On a dark winter’s day in Sweden some eight years ago, one of the most remarkable and beloved figures in modern Iranian culture died on a sidewalk. His name was Seyed Khalil Alinejad. While is largely unknown among non-Iranians, since little is written about him in English, his story continues to provoke controversy and elicit mourning from Iranians living under the tyranny of the Tehran clerical regime. His tale offers a glimpse of the tormented history of the Iranian people, and it may even be seen as similar, in a sense, to current opposition movement in Iran.
Seyed Khalil Alinejad was a musician who performed on the long-necked, oriental stringed instrument called the tanbur in Iran. (In Turkey it is called the saz, and those in Balkans call it something else.) His ethnicity was Kurdish. He was born in 1957 in the western Iranian city of Kermanshah, the son of a distinguished tanbur performer, Seyed Shah Moradi, and was encouraged to study the tanbur by his mother. Given his eventual standing as an Iranian national star, Seyed Khalil, as he is typically known, could be likened to the Iranian Bob Dylan/John Lennon. But unlike them, he underwent an extended course of study comparable to that of classical musicians in the West.
