Flavorwire

Photo credit: ABC News

As The Miami Herald reports, Pragaash, Kashmir’s first all-girl rock band — a group made up of three high schoolers who have only played one live gig — has been forced to break up after Mufti Bashiruddin Ahmad, a state-sponsored cleric, issued a fatwa Sunday ordering them to “stop from these activities and not to get influenced by the support of political leadership.”

A post on Jezebel provides a little more context:

Unfortunately for Pragaash, this issue runs deeper than three teen girls deciding to start a band. Indian-controlled Kashmir is in the middle of an intense freedom struggle and the girls have somehow become the poster children used to rile up either side and prove what the separatist alliance calls India’s “step toward diverting young girls toward Westernization.”

While the teens had been the subject of threats and name-calling via Facebook, according to the group’s music teacher and manager Adnan Nattoo, it was the cleric’s edict that caused them to disband. “I know it from my last eight years’ experience that we could have easily dealt with the online abuse,” he says. “We were failed by the government-run mufti, who asked us to forget our music and declared our band against the religion.”