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

by Malala Yousafzai

I am in a country which is five hours behind my beloved homeland Pakistan and my home in the Swat Valley. But my country is centuries behind this one.

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.’

There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Seema. Everyone knew she was in love with a boy, and sometimes he would pass by and she would look at him from under her long dark lashes, which all the girls envied. In our society for a girl to flirt with any man brings shame on the family, though it’s all right for the man. We were told she had committed suicide, but we later discovered her own family had poisoned her.

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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. I shivered when he told me such things.

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

‘Dear God,’ I wrote, ‘I know you see everything, but there are so many things that maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.’

Mullahs from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a warning from God. They said it was caused by women’s freedom and obscenity. If we did not mend our ways and introduce sharia or Islamic law, they shouted in their thundering voices, more severe punishment would come.

In Pakistan we have something called the Blasphemy Law, which protects the Holy Quran from desecration. Under General Zia’s Islamic radicalisation campaign, the law was made much stricter so that anyone who ‘defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet, PBUH,’ can be punished by death or life imprisonment.

‘putting masala on the situation’.

‘Sometimes I think it’s easier to be a Twilight vampire than a girl in Swat,’ I sighed.