The girl who took on terrorists and lived to bag a Nobel

Malala is a very Kenyan-sounding name.

When I first heard the name whilst listening to CNN, I assumed that in fact it was a man, a Kenyan man, being spoken of.

When I lifted my eyes and focused on the newscaster on CNN, I realized she was talking about a young Pakistani girl who had defied the Taliban’s’ attempts to stop girls from going to school and had nearly paid with her life. She was talking about Malala having been shot in the head and survived. It sounded incredulous but isn’t everything to do with the Taliban unbelievable!

Well, Malala Yousafzai, who shared the Nobel Prize for Peace for 2014 with Kailash Satyarthi—the Indian child rights campaigner— tells her story in the book I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Upfor Education and was Shot by the Taliban (2013).

Malala’s book tells her story from the countryside of Swat Valley in the interior of Pakistan to global fame through school, crusading for children’s rights, and surviving the Taliban’s bullets. It is an inspirational story that is worth reading for its message about resisting the shadow of evil. 

Malala was shot by the Taliban for insisting that school is good for children, especially girls. Her love for school was inspired by her father who owned a school and who believed that girls and boys should be educated equally.

ISLAM ALLOWS EDUCATION

Malala summarises her convictions this way: “Today we all know education is our basic right. Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this right. Islam says every girl and every boy should go to school. In the Quran it is written, God wants us to have knowledge. He wants us to know why the sky is blue and about oceans and stars. I know it’s a big struggle— around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them are girls. Sadly my own country Pakistan is one of the worst places: 5.1 million children don’t even go to primary school even though in our Constitution it says every child has that right. We have almost fifty million illiterate adults, two-thirds of whom are women, like my own mother.”

Illiteracy is the cause of much of the evil that Malala speaks of in I Am Malala.

Illiteracy breeds ignorance and the ignorant are good candidates for conviction by ‘traditionalists.’ Illiteracy isn’t the same as lack of book knowledge. Illiteracy means lack of skills and knowledge to interpret one’s world as it unravels every day.

Illiteracy reproduces itself when uneducated mothers, confined to the home and the kitchen by ‘traditions’ stop their daughters from going to school because, anyway at the end the girl child will end up in the home and in the kitchen, “to cook and serve … brothers and fathers”, as Malala writes. It is this illiteracy that Malala refuses to bow to.

She is fascinated with books; her story reveals a girl, in the countryside of Pakistan, thirsty for knowledge. But she is also a lucky girl who has the undivided support of her parents, especially the father.

Malala’s father is just as exceptional as the daughter. In a society where a son is preferred to a daughter, the father, whom Malala describes as “the falcon” and “different from most Pashtun men”, names her after a famous daughter of the Pashtun, Malalai of Maiwand, who inspired the “Afghani army to defeat the British in 1880 in one of the biggest battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.”

So, if Malala challenges the authority of traditions that teach girls to only serve men, her father is a co-fighter in the battle against such customs. The father stands out in the book as one of the few men in their town who opposed the Talibanisation of the society.

So, Malala’s story also highlights the need for solidarity in resisting suppression and oppression. It is not just enough to speak about specific rights— such as women’s rights or the girl child’s rights — it is very important to insist on all rights as primary all the time.

TRIBAL IDENTITY

I Am Malala restates the case for a holistic approach to struggles for restoring diminished human rights of all human beings instead of the overwhelming fractured calls we hear today about how one set of rights supersedes another. Malala’s story carries in it so many other stories.

I Am Malala is also a declaration of the Pashtun tribal identity. Malala celebrates her Pashtun identity. She reminds you throughout the story of how proud she is to be a Pashtun.

She celebrates her pastoral origins, nostalgically speaking of the paradise that Swat Valley used to be before environmental degradation brought floods, landslides and deaths to millions of its inhabitants. Here is Malala the cultural ambassador and archivist and crusader for environmental conservation.

But, with intense irony in her anecdotes, Malala also tells the story of the tragedy that is Pakistan. She wonders what Pakistan could have turned out to be if the politicians in her time had kept alive the dreams of the founder of modern Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

She is disappointed by the corruption of the ruling elite which has produced incredible social inequalities and underdevelopment in the country. Through Malala’s eyes, one sees this seeming collapse of the Pakistan state as also the cause of the rise of religious fundamentalism most publicly represented by the Taliban.

Fundamentalism arises when uncertainty overwhelms society because the rulers are unable or unwilling to (re)solve people’s most pressing problems. Malala continuously wonders why the country’s rulers can’t provide for the basic needs of the citizens.

TALIBAN TYRANNY

When the majority of the population is denied the basics for a decent life, it will always rebel. The form that the rebellion takes is always unpredictable.

Huge inequalities as are being witnessed all over the world, but especially in the poorer Global South, inevitably lead to violence. It is not difficult to justify violence. One can simply claim be fighting for equality or recognition or a share of the common wealth.

But as Malala shows, the Taliban or their predecessors, claimed to be only interested in doing good and indeed did good deeds, as when they helped people afflicted by poverty, floods and injustice. But how would one know for how long the good in the heart of the do-gooder would last?

Soon the Taliban imposed their own version of ‘goodness’, supposedly founded on their own interpretation of the Islamic scriptures and law.

Malala nearly got killed for contesting the tyranny of the Taliban which, ironically, had arrived as a new order with the intention to restore humanity to her people.

In the end I Am Malala is the story of a girl who wanted just to grow up peacefully as a child  and get an education and pursue her dreams and become what she wished to be when grown up but was betrayed by adults.

It is the story of part stolen childhood, which is resolutely reclaimed but also of how to defy evil masquerading as traditions and religion. This is a book on how to remain human in a de-humanising world.