If the anguish of Afghan evacuees flooding into the United States could be captured with an infectious melody, horns and a snare drum, the man known as the “Afghan Elvis” might have tried.
Or, so believes Ahmad Zahir’s widow, who after living mostly anonymously in Northern Virginia for 41 years agreed to talk about a time in her native country’s history when her husband reigned as the king of Afghan music — the subject of a documentary their daughter is working to complete.
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“I’m sure if he was here he would have written songs about what is happening now,” said Fakhria Zahir, 70, who out of worry for her family’s security has mostly avoided the topic of her husband since his 1979 death in Kabul under mysterious circumstances. “He would have helped in any way he could.”
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With Elvis Presley-size mutton chops for sideburns and a voice that was both haunting and playful while he performed during the 1960s and ’70s, Ahmad Zahir remains a legend to several generations of Afghans.
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A Spotify playlist dedicated to him has 25,000 listeners while a host of “best of” Zahir compilations posted to YouTube have been watched as many as 3.4 million times.
He died in Kabul on his 33rd birthday, a few hours before his daughter, Shabnam Humphrey, was born. The official cause given by the then-communist Afghan government was a car crash. But many believe that Zahir, the son of a former prime minister, was murdered after his songs became political.
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Humphrey said the film she is making underscores how much Afghanistan has changed since it was a hub of Western-influenced culture during the mid-20th century.
“Right now, more than ever, we need this,” she said. “It’s important for us to bring a new conversation to the table about Afghanistan. It was a thriving country back then. It didn’t need saving. And my father was the voice of those times.”
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Back then, the Taliban did not yet exist and there were no bombed-out ruins or blast walls to reflect the four decades of war that has since ravaged the country.
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The Afghanistan of Zahir’s time was a place where women could go out in miniskirts, schools and universities were coed, and discos and live-music clubs lit up the nights in Kabul.
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“We are the ones who’ve seen beautiful Afghanistan,” Fakhria Zahir said about her generation. “It was peaceful.”
A pop star gets political
Ahmad Zahir was the country’s first pop superstar, electrifying audiences with lyrics rooted in Persian poetry and music styles that ranged from folkloric Afghan to Western rock and Indian classical.
The son of Abdul Zahir — who helped write the then-monarchy’s 1964 constitution before becoming prime minister in the early 1970s — the singer initially stayed away from Afghanistan’s often-fractious political scene, even as the country’s last king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a 1973 military coup.
Ahmad Zahir sang instead about lost or unrequited love while performing in Kabul and the Afghan countryside, venturing into Presley’s terrain with a cover of the hit song “It’s Now or Never.”
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He spotted the woman who would become his wife sitting in the front row at one of his shows, writing a note to her on a napkin with a plea to meet. Not long after, they were married.
“That was the best time of my life, the three years that I spent with him,” Fakhria Zahir said.
Her husband largely eschewed a celebrity lifestyle, she said, preferring small family gatherings or poring over his books of poetry in search of inspiration for his next song.
His music assumed a tone of political resistance after the bloody Saur Revolution in 1978, which established a Soviet-friendly Marxist regime that imposed an era of social repression in Afghanistan.
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“Life will eventually end. There's no need for submission,” one song, “Zindagi Akhir,” begins. “If submission were a must, there’s no need for living.”
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On June 14, 1979, he died in Kabul.
Though newspapers reported the government account of a car accident, his wife said those who saw his body saw a bullet wound.
“They killed him,” she said. “Everybody knew that. It was very clear. But nobody could speak or ask questions.”
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Fakhria Zahir, who was eight months pregnant at the time, said she was so distraught that she went into labor later that night, delivering their daughter, Shabnam, prematurely.
The mother and child were placed under house arrest by the government until a contact at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, where she once worked, secured passage for them to leave Afghanistan and apply for U.S. asylum.
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They boarded a plane bound for Rome in 1980, after the Soviets landed in Kabul and the country began its descent into war.
A new life, fading memories
Growing up in Alexandria, Va., Humphrey tried to piece together an image of the father she never knew. She was too young to realize how much her mother struggled to start over in a new country.
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Shortly after they arrived, a friend connected Fakhria Zahir with an administrative job at the Oman Embassy. She took a second job as a clerk at a department store.
None of her work colleagues and few of her friends knew about her life with the renowned Afghan singer, though her husband’s sister, Zahira Zahir, gained some celebrity as a hairdresser for President Ronald Reagan and others at the White House.
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Occasionally, an invitation would come to speak at an event commemorating Ahmad Zahir's death. But, worried about zealous fans and former communist government sympathizers who might harbor resentment against her husband, she always declined.
“I’m a very private person,” Fakhria Zahir said. “I don’t talk much.”
For Humphrey, now 42, those years were marked by a sense of longing for a past she couldn’t understand.
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The glamour in family photographs that sat in her Alexandria home didn’t jibe with the rocky images of an Afghanistan under siege that dominated news accounts.
At night, Humphrey would shut herself in her bedroom and listen to old cassettes of performances Ahmad Zahir gave at small gatherings in Kabul. In between songs, she could hear him calling to her mother or joking with friends, and her heart swam in the intimacy.
“It was like a lullaby,” Humphrey said. “I could close my eyes and almost feel like he’s present.”
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The idea for a documentary came after her now-11-year-old daughter was born. Watching the girl interact with her father reminded Humphrey of the connection she never really had, she said.
The project has been four years in the making, with investigators in Afghanistan tracking down archived footage and contemporaries of Ahmad Zahir’s who could share details of the musician’s death, Humphrey said.
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Since the fall of Kabul, the film crew there has gone into survival mode, keeping clear of the Taliban along with many other artists and filmmakers still in the country.
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During video meetings about the film, the discussions have gone from pursuing potential leads to, “We’re holding on to a very thin thread for survival’s sake,” Humphrey said.
Fakhria Zahir said watching news reports of Afghan evacuees arriving amid the recent U.S. military withdrawal with looks of exhaustion in their eyes has made her think about how her husband’s legacy has managed to survive all these years, still offering hope for a simpler, more peaceful time.
Occasionally, she has revealed her past to children she has met who know about Ahmad Zahir from their parents or grandparents, she said. She generally keeps that part of her life to herself.
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On a recent night, Fakhria Zahir pulled out books of Persian poetry that her husband had marked up with notes for potential songs.
“These are some of the only things I took with me when I left,” she said, fingering the yellowing pages near a window that overlooks the Washington Monument.
Blocks away, dozens of recently arrived Afghan families were settling into neighboring apartment complexes, each with their own memories of a past they were now leaving behind.