A Trumpet Against Silence

Zohra Ahmadi grew up in a home where music shaped everyday life. Songs played on television, art was encouraged, and creativity was never treated as something dangerous or forbidden. Still, she didn’t know Afghanistan even had a music school until her uncle showed her a video of students from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music performing at Carnegie Hall. In 2019, she enrolled. When it came time to choose an instrument, her cousin suggested the trumpet, partly because no girl in Afghanistan played it. Zohra agreed without realizing that the choice would quietly place her at the intersection of music and resistance.

At first, she didn’t like the trumpet. She had wanted the piano or sitar. But over time, the unfamiliar brass sound became her own. At ANIM, Zohra found something she hadn’t known before: freedom. Boys and girls studied together. Music filled the halls. Teachers encouraged curiosity rather than silence. She stayed after school to practice, often playing for hours, waiting for someone to take her home. “Music became a dream,” she says—a future she could imagine for herself in a country where girls’ paths were often decided for them.

That dream shattered on August 15, 2021, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Zohra remembers listening to an ANIM song in her garden when her family rushed her inside, frightened. In an instant, her thoughts turned dark: Would she still be allowed to study? To play music? What would happen to the girls left behind? When ANIM organized an evacuation, relief was mixed with grief. Leaving meant safety, and the chance to dream again, but it also meant leaving her family and homeland.

Now living in Portugal, Zohra continues to perform Afghan music on international stages. Each concert feels both powerful and painful, proof that music cannot be silenced, and a reminder that it still is in her home country. Music, she says, changed her from a shy child into someone who can speak for herself and for others.

“A country cannot live without music,” she says. And as long as she plays, Afghanistan’s music still lives.