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

by Malala Yousafzai

The Maasai told us that until recently a boy would be circumcised and then had to go into the bush to kill two or more lions and bring back the carcasses. The elders would then yank out the boy’s two front teeth – imagine how painful! – and if he didn’t cry he would become a Maasai warrior. Today their customs have changed. They told us if they kill all the lions the wildlife will disappear, so now those who become warriors are those with higher education, not those who kill lions. They will even have women Maasai warriors. And they have stopped circumcising their women.

Jinnah said, ‘No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men.

He’d boast, ‘Ziauddin is a shaheen’ – a falcon – because this is a creature that flies high above other birds. ‘Write your name as “Ziauddin Shaheen”,’ he told him. For a while my father did this but stopped when he realised that although a falcon flies high it is a cruel bird.

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

Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. 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.

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.

In our Islamic studies class at school we used to write essays entitled ‘How the Prophet, PBUH, Lived’. We learned that the first wife of the Prophet, PBUH, was a businesswoman called Hazrat Khadijah. She was forty, fifteen years older than him, and she had been married before, yet he still married her.

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.’

My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform,

Though we loved school, we hadn’t realised how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our homework wasn’t just a way of passing time, it was our future.

Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking.

‘Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.’ Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.

‘When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,’ it says. 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.

I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl. Later I realised that simply having your head uncovered isn’t what makes you modern.

My headmistress Maryam was a strong, educated woman but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.

In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.

On the plane we noticed that some people could not find their seats because they could not read letters and numbers.

His body was riddled with TB and lung cancer when Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, agreed that India would be divided at independence. Afterwards he said that had he known Jinnah was dying he would have delayed and there would have been no Pakistan.

‘Had there been no hope I would not be here,’

No visitors could get in – even when the Prime Minister came to see me he was not allowed inside.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, called it ‘a heinous and cowardly act’. President Obama described the shooting as ‘reprehensible and disgusting and tragic’.

Fortunately at this point the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates stepped in. They offered their private jet, which had its own on-board hospital.

‘My daughter is now in safe hands and going to a safe country. I can’t leave my wife and sons alone here. They are at risk. What has happened to my daughter has happened and now she is in God’s hands. I am a father – my sons are as important to me as my daughter.’

‘What do you like?’ they asked me. ‘Fried chicken,’ I replied. Yma discovered there was a halal Kentucky Fried Chicken at Small Heath so would go there every afternoon to buy me chicken and chips. One day she even cooked me a curry.

I realised what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global.

Me, who had always cared about my appearance, how my hair looked! But when you see death, things change.

‘When you start your journey from the end of a snake’s tail,/ You will end up on its head in an ocean of poison.’ To us that referred to how the authorities in Pakistan had initially used the militants and now were in a mess of their own making.

used to be known as his daughter; now he’s known as my father. When he went to France to collect an award for me he told the audience, ‘In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter.’

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.