Courage and Music in the face of terrorism and ultraconservatism in a patriarchal society (Afghanistan, also Pakistan, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, and the US; 2015—2023): It’s hard to wrap your head around the extreme differences between female activists in America and Afghanistan, where this extraordinary memoir originates. 

A mind-bending story of a young girl through young adulthood viewed within the context of Zarifa Adiba’s recounting what the United Nations and other sources have said about the country she’s dedicating herself to bettering: “the worst place on earth to be born a woman.”

She’s a “bad girl,” a sinner, refusing to accept her lowly female status; also a minority Shiite persecuted by the vast majority of Sunnis, two factions of the Islamic religion, and regarded as the lowest of the five major ethnic groups – hers Hazara. The Pashtuns, the highest.

Raised in dire poverty in a country that’s nearly at the bottom of the world’s poverty list, in a country that treats girls and women as “objects” and “property.” She’s also an outcast for her passion for education and music. Both shunned by an “ultraconservative” patriarchal society, making Playing for Freedom: The Journey of a Young Afghan Girl nothing short of a miracle.

You’ll come away with a profound appreciation of what it means to be a role-model, and its far-reaching impact. Zarifa Adiba’s says her story is “how I found hope in the first place” and must revisit “again and again.” A breathtaking testament to the “power of aspiration.”

It’s far more than that. At its deepest level, it’s astonishment and admiration for aspiring to be a humanitarian for her country where the lack of women’s rights has been called “gender apartheid”; and for seeing a global role to inspire other repressed girls and women.

How does someone who’s seen and endured so much inhumanity become a voice for humanity?

Hers is a story of victimization until she discovered music as salvation and a “tool for peace.” Her very existence in a society that doesn’t value women is also depicted within her own complicated family too, adhering to the culture’s dictate that married women must live with their husband’s family whether welcomed or not. Painfully, Adiba describes her mother’s abrasive and abusive relationship with her, “capable of saying horrible things to me and showering me with compliments,” which left an “emotional scar” yet she remains generous, sympathetic, and sensitive towards her.

We cannot imagine that when she gets several chances to flee, her dreams are “not of escape but of changing things for my country.” Given the opportunities she’s orchestrated through sheer willfulness, tirelessness, superhuman effort, and clearly multiple talents, Adiba’s message to the world is not to give up on us.

There’s something about her courage in the face of the brutality of war, terrorism, oppression, cruelty, and deprivation for much of her young life of basic nurturing that adds a different quality to other heroic stories of bravery. Two profound exceptions: her extended Pakistani family, when she’s shuffled back and forth to the home of her grandparents (“angels”) and elegant aunt in Quetta, close to Afghanistan’s southern border.

The other family is what this story shouts out. Her music family.

Wisely not opening with the inhumane injustices inflicted on her, Zarifa Adiba chooses to open her story at the height of victory. “Here I am: “backstage sitting on the steps, waiting for them to call me,” she says, drawing us into the fantastical global leaders’ scene she’s about to enter. On the verge of making history as the only girl (she’s eighteen) to lead and play (the viola) in the Afghan Women’s Orchestra comprised of thirty young women – the only one of its kind in Afghanistan – to perform at the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2017.

“This evening, I am Afghanistan,” she declares, “experiencing a flood of emotions” conducting herself both musically and as an ambassador of human rights. An enormous risk since music is considered a “sin” in Islam, particularly for the “radical fringe” and those like her mother who acquiesce fearing repercussions for their defiance. Music is “haram,” the Arabic word for sinner, because it leads to temptation, the same reason females must cover up when they go outside. Their plight is seen as relegated inside their houses, attending to domestic chores and children while subjugating themselves to “Uncles” who rule. Marriages arranged and dictated like her mother’s three (widowed twice by age twenty) when youngsters themselves. Her mother describes her life like a prisoner “condemned to solitude.”

No surprise Adiba’s story has been featured in the media. For instance, USA Today noted, “In most of the world,” she’d be “a star student. In Afghanistan, that makes Zarifa Adiba a target,” and Forbes named her one of “30 under 30 in Asia” in 2022. In 2019, she gave the TED talk below, “Spreading My Wings Through Music Conversation”:

An American first lady has been her role-model. Adiba writes about her “obsession” with Michelle Obama, her “commitment to girls’ education,” in particular. Others like Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton have also advocated for the global importance of educating girls. Both have also spoken about the author’s friend Malala Yousafzai, brutally attacked in 2012 by the Taliban and survived. You may be familiar with her story: I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, the youngest person to ever win it. Excruciating details are related telling us what the terrorists are capable of, greatly affecting the author’s amazing hopefulness.

Despite witnessing and hearing extreme violence, Adiba walks to and from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music on “hellish roads, in constant fear of a suicide bomber appearing out of nowhere or a car or a truck going up in flames.” Relentlessly, she practiced to earn a spot in the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. In 2015, when she makes her way through the streets of Kabul the Taliban had resurged. 

The founder of the music school, Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, is another humanitarian role-model. A musician (trumpet), his father a composer, he’s a rarity educating girls and boys together.

This is also a story about the power of education, how it opens doors. The author speaks multiple languages – multilingualism a byproduct of being tossed around different educational systems in two countries. Co-authored by Anne Chaon, a journalist reporting in Kabul during crucial years the book takes place when she worked for an international news agency based in Paris. Originally published in French, the translation is the work of Susanna Lea Associates, a literary agency. 

Writing about the “narrowing” effect of terrorism in her homeland, Adiba says the “population stiffens, tenses, becomes inflexible.” War, she concludes, “destroys everything.” And yet she isn’t deterred.

Lorraine