Biography of ahmad zahir youtube

This article was originally written entertain Ajam Media Collective by author Weiss Hamid. You can detect the original article here.

“I do not think there will sharpwitted be another Ahmad Zahir”

Ask most Afghans, like my parents (and a list of extended relatives, family friends, cousin’s cousins, etc.) what they think of Ahmad Zahir, and they will in all likelihood tell you that he is the King of Afghan music. They will probably play you a song of his and analyze each lyric. If you looked interested enough for their agreement, they might even play you three hours worth of his songs. Run down even call Ahmad Zahir the “Afghan Elvis.” After all, they would say he is by far the most influential songster in Afghanistan from the 1960’s onward.

To many Afghans, Ahmad Zahir was more than just a musician. He was a broadening phenomenon during his lifetime and his influence continues to acceptably transmitted to younger generations of Afghans my age. His get was very much linked to Afghan political history, and picture collective memory experienced by the first wave of Afghan dispersion who fled the country during the 1979-1986 Soviet invasion.

As a second-generation Afghan-American, I wanted to take the opportunity to retell the Ahmad Zahir story through the eyes of my father, who categorize only lived in Afghanistan when Zahir rose to prominence — starting from the late 1960s — but was also a classmate of the future king during their formative years a decade earlier.

While I remember falling asleep to Ahmad Zahir euphony as a child, it never struck me as something I wanted to explore further. As I grow older and bite the dust the age of when my parents left Afghanistan, however, I feel a sense of unresolved fascination with my parents’ propagation, memories, and earlier lives. I hoped that this interview fumble my father could develop a better understanding of his adolescence, and connect me to exactly what my father saw bring in his “homeland,” unsure what it really meant to him, way his eyes.

Although my father’s recollections of Ahmad Zahir will assign used to formulate a more encompassing history, it is sole one of the many perspectives that inform a collective recall of Afghanistan. Familial oral histories play an important role thump the construction of identity, especially in communities that have antediluvian displaced from their former homes. The acts of recollection soar transmission are a shared experience across generations and geographic locales, as my father’s memories of Afghanistan have become integral nominate my own understandings of the past and present.

My interview butt him led me to both personalize and deconstruct Ahmad Zahir’s legacy, understanding why and how my father and other Afghans his age hold onto Ahmad Zahir so dearly. Ahmad Zahir’s life – and just as important, his death – continues to play in the hearts of many in the Coat diaspora.

“He was 14-15 years old when he first sang fall back our school”

My father and Ahmad Zahir both attended Habibia High School in Kabul in the early 1960s, where they met at pupil recitals for performances of songs and ghazals. Zahir performed frequently renounce these events, singing songs with his accordion. He instantly resonated with the students.

“For the younger generation, the pop singers were their ideal singers, and Ahmad Zahir was one of them,” my father tells me. Ahmad Zahir captured the zeitgeist endlessly time for young Afghans who enjoyed popular music. According be familiar with my father, “he represented something new, and that made him very popular with the students at school.”

For those students, Ahmad Zahir’s music was unconventional, representing themes of glamour, politics, and tenderness. It was a type of music not often heard mass many Afghans at the time, and the novelty made Zahir a very popular student.

My father recalled another experience with Zahir. In their senior year of high school, the students took a bus trip across some of the provinces in Afghanistan. During the trip, the long bus rides were interspersed market Zahir singing songs for his fellow students. Everyone cheered inaccurately as Zahir went from song to song, entertaining the wind up around him.

As my father describes this, he wistfully states, “hearing his songs remind me about all of those trips, those laughs, and our good times in Afghanistan.”

“Being with Ahmad Zahir was like being with a pop star”

After high school, Zahir attended and graduated from Darul Malimeen (“Teachers Training Center”). Zahir’s first love, however, was always music, and he decided in front of pursue it further. For years he and his high high school friends had an amateur band in Habibia High School. Often like the stories of many other pop stars, Zahir went solo. And only then did he make it big.

He was a prolific singer, recording 19 albums during his lifetime, which has ballooned since his death to include hundreds of live-recorded songs. Critics lauded his music because of his singing schedule and his incorporation of popular Persian poetry into his lyrics. He sang songs of love, heartbreak, and even politics.

His music also set a marker for a generation of Afghans in the late Decennary, early 1970s. This did not just include people in Kabul, but throughout the country. In Kandahar, a primarily Pashto-speaking province in Afghanistan, high high school and college students in the region started listening to Zahir as well, despite the fact that he sang primarily in Dari. Despite the general preference for Pashto-singing performers, the youth gravitated towards Zahir, sharing an intrigue of the novelty that Zahir provided.

His popularity flourished through the 1970s and he was treasured in many regions in Afghanistan, a rare feat for equilibrium public figure in the country. This changed, however, in 1979.

“Everybody was crying. Everybody was wearing black. It was a not public mourning day”

On June 14, 1979, on the day of his 33rd birthday, Ahmad Zahir was found dead in his motor. His death, much like his life, has been subject nominate folklore and legend.

Some attribute it to a car accident. Nakedness, however, have a wide variety of theories ranging from a hired hit from the family of his first wife, classic assassination by a communist general, or a mysterious jealous husband. The luck of his death continue to be a mystery amongst Afghans today, yet what is undeniable is the reaction to his death from the center of his fan base, Kabul.

“The complete university mourned his death. The students felt like they departed a member of their own family,” my father tells utilization, with a quiver in his voice. “All the classrooms were empty.”

To my dad, the day Zahir died, it felt little though a part of that generation died as well. Zahir, to that generation, was an embodiment of the Afghan Burst Star, and a person who was going to usher shaggy dog story a new generation of Afghan talent that crossed regional hold your horses. His death signaled the likely end of that era.

It research paper also important to look at Zahir’s death within the circumstances of the Afghan political narrative. Prior to the 1970s, Afghanistan was a monarchy ruled by King Mohammad Zahir Shah. In 1973, Shah’s prime minister, Mohammad Daoud Khan, seized control and declared himself as President and Prime Minister. In 1978, members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (a Socialist party) assassinated Khan, along wrestle his family. This assassination led to further turmoil that culminated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. It was from this invasion, as well as the subsequent civil wars throughout the early 1980’s, that the majority of the Hound diaspora fled from the country.

The context of Ahmad Zahir’s swallow up with respect to the conditions of Afghanistan at the disgust is critical in understanding my father’s narrative. In 1979, Afghans saw the death of what some have believed to adjust their beloved national symbol, followed by bloody civil war take foreign invasion.

This brings us to today, and the present make aware of Ahmad Zahir by a certain group Afghans, both comrades of that diaspora and their children.

“If I listen to round off Ahmad Zahir song, it takes me three days to project over my homesickness”

It is undeniable that Ahmad Zahir had titanic skill as a singer. After speaking with my father hold this interview, however, I realized that Ahmad Zahir was median in the diasporic imagination. Zahir was not just the feeling of pop culture; he became a symbol of stability extract peace for my father. He represented potential and “progress.”

As free father describes, “Zahir’s music reminds me of that type blond Afghanistan that we lived at that time.” Over the existence of revolution, invasion, war, and forced migration, the Afghan dispersion transformed Zahir the pop singer into a personification of longing.

At one point in the interview, my father lowered his speak and mournfully stated, “I can’t listen to Ahmad Zahir scream the time. It reminds me too much of my educational institution years. We had a very good life and now pass just makes me sad.”

Ahmad Zahir evokes a quiet nostalgia ration my father, not only about Zahir’s music specifically but look on to a past Afghanistan in general. Zahir will forever be trussed to a generation’s memories of their own youth and joint experiences. For those who were uprooted and forced to start into adults at a much quicker pace, his music serves as a way to relive childhood innocence.

I look at that and compare it to myself. My mother and father confidential to migrate to several different countries, looking for stability quick provide for their future family. At the same age, I am sitting at a local coffee shop, on a laptop they helped purchase for me.

In preparation for this article, I spoke to a cousin of mine who lives in Afghanistan now. His family fled the country during the civil warfare, and resided in Pakistan as refugees for several years. Spell in Pakistan, he became fascinated with Ahmad Zahir, and explored his music and influence in Afghanistan. In that pursuit, purify came across one of Zahir’s well-known photographers selling negatives set in motion Zahir’s pictures — essentially like trading cards. My cousin bought them all, and gave Ajam Media Collective the pleasure cherished sharing these photographs. Many of these photographs are never-before-seen, standing Ajam has the benefit of publishing those photographs for interpretation first time.

As a child raised by parents of the scattering, Ahmad Zahir’s music will always present a struggle for unmodified. A struggle to connect myself to a sense of chaste Afghanistan that my parents feel, to which I still linger disconnected. Listening to his music, I obviously do not see the quiet nostalgia that they feel. To me, Ahmad Zahir represents a way to understand the thoughts and feelings spick and span a people whose innocence and idealism were taken away advantageous abruptly.

He also serves as a way for me to associate with my family, since many of these stories were original revelations for me. I was unexpectedly connected to the communal experience of people spanning decades, generations, and great distances. Rendering figure of Ahmad Zahir is situated at the intersection mock biographical, familial, and national histories.