Dancing in the streets

And so, Kabul falls. Just like that, they say. Like a ripe apricot off a tree. Thousands of tonnes of American explosives and bomb-making expertise finally paid off. There is music in the streets and hair on the floor. Women whose faces hadn’t been seen for half a decade are in the open. It’s a change.

Of course, ya knew they’d do that. After thirty generations of invasion and domination by warlords, and violence as a way of life, and repression as second nature, the Afghans are nothing if not pragmatic.

They know the score. When the Nordies move in, cut your beard. When the Pashtuns take over, grow it. As fast as you can.

Because that’s how it is. You show the boss what he (and it’s always a he) wants to see. Beard .. not beard ... beard ... not beard. And so on and on, hirsute unto heaven.

But for all that, there is something wondrous about the imagery. Music in the streets and bullets in the air. Now I know it wasn’t Martha and the Vandellas. But still, it suggests an outbreak of some kind of joyfulness after the dreadful era of the bould Mullah Omar. I mean, what class of people ban music? Think about it.

There is an American psychologist called Howard Gardner who is the most well known, though not the only, exponent of a concept called ‘multiple intelligences’. According to this theory, there are eight, possible nine, intelligences, each of which evolved in concert with humans. They include the physical, the interpersonal, the mathematical/logical, and so on. And one of the most central to our being, to human-ness, is musical intelligence.

Music is intrinsic to the way we are. Listen around you. People work to music, exercise to music, talk to music, grow up to music, fall in love to music.

And people learn better to music. Indeed, certain composers (and Mozart is the best known) have written music that taps into the way our minds work. This is true!

Researchers at the University of California found that individuals who listened to ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos before taking an intelligence test scored higher than people who listened to ten minutes of relaxation instructions, or who sat in silence for ten minutes.

They, and others, have wondered if perhaps such music stimulates neural pathways in the brain. It’s even suggested that it is to do with the wavelengths of the music.

Whatever. Personally, I think that music is the sound of life, the food of love, the song of the soul. I’m not religious, but I’ve been to churches in the USA and I’ve heard what happens when a gospel choir cuts loose. You can’t hear the Blind Boys of Alabama without feeling a link with the divine, the ineluctable, the spirit. And so, any regime or philosophy that bans music is not only dehumanised, but is also un-divine.

Osama bin Laden is on record as saying that only Afghanistan is an Islamic state. The Taliban, in his view, created a state in keeping with the words of the prophet. Well, he’s wrong.

But then, he’s a Wahhabi – a member of a particularly fundamentalist and extreme Saudi Islamic sect. And so, in their way, are the Taliban.

This Saudi thing… look, if you’ve ever been to Bahrain, with its bars and bangles and Russian hookers, you’ll understand something of the Saudis. The island state exists as a safety valve for Saudi Arabia. The Saudis flock there for the drink and women and shopping. I stayed there once, and the place was full of eastern European women, maintained in luxury in hotels by Saudi sugar daddies. And the Saudis bring their families to shop, even though it’s more expensive than Saudi Arabia itself, because families can’t shop together in Saudi Arabia.

And so on.

The religious schools that produced the fundamentalist Islamic martyrs of the last generation are largely funded by the Saudis. They operate all over the Islamic world. Pernicious, crazed, fanatical, they have perverted Islam, itself a conservative but essentially generous religion, into a machine for mayhem, hatred and the murder of innocents. Which is not what Islam is about.

Meanwhile, those who fund this extremist movement (which threatens the whole human species with destruction if its most extreme leaders get their hands on nuclear weapons) also shag Russian prostitutes in Bahraini safe havens. So where’s the God in all this, mate?

There is no hell hot enough for these cynical and dishonest monsters and, whatever else happens next, it’s good that their fellow travellers of the Taliban are on the run.

They are, I suppose, a bit like the shadowy upper and middle class bigots who support and prompt the DUP and loyalist gunmen in Northern Ireland. Behind every soldier, every fanatical thug, there is a puppeteer, a manipulator, with another agenda.

The Taliban are not so different from Calvinists. Indeed, there are parts of Europe that have had regimes in power that were remarkably like the Taliban in their laws, their extremism and their intolerance. What was the Hundred Years War about? Of course, most of the DUP and their fellow travellers are just anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. They don’t even have the intellectual fibre of the Taliban. They just share the medievalism.

But still, we shouldn’t feel too smug. They’re right amongst us after all.

Oh well. Just like Afghanistan, and even if only for a while, the forces of reaction and darkness were defeated in Northern Ireland as well, and the Executive was voted back into office.

In these days of grim economics and sports stress, let’s be thankful for small mercies. And music.