I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (12 page)

Jinnah had lived in London as a young man and trained as a barrister. He wanted a land of tolerance. Our people often quote the famous speech he made a few days before independence: ‘You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’ My father says the problem is that Jinnah negotiated a piece of real estate for us but not a state. He died of tuberculosis just a year after the creation of Pakistan and we haven’t stopped fighting since. We have had three wars against
India and what seems like endless killing inside our own country.

We Muslims are split between Sunnis and Shias – we share the same fundamental beliefs and the same Holy Quran but we disagree over who was the right person to lead our religion when the Prophet died in the seventh century. The man chosen to be the leader or caliph was Abu Bakr, a close friend and adviser of the Prophet and the man he chose to lead prayers as he lay on his deathbed. ‘Sunni’ comes from the Arabic for ‘one who follows the traditions of the Prophet’. But a smaller group believed that leadership should have stayed within the Prophet’s family and that Ali, his son-in-law and cousin, should have taken over. They became known as Shias, shortened from Shia-t-Ali, the Party of Ali.

Every year Shias commemorate the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein Ibn Ali at the battle of Karbala in the year 680 with a festival called Muharram. They whip themselves into a bloody frenzy with metal chains or razor blades on strings until the streets run red. One of my father’s friends is a Shia and he cries whenever he talks about Hussein’s death at Karbala. He gets so emotional you would think the events had happened just the night before, not more than 1,300 years ago. Our own founder, Jinnah, was a Shia, and Benazir Bhutto’s mother was also a Shia from Iran.

Most Pakistanis are Sunnis like us – more than eighty per cent – but within that we are again many groups. By far the biggest group is the Barelvis, who are named after a nineteenth-century madrasa in Bareilly, which lies in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Then we have the Deobandi, named after another famous nineteenth-century madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, this time in the village of Deoband. They are very conservative and most of our madrasas are Deobandi. We also have the Ahl-e-Hadith (people of the Hadith), who are Salafists. This group is more Arab-influenced and even more conservative than the others. They are what the West calls fundamentalists. They don’t accept our saints and shrines – many Pakistanis are also mystical people and gather at Sufi shrines to dance and worship. Each of these strands has many different subgroups.

The
mufti
on Khushal Street was a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a Deobandi group that holds a huge rally every year at its headquarters in Raiwind, near Lahore, attended by millions of people. Our last dictator General Zia used to go there, and in the 1980s, under his regime, the Tablighis became very powerful. Many of the imams appointed to preach in army barracks were Tablighis and army officers would often take leave and go on preaching tours for the group.

One night, after the
mufti
had failed to persuade our landlady to cancel our lease, he gathered some of the influential people and elders of our
mohalla
into a delegation and turned up at our door. There were seven people – some other senior Tablighis, a mosque keeper, a former jihadi and a shopkeeper – and they filled our small house.

My father seemed worried and shooed us into the other room, but the house was small so we could hear every word. ‘I am representing the Ulema and Tablighian and Taliban,’ Mullah Ghulamullah said, referring to not just one but two organisations of Muslim scholars to give himself gravitas. ‘I am representing good Muslims and we all think your girls’ school is
haram
and a blasphemy. You should close it. Girls should not be going to school,’ he continued. ‘A girl is so sacred she should be in purdah, and so private that there is no lady’s name in the Quran as God doesn’t want her to be named.’

My father could listen no more. ‘Maryam is mentioned everywhere in the Quran. Was she not a woman and a good woman at that?’

‘No,’ said the mullah. ‘She is only there to prove that Isa [Jesus] was the son of Maryam, not the son of God!’

‘That may be,’ replied my father. ‘But I am pointing out that the Quran names Maryam.’

The
mufti
started to object but my father had had enough. Turning to the group, he said, ‘When this gentleman passes me on the street, I look to him and greet him but he doesn’t answer, he just bows his head.’

The mullah looked down embarrassed because greeting someone properly is important in Islam. ‘You run the
haram
school,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to greet you.’

Then one of the other men spoke up. ‘I’d heard you were an infidel,’ he said to my father, ‘but there are Qurans in your room.’

‘Of course there are!’ replied my father, astonished that his faith would be questioned. ‘I am a Muslim.’

‘Let’s get back to the subject of the school,’ said the
mufti
, who could see the discussion was not going his way. ‘There are men in the reception area of the school, and they see the girls enter, and this is very bad.’

‘I have a solution,’ said my father. ‘The school has another gate. The girls will enter through that.’

The mullah clearly wasn’t happy as he wanted the school closed altogether. But the elders were happy with this compromise and they left.

My father suspected this would not be the end of the matter. What we knew and they didn’t was that the
mufti’
s own niece attended the school in secret. So a few days later my father called the
mufti’
s elder brother, the girl’s father.

‘I am very tired of your brother,’ he said. ‘What kind of mullah is he? He’s driving us crazy. Can you help to get him off our backs?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Ziauddin,’ he replied. ‘I have trouble in my home too. He lives with us and has told his wife that she must observe purdah from us and that our wives must observe purdah from him, all in this small space. Our wives are like sisters to him and his is like a sister to us, but this madman has made our house a hell. I am sorry but I can’t help you.’

My father was right to think this man was not going to give up – mullahs had become more powerful figures since Zia’s rule and campaign of Islamisation.

In some ways General Musharraf was very different from General Zia. Though he usually dressed in uniform, he occasionally wore
Western suits and he called himself chief executive instead of chief martial law administrator. He also kept dogs, which we Muslims regard as unclean. Instead of Zia’s Islamisation he began what he called ‘enlightened moderation’. He opened up our media, allowing new private TV channels and female newsreaders, as well as showing dancing on television. The celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve was allowed. He even sanctioned an annual pop concert on the eve of Independence Day, which was broadcast to the nation. He did something which our democratic rulers hadn’t, even Benazir, and abolished the law that for a woman to prove she was raped, she had to produce four male witnesses. He appointed the first woman governor of the state bank and the first women airline pilots and coastguards. He even announced we would have female guards at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi.

However in our Pashtun homeland of the North-West Frontier Province things were very different. In 2002 Musharraf held elections for ‘controlled democracy’. They were strange elections as the main party leaders Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were in exile. In our province these elections brought what we called a ‘mullah government’ to power. The Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA) alliance was a group of five religious parties including the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which ran the madrasas where the Taliban were trained. People jokingly referred to the MMA as the Mullah Military Alliance and said they got elected because they had Musharraf ’s support. But some people supported them because the very religious Pashtuns were angry at the American invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban from power there.

Our area had always been more conservative than most of the rest of Pakistan. During the Afghan jihad many madrasas had been built, most of them funded by Saudi money, and many young men had passed through them as it was free education. That was the start of what my father calls the ‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan. Then 9/11 had made this militancy more mainstream. Sometimes when
I walked along the main road I saw chalked messages on the sides of buildings.
CONTACT US FOR JIHAD TRAINING
, they would say, listing a phone number to call. In those days jihadi groups were free to do whatever they wanted. You could see them openly collecting contributions and recruiting men. There was even a headmaster from Shangla who would boast that his greatest success was to send ten boys in Grade 9 for jihad training in Kashmir.

The MMA government banned CD and DVD shops and wanted to create a morality police like the Afghan Taliban had set up. The idea was they would be able to stop a woman accompanied by a man and require her to prove that the man was her relative. Thankfully, our supreme court stopped this. Then MMA activists launched attacks on cinemas and tore down billboards with pictures of women or blacked them out with paint. They even snatched female mannequins from clothing shops. They harassed men wearing Western-style shirts and trousers instead of the traditional shalwar kamiz and insisted women cover their heads. It was as though they wanted to remove all traces of womankind from public life.

My father’s high school opened in 2003. That first year they had boys and girls together, but by 2004 the climate had changed so it was unthinkable to have girls and boys in the same class. That changing climate made Ghulamullah bold. One of the school clerks told my father that the
mufti
kept coming into school and demanding why we girls were still using the main entrance. He said that one day, when a male member of staff took a female teacher out to the main road to get a rickshaw, the
maulana
asked, ‘Why did this man escort her to the road, is he her brother?’

‘No,’ replied the clerk, ‘he is a colleague.’

‘That is wrong!’ said the
maulana
.

My father told the clerk to call him next time he saw the
maulana
. When the call came, my father and the Islamic studies teacher went out to confront him.

‘Maulana
, you have driven me to the wall!’ my father said. ‘Who
are you? You are crazy! You need to go to a doctor. You think I enter the school and take my clothes off? When you see a boy and a girl you see a scandal. They are schoolchildren. I think you should go and see Dr Haider Ali!’

Dr Haider Ali was a well-known psychiatrist in our area, so to say, ‘Shall we take you to Dr Haider Ali?’ meant ‘Are you mad?’

The
mufti
went quiet. He took off his turban and put it in my father’s lap. For us a turban is a public symbol of chivalry and Pashtunness, and for a man to lose his turban is considered a great humili– ation. But then he started up again. ‘I never said those things to your clerk. He is lying.’

My father had had enough. ‘You have no business here,’ he shouted. ‘Go away!’

The
mufti
had failed to close our school but his interference was an indication of how our country was changing. My father was worried. He and his fellow activists were holding endless meetings. These were no longer just about stopping people cutting down trees but were also about education and democracy.

In 2004, after resisting pressure from Washington for more than two and a half years, General Musharraf sent the army into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), seven agencies that lie along the border with Afghanistan, where the government had little control. The Americans claimed that al-Qaeda militants who had fled from Afghanistan during the US bombing were using the areas as a safe haven, taking advantage of our Pashtun hospitality. From there they were running training camps and launching raids across the border on NATO troops. For us in Swat this was very close to home. One of the agencies, Bajaur, is next to Swat. The people who live in the FATA are all from Pashtun tribes like us Yousafzai, and live on both sides of the border with Afghanistan.

The tribal agencies were created in British times as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and what was then India, and they are still run in the same way, administered by tribal chiefs or elders known as maliks. Unfortunately, the maliks make little difference. In truth
the tribal areas are not governed at all. They are forgotten places of harsh rocky valleys where people scrape by on smuggling. (The average annual income is just $250 – half the Pakistani average.) They have very few hospitals and schools, particularly for girls, and political parties were not allowed there until recently. Hardly any women from these areas can read. The people are renowned for their fierceness and independence, as you can see if you read any of the old British accounts.

Our army had never before gone into the FATA. Instead they had maintained indirect control in the same way the British had, relying on the Pashtun-recruited Frontier Corps rather than regular soldiers. Sending in the regular army was a tough decision. Not only did our army and ISI have long links with some of the militants, but it also meant our troops would be fighting their own Pashtun brothers. The first tribal area that the army entered was South Waziristan, in March 2004. Predictably the local people saw it as an attack on their way of life. All the men there carry weapons and hundreds of soldiers were killed when the locals revolted.

The army was in shock. Some men refused to fight, not wishing to battle their own people. They retreated after just twelve days and reached what they called a ‘negotiated peace settlement’ with local militant leaders like Nek Mohammad. This involved the army bribing them to halt all attacks and keep out foreign fighters. The militants simply used the cash to buy more weapons and resumed their activities. A few months later came the first attack on Pakistan by a US drone.