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Her head was claimed because she appeared un-Islamic: the singer Aryana Sayeed was given a fatwa – like Salman Rushdie.
As news of the stabbing attack on author Salman Rushdie broke out last week, there are several other forgotten examples of artists fearing for their lives because of a fatwa.
Such as Aryana Sayeed. She was born in Kabul in 1985 and fled with her family via Pakistan to London in 1993, before the Taliban took power for the first time. After the Taliban were ousted in 2001, she returned to Afghanistan and became a star as a singer.
Singers are naughty women
“Aryana is the voice of freedom when it comes to music,” says Afghan-Canadian political scientist Nahid Shahalimi, whose book features Aryana Sayeed. Music was always taboo for women, even before the Taliban took power. “Afghan women are not seen as decent when they make music,” Shahalimi said.
For someone who interprets religious values very strictly, women are considered “indecent” if they sing, wear their hair down, wear glittering clothes – and if they are heard.
Legend:
Wrapped in the Afghan national colors and still the target of extremist hatred: Aryana Sayeed performing in 2017.
AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini
Mullah issues fatwa in interview
When the Taliban won again in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, Aryana Sayeed just managed to escape. A fatwa has been attached to it for years, as Nahid Shahalimi explains: “A mullah gave an interview in a major international newspaper in which he said: It is a good thing for a Muslim to kill Sayeed and chop off her head.”
Because she dresses un-Islamically, she is a great danger to society. Sayeed was undeterred and criticized the extremists.
Several “enemies of Islam”
“Against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran” are the “Satanic verses,” was Khomeini’s reasoning in 1989 for the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie. Farag Foda was “an enemy of Islam,” according to a 1992 Egyptian fatwa against the writer, who was then murdered by jihadists.
In 2012, an ayatollah found “blasphemy” because of a song by the Iranian-born, Cologne-based rapper Shahin Najafi, who made fun of an imam who had died centuries ago.
Dispute over Rushdie’s fatwa
It was of no use to Salman Rushdie that in 1989 religious scholars in Saudi Arabia and Egypt condemned the Iranian fatwa as illegal. Incidentally, it is unknown how many murder fatwas actually circulate. Because in Islamic law – especially among the Sunnis – anyone can in principle pronounce such a statement.
In addition, extremists kill without this religious formality – for example in 2005 with the Danish Mohammed cartoons and in 2015 with the terrorist attack on the editorial office of “Charlie Hebdo”. They hate free speech, freedom of art and freedom of thought.