The Afghan voice that won't be silenced

Dressed modestly, with a red headscarf loosely draped over her head and shoulders, she steps onto the stage and nervously paces back and forth. Waiting for the music to begin and break the silence, she almost misses her first note before quietly singing into the microphone.

 

Male and female Afghan students studying computing technology sit together and listen to a female Soviet teacher (center) in the Computing Center of the Polytechnical Institute in Kabul in 1981. The Soviet Union had invaded the country in December 1979. Her voice chokes when one of four judges turns his chair to face her; she awkwardly bows her head and smiles. But she sings more confidently when the sole female judge turns around a few minutes later. The singer is through to the next stage.

 Afghan female university students, dressed in the traditional blue burqa, attend a math class under a tent at the Nangarhar University campus in Jalalabad in September 2012. Under Taliban rule, between 1994 and 2001 women were banned from education and work, even from leaving their homes unaccompanied.

In a country ranked by a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll as the most dangerous place in the world for women in 2011, what Shabana Faryad did was brave. Very brave. Faryad was the only female contestant to have auditioned for the first series of "The Voice of Afghanistan" last year. And the claps and cheers that loudly resounded throughout the studio came from an audience of men.

Aryana Sayeed on "The Voice of Afghanistan." Credit: Sherzaad Entertainment/Tolo TV

Aryana Sayeed -- a popular Afghan singer who was a judge on the show -- said she turned her chair around purely because the contestant was a woman. "I had to do it," she said. "She at least had the courage to come along, to step onto the stage."

But Sayeed says her own appearance on the show put her life at risk. Dressed in fashionable, figure-hugging attire, certain religious hard liners were angered by the fact that her wardrobe lacked one item: a headscarf. In the view of her critics, women should be covered and compliant. As a result, Sayeed says mullahs threatened her with death.

"They said that whoever kills this singer would go to heaven," she recalls. "It was getting really difficult, I couldn't go anywhere. I was basically a prisoner in my hotel room, I had bodyguards with me all the time."

Sayeed, 28, was born and raised in Kabul and left at the age of eight with her parents and five sisters for Pakistan, where she lived for a few years before heading to Switzerland. She eventually settled in London in 2000.

War and violence forced her family to flee her Afghanistan. "All I have seen and have grown up with is war, guns and problems," she says, recalling an incident when a rocket hit a tree in her garden in the early hours of the morning while she and her family were sleeping.