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

by Malala Yousafzai

‘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.’

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’.

Ignorance allowed politicians to fool people and bad administrators to be re-elected.

if you help someone in need you might also receive unexpected aid.

‘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!’

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

‘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,’

‘Teach him it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat.’

Kindness can only be repaid with kindness. It can’t be repaid with expressions like ‘thank you’ and then forgotten.

Lincoln also wrote in the letter to his son’s teacher, ‘Teach him how to gracefully lose.’ I was used to coming top of my class. But I realised that, even if you win three or four times, the next victory will not necessarily be yours without trying – and also that sometimes it’s better to tell your own story.

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

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

‘This is typical,’ he said. ‘We people of Swat were first seduced by the Taliban, then killed by them and now blamed for them. Seduced, killed and blamed.’

‘What’s stopping each and every politician from doing good things? Why would they not want our people to be safe, to have food and electricity?’

One day I will be a politician and do these things myself.

‘My only ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able. But when half of your leaders tell lies and the other half is negotiating with the Taliban, there is nowhere to go. One has to speak out.’

‘In medicine two plus two does not always make four,’ replied Colonel Junaid. ‘We did our job – we removed the piece of skull. Now we must wait.’

‘It is my belief God sends the solution first and the problem later,’ replied Dr Javid.

We human beings don’t realise how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, a nose which smells the beauty of fragrance, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

All he worked for for over almost twenty years has been left behind: the school he built up from nothing, which now has three buildings with 1,100 pupils and seventy teachers. I know he felt proud at what he had created, a poor boy from that narrow village between the Black and White Mountains. He says, ‘It’s as if you planted a tree and nurtured it – you have the right to sit in its shade.’