When Malala Yousafzai woke from the coma the Taliban put her in, she was aware of only a few things. “Yes, Malala, you were shot,” she told herself. She thought back to her dreams – of lying on a stretcher, being in
some distant place far from home and school – and realized that they
weren’t dreams, but recollections. “The nurses and doctors, everyone was speaking in English,” she recalls. “I realized that now I am not in Pakistan.” All Malala Yousafzai wanted was to go to school.
But she lived in an area of Pakistan, the
Swat Valley, where the Taliban had effectively taken over governance,
and imposed its harsh ideology – of no music, no visible women, and
certainly no girls in school.
For defying their will, and refusing to stay silent, the Taliban tried to murder Malala, then a 15-year-old girl.
Miraculously, she survived, and has continued speaking truth to power about education, extremism, and equality.
Almost a year to the day after the attempt on her life, Malala, and
her father Ziauddin, spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in front of a
live town hall audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
The Taliban, she told Amanpour, “say that we are going to fight for Islam. … So I think we also must think about them.”
“And that's why I want to tell Taliban [to] be peaceful,” she said,
“and the real jihad is to fight through pens and to fight through your
words. Do that jihad. And that's the jihad that I am doing. I am
fighting for my rights, for the rights of every girl.”
When she woke up from her week-long coma she asked for her mother and
father by writing on a piece of paper; she had a breathing tube in her
throat that prevented her from speaking.
“The first thing I did was that I thanked Allah – I thanked God, because I was surviving, I was living,” she told Amanpour.
“They told me that your father is safe and he will come soon, as soon as possible,” she recounted.
“And the second question that was really important for me and about
which I was thinking - who will pay for me? Because I don't have money
and I also knew that my father is running a school, but the buildings of
the schools are on rent, the home is on rent … then I was thinking he
might be asking people for loans.”
A 15-year-old girl, a week after being shot in the head by the Taliban, was worried about how her medical bills would be paid.
Extraordinary circumstances
Malala was ten when the Taliban came to the Swat Valley, she writes in her memoir out this week, “I Am Malala.”
“Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books and longed to be
vampires,” she wrote. “It seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the
night just like vampires.”
The Taliban started broadcasting nightly sermons on FM Radio. Everyone started calling it “Mullah FM.”
In the beginning, their messages were guidance on living that appealed to a devout audience, including Malala’s mother.
Slowly, they became more radical, urging people to give up their TVs and music.
Then, Malala told Amanpour, the Radio Mullah – as they called him –
made an announcement that the young schoolgirl could not possibly abide.
“‘No girl is allowed to go to school,’” she recalls him saying. “‘And if she goes, then, you know what we can do.’”
They congratulated the girls that heeded the call.
“‘Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,’ he’d say,” she wrote.
And you had only to walk around her hometown of Mingora, in the Swat
Valley, to see what would happen if you crossed them – women flogged in
the street, decapitated men lying in the gutter.
But Malala defied the call. She went to school as normal, and
listened to the Western music – Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez – of
which she was fond.
She replaced her school uniform with plain clothes, to avoid
attention; she wore a Harry Potter backpack, as shown in a documentary
by Adam Ellick of the New York Times.
At one point, a Pashto television station interviewed some school
children, including Malala, about life in Swat. Soon thereafter, she
spoke to a national broadcaster, Geo TV.
“I did not want to be silent, because I had to live in that situation
forever,” she said, nearly screaming the final word. “And it was a
better idea, because otherwise they were going to kill us – so it was a
better idea to speak and then be killed.”
A producer from the BBC approached her father about having one of his
teachers blog about the experience of living under Taliban rule;
instead, Malala volunteered herself.
“On my way from school to home I heard a man saying 'I will kill
you,’” she wrote on January 3, 2009. “I hastened my pace and after a
while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my
utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening
someone else over the phone.”
Daddy’s girl
You cannot really tell the story of Malala Yousafzai without talking about her father, Ziauddin.
In most Pakistani families, Ziauddin told Amanpour, when a girl is
born, “a kind of sympathy is expressed with [the] mother,” an
acknowledgement of the fact that boys are vastly more valued than are
girls.
Not so for Ziauddin.
“I usually tell people, don’t ask me what I have done,” he said.
“Just ask me what I did not do. That is important. The only thing which I
did not do, and I went against the taboos, and I went against the
tradition – that I did not clip the wings of my daughter to fly.”
It is impossible to stand with Ziauddin and his daughter and not
feel, as if by osmosis, the soul-wrenching love he feels for his
daughter.
“She's the most precious person for me in my life,” he told Amanpour. “And we are not only father and daughter, we are friends.”
But to ask Malala, it is Ziauddin’s personal courage, not his devotion to her, that has fueled her determination most.
“I also remember the time of terrorism, when no one was speaking, and
my father dared to speak, and he raised up his voice,” she said. “He
was not afraid of death at that time. And he still not is.”
Ziauddin, an English-teacher by vocation, ran the girls’ school, Khushal School, that Malala attended.
“You blast my school and you will say, ‘Don't condemn it.’ It's very
difficult,” Ziauddin said of the Taliban. “You kill my people and say
don't say anything.”
“I think better to die than to live in such a situation,” he told
Amanpour. “I think that it's better to live for one day to speak for
your right than to live for a hundred years in such a slavery.”
Even when she had an international media profile, Malala worried that the Taliban would come for her father, not her.
“I was worried about my father, because I was not expecting Taliban
to come for me,” she said. “I thought that they might have a little bit
manners, and their behavior would be – somehow they would be like
humans.”
It was Ziauddin who encouraged Malala to speak up, and allowed her to
give TV interviews, blog for the BBC, and raise her international
profile.
Did he, Amanpour asked, feel at all responsible for the violent attack that almost ended his daughter’s life?
“No,” he said emphatically. “Never.”
Pakistan’s government, he said, “could not protect four hundred
schools in Swat. They should be repenting that they could not protect
the girls to be flogged. They could not protect the infrastructure of
Swat to be sold and they could not protect the men to be slaughtered in
the square. Why should I repent?”
The politician
When Malala was young, she wanted to be a doctor. She got good
grades, she told Amanpour – and not just because her father was the
school principal, she chuckled – and in her community the studious girls
could become one of two things: a doctor or a teacher.
Ziauddin, no doubt with some mix of affection and recognition that
she was a prodigy, encouraged her to speak up and think about going into
politics.
Soon, she started to like the idea.
“I realized that becoming a doctor, I can only help a small
community,” she said. “But by becoming a politician, I can help my whole
country.”
And, with a wry sense of humor that surprised and delighted the town
hall audience, she added that many doctors in Pakistan “have to treat
patients who are being injured, who are being killed. So I want to go
and stop those people who are doing killings. So it’s also like helping
doctors.”
And yes, she added, “I want to become a prime minister of Pakistan.”
The nuclear family
So much attention has been focused on Malala and her father – so
progressive in their cause – that it is easy to forget the mother and
two brothers who have stayed almost invisible to the public eye.
“The first and the important thing in my life is that I raise my
voice – against my brothers,” she joked. “I am, like, the only daughter.
So it's very necessary to fight against them and to raise our voice
against them.”
Her mother, who is devoutly religious, has been supportive of her cause, Malala said, but just has maintained a modest profile.
She grew up illiterate in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, and English, literate only in her local mother tongue.
“I used to write poems to her,” Ziauddin admitted, blushing.
Malala rescued her father from further embarrassment.
“A father must not share it in front of his daughter,” she said
through a broad grin, “because the daughters learn from parents.”
Malala said her mother used to take her to the market and scold her for not properly covering her head.
“She used to tell me, cover your face. See, that man is looking at
you,” Malala told Amanpour. “I said, mom, I'm also looking at them!”
“We love our culture,” Ziauddin said. His wife, he said, has “always
[had] her scarf. And this is not something imposed. This is cultural.”
“For me, all cultural and traditional things, they are very lovely when they don't go against human rights. So that is simple.”
The fateful day
On October 9, 2012, Malala was on the white bench of her Toyota
TownAce school van on her way home from school. She had just taken an
exam, and was happy to be chatting with her friends.
Two men stood in the middle of the road, blocking the van’s path. One started speaking to the driver.
“Another boy, he came at the back,” Malala told Amanpour. “He asked,
‘Who is Malala?’ All the girls, they got furious. No one could
understand what he is saying, because we were thinking about our next
day exam paper. And on that day we were having a gossip, who would get
the higher marks, who would get the lower marks.”
“He asked ‘Who is Malala?’ He did not give me time to answer [the]
question. … And then in the next few seconds he fired three bullets. One
bullet hit me in the left side of my forehead, just above here,” she
said, gesturing to the left side of her forehead.
“My two other friends,” she said, “they were also shot in their
shoulders. … That was a really sad news for me, because if I was shot,
that was fine for me. But I was then feeling guilty that why they have
been the target. So it was really sad for me to hear.”
The next time she saw the light of day, she would be lying thousands of miles away, in a British hospital.
The world knows ‘Malala’
“I didn't know that - that the whole world was praying for me, and
are still praying for me,” Malala told Amanpour. “Not only the people of
Pakistan, not only Muslims, not only Pashtuns, but everyone prayed for
me.”
Not only are there prayers, but celebrities from Madonna to Angelina
Jolie, leaders from Gordon Brown to Queen Elizabeth II have offered
public and emphatic support.
The Queen, in fact, has extended an invitation to Malala and her father for a royal visit.
Of course she will go, Malala joked, “because it's the order of the queen – it’s the command.”
“When people write on Twitter, we support Malala, it does not only
mean” they are just supporting Malala, the person, she said. “They're
also supporting my cause. It means that the whole world is taking an
action for girls' education, for the education of every child.”
The cause
“In Swat, before the terrorism, we were going to school,” Malala told
Amanpour. “It was just a normal life and carrying a heavy bag and doing
homework daily and being good and getting high marks.”
Why are we going to school, she and her friends asked themselves.
“When the terrorists came, when they stopped us from going to school,
I got the evidence,” she said. “And they showed me a proof that, yes,
the terrorists are afraid of education. They are afraid of the power of
education.”
That power has sustained her through life under unimaginably harsh
conditions, through an assassination attempt, through the alien world of
book junkets and shouting reporters and flashing cameras.
“They did a mistake, the biggest mistake. They ensured me, and they
told me, through their attack, that even death is supporting me, that
even death does not want to kill me.”
“The thing is, they can kill me. They can only kill Malala. But it
does not mean that they can kill my cause, as well; my cause of
education, my cause of peace, and my cause of human rights. My cause of
equality will still be surviving. They cannot kill my cause.”
“They only can shoot a body,” she said, “but they cannot shoot my dreams.”
Culled from CNN
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