Yesterday was the nine year anniversary of Farkhunda Malikzada’s brutal murder in Kabul, Afghanistan. She was beaten to death for having an opinion of the Quran and disagreeing with other religious men.
The response from hundreds of people, men and women together, was to take to the streets to protest; which is not some thing you do in a country like Afghanistan, if you want to stay alive.
The powerful gesture of solidarity struck me hard, and I wrote this song for my band Current Personae back in 2015, and asked my dear friend and brother Austin Antoine to write verses on it.
When you see me and others write and speak on these issues, we are not coming from a place of being anti-Arab or anti-Muslim even. We just see that the corrosive and destructive ideology that is jihadism negatively impacts everyone; even other Muslims.
It’s the same ideology that did to Israel what it did on October 7th, 2023, and it’s the same ideology that visits the same terror and the biggest slave trade in human history upon African countries like Sudan, Mauritania, Libya, Algeria and Nigeria every other day, as Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng writes about here.
May we all have the courage to stand when everything is stacked against us.
Farkhunda is available on all streaming platforms.