Originally published 2021-08-28.
Yes, the Taliban said music would not be allowed. In an interview with The New York Times published on 26 August 2021, eleven days after the group took Kabul, chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said music would not be permitted in public. He added that the movement hoped to persuade people to give it up rather than force them. In the months and years that followed, the softer promises made in that interview, especially about women and girls, were largely reversed.
What Zabihullah Mujahid actually said
Mujahid had been the voice of the Taliban since 2007, but for most of that time he was known only by phone, text and social media. He showed his face publicly for the first time at the group's first press conference in Kabul on 17 August 2021. A few days later he gave the Times interview that made headlines around the world.
His words on music were short: "Music is forbidden in Islam." He said the Taliban would try to convince Afghans to stop listening to or making music instead of pressuring them, and that the country should look to the future rather than dwell on the past. On women, he said they could go to educational centres and hospitals without a mahram, a male guardian. Earlier reports summarising the same period had suggested women would need a chaperone for longer journeys, and that later became official policy.
He also criticised Western countries for evacuating doctors, professors and other skilled Afghans. In his view they were taking away people the country needed, only for them to end up in low-status jobs abroad, which he called inhuman.
The background: Kabul in August 2021
The interview came at the height of the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport. The Afghan government and army had collapsed as US and NATO forces withdrew after almost twenty years of war, a war that began when the Taliban were removed from power following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Kabul fell on 15 August 2021.
Between 14 and 30 August the United States and its allies flew more than 123,000 people out of the country. Many were Afghans who feared reprisals for working with foreign forces or the former government. On 26 August, the same day the interview was reported, a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State's local branch killed more than 180 people at the airport gates, including 13 US service members. The last American troops left on 30 August.
Music under the Taliban, then and now
During its first period in power, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban banned most music, along with television and many other forms of entertainment. People caught with instruments or cassettes risked confiscation, beatings and prison. Afghan musicians who could leave fled, many of them to Peshawar in Pakistan.
After 2021 the pattern returned. Music was quickly pushed off radio and television and banned at weddings and public gatherings. The Afghanistan National Institute of Music, founded in Kabul in 2010 by ethnomusicologist Ahmad Naser Sarmast and known for teaching girls as well as boys, lost its building and instruments; its students and staff were evacuated and rebuilt the school in exile in Braga, Portugal. In July 2023 Taliban officials in Herat were reported to have publicly burned confiscated musical instruments.
Many Muslims and Islamic scholars reject the claim that music as such is forbidden. Afghanistan itself has a rich musical tradition, from the rubab, the national instrument, to the classical style that grew up in Kabul's Kharabat quarter. The Taliban's position reflects their own strict interpretation, not a consensus across the Muslim world.
What happened to the promises about women
In 2021 Taliban leaders said they would be more moderate than in the 1990s, a period when human rights groups documented public punishments including executions and floggings. They said girls would continue to be educated and that women could work. Here is how the main rules developed:
- 26 December 2021: women barred from travelling more than 72 km without a close male relative.
- 23 March 2022: girls' secondary schools ordered closed only hours after they had reopened.
- 7 May 2022: a decree from supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered women to cover their faces in public.
- 20 December 2022: women suspended from universities.
- 24 December 2022: aid organisations ordered to stop employing women.
- 24 July 2023: beauty salons ordered to close.
- August 2024: a "vice and virtue" law turned many earlier decrees into a single legal code restricting women's movement, dress and public speech.
The early interviews are therefore best read as statements made for an international audience at a moment when the Taliban were seeking international recognition and access to frozen Afghan assets. How the rules were actually applied varied from province to province, but the overall direction was clear.
Why the "brain drain" argument resonated
Mujahid's complaint about skilled Afghans leaving touched a real problem. Doctors, engineers, teachers and civil servants were heavily represented among the evacuees, and the departure of so many professionals weakened hospitals, universities and ministries. Yet the reason so many wanted to go was fear of the new rulers themselves, especially among women, journalists, former soldiers and people who had worked with Western organisations.
Common questions
Is music completely banned in Afghanistan?
Public performance, broadcast music and music at weddings are banned and enforced by the ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice. Private listening is harder to police, but there have been repeated reports of instruments and sound equipment being confiscated and destroyed.
Did the Taliban keep girls in school?
Primary schools stayed open for girls, but secondary schools and universities were closed to them in 2022.
Is Zabihullah Mujahid still the spokesman?
He was confirmed as chief spokesman in October 2021 and also became a deputy minister of information and culture. In 2023 he was moved to Kandahar to work closer to the supreme leader.
Sources: ARY News, 26 August 2021 (summary of the New York Times interview); Daily Mail, August 2021; Wikipedia: Zabihullah Mujahid; Wikipedia: Women in Afghanistan; Wikipedia: Music of Afghanistan; Wikipedia: Afghanistan National Institute of Music; Wikipedia: Fall of Kabul (2021).
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