The morning light pours into the small room in the northern California home, illuminating a stack of videotapes and music cassettes on an Afghan carpet. Each tape has been meticulously labeled with green stickers marking the date and name of the singer, in both Dari and English. Posters of Afghan singers crowd the walls, a reminder of a time when Afghan fashion and culture were at the forefront of the country’s artistic identity.
In the wake of Afghanistan’s recent political shifts, one man’s mission to preserve the country’s cultural heritage has taken on a new urgency. Omid J., an Afghan-American vinyl, TV and radio collector, has spent years gathering and sharing the sounds, memories and visuals that have defined his homeland — treasures now at risk of being destroyed forever.
Omid J.’s connection to Afghan film, radio and TV archives was deeply influenced by his family, especially his grandfather. “He was a Pashto poet, and I vividly remember evenings where he’d ask me to grab a cassette, play it, and we’d listen together. I was just 4 or 5 years old, fascinated by the sounds even if I didn’t fully understand them,” explains Omid J., who for security reasons asks that his last name not be used.
Growing up as the first generation of his family to be born outside of Afghanistan, Omid J. absorbed the poetry and music of Afghan radio. It was more than just entertainment; it was something he held onto, a cultural thread that bound him to his roots. He developed a passion for the legendary singer and songwriter from the 1970s, Ahmad Zahir, revered as Afghanistan’s Elvis Presley, and loved watching old music videos where people stood and lip-synched awkwardly. “It was so cool and different from MTV, but because it was ours, it was something special,” he says. His mother left Afghanistan in 1979 as the Soviets invaded the country to ostensibly prop up the communist regime. When Omid J. asked her why she never returned, his mother replied, “I want to remember the beautiful and vibrant Afghanistan I knew, not the destroyed one.” By the time Omid J. was born in 1995, the Soviet war was over and the Taliban were in control. In late 2001, Americans would invade and stay for another two decades.
In a world where memories can fade and where history is often erased by the forces that seek to control it, Omid J. reminds us that preserving stories — whether through songs, films or simple moments captured on a cassette — can be an act of resistance, one that ensures the survival of a culture and the voices of those who came before. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, there has been growing concern about the threat to Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. Although the Taliban’s policies do not appear to be focused on outright destruction of heritage as they were in the 1990s, when they tried to destroy the national film and TV archives, their strict interpretation of Islamic law is putting the country’s cultural practices and artistic expressions at risk.
“I’m sure, at some point, they’ll come for the cultural heritage,” Omid J. says. “They’ve learned how to hide things, and this time they won’t make the same mistakes. It’s terrifying. They’ve got a twisted kind of intelligence, and they know exactly how to destroy it all.”
Over the past three years, he has worked with a network of collectors across the world, but primarily in Germany and Iran, trading and occasionally buying Afghan clips and tapes. Outreach happens through community groups, social media and word of mouth. He begins by asking people if they have old family videos, recordings or photos that hold personal or historical significance. “Once people understand the importance of preservation, they’re often eager to contribute.”
Throughout our many hours of conversation, Omid J. shows me his desk setup on our video calls. It is simple: a cassette deck, a tape machine for digitizing, a digital converter, a laptop and another player with colorful lights that flicker on and off, creating a nostalgic, almost magical atmosphere. Wires crisscross like lifelines between the analog past and the digital future.
After he returns home from what he calls his “day job,” he eats dinner and then dives into the sounds of his parents’ homeland. Once the material has been digitized, he publicly posts clips of it to his social media accounts on YouTube and Instagram. Omid J.’s long-term goal is to create a digital museum involving professional archivists, making the material accessible for generations to come. The public will be able to submit music MP3s to the repository for digitization. “The real issue is the size of the archive. It’s overwhelming,” he says. Keeping the archives safe is also far from easy. The tapes degrade over time and need to be properly stored before being digitized. The national TV archive in Kabul is in suboptimal condition. In 2018, President Ashraf Ghani inaugurated the National Archive at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, in a bid to secure the country’s historical records and make them more accessible to researchers and the public. When I last visited the TV archive in 2020, there was basic temperature control and secure locks were on the doors, but many tapes were not fully digitized, and some lacked even proper numbering, making it difficult to locate them. The rooms themselves were functional but still lacked ideal preservation conditions. Nothing is known about how these rooms are being managed, if at all, today.
One of the biggest hurdles Omid J. faces is the fragmented nature of Afghan media, which makes collecting difficult. During the Taliban’s first rule nearly 30 years ago, almost all music was publicly banned, and one had to go to Pakistan to source tapes. As Omid J. grew up, satellite TV brought Afghan programming like public broadcaster RTA and the country’s most-watched channel, Ariana, into his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Everything changed,” he tells me over a Zoom call. “The visuals felt so free, visual connections to a place I’d only heard about in family stories. Seeing something from your culture, even in bad quality, it just hits differently, it makes you want to see more.”
As the internet grew, so did Omid J.’s curiosity. “People started uploading grainy clips from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — the era my family grew up in,” he says. “It was beautiful. It wasn’t just words — it was emotion, it was the soul of the people. It connected us. We heard our poets’ voices and felt their hearts beat in every verse.” He is particularly proud of Afghanistan’s musical variety, a sweep containing everything from pop and folk ballads to northern Afghan styles like Bangicha, named after the eponymous folk singer who pioneered a type of duet performance with a traditional Daira drum and a female singer.
Embedded in Omid J.’s quest is a desire not only to protect the music itself but to preserve the diversity of Afghanistan. While Pashto and Dari, or Farsi, are the most widely spoken languages, Afghanistan is home to many ethnic groups and dozens of other languages, including Uzbek, spoken primarily in the north; Turkmen in the central and northern regions; and Pashayi, a language from the eastern part of the country. Each of these communities has its own unique music, stories and traditions, but there are limited resources available to share this knowledge. “If I have the ability to save this stuff, I have to do it. This is my way of giving the middle finger to the Taliban — saying, ‘You may destroy what you want, but we have ways of saving it.’”
Through scouring the internet and examining hundreds of hours of footage and recordings obtained from around the world, primarily through the Afghan diaspora, Omid J. has also gleaned insight into the country’s regional and historical nuances. In the 1990s, when most of the country was suffering from Taliban oppression, the north, under warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, enjoyed relative freedom and some opportunities for expression. Facing a crackdown on their artistry, musicians fled north, where they were allowed to be creative as long as they didn’t challenge Dostum. This fostered a unique environment where musicians, TV stars and studio technicians came together to create new melodies. Some musicians, like the 1980s crooner Wahid Saberi, were even commissioned to perform for Dostum’s officials and wealthy patrons, often collaborating with former members of popular bands.
Like much of the rest of the world, the 1990s were also a time when families enthusiastically made home videos, especially in northern Afghanistan. They are not just of music and dancing, but also capturing moments of everyday normality and creativity amid the chaos, providing an intimate look into life before war overtook everything.
Under today’s Taliban rule, music and poetry feel empty. The Taliban have repurposed Afghan, Indian and Iranian musical styles, changing the lyrics to align with their agenda. “It’s as if they’re reading from a phone, with no creativity, no soul. It’s mechanical. It’s not art,” Omid J. says.
Taliban anthems, also called Taliban Nasheed or Tarana, particularly those broadcast on state-controlled radio and television, are deeply tied to the Taliban’s ideological message and political control. Unlike traditional Afghan music, these songs use repetitive, emotional rhythms to glorify past victories and promote religious extremism. They serve as propaganda, celebrating the Taliban’s battles against foreign forces, such as the United States, and promoting their vision of a conservative Islamic society.
The Taliban promote their anthems on social media platforms, mostly YouTube and TikTok, even though the group has officially banned music. These songs, often paired with speeches and poetry, act as tools for mass communication, reinforcing their ideology and silencing dissent. At checkpoints or in public spaces, people are sometimes forced to switch to these tracks to avoid punishment, reflecting the broader censorship since the Taliban took back power in 2021.
Omid J.’s eyes darken as he reflects on the current situation and the Taliban’s draconian restrictions on women, who are banned from working, most education and public spaces. “Women can’t be on TV, they can’t even speak on TV. They don’t want you to see them, to hear them.”
He shares a poignant example of the Taliban’s erasure of Afghan history, particularly when it comes to women: the 10th-century Rabia Balkhi, one of Afghanistan’s greatest poets. Legend has it that she wrote her final poems with her own blood, cementing her status as a symbol of love and resistance against patriarchy. Today, Rabia remains a powerful figure in Afghan and Persian literary traditions, embodying defiance and the enduring power of poetry. Her contributions to literature, celebrating resistance and women’s empowerment directly contradict the Taliban’s patriarchal agenda. A beautiful film was made about her in the 1970s but is now unwatchable in today’s Afghanistan, where a recent Taliban edict silencing women on television and radio threatens not just the freedoms of individuals but the cultural landscape itself. “Under their rule, even her name is being buried,” Omid J. says.
The Afghan diaspora’s role in the preservation of the country’s sounds extends beyond the work of Omid J., including Afghans who create music in exile, continuing to contribute to the cultural conversation. These include composer and singer Farhad Darya, who settled in Virginia in the mid-1990s, and California-dwelling singers Naim Popal and Haider Salim, who were popular artists in Afghanistan before they left. The tapes and videos of such diaspora artists even reached Afghanistan, where they began to influence new sounds and music. Both Darya and Popal returned to Kabul during the U.S.-led war to give concerts.
Omid J. reflects on the struggles of preserving cultural artifacts in conflict zones, drawing parallels between Afghanistan and other countries like Somalia, where preservation efforts have faced similar obstacles. Somalia, he points out, didn’t have the technology needed to protect its media, while Afghanistan, despite its own challenges, has been fortunate to have access to at least some of the tools necessary for preservation.
While Omid J.’s immediate focus is on his own Afghan project, he also sees a future where this model could expand to other diasporas. “I want this work to empower other communities — Somali, Armenian, Lebanese — to do the same, to preserve their history before it’s too late,” he says.
This cultural resurgence through music isn’t just about nostalgia for what has been lost; it’s also about teaching the world about the beauty and complexity of Afghan identity. Omid J. doesn’t stop at merely collecting and preserving music — he shares the context, explaining the cultural significance behind the songs. “Afghan culture is so rich, and there’s a lot that the world doesn’t know. For instance, in Afghan culture, men and women holding hands on TV is almost taboo. But when people saw it in a romantic song [on a music video], they didn’t just enjoy the music — they appreciated the meaning behind it,” he says, explaining that the music he collects also holds up a mirror to today’s society and asks questions.
And despite the many challenges, Omid J. remains undeterred. “These people, they were human. They wanted to create beauty, even when politics restricted them. Their legacy lives on, and it’s up to us to keep it alive.”
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