PART 1

To start with, I don’t want to downplay the restrictions that the Taliban placed especially over urban life. Most of the things in the original post did indeed take place, and especially in Kabul and other large towns/cities. An article by Juan Cole, ‘The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Public Sphere’ (1), describes much of this in analytical perspective that focuses on the spectacle of violence and restriction: public executions for immorality took place, but even more common was to see things like cassettes or electronic entertainment equipment ritually ‘hung’ as well in public. Regarding birds, this was partly due to the fact that people frequently kept birds like pigeons and especially quails or partridges for competitive sports that would also involve gambling; and even if no money changed hands, this kind of spiritually and materially unproductive time-passing was seen by the Taliban’s parent school of thought as frivolous at best, and were frowned upon. The Taliban took this, and made it into a prohibition.

Addressing your larger point about prescriptions and prohibitions that include entertainment but extend far beyond them to include eg. dress, Cole writes about all this in terms of public sphere theory. To his view I would add a more recent material theory by Kusha Sefat, who writes about ‘Things and Terms’ in post-Revolutionary Iran. (2) The setting is different, but Sefat’s ideas work for Kabul post 1996, when the Taliban took over, and implemented policies like the uniformity of men’s and women’s physical presentations outside the home, and the removal of ‘westernized’ objects as signifiers for ‘un-Afghan’ and ‘un-Islamic’ lifestyles. In practice, the uniformity that the Taliban demanded was also heavily skewed in the direction of ‘Pashtun’ dress, and residents of Kabul, which gets much icier than Kandahar or Jalalabad in the winter, found it highly distressing to have to wear heavy sandals and a wool shawl in the snow, as opposed to shoes/boots and a coat; and apologies that this is anecdotal from my own fieldwork in Kabul, rather than from a printed source). In any case: the Taliban period, in Kabul, was heavily marked by attempts to reshape the material landscape, to create a proliferation of certain kinds of objects and block the visibility of other kinds, as a way to change (or ‘reform’) people’s interiority into the direction that the Taliban wanted. In other words, the material world around one, and the way that one moves through it, have an effect on the kinds of thoughts that one thinks/can think, and will produce a new kind of ideal society in which the Taliban were raised to an almost higher level of reality, which would seem natural and thus uncontestable. Indeed Cole, analyzing list of Taliban prohibitions, says that they all fit organically into what he calls an ‘episteme’. Many entertainment forms, like TV and radio and cinema, depicted landscapes that cut against this episteme; and the objects they depicted were especially singled out as well: the Taliban specifically outlawed Leonardo DiCaprio’s hairstyle in Titanic, which had been popular in Kabul among youths.

As Cole writes, much of this applied to ‘public’ space, but the Taliban also employed morality squads who could search homes for contraband objects, as well as practices. Weddings and things could not be accompanied by instrumental music, although the punishment for drum music was apparently discretionary to the particular inspector. Additionally, the Taliban, like the Mujahidin and the PDPA before them, had a well-developed network of informants, formal and informal/coerced, who could help police the domestic. Anecdotally, again, many families simply used kitchenware to produce music for happy occasions.

Returning to Cole’s article, you’re also right that urban society generally seems to have been ‘not much fun’. That is, Cole cites a Swedish Physicians for Human Rights report that says, among other things, that 97% of women surveyed (in 1998) showed clinical signs of major depression.

In the midst of this, sometimes, resistance itself could be a source of … not *fun*, exactly; but I’ll let the following speak for itself. Anne Brodsky quotes an activist in the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association, who ran underground educational and other services, especially for women, who were particularly restricted in their access to social goods:

“Our life is not without pleasure and meaning. Our sacrifice is for the value of freedom, not just for anything. I will not be able to achieve my personal goals in life—they were stolen by my country’s history. But for the children in this school I will sacrifice so they can reach theirs—they must be able to achieve. I am so angry at my own suffering and lost future that these innocent children must be aided.” (3)

WITH ALL THAT, THOUGH:

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