The Taliban War on Music: Religious Piety vs. Therapeutic Properties of Music

Why are the Taliban against music?

The man blows his sorrows into his flute as he copes with the loss of his two sons, who were killed by the Taliban. You can listen to him here.

I was walking on an Italian street yesterday when I saw a signboard saying “musicoterapia.” It caught my attention because I had been reading about logotherapy an hour before. “Logo” comes from the Greek “logos,” meaning “meaning,” and neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued that having a sense of meaning can help us survive better in the face of hardships. It made me think that if, like meaning, music can help us heal and endure the bad things that life throws at us, then why is music Haram in Islam? And why is the Taliban enforcing this religious notion and punishing people for listening to music?

Music has been with us for as long as we can remember. When we were in the jungle, maybe a hundred thousand years ago, we may have enjoyed listening to the songs of birds living alongside us and sharing the same fruit. This may be why humans crave music; singers are among the most celebrities worldwide. The music industry is vast, generating as much as $26 billion in 2022, according to Zippia. This shows that humans crave music. Why else would we spend money subscribing to Apple Music or Spotify or buying concert tickets? But why, a hundred thousand years after we left the jungle, does the Taliban say music corrupts our souls…