A song of freedom

Article by Diane Stopyra September 02, 2022

From the peak of Forty-Girl Mountain overlooking Kabul, Hajar Ahmed gazed upon symbols of progress in Afghanistan’s capital city: universities, shopping centers and restored gardens lush with apricot trees and rose bushes. A high school student at the time, she’d made the hourlong ascent to celebrate the Afghan new year, Nowruz, which coincides with the start of spring. The sky was clear—residents had stowed their coal-burning furnaces for the season—and a friend encouraged her to take advantage of this moment and all its promise by making a wish for her future.

Perhaps inspired by the 40 girls who, according to Afghan legend, flung themselves from the side of this mountain one century ago to avoid slavery at the hands of a tyrannical government, Ahmed made an empowered choice of her own: She wished for knowledge, for fulfillment and for a scholarship to a university where she might achieve both.

“From a very young age, I had this idea of dreaming big,” she says. “I was not afraid."

Illustration of a woman looking out at an Afghan city

Ahmed was born a displaced person in Iran, the country where her parents fled after escaping the extremist Taliban movement in the 90s. When she was 3, her grandmother’s health deteriorated, and the elderly woman decided she wanted to die in her home country. The family moved back to their native Afghanistan, a nation no longer under jihadist control.

In Kabul, Ahmed grew up with many siblings (although she prefers not to reveal how many, she uses both hands when listing them). Coming of age in their patriarchal society, she and her sisters were expected to play house, to imagine themselves as mothers and wives. But Ahmed gleaned no joy from pretending to be something that, to her, held little aspiration. Instead, she pleaded with friends to join her for rounds of jozbazzi, a more physical game involving stones and a dirt court.

“I value family,” she says. “But you are not meant to stay with your parents for 15 or 20 years, move into your husband’s house, give birth and die without doing anything for yourself.”

From a very young age, I had this idea of dreaming big.
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In her family’s two-room home, as she grew older, Ahmed managed many tasks. She helped her mother make the daily bread in an outdoor clay oven, and she prepared jam from a crop of apple trees in the backyard. When extended family visited for the Islamic holidays known as Eid, her father sometimes slaughtered a sheep for the meal (never a cow, as “that was for rich people”), while she kept a watchful eye on rambunctious, kite-flying cousins.

Between volleyball games and posting to Instagram, a teenage Ahmed developed a passion for learning. She joined a cultural group organized by a government official, which allowed for reading original poetry and essays in front of progressive community members. With a scholarship, she also took English language classes at a local educational center, eventually becoming so fluent, she taught these classes herself. The income helped support her family—a necessity, since partners in a sheep-selling business regularly swindled her illiterate father.

Ahmed’s older brother, conditioned to believe women belong at home, repeatedly asked their mother: “Aren’t you afraid of your daughter’s big dreams?” But this matriarch encouraged her girls to pursue a life beyond cleaning and childrearing, a life more robust than her own.

Ahmed took the message to heart. After a three-month application process, she received a scholarship to Bangladesh’s Asian University for Women (AUW), an institution dedicated to the empowerment of female leaders. The dream she’d manifested on top of a mountain just a few years before finally felt within reach.

“I watched each of my peers marry another illiterate man,” she says. “But I am different. I see education as a powerful weapon.”

The month Ahmed was set to leave for this new opportunity, the Taliban unleashed a wave of reprisal killings and regained Kabul. Her home, once the site of happy celebrations and kite flying and apple trees, became a prison. As the streets turned to bedlam, she traded her jeans for a floor-length dress from her wardrobe (anything shorter might now get her killed) and did something she’d never been inclined to do before, something prohibited under Taliban rule.

“I started singing,” she says. “Singing while crying.”

With the words of Afghan songwriter Dawood Sarkhosh in her head—My land, so tired of persecution; My land, anonymous and silenced; My land, suffering without a cure—she planned her escape. Coordinating with University officials, she and AUW peers around the city chartered seven city busses and, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, made their way to the Kabul Airport.

I watched each of my peers marry another illiterate man.
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“My mother pushed me and encouraged me, and even my brother believed I should take this chance,” she says. “They told me: ‘Even if you don’t make it, God forbid, at least you will have tried’.”

Ahmed and the others spent four days circling the airport grounds, navigating through a stampeding crowd 10,000 strong. At one point, bullets pierced one of the busses and, when a suicide bomb killed 170 civilians, some passengers witnessed the flames. The students slept—and prayed—in shifts.

At one point, with their window of opportunity closing, Ahmed and her classmates decided to fling themselves from the proverbial mountain, risking everything to approach a Taliban-controlled gate and plead their case. Unmoved, a guard fired his gun into the air as warning. All seven buses turned around at midnight, and the women returned home.

“I told myself: ‘You are stupid to have faith in this situation’,” Ahmed said.

But the following morning, the woman tried again. Just before dawn, U.S. soldiers escorted the students onto a Spartan military transport. Only then did relief untangle the fear and anger knotting inside Ahmed. She called her brother, who had not been eating or sleeping in her absence, to let him know she had survived—her big, frightening dreams still intact.

I am different. I see education as a powerful weapon.
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Now, as she adjusts to life at UD, Ahmed worries daily about the safety of her community, especially fearful that her sisters and other girls, as young as 15, will be forced into marriage. But she did not escape that reality to lose herself in grief.

When she’s not working toward a degree in physical therapy, Ahmed spends her free time finding threads of cultural connection. Now in Newark, she and three of her fellow evacuees experiment with what they call AA, or Afghan-American cooking. To a soundtrack of Justin Bieber, a sensation even in the Middle East, they infuse English-muffin pizzas with Afghan spices or bake a type of flatbread known as bolani. The dough Ahmed still makes by hand, but it’s not quite the same as the clay-oven version she learned from her mother as a girl.

Nothing, she realizes, will ever be the same.

Despite this heartbreak, Ahemd has hope—that the Taliban might self-destruct under the weight of its own evil, and that she might someday see her family again. In the meantime, she’ll continue video chatting with her parents and siblings every few weeks, sharing with them odd perceptions people in this strange new land have about her home: “They ask if we have shopping malls and even doorbells in Afghanistan,” she says. “Of course we do. My country developed rapidly, and I believe this would have continued… if only we’d been allowed peace.”

Last spring, Ahmed once again observed another Afghan new year. This time, she could not climb the mountains of her beloved Kabul, and she could not celebrate with family. But she has not given up on making wishes for her future.

“I believe no one is created without a purpose,” she says. “I still have faith I can accomplish something positive with my life. And I still have faith in humanity.”