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

by Malala Yousafzai

“Son, may you be the star in the sky of knowledge,”

There was really only one subject—9/11. It might have changed the whole world, but we were living right in the epicenter of everything. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him.

The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.

We were not fans of the Taliban, as we had heard they destroyed girls’ schools and blew up giant Buddha statues—we had many Buddhas of our own that we were proud of. But many Pashtuns did not like the bombing of Afghanistan or the way Pakistan was helping the Americans, even if it was only by allowing them to cross our airspace and stopping weapon supplies to the Taliban. We did not know then that Musharraf was also letting the Americans use our airfields.

Some of our newspapers printed stories that no Jews went to work at the World Trade Center that day. My father said this was rubbish.

Musharraf told our people that he had no choice but to cooperate with the Americans. He said they had told him “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” and threatened to “bomb us back to the Stone Age” if we stood against them. But we weren’t exactly cooperating, as the ISI was still arming Taliban fighters and giving their leaders sanctuary in Quetta. They even persuaded the Americans to let them fly hundreds of Pakistani fighters out of northern Afghanistan. The ISI chief asked the Americans to hold off their attack on Afghanistan until he had gone to Kandahar to ask the Taliban leader Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden; instead he offered the Taliban help.

The governor of our province issued a statement that anyone who wanted to fight in Afghanistan against NATO forces was free to do so.

Anyone could see that Musharraf was double-dealing, taking American money while still helping the jihadis—“strategic assets,” as the ISI calls them. The Americans say they gave Pakistan billions of dollars to help their campaign against al-Qaeda, but we didn’t see a single cent. Musharraf built a mansion by Rawal Lake in Islamabad and bought an apartment in London. Every so often an important American official would complain that we weren’t doing enough and then suddenly some big fish would be caught. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, was found in a house just a mile from the army chief’s official residence in Rawalpindi. But President Bush kept praising Musharraf, inviting him to Washington and calling him his buddy. My father and his friends were disgusted. They said the Americans always preferred dealing with dictators in Pakistan.

God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.”

‘Nim hakim khatrai jan’—‘Half a doctor is a danger to one’s life,’

The Quran teaches us sabar—patience—but often it feels that we have forgotten the word and think Islam means women sitting at home in purdah or wearing burqas while men do jihad.

We Muslims are split between Sunnis and Shias—we share the same fundamental beliefs and the same Holy Quran, but we disagree over who was the right person to lead our religion when the Prophet, PBUH, died in the seventh century.

The man chosen to be the leader or caliph was Hazrat Abu Bakr, a close friend and adviser of the Prophet, PBUH, and the man he chose to lead prayers as he lay on his deathbed. “Sunni” comes from the Arabic for “one who follows the traditions of the Prophet, PBUH.” But a smaller group believed that leadership should have stayed within the family of the Prophet, PBUH, and that Hazrat Ali, his son-in-law and cousin, should have taken over. They became known as Shias, shortened from Shia-t-Ali, the Party of Ali.

Most Pakistanis are Sunnis like us—more than 80 percent—but within that we are again many groups. By far the biggest group is the Barelvis, who are named after a nineteenth-century madrasa in Bareilly, which lies in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

In those days jihadi groups were free to do whatever they wanted. You could see them openly collecting contributions and recruiting men.

There was even a headmaster from Shangla who would boast that his greatest success was to send ten boys in Grade 9 for jihad training in Kashmir.

I think when there is a great disaster or our lives are in danger we remember our sins and wonder how we will meet God and whether we will be forgiven. But God has also given us the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal.

My cousin who was studying in the UK said they raised lots of money from Pakistanis living there. People later said that some of this money had been diverted to finance a plot to bomb planes traveling from Britain to the US.

In Pakistan, madrasas are a kind of welfare system, as they give free food and lodging, but their teaching does not follow a normal curriculum. The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon.

I was ten when the Taliban came to our valley. Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books and longed to be vampires. It seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the night just like vampires.

Mullahs often misinterpret the Quran and Hadith when they teach them in our country, as few people understand the original Arabic. Fazlullah exploited this ignorance. “Is he right, Aba? ” I asked my father. I remembered how frightening the earthquake had been. “No, Jani,” he replied. “He is just fooling people.”

My friends at school said their mothers listened to the Radio Mullah although our headmistress Madam Maryam told us not to. At home we only had my grandfather’s old radio, which was broken, but my mother’s friends all listened and told her what they heard. They praised Fazlullah and talked of his long hair, the way he rode a horse and behaved like the Prophet, PBUH. Women would tell him their dreams and he would pray for them. My mother enjoyed these stories, but my father was horrified.

Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long,

My father came home fuming. “If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year,” he said. “The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa.”

First the Taliban took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history.

The Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and stupas where we played, which had been there for thousands of years and were a part of our history from the time of the Kushan kings.

We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.

The black and white flags of Fazlullah’s Taliban started appearing on police stations. The militants would enter villages with megaphones and the police would flee. In a short time they had taken over fifty-nine villages and set up their own parallel administrations. Policemen were so scared of being killed that they took out ads in the newspapers to announce they had left the force.

It felt as though the whole country were going mad.

There was one ray of hope—Benazir Bhutto was returning. The Americans were worried that their ally General Musharraf was too unpopular in Pakistan to be effective against the Taliban, so they had helped broker an unlikely power-sharing deal. The plan was that Musharraf would finally take off his uniform and be a civilian president, supported by Benazir’s party. In return he would drop corruption charges against her and her husband and agree to hold elections, which everyone assumed would result in Benazir becoming prime minister. No Pakistani, including my father, thought this deal would work, as Musharraf and Benazir hated each other.

“Are you scared now?” I asked my father. “At night our fear is strong, Jani,” he told me, “but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again.” And this is true for my family. We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage. “We must rid our valley of the Taliban, and then no one has to feel this fear,” he said.