Bya Beraim Ba Sangaran

Bya Beraim Ba Sangaran — Come, Let Us Go to Sangaraan — is among the most explicitly geographical songs in Ahmad Zahir's catalog, naming specific places in the Afghan landscape: Sangaraan (a district in the Panjshir Valley) and the Panjshir itself. The Panjshir — a narrow river valley north of Kabul — holds a particular place in Afghan cultural imagination: remote, beautiful, culturally distinct, historically significant as a place of both refuge and resistance.

The song's catalog of Panjshir's qualities — mulberries (toot), the roaring river (darya-ye pur seda), laughing children, the presences of saints (mazarat) on the mountains — moves through the natural, the human, and the sacred. The Panjshir's landscape is not just beautiful but layered with human history: the mulberry trees that feed communities, the children who will inherit it, the saints whose shrines mark the high ground.

The final line shifts suddenly to Kabul: 'My heart pounds for Kabul.' The invitation to go to Sangaraan is framed by a longing for the capital — and this combination suggests that the song may have been written by or for someone displaced from both, looking back at the country's landscapes with the intensity that only distance creates. Zahir recorded songs like this in a Kabul that, for his listeners in diaspora, would itself become a place as remote and beloved as the Panjshir valley.