Afghanistan's culture: poetry said aloud and music twice silenced

Which languages Afghans speak and write

Pashto and Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, are the two official languages, and both are Indo-European. Britannica counts more than two-fifths of the population speaking Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, and about half speaking some dialect of Persian. The dialects shade into one another across the country, some closer to the Farsi of Iran and some to the Tajik of Tajikistan, and bilingualism is common. Dari is the lingua franca of Kabul and the north and west, and although Pashtuns have dominated national politics for centuries, Dari stayed the working language of government.

The 2004 constitution named six more languages, Uzbek, Turkmen, Pashai, Nuristani, Balochi and Pamiri, as a third official language wherever a majority speaks them. Turkic languages, Uzbek, Turkmen and a little Kyrgyz in the far northeast, belong to the most recent settlers. Brahui, spoken in the far south, is Dravidian.

The shares add up to more than 100% because many people speak several. Many Afghans also understand Hindustani, from years as refugees in Pakistan and from Bollywood films, and some who went to school in the 1980s kept some Russian.

How poetry became the national art form

Poetry is the part of Afghan culture with the longest written record, and it has never been only written. Herat was a centre of Persian letters: the Arabic writer al-Hamadhani settled there in the 10th century and the Persian poet Jami five hundred years later, and the theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi lived there in the 12th. Khwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat in the 11th century, Sanai of Ghazni in the 12th and Rumi, born in Balkh in the 13th, are claimed as national figures in Afghanistan and in Iran alike.

Pashto literature has a founder. Britannica credits the chieftain and poet Khushal Khan Khattak with founding it in the 17th century, and he is called the national poet. Rahman Baba, Rabia Balkhi, Khalilullah Khalili and Parween Pazhwak are among the other names the Wikipedia country article lists.

The oral forms carry the most weight in daily life. The landay is a folk verse form. On Thursdays Herat has traditionally held poetry nights at which whole families recite old and new poems. Proverbs, zarbul masalha in Dari, are prized as a mark of wit. Where literacy is low, Britannica notes, newspapers have long been read aloud in public places, and the practice widened their audience well beyond the people who could read them. The first Afghan newspaper appeared in 1873, and Mahmud Tarzi's Seraj al-Akhbar, published from 1911 to 1918, had political influence far beyond the country.

Literacy has been the constraint. In 2018 the adult literacy rate was 43.02%, 55.48% for men and 29.81% for women, and UNESCO reckons that women's literacy nearly doubled between 2001 and 2021, from 17% to almost 30%.

What happened to music under two Taliban governments

Afghan classical music is close kin to the Indian tradition and uses its terms, raga among them. The ghazal is its sung poetic form. Its instruments include the tabla, sitar, harmonium, zerbaghali, dayereh and tanbur; the first three came from India, and the dayereh and tanbur are also played in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The rubab, a short-necked lute, is the national instrument and the forerunner of the Indian sarod. Ustad Sarahang is among the best-known classical singers.

Popular music came through the radio. Radio Kabul broadcast from the 1920s, and pop developed on it in the 1950s, when women singers began to appear, the first of them Mermon Parwin. Ahmad Zahir, who died in 1979, is the name most associated with it. The attan, a circle dance danced in the open air, began as the Pashtun national dance and became the country's, and it is performed at weddings and on feast days.

Both Taliban governments turned on this half of the culture. In the 1990s they banned instrumental music and most public music-making, and Britannica records that performing, listening to or watching music and dance were all forbidden as un-Islamic. Many musicians moved abroad, and Peshawar and Quetta became centres for the distribution of Afghan music. After 2021 Kabul University reopened without its music department. The decree on public morality published in August 2024 further limited music and news media, Freedom House reports, and banned festivals of Persian origin. The same law prohibits any representation of human figures and stops women's voices being broadcast on radio, according to UNESCO.

How faith and custom order daily life

Religion runs through almost every custom. The CIA estimated in 2009 that 99.7% of Afghans were Muslim. Britannica puts about four-fifths as Sunni of the Hanafi school, the others, mainly Hazara and Qizilbash, following Twelver or Ismaili Shia Islam; the Pew Research Center gives 90% Sunni and 7% Shia. Fewer than one in ten Afghans belonged to a Sufi order in the 21st century, although Sufism has a long history there. The Nuristani were converted by force in 1895, when their region's name changed from Kafiristan, land of the infidels, to Nuristan, land of light.

The other faiths have almost gone. About 250 Sikhs and Hindus remained in September 2021, by Deutsche Welle's count, after 67 were evacuated to India. The Jewish community of Herat and Kabul left over the 20th century, and its last known members left after the Taliban returned. Christians, estimated at 500 to 8,000, worship in secret, and there are no public churches.

Family is the unit of social life and it is patriarchal. Afghans also identify by qawm, a word Britannica describes as able to mean almost any social group, a tribe, a clan or a village, and which marks members of one group off from outsiders. Among Pashtuns the customary code is Pashtunwali. Its three primary principles are melmastia, hospitality to any guest without expectation of return; nanawatai, sanctuary for a fugitive; and badal (justice or revenge), which can be settled by compensation. Disputes go to a jirga. Marriage to a parallel cousin is the preferred match, a bride price is commonly expected, and child marriage is common; Human Rights Watch gave the legal age for girls in 2017 as 16, or 15 with the consent of a father or judge.

What Afghans wear and where they live

Men and women wear forms of the shalwar kameez: for men the perahan tunban, loose trousers under a long shirt, often with a heavy waistcoat. The chapan is a long coat. Three hats mark regions or people: the karakul, of the fleece of a local breed of sheep, worn by the former kings; the pakol, a rolled wool cap from the far east of the country; and the Mazari hat of the north. Women wear the chador, and in conservative communities the chadri or burqa, a full body covering some Pashtun women wore before Islam reached the region and the Taliban later enforced. Since May 2022 a full-body covering has been required of all women in public.

The house follows the land. In the north and west villages are built as qalahs, fortified compounds of stone and mud-brick; Nuristanis in the eastern mountains built multistoried wooden houses. Nomads of Turkic and Mongol origin in the north live in yurts and Pashtun nomads in the south in tents. The Kuchi herders buy supplies from the villages they pass, tea and wheat among them, and sell wool and milk; their share of the population is given as about 15% in one section of the Wikipedia country article and 4.3% in another. A rural house is traditionally built around a closed courtyard where women and children can move out of public view, with a hujra, a room where men receive guests.

What an Afghan meal is built on

Bread comes first. Naan, flat and usually oblong, is baked on the wall of a tandoor, a clay oven set in the ground, and eaten hot. Rice is the centre of a meal that matters: challow, plain rice cooked with mild spices, goes with qorma stews, and palaw has meat, stock, qorma and herbs mixed in before it is baked. Kabuli palaw, with lamb or beef, carrots, raisins and nuts, is the national dish. Other palaw take their colour from what goes in: spinach and dill for the green zamarod, tomato for the red bonjan-e-roomi, saffron and orange peel for narenj.

Beyond rice there are dumplings (mantu), a thick noodle soup (ash), meat pies (sanbuseh), kebabs and bolani, a fried flatbread filled with potato, leek, pumpkin or lentils that is sold as street food. The cooking is halal and mild, using coriander, mint, dill, cumin, cardamom, turmeric and the country's own saffron. Fruit is eaten fresh and dried, pomegranates, grapes and melons above all, and tea is drunk in quantity and offered to every guest.

How crafts and images came through the wars

Carpet weaving is the oldest of the crafts still worked at scale, done by hand and traditionally by women, and every province has its own patterns. In some Turkic districts of the northwest a bride's weaving skill affects the price agreed at a wedding. After the Soviet invasion weavers made "war rugs", whose designs record the suffering the conflict caused. The village of Istalif, north of Kabul, makes turquoise and green pottery by methods unchanged for centuries.

The image-making tradition is older and has fared worse. Gandhara art, a fusion of Greco-Roman and Buddhist forms, flourished here between the 1st and 7th centuries CE, and in the 15th century Kamaleddin Behzad of Herat was a leading painter of Persian miniatures. A School of Fine Arts opened in Kabul in the 1930s. The civil wars and the Taliban left most cultural institutions defunct, and the Bamiyan Buddhas were blown up in 2001. The National Gallery reopened in February 2002, having hidden many of its works through the Taliban years, and the 2024 virtue law has since banned any representation of human figures.

Which festivals and games have lasted

The official new year is Nowruz, at the spring equinox, a tradition that began as a Zoroastrian celebration and is kept with music and dance and with buzkashi matches; Mazar-e Sharif holds its Red Flower Festival at the same time. Yalda, on the longest night of the year, is spent reading poetry and eating fruit with family. Ramadan, the two Eids and Ashura are kept as Islamic holidays, and Independence Day on 19 August marks the treaty of 1919.

Buzkashi is the national game. Horsemen, in teams or alone, fight to seize the headless carcass of a goat or calf weighing about 20 to 40 kilograms and carry it to a goal. Kite flying is competitive, with youths trying to cut each other's strings, and wrestling is played for personal and group honour.

Team sports arrived later. The national football team dates from 1922 and joined FIFA in 1948; the cricket team, formed in 2001, played in the World Cups of 2015, 2019 and 2023. Afghanistan first competed at the Olympics in 1936. Women's sport is banned under the Emirate. In September 2026 an Afghan woman cyclist who had trained disguised as a man won a silver medal at the Asian Games.