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

by Malala Yousafzai

To all the girls who have faced injustice and been silenced. Together we will be heard.

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

In the refugee settlements, most of the children were not going to school. Sometimes there was no school. Sometimes it was unsafe to walk to school. And sometimes children were working instead of being educated because their fathers had been killed. I saw many children on the roadside in this hot, hot weather doing child labour, asking for work such as carrying heavy stones to feed their families. I just felt such pain in my heart. What is their sin? What have they done that they’ve had to migrate? Why are these innocent children suffering such hardship? Why are they deprived of school and a peaceful environment?

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.

To be torn from the country that you love is not something to wish on anyone.

I’d imagine that on the way home a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps. I wondered what I would do. Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him, but then I’d think if I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, ‘OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I’m not against you personally, I just want every girl to go to school.’

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.

Yet, he brought with him a vast family tree of our clan, the Dalokhel Yousafzai, going right back to my great-great-grandfather and showing only the male line. My father, Ziauddin, is different from most Pashtun men. He took the tree, drew a line like a lollipop from his name and at the end of it he wrote, ‘Malala’. His cousin laughed in astonishment. My father didn’t care. He says he looked into my eyes after I was born and fell in love.

We’d be expected to cook and serve our brothers and fathers. 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 fiveyear-old boy! This was the tradition. I had decided very early I would not be like that. My father always said, ‘Malala will be free as a bird.’

‘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. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and become pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime. A woman couldn’t even open a bank account without a man’s permission.

As a nation we have always been good at hockey, but Zia made our female hockey players wear baggy trousers instead of shorts, and stopped...

During my father’s first term at college national elections were held, which were won by Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the prime minister who had been executed when my father was a boy. Benazir was our first female prime minister and the first in the Islamic world.

‘Would you like to cook chicken for us?’ and I’d say, ‘No, the chicken is innocent. We should not kill her.’

One of my male cousins was angry and asked my father, ‘Why isn’t she covered?’ He replied, ‘She’s my daughter. Look after your own affairs.’

He said that the Taliban had even banned women from laughing out loud or wearing white shoes as white was ‘a colour that belonged to men’. Women were being locked up and beaten just for wearing nail varnish.

My father used to say, ‘I will protect your freedom, Malala. Carry on with your dreams.’

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.