Dad Noorani’s light passed away on Wednesday 13th when a full moon was lightening Kabul’s early night, just as he was the noor (light) many young journalists were eagerly searching and getting from him.
Dad Noorani’s light passed away on Wednesday 13th when a full moon was lightening Kabul’s early night, just as he was the noor (light) many young journalists were eagerly searching and getting from him.His face was like a strong, smiling sun. That of a lion, too, carved through years of fighting for the people of his country, Afghanistan, and for truth, his only masters.
He was stubbornly independent “as a journalist must be”, he said and taught. Not with arrogance but with a tone suggesting there is no other choice: “If you are politically sided, your chances of gathering and interpreting information will be damaged”, he said. He mastered the difficult art of doing so while being a deeply committed political person who suffered exile, first in Tehran, Iran (1980-88), later in Peshawar, Pakistan (1988-2001). He returned immediately after the fall of the Taliban government. In the last presidential elections, Hamid Karzai’s team approached him with the offer of becoming a central figure in the campaign. The reward would have been any position he would like to have in the new government. He kindly rejected.
“He taught me how to fight for facts”, said one of Killid reporters, the media group he joined in 2006 with the key responsibility of making contents accurate.
“He never wrote or said one single sentence without a figure supporting it”, underlined other reporter, who added: “His was regularly advising me: ‘you must always be free, in each single aspects of your life, add effort to effort to remaining free’. That teaching will remain within me.”
For one of Killid’s woman journalist “Noorani was pointing corrections with tenderness and affection: ‘it is better this way, not the other one…’, and he always had time to explain complex matters many of us could not understand. His memory was extraordinary, much better than a computers’ one, I enjoyed telling him,” she said.
Noorani was especially concerned about the fate of Afghan women, as he evidenced daily in his editorials for Radio Killid, the commentaries in Morsal and Killid weeklies.
“He was an instructor not only of journalism, he also improved enormously our political understanding,” said another reporter who has been next to him along the last five years. “I learnt how to be realistic and at the same time to understand that nationalism is acceptable only when it means being concerned for our people, women among it.”
Another reporter said: “What I am able to do today is all thanks to him. He was my teacher. There will be no replacement for Noorani throughout the country,” he added in tears.
“I learnt from him two things important for me as a journalist,” other reporter recalled. “Keep good personal relations with anyone you come across and file your information because, sooner or later, you will use it again.”
There was more in Noorani. “One day I had a headache and went to his office. He stopped writing, caught an apple and took me for a walk. ‘Eat it’, he said. I did not want to. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You need to eat something and your pain will go away’. Probably you did not clean it well enough, I said. So he gave the first bite to show me that I should not fear.”
That was and will remain, Noorani. I was his pupil, too, on the complex Afghan and regional matters.
Noo-ra-ni, he spelled his surname, his face opened in one of his many ironic smiles when we first met and I asked him to repeat it. It would remain forever among us. “Good morning, Mr. Noo-ra-ni”, was the daily greeting after knocking the door of his office at Killid, with a great window facing the garden.
That was the place where the bukhari and his passion would warm me up in the Kabuli cold winter days; he gave hours of his life drawing maps to explain better the politics of tribes in Helmand and Kandahar, the concentric power circles that allow Pakistan’s ISI to rule the country, or explaining in details the substantial difference between the previous arbakis, the local militias, and those tried today.
In springtime and early summer one could see him in the garden chatting with one or several reporters at the same time, while they would also rush with their stories to get his advice before broadcasting or publishing them. He went into it pen in hand, “the only weapon towards cultural and political development”, he said.
He was born in Farah in 1956, son of an open-minded, educated family. He studied medicine at Kabul University, the city were he died, at the Wazir Akhbar Khan Hospital.
Good-bye, dearest Dad Noo-ra-ni. Follow TKG on Twitter & Facebook
