I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

by Malala Yousafzai

I have even stopped thinking about the constant rain, although I laugh when my friends here complain about the heat when it’s 68 or 77 degrees Fahrenheit. To me, that feels like spring.

I’m still hopeful that I can return to Swat and see my friends, my teachers, my school and my house again. Perhaps it will take time but I’m sure it will be possible one day.

Sadly, Maulana Fazlullah, the man who was the head of the Swat Taliban who shot me, is now the head of the whole Pakistan Taliban.

when you are exiled from your homeland, where your fathers and forefathers were born and where you have centuries of history, it’s very painful. You can no longer touch the soil or hear the sweet sound of the rivers. Fancy hotels and meetings in palaces cannot replace the sense of home.

I told him that instead of focusing on eradicating terrorism through war, he should focus on eradicating it through education.

I asked her, “If you could do anything what would you do?” and she said, “I want to see my home again and stop these wars.”

I am a refugee, too, forced to live far away from my own country. As my father says, we might be the world’s best-treated refugees, in a nice house with everything we need, but we still yearn for our homeland.

Some people say I will never return home, but I believe firmly in my heart that I will. To be torn from the country that you love is not something to wish on anyone.

When I stand in front of my window and look out, I see tall buildings, long roads full of vehicles moving in orderly lines, neat green hedges and lawns, and tidy pavements to walk on. I close my eyes and for a moment I am back in my valley—the high snow-topped mountains, green waving fields and fresh blue rivers—and my heart smiles when it looks at the people of Swat.

Rather I receive your bullet-riddled body with honor Than news of your cowardice on the battlefield

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

I was named after Malalai of Maiwand, the greatest heroine of Afghanistan.

We have a saying, “Without honor, the world counts for nothing.”

O Malalai of Maiwand, Rise once more to make Pashtuns understand the song of honor, Your poetic words turn worlds around, I beg you, rise again

In olden times Swat was called Uddyana, which means “garden.”

the White Palace that was built from the same marble as the Taj Mahal by our king, the first wali, or ruler, of Swat.

Islam came to our valley in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom.

The Buddhists had arrived here in the second century and their kings ruled the valley for more than 500 years. Chinese explorers wrote stories of how there were 1,400 Buddhist monasteries along the banks of the River Swat, and the magical sound of temple bells would ring out across the valley. The temples are long gone, but almost anywhere you go in Swat, amid all the primroses and other wildflowers, you find their remains.

So I was born a proud daughter of Pakistan, though like all Swatis I thought of myself first as Swati and then Pashtun, before Pakistani.

While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five-year-old boy! This was the tradition.

Zia ul-Haq seized power. He arrested our elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had him tried for treason then hanged from a scaffold in Rawalpindi jail.

General Zia launched a campaign of Islamization to make us a proper Muslim country with the army as the defenders of our country’s ideological as well as geographical frontiers. He told our people it was their duty to obey his government because it was pursuing Islamic principles. Zia even wanted to dictate how we should pray, and set up salat, or prayer committees, in every district, even in our remote village, and appointed 100,000 prayer inspectors.

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, “No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.” But General Zia brought in laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s.

Our history textbooks were rewritten to describe Pakistan as a “fortress of Islam,” which made it seem as if we had existed far longer than since 1947, and denounced Hindus and Jews. Anyone reading them might think we won the three wars we have fought and lost against our great enemy, India.

Everything changed when my father was ten. Just after Christmas 1979 the Russians invaded our neighbor Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans fled across the border and General Zia gave them refuge. Vast camps of white tents sprang up mostly around Peshawar, some of which are still there today. Our biggest intelligence service belongs to the military and is called the ISI. It started a massive program to train Afghan refugees recruited from the camps as resistance fighters, or mujahideen.

Money poured in from all over the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia, which matched whatever the US sent, and volunteer fighters too, including a Saudi millionaire called Osama bin Laden.

My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like “If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left” or “15 bullets – 10 bullets = 5 bullets.”

what was happening in Afghanistan as a “war between two elephants”—the US and the Soviet Union—not our war, and said that we Pashtuns were “like the grass crushed by the hooves of two fierce beasts.”

The most violent took place in Islamabad on 12 February 1989, when American flags were set alight in front of the American Center—even though Rushdie and his publishers were British.

“First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book.” He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, “Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it? Not my Islam!”

We Pashtuns cannot turn away relatives or friends, however inconvenient. We don’t respect privacy and there is no such thing as making an appointment to see someone. Visitors can turn up whenever they wish and can stay as long as they want.

It was while he was visiting one afternoon in September 2001 that there was a great commotion and other people started arriving. They said there had been a big attack on a building in New York. Two planes had flown into it. I was only four and too young to understand. Even for the adults it was hard to imagine

It seemed very far away. I had no idea what New York and America were. The school was my world and my world was the school. We did not realize then that 9/11 would change our world too, and would bring war into our valley.

my father said if our politicians hadn’t spent so much money on building an atomic bomb we might have had enough for schools.

Usually politicians only visited during election time, promising roads, electricity, clean water and schools and giving money and generators to influential local people we called stakeholders, who would instruct their communities on how to vote. Of course this only applied to the men; women in our area don’t vote. Then they disappeared off to Islamabad if they were elected to the National Assembly, or Peshawar for the Provincial Assembly, and we’d hear no more of them or their promises.

I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.

There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Seema. Everyone knew she was in love with a boy, and sometimes he would pass by and she would look at him from under her long dark lashes, which all the girls envied. In our society for a girl to flirt with any man brings shame on the family, though it’s all right for the man. We were told she had committed suicide, but we later discovered her own family had poisoned her.

Taliban had even banned women from laughing out loud or wearing white shoes, as white was “a color that belonged to men.”

I started crying and apologized over and over again. “Don’t tell Aba,” I begged. I couldn’t bear for him to be disappointed in me. It’s horrible to feel unworthy in the eyes of your parents.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his son’s teacher, translated into Pashto. It is a very beautiful letter, full of good advice. “Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books…But also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside,” it says. “Teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat.”

In my country too many politicians think nothing of stealing. They are rich and we are a poor country yet they loot and loot. Most of them don’t pay tax, but that’s the least of it. They take out loans from state banks, but they don’t pay them back. They get kickbacks on government contracts from friends or the companies they award them to. Many of them own expensive flats in London.

don’t know how they can live with their consciences when they see our people going hungry or sitting in the darkness of endless power cuts, or children unable to go to school, as their parents need them to work.

But two years after I was born the generals again took over. It happened in a manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time and had fallen out with his army chief General Pervez Musharraf and sacked him. At the time General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka. Nawaz Sharif was so worried about his reaction that he tried to stop the plane from landing in Pakistan. He ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another country. Within an hour of the announcement on television of Musharraf’s sacking, tanks were on the streets and troops had taken over the newsrooms and the airports. The local commander, General Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf’s plane could land. Musharraf then seized power and threw Sharif into a dungeon in Attock Fort.

General Zia had promised to be in power for ninety days and had stayed more than eleven years until he was killed in an air crash.

It’s the same old story, my father said, and he was right. Musharraf promised to end the old feudal system by which the same few dozen families controlled our entire country, and bring fresh young clean faces into politics. Instead his cabinet was made up of the very same old faces. Once again our country was expelled from the Commonwealth and became an international black sheep. The Americans had already suspended most aid the year before when we conducted nuclear tests, but now almost everyone boycotted us. With such a history, you can see why the people of Swat did not always think it was a good idea to be part of Pakistan.

if you want to do good, but do it in a bad way, that’s still bad.

In the same way, if you choose a good method to do something bad it’s still bad.

My favorite program was Shaka Laka Boom Boom, an Indian children’s series about a boy called Sanju who has a magic pencil.

At night I would pray, “God, give me Sanju’s pencil. I won’t tell anyone. Just leave it in my cupboard. I will use it to make everyone happy.”