in 2008. She faced death threats, harassment and violence because of her public profile, including from male family members. When an anonymous person uploaded a fake pornographic video of her to YouTube, the violence escalated, and she fled Afghanistan in 2010, seeking asylum in the UK in 2012.
Whilst society was still restrictive, there was more freedom for musical expression then, she said. Bands played at weddings, “music travellers” would walk around the streets with percussion instruments and people loved listening to music.
“You’d go to a taxi [and] everybody’s listening to music at a loud volume,” she said. “It was mainly Afghan pop music from the ’60s and ’70s, new music, Bollywood, Turkish, Arabic and Hindustani.”
She believes that the Taliban’s draconian laws are a way of limiting free thought.
“Musicians, artists, they open up new doors and new ideas. They have this power of entering someone’s subconscious. The Taliban are scared of the power of art, because it can spark new ideas in someone’s mind, and change their way of thinking,” she said.
Now that she’s out of the country, she believes it is her role as an exiled musician to help keep Afghan music alive. In October, she released a new female liberation song titled Naan, Kar, Azadi! (Bread, Work, Freedom!), which she sings in her mother language, Farsi. It features other exiled female Afghans who have spoken out against the Taliban’s oppressive rule, including rapper Sonita Alizadeh. On Instagram, Soroor dedicated the song to “our sisters in Afghanistan as they continue to fight for their rights… in the face of adversity”.
“I feel like the artists who are outside Afghanistan… should be more proactive, create more and stay connected with the story of Afghanistan,” Soroor said. “So at least, if people cannot produce art inside, we should continue producing it outside and export it there [through the internet]. So we keep the flame alive.”
Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, who produced Soroor’s latest track, is director of performance at Oxford University’s St Catherine’s College, and an academic specialising in orchestral music in Afghanistan. She is working with exiled Afghan musicians to write the first book on orchestral music in the country.
She says that while there is an “absolute ban on music”, its enforcement is likely “uneven”. It’s possible that, in less policed areas, people still listen to music and “engage in their traditional music practices” at home, but professional music-making has certainly been brought to a standstill, which will have long-term impacts on the country’s musical heritage.
“You can’t work – there are no weddings, no parties,” she told Index. “So you have people’s musical knowledge and skill-sets that are probably atrophying. Then they’re becoming impoverished because they don’t have alternative work opportunities.” This has lowered the “social status” of musicians, she said, to historically what it would have been when it was intertwined with “vices” such as alcohol and drug use.
She is particularly concerned about traditional musicians, who she says have been overlooked by European asylum schemes. These have typically given preference to schools making orchestral music – or “Western” music – as they have stronger diplomatic ties with international orchestras, and their students are often better educated with stronger English language skills.
Music made using instruments such as the rubab, the tanbur and the dholak could be lost. She is calling for Germany, which has already established asylum schemes, to set up an Institute of Afghanistan Traditional Music, which could become an international hub for the art form and could help to “potentially get more people out of the country to teach”.
The Afghanistan National Institute of Music is now based in Portugal. Photo by Jennifer Taylor
Artists who made “modern” music, such as rock and pop, also remain stranded in the country. One singer-songwriter and guitar player spoke to Index anonymously. He taught himself the guitar after practising on his father’s dotar. His income stream from music has completely stopped. While he sees music “as a way for great social and cultural change, rather than for money making”, that too has been curtailed.
Having a public profile as a musician is now “almost equal to signing my death certificate”, he said. He has endured threats and physical attacks, and the situation has severely impacted his mental health. “I spend every day with worry and every night with fear, and sometimes I jump from sleep,” he said. “The mental problems that have been created for me are sometimes unbearable. I am always worried about being arrested, killed or tortured.”
Prior to 2021, he would perform for events like International Women’s Day. He hopes that one day girls and women can “study freely and play music, and not be deprived of their basic rights”.
“The absence of music and art has caused freedom of expression to disappear, creativity in culture and art to decline, and national and cultural identity to be weakened,” he said.
Those who have fled Afghanistan have been torn away from their home country, but are still beating the drum for progress and equality. Sarmast, of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, says that the international music community must work together to raise awareness of the cultural destruction and “gender apartheid” that is happening, and put pressure on the Taliban to restore human rights, of which he believes access to music is one.
As Afghan musicians live in the shadows, those in exile continue to raise awareness of their plight. But there is a real risk that the rich musical heritage of the country will be forever silenced if the world doesn’t continue to campaign for its right to exist.
15 Aug 2023 | Afghanistan, News and features
Music has always occupied an important place in Afghan society, serving as a medium of expression, storytelling and a celebration of cultural identity. For decades, Afghan musicians have also played a vital role in providing solace to our war-torn nation. But the situation has completely changed since the return of the Taliban to power. Musicians are one of the most severely affected of the many sections of Afghan society by Taliban rule. A once vibrant community of artists is now facing repression. Like other art forms, the Taliban consider music un-Islamic as per their strict interpretation of Islam. The lives of musicians are endangered, their livelihoods and artistic freedom deprived.
Artists who survived and worked covertly during the previous stint of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001 were aware of the dark future that awaited them and were haunted by old memories. When the Kabul fell on 15 August 2021 many musicians fled. Rashid Khan, one of the famous musicians based in Kabul, told us that on the second night after the fall of Kabul, he got a call from the security guard of his studio to tell him that people with guns had entered the office, broke all the instruments and set them on fire. They enquired about him before leaving and the incident terrified Khan. The next day he escaped to Pakistan with his family.
The Artistic Freedom Initiative, which helps with the resettlement of international artists who are persecuted or censored, in the past two years has received more than 3,000 requests from Afghan artists for relocation.
For those who remained the attacks started immediately and grew and grew. Just a couple of days into the Taliban’s regime they brutally killed a famous folklore singer. On 27 August 2021, Fawad Andarabi was murdered at home.
Restrictions were put in place surrounding live performances, public gatherings and entertainment venues. The music industry came to a halt. Many had to retrain, if they could. One of those is a singer named Abdul Qadir, who has started working as a motorcycle mechanic.
The ministry of vice and virtue banned music on the national broadcasting network. All entertainment channels on television and radio were no longer allowed to play any music. Today they are only allowed to play the Naghmas/Taranas (patriotic and nationalist songs) of the Taliban, which are “songs” with slogans and without any actual music. They’re designed to promote the ideology of the Taliban, glorify the leaders of the Taliban and romanticise their achievements.
The Afghanistan National Institute of Music was closed. The centre’s director, Ahmed Sarmast, says we are witnessing the end of great musical heritage and we agree.
Once a famous spot for music and entertainment in Kabul, Sar e chowk has now been turned into a regular market with no sign or remnants of music anywhere. The market used to be full of shops selling musical instruments. It had small studios where artists, musicians and singers would gather to make songs, create music and entertain people. That is now all gone and instead people sell fruit and vegetables.
In attempts to completely eradicate music from society, it is even banned during weddings. What happens to those who ignore the ban? In October 2021 people with guns entered a wedding ceremony in Nangahar where music was playing. They tried to break the loud speaker. When guests resisted, the armed people fired at them, killing two and injuring 10.
In a recent attack the Taliban confiscated musical instruments in the west province of Herat on 30 July 2023 and set them on fire.
These are just some examples in an endless list.
In these testing times, the international community must not forget Afghan musicians and artists. While providing humanitarian aid and evacuation to all vulnerable populations, there is a dire need to extend support to the artistic community as well. Collaborative efforts with international arts organisations, cultural exchanges and virtual platforms can offer a lifeline to Afghan musicians, allowing them to continue their craft and share their talent with the world.
