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

by Malala Yousafzai

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

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.

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.

Alexander the Great swept into the valley with thousands of elephants and soldiers on his way from Afghanistan to the Indus.

Our ancestors came to Swat in the sixteenth century from Kabul, where they had helped a Timurid emperor win back his throne after his own tribe removed him.

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.

like that. My father always said, “Malala will be free as a bird.” I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley.

He believed that lack of education was the root of all of Pakistan’s problems. Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected.

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.

Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with?

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

Our people see conspiracies behind everything, and many argued that the attack was actually carried out by Jews as an excuse for America to launch a war on the Muslim world.

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.

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, and gives birth to their children.

His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an American plot to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out.

“Life isn’t just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide.

The truth will abolish fear.”

Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban—to finally achieve status and power.

When someone takes away your pens you realize quite how important education is.

Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.

“When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,”

I don’t think that Paulo Coelho had come across the Taliban or our useless politicians.

Some people are afraid of ghosts, some of spiders or snakes—in those days we were afraid of our fellow human beings.

We couldn’t believe the army had been oblivious to bin Laden’s whereabouts. The newspapers said that the cadets even did their training in the field alongside his house. The

“Please don’t honk, the army is sleeping,” said one text and “Second-hand Pakistani radar for sale…can’t detect US helicopters but gets cable TV just fine,” said another.