Kabuk, Afghanistan - Bright and modern, she hosted a music show in Afghanistan. It drove extremists to murder her
SHAIMA REZAYEE was the face of a new generation of young Afghan women: she discarded her shalwar kameez and burkha for Western clothes and a glamorous job as a television presenter on Kabul’s answer to MTV.
But two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.
This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.
Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.
Ms Rezayee was the only female presenter on the show, which won as many young urban fans as it did enemies among the mullahs. Her murder raises the stakes in the battle for the soul of Afghanistan’s young people.
Like other young women, Ms Rezayee was denied five years of schooling while the Taleban were in control and like them was forced to wear the burkha whenever she ventured out of the house.
When the Taleban were driven from power, she was one of the first to drop the veil. Then in October she burst on to Kabul television screens presenting an hour-long music and chat show airing videos of Western singers such as Madonna, as well as Turkish and Iranian pop stars.
Tolo TV was the latest private station to test the boundaries of acceptability in an Islamic republic — and the most controversial. The station was the brainchild of an Afghan who returned from Australia and who already owned Arman, a wildly popular youth radio station.
Tolo quickly became the most watched station in the city with a reported 81 per cent audience share and Hop was its No 1 programme. But it drew the ire of the country’s mullahs and members of the Supreme Court, who were still incensed after losing a battle last year to have women removed from the nation’s television screens.
In March the national Ulema Council, a government panel of religious scholars, issued a statement accusing the station of “broadcasting music, naked dance and foreign films, which are against Islam and other national values of Afghanistan”. Hop was at the top of their hitlist.
The information ministry asked the station to tone down the show, objecting specifically to the raciness of the pop videos and the “casual” chat between male and female presenters. In Afghanistan even conversation between men and women who are not related is regarded as suspect.
S.A.H. Sancharaky, the Deputy Minister for Information and Culture, told a foreign interviewer that the Government prided itself on not censoring the show but was compelled to ask for changes. One particularly offensive incident, he noted, was when a male presenter had complimented Ms Rezayee on her shoes. “He says, ‘Can you hold up your legs so everybody can see how good your shoes are?’” the official recalled. “ ‘Hold up your legs’ has a very bad meaning in our language.”
It was to be Ms Rezayee and not the male presenter who would pay for this exchange.
As they prepared to go national with satellite broadcasting, the station dropped her. Young viewers expressed disappointment but not surprise. In an interview three months ago Ms Reyazee noted that the split in attitudes towards women on television was generational, pitting the urban young, who delight in their freedom to watch satellite television and foreign movies, against their conservative elders.
She acknowledged that she was pushing boundaries that other young Afghan women were afraid to challenge. She hoped others would follow.