I Am Malala is a book published in 2013 and written by Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and an activist for girl’s education who was shot by the Taliban. A powerful, moving account of human potential, the horrendousness of war (as well as the corresponding ignorance), and the vitality of education, I Am Malala should be read by every human being who desires the improvement of the human race.
I Am Malala begins with a foreword that she wrote in June 2015 while in Birmingham, England in which she acknowledges the past few years: “Two years have passed since my book came out, and three years since the October morning when I was shot by the Taliban on a school bus on my way home from class. My family has been through many changes. We were plucked from our mountain valley in Swat, Pakistan, and transported to a brick house in Birmingham, England’s, second-biggest city” (xiii). She writes that she feels at home in Birmingham, though she greatly misses her home of Swat, Pakistan. She still communicates with some of her friends using the benefits of existing technology. When it comes to the future, Malala hopes that she can one day return to her home: “My dream is to return to the country where I was born and serve the people. I dream that one day I will be an influential politician in Pakistan. Sadly, Maulana Fazlullah, the man who was the head of the Swat Taliban who shot me, is now the head of the whole Pakistan Taliban. That has made it even riskier for me to return. But even if there were no threat, I believe that I must get an education to strengthen myself for the fight I will surely have against ignorance and terrorism. My plan is to learn more about history, to meet interesting people and listen to their opinions” (xv). Upon first arriving in Birmingham, she was given medical treatment by the doctors for her gunshot wound (who she gladly thanks): they’ve done such a good job helping her recover that her facial nerve has healed by up to 96%. Malala states that whatever money she got from winning prizes has been given to the people of Swat to help them: “When I get prizes I send the money to Swat to help children go to school or adults buy small businesses, like a shop or a taxi to drive so that they can earn money for their families. We have received many letters, even one from an elderly man in Japan who wrote, ‘I am an old poor man but I want to help,’ and sent us a note for ten thousand yen without a return address so that we couldn’t thank him” (xvii). To clarify, she started an organization known as the Malala Fund which focuses on providing education to a variety of people. Malala has met with President Obama himself, and told him that America, instead of trying to stamp terrorism out through drone attacks and other violent means, should try to do so using education, as terrorism is largely a result of indoctrination, fanaticism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and stupidity. All in all, Malala writes that much more needs to be done to provide people with an education. Despite her luxurious living conditions, she’s still technically a refugee, as she desires to be in her homeland: “I am a refugee, too, forced to live far away from my own country. 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” (xx).
When it comes to her ancestry, “Our ancestors came to Swat in the sixteen century from Kabul, where they had helped a Timurid emperor win back his throne after his own tribe removed him. The emperor rewarded them with important positions in the court and army, but his friends and relatives warned him that the Yousafzai were becoming so powerful they would overthrow him. So one night he invited all the chiefs to a banquet and set his men on them while they were eating. Around 600 chiefs were massacred. Only two escaped, and they fled to Peshawar along with their tribesmen. After some time they went to visit some tribes in Swat to win their support so they could return to Afghanistan. But they were so captivated by the beauty of Swat they instead decided to stay there and forced the other tribes out” (23-4). When it came to dividing and allotting the land, the males were the ones who directly owned the land (though it should be noted that they didn't really own the land, as the land is possessed by no one, seeing how property rights are an imaginary concept). However, due to the tribal nature of the Yousafzai, there were quite a few battles: “Villages were ruled by khans, and the common people, craftsmen and laborers, were their tenants. They had to pay them rent in kind, usually a share of their crop. They also had to help the khans form a militia by providing an armed man for every small plot of land. Each khan kept hundreds of armed men both for feuds and to raid and loot other villages” (24). In 1917, Miangul Abdul Wadood was made the definitive leader of the area to put an end to the endless squabbling and bloodshed: “We know him affectionately as Badshah Sahib, and though he was completely illiterate, he managed to bring peace to the valley. Taking a rifle away from a Pashtun is like taking away his life, so he could not disarm the tribes. Instead he built forts on mountains all across Swat and created an army. He was recognized by the British as the head of state in 1926 and installed as wali. He set up the first telephone system and built the first primary school and ended the wesh system because the constant moving between villages meant no one could sell land or had any incentive to build better houses or plant fruit trees” (25). He abdicated in 1949 (two years after Pakistan was created) and was succeeded by his oldest son, Miangul Abdul Haq Jehanzeb, who did a great job, as he focused on providing services to the public, including the building of infrastructure and the providing of education. “He had studied in a British school in Peshawar, and perhaps because his own father was illiterate he was passionate about schools and built many, as well as hospitals and roads. In the 1950s he ended the system where people paid taxes to the khans … In 1969, the year my father was born, the wali gave up power and we became part of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, which a few years ago changed its name to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa” (25).
Malala’s father, despite being educated and loving words (especially poetry), suffered from a stutter that affected his pronunciation of letters like “m,” “p,” and “k.” Malala writes that Pakistan, though a young country, had already seen multiple military coupes. In one incident, a general and religious fanatic named Zia ul-Haq took over, and he arrested and executed the elected prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That is, Zia tried to Islamize totally the country, and focused heavily on oppressing women: “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 became 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 … Zia … stopped women playing some sports altogether” (31). Zia also had the textbooks rewritten to glorify Islam and to have a negative view of Hindus and Jews. Overall, “We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don’t really recognize the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago. So our blood boiled over the Soviet invasion for both religious and nationalist reasons. The clerics of the mosques would soften talk about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in their sermons, condemning the Russians as infidels and urging people to join the jihad, saying it was their duty as good Muslims … the 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.’” (32-3). Malala’s father, as a teenager, was heavily influenced by the idea of Islam and jihad, and himself said that if suicide bombers existed while he was young, he might’ve become one himself. However, he was still able to ask questions and to think for himself, which caused him to retain his sanity and conscience. He was also heavily influenced by his grandfather, who had very high standards and was extremely disciplined: “He was an extremely disciplined man and could not understand why they were not the same … My father’s dislike of Baba’s frugality has made him a very generous man both materially and in spirit. He became determined to end the traditional rivalry between him and his cousins. When his headmaster’s wife fell ill, my father donated blood to help save her. The man was astonished and apologized for having tormented him. When my father tells me stories of his childhood, he always says that though Baba was a difficult man he gave him the most important gift-the gift of education. He sent my father to the government high school to learn English and receive a modern education rather than to a madrasa, even though as an imam people criticized him for doing this. Baba also gave him a deep love of learning and knowledge as well as a keen awareness of people’s rights, which my father has passed on to me. In my grandfather’s Friday addresses he would talk about the poor and the landowners and how true Islam is against feudalism. He also spoke Persian and Arabic and cared deeply for words. He read the great poems of Saadi, Allama Iqbal and Rumi to my father with such passion and fire it was as if he were teaching the whole mosque” (37-8). Malala’s father soon made himself known as an eloquent speaker: his father would write his speeches while he would recite them. In fact, his father was actually proud of him because of that (as stated before, he’s a very difficult person), and told him to write his name as “Ziauddin Shaheen” (“Shaheen” means “falcon”) - Malala’s father declined, writing his name instead as “Ziauddin Yousafzai,” seeing how though the falcon could fly above many other birds, it was capable of cruelty (though not nearly as much as humans, ironically).
Malala’s mother had gone to school, but quit quickly due to her recognizing that women were extremely restricted: even if she was very educated, she would be continuously pressed into getting married, having children, and being a housewife. Malala’s father, though struggling desperately with finances, was able to start a school. The dictator Zia was killed when his plane crashed (some say a bomb was planted into a crate of mangoes on the plane), and Benazir Bhutto was made the first female prime minister. As Malala grew up, she recognized that women had few to no rights: even worse, the situation was worse in neighboring areas like Afghanistan where religious fanatics were forcing people to live the way they desire. That is, “Women in the village hid their faces whenever they left their purdah quarters and could not meet or speak to men who were not their close relatives … A woman named Shahida who worked for us and had three small daughters told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one. When girls disappeared it was not always because they had been married off. There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Semma. 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 … Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with? When I complained about these things to my father he told me that life was harder for women in Afghanistan. The year before I was born a group called the Taliban led by a mullah had taken over the country and was burning girls’ schools” (66-7). Malala reveals that as a child, she made mistakes, like most human beings: she was envious of a girl named Malka-e-Noor due to her possessions and intelligence, and stole some of her belongings. When her parents found out about the deed, they chided her, causing her to be so ashamed that she claimed that she never lied or stole ever since. Malala then writes that her society sees a large amount of violence, as honor killings and revenge were prominent concepts. As she describes, “Many families live in walled compounds with watchtowers so they can keep an eye out for their enemies. We knew many victims of feuds. One was Sher Zaman, a man who had been in my father’s class and always got better grades than him. My grandfathers and uncle used to drive my father mad, teasing him, ‘You’re not as good as Sher Zama,’ so much that he once wished that rocks would come down the mountain and flatten him. But Sher Zaman did not go to college and ended up becoming a dispenser in the village pharmacy. His family became embroiled in a dispute with their cousins over a small plot of forest. One day, as Sher Zaman and two of his brothers were on their way to the land, they were ambushed by his uncle and some of his men. All three brothers were killed.” (73). Malala states that violence solves nothing, as it only encourages further violence (seen best in retaliation), especially if the concept of “honor” is a prominent one in said culture. Malala writes scathingly of politicians, describing them for what they really are: greedy scumbags who act like parasites, keeping the poor poor in order to allow themselves to continue to hoard their obscene wealth. That is, “In my country too many politicians think nothing of stealing. They are rich and we are a poor country yet they loot and loot. Most of them don’t pay tax, but that’s the least of it. They take out loans from state banks, but they don’t pay them back. They get kickbacks and government contracts from friends or the companies they award them to. Many of them own expensive flats in London. I don’t know how they can live with their consciences when they see our people going hungry or sitting in the darkness of endless power cuts, or children unable to go to school, as their parents need them to work.” (74). Two years after Malala was born, a military coup and subsequent dictatorship occurred once again: like before, it involved a general (Pervez Musharraf). To be more specific, the coup happened when the prime minister Nawaz Sharif fired Pervez Musharraf, only to be turned on by the other military authorities and exiled.
As Malala grew up, her father was largely away from home, as he focused on advocating for education and traveling to meet with others, causing her mother to do many of the chores in his place. When 9/11 happened, many of the people in Swat saw it as just recompense for America’s exploitation of other countries: Malala writes that it was wrong to kill thousands of people who were largely innocent when it comes to the exploitation. Despite his negative attitude towards America, “Musharraf told our people that he had no choice but to cooperate with the Americans. He said they had told him ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,’ and threatened to ‘bomb us back to the Stone Age’ if we stood against them. But we weren’t exactly cooperating, as the ISI was still arming Taliban fighters and giving their leaders sanctuary in Quetta. They even persuaded the Americans to let them fly hundreds of Pakistani fighters out of northern Afghanistan. The ISI chief asked the Americans to hold off their attack on Afghanistan until he had gone to Kandahar to ask the Taliban leader Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden; instead he offered the Taliban help … The governor of our province issued a statement that anyone who wanted to fight in Afghanistan against NATO forces was free to do so. Some 12,000 young men from Swat went to help the Taliban. Many never came back. They were most likely killed, but as there is no proof of death, their wives can’t be declared widows” (86-7). Osama bin Laden moved around areas to avoid capture, and even stayed in Swat for a year while keeping a low profile. Overall, “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 … But President Bush kept praising Musharraf, inviting him to Washington and calling him his buddy. My father and his friends were disgusted. They said the Americans always preferred dealing with dictators in Pakistan'' (88). Malala writes of the beginning of Pakistan: “British India was divided in August 1947, and an independent Muslim state was born. It could hardly have been a bloodier beginning. Millions of Muslims crossed from India, and Hindus traveled in the other direction. Almost two million of them were killed trying to cross the new border. Many were slaughtered on trains which arrive at Lahore and Delhi full of bloodied corpses. My own grandfather narrowly escaped death in the riots when his train was attacked by Hindus on his way home from Delhi, where he had been studying. Now we are a country of 180 million and more than 96 percent are Muslim. We also have around two million Christians and more than two million ahmadis, who say they are Muslim though our government says they are not. Sadly those minority communities are often attacked” (91-2). Aside from the religious disparities and the subsequent atrocities (Blaise Pascal writes that humans love to commit evil in the name of an ideology, especially religion), the Muslims saw internal conflict within their religion itself: there are the Shias (Muslims who want Muhammad’s descendants to lead Muslims) and the Sunnis (the majority of Muslims - they want an elected leader to be the leader). Some Muslim fanatics (there was one living right next to the school) tried to use bribery and blackmail to have the school Malala’s father started closed, as they thought it was “blasphemous” and “evil” for girls to receive an education. Indeed, this kind of misogyny and patriarchism can be expected from religion as a whole: religion’s sole purpose is to control and manipulate people by keeping them ignorant, as well as to guarantee that its adherents reproduce endlessly, seeing how religion requires a continuous influx of people to maintain that its numbers are large enough to be imposing. In this case, the attempt to keep girls out of school is a blatant gesture to make them obedient housewives who are deeply indoctrinated and allow themselves to be viewed as nothing but sexual objects and incubators - this is an utter abomination of humanity’s potential (I would like to add that if we never grow out of this kind of disgusting behavior, we are arguably the most stupid species on the planet: we as a whole have the potential and intellect but we neglect them for the sake of selfishness, comfort, and bigotry). Also, the fanatics tried to get the school closed by telling a landlady to revoke the lease on the land: they promised her money and entrance to Heaven (though who wants to go to a Heaven where a genocidal, greedy, and violent god lives and rules?). When she refused, they directly talked to Malala’s father, but he was able to skillfully negotiate: he would make the girls enter the school in a different route than the boys to keep them relatively separate. Musharraf was a different dictator than Zia: though he regarded himself as a Muslim, he also allowed for some Western culture to exist, including suits and dogs.
Sometime later, a terrible earthquake struck not just Swat, but the surrounding era: it occurred on 8 October 2005, one of the worst in recorded history. In Malala’s own words, “It was 7.6 on the Richter Scale and was felt as far away as Kabul and Delhi. Our town of Mingora was largely spared-just a few buildings collapsed-but neighboring Kashmir and the northern areas of Pakistan were devastated. Even in Islamabad buildings collapsed … The earthquake had affected 30,000 square kilometers, an area as big as the American state of Connecticut. The numbers were unbelievable. More than 73,000 people had been killed and 128,000 injured, many of them crippled for life. Around three and a half million people had lost their homes. Roads, bridges, water and power had all gone. Places we had visited like Balakot were almost completely destroyed. Many of those killed were children who like me had been at school that morning. Some 6,400 schools were turned to rubble and 18,000 children lost their lives'' (103-4). Despite the calamity, people were still able to aid each other, and even America gave some help. However, every wall has its cracks: 11,000 children had been orphaned. Tradition mandates that extended families take them in, but the earthquake had wiped out complete families, as well as reducing countless others to financial ruin. Therefore, these children were indoctrinated in religious schools: “The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon” (107). Even more disgusting (in my opinion), people tried to rationalize the earthquake: instead of admitting that the earth and the universe doesn’t care about human life (they’re insentient as far as we know, after all), seeing how plate tectonics were to blame, they believed that God had punished the nation for allowing women greater liberties (thus clearly showing the dangers of fanaticism and ignorance and giving credence to Einstein’s quote that human stupidity is virtually infinite): “Mullahs … 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.” (107). The Taliban seized power when Malala was ten, and they were led by Maulana Fazlullah, “a 28-year-old who used to operate the pulley chair to cross the Swat River and whose right leg dragged because of childhood polio. He had studied in the madrasa of Maulana Sufi Mohammad, the founder of the TNSM, and married his daughter” (112). He soon started a radio station that was illegal, and it was known as the “Mullah FM,” and Fazlullah was named the “Radio Mullah.” Careful to get support in the beginning, Fazlullah started his career by being quite realistic and humane. However, he was also a fanatic, seeing how he and his comrades “warned people to stop listening to music, watching movies and dancing. Sinful acts like these had caused the earthquake, Fazlullah thundered, and if people didn't stop they would again invite the wrath of God. Mullahs often misinterpret the Quan and Hadith when they teach them in our country, as few people understand the original Arabic. Fazlullah exploited this ignorance” (113). As expected, Fazlullah’s appeals to people's ignorance made him quite popular with many, as he promised them an eternity of bliss if they were to follow his advice. Many people gave much of their money (some even their life savings) to his cause, believing that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. Malala’s father tellingly said, “‘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,’” “‘The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa.’” (117). Fazlullah denounced women’s education, as Sufi Mohammad said that women should be completely barred from education. Not having enough, he banned barbers in an attempt to force men to grow large beards. They also whipped people in makeshift courts (though these courts were efficient in their proceedings, to the delight of many people, as official government trials can take a long time to just start), and even went against public health: “His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an American plot to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out” (120). To reiterate, the behavior of humans is frequently akin to a disease: many nationalistic, political, and religious groups try to increase their numbers through reproduction to keep their group “strong,” which is infinitely foolish, seeing the danger of overpopulation and resource consumption, not to mention that we are technically all human beings - our few differences are nothing compared to our many similarities. Fazlullah then began sanctioning the murders of people: though he had not taken power yet, the authorities ignored the killings he ordered.
The Taliban, in an attempt to get rid of rival religions, “destroyed the Buddhist statues and stupas where we played, which had been there for thousands of years and were a part of our history from the time of the Kushan kings. They believed any statue or painting was haram, sinful and therefore prohibited. One black day they even dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha, which was carved into a hillside just half an hour’s drive from Mingora and towered twenty-three feet into the sky. Archaeologists say it was almost as important as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Afghan Taliban blew up” (123-4). The Taliban also banned board games and began committing mass murder, killing the policemen, intimidating them so much that they had little trouble taking over multiple villages and areas. Even in the capital of the area, Islamabad, young women who had been indoctrinated destroyed pieces of technology in an attempt to remove modernization (giving credence to Michio Kaku’s description of terrorists and the like as scared people who want tradition more than innovation and improvement, as they typically believe the past was somehow better than the future). Benazir returned in an attempt to restore peace to the area, only to be targeted by an explosion that killed 150 people. The Taliban later murdered her by using a suicide bomber. Many Islamic extremists justified her death by saying that she wasn’t “‘following Islam properly’” (134). The Taliban continued to use suicide bombers to kill large groups of people, even those who were attending the funerals of past victims: in merely one incident, more than fifty-five people lost their lives. By the end of 2008, approximately 400 schools were destroyed by the Taliban (again, in an attempt to make stupid and to brainwash people into following their religion and to produce future progeny who will likewise be indoctrinated and turned into a slave of ideology). Malala’s life was personally affected: she could hear bombs going off around her home, and some of her friends witnessed executions and whippings. She also took care to hide the fact that she engaged in entertainment which the Taliban viewed as “sinful” (ex. watching TV), and stayed mostly at home in her free time, seeing that going outside was quite dangerous. Furthermore, “at the end of 2008, Fazlullah’s deputy Maulana Shah Dauran announced on the radio that all girl’s schools would close. From 15 January girls must not go to school, he warned.” (146). The Taliban, in an attempt to intimidate people, continued to brutally murder people (ex. they abused and shot to death a woman whose only crime was dancing - she was said to be “immoral”). This clearly demonstrates the danger of religious fanaticism: as the polymath Denis Diderot once said, “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.” Malala, witnessing the atrocities, was shocked by what was happening in the name of Islam, and responded to the issue by writing a diary to later show the world: she wanted to illustrate the terrible effects war (bred in this case by militant religious extremists) has on people. Later, facing external pressure, Fazlullah agreed to a temporary truce, and stated that girls up to grade 4 can be educated. However, this made nothing better: after making the deal with Pakistan’s government, the Taliban “became even more barbaric. They were now state-sanctioned terrorists. We were disillusioned and disappointed. The peace deal was merely an image. One night the Taliban held what we call a flag march near our street and patrolled the roads with guns and sticks as if they were the army.” (169). As illustrated in the previous quote, the Taliban continued torturing, intimidating, and indoctrinating people (they’re still in power in Afghanistan today) - they eventually had the audacity to assume they were in power, as the army was indeed terrified of them (policemen, as stated before, didn't resist their atrocities for fear of their lives). As Malala put it, “Militants had killed Benazir, blown up the country’s best-known hotel, killed thousands of people in suicide bombings and beheadings and destroyed hundreds of schools. What more would it take for the army and government to resist them?” (174). Malala’s family, seeing the danger of the situation, eventually left the Swat valley: Malala described it as the hardest thing in her life, as she had lived there all her life. “There were a lot of us-not just us five but also my grandmother, my cousin, his wife, Honey, and their baby. My brothers also wanted to take their pet chickens-mine had died because I washed it in cold water on a winter’s day … we left them with a lot of water and corn. She also said I must leave my school bag because there was so little room. I was horrified. I went and whispered Quranic verses over the books to try and protect them.” (178). When she and her family left, they found that the streets were extremely crowded, as plenty of people were trying to leave (illustrating the danger of a high population density and overpopulation).
After leaving, Malala’s family stayed in Karshat, the village of Malala’s mother, with her uncle Faiz Mohammad and his family. After a while, they left for other areas. Almost three months after their departure, they returned to Swat. Malala details, “As we drove through villages we saw buildings in ruins and burned-out vehicles. It made me think of old war movies or the video games my brother Khushal loves to play. When we reached Mingora we were shocked. The army and Taliban had fought street to street and almost every wall was pockmarked with bullet holes. There was the rubble of blown-up buildings which the Taliban had used as hideouts, and piles of wreckage, twisted metal and smashed-up signs. Most of the shops had heavy metal shutters; those that didn't had been looted. The city was silent and emptied of people and traffic as if a plague had descended. The strangest sight of all was the bus station. Usually it’s a complete confusion of Flying Coaches and rickshaws, but now it was completely deserted. We even saw plants growing up through the cracks in the paving. We had never seen our city like this” (189-90). The Taliban, however, appeared to be gone. All in all, “as many as half of its 1.8 million population had left our valley. From what we could see, most of them weren’t convinced it was safe to return.” (190). When they went home, they found that the backyard was overgrown with plants. As expected, the chickens had died (this is very negligent of them: since this outcome could’ve been predicted, they should’ve shown some mercy and killed them quickly instead of forcing them to starve to death in horrendous agony): “All that remained of the chickens was a pile of feathers and the bones of their small bodies entangled as if they had died in an embrace. They had starved to death.” (190). Fortunately for Malala, her books were largely untouched, and the school her father ran was intact (though the building opposing it was obliterated). However, it was desecrated terribly: “There were cigarette stubs and empty food wrappers all over the floor. Chairs had been upended and the space was a mess. My father had taken down the Khushal School sign and left it in the courtyard. It was leaning against the wall and I screamed as we lifted it. Underneath were the rotting heads of goats. It looked like the remains of someone’s dinner. Then we went into the classrooms. Anti-Taliban slogans were scrawled all over the walls. Someone had written ARMY ZINDABAD (Long live the army) on a whiteboard in permanent marker. Now we knew who had been living there. One soldier had even written corny love poems in one of my classmate’s diaries. Bullet casings littered the floor. The soldiers had made a hole in the wall through which you could see the city below. Maybe they had shot at people through that hole. I felt sorry that our precious school had become a battlefield.” (191). Fazlullah was gone, still at large: in fact, most of the leaders of the Taliban were not captured, as the only important figures who were caught were Muslim Khan and a commander named Mehmud. Malala and some of the other girls talked to a general named Abbas, and he answered their questions, though some of his answers were vague (ex. when he was asked when the schools would be rebuilt, he said that the army will go through standard protocol once they secure the area). For the three months in which Malala and the others were gone, the teachers of the Khushal school didn't receive their salaries. This was a big problem, as they needed a total of one million rupees. Malala solved the problem by writing to General Abbas asking for assistance: “He was very kind and sent us 1,100,000 rupees so my father could pay everyone three months’ back pay.” (197). Later, floods struck the Swat valley, severely damaging the school. Malala details, “It took days for the water to drain away and when we returned we could see chest-high tide marks on the walls. There was mud, mud, mud everywhere. Our desks and chairs were covered with it. The classrooms smelled disgusting. There was so much damage that it cost my father 90,000 rupees to repair-equivalent to the monthly fees for ninety students.” (200). Aside from that, the flood also impacted other areas: “Roads, crops, and entire people were affected. Around 2,000 people drowned and 14 million people were affected. Many of them lost their homes and 7,000 schools were destroyed. It was the worst flood in living memory. The head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, called it a ‘slow-motion tsunami.’ We read that more lives had been affected and more damage had been caused by the floods than the Asian tsunami, our 2005 earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake combined.” (201). Some people remarked that Swat had become “The Valley of Sorrows”: their misery would only get worse over time, as the flood affected the valley’s use of electricity, preventing the people from having access to clean water, causing cholera cases to appear. Malala remarks that during this time, Swat’s politicians were all virtually useless, much to her dismay.
Although the Taliban was terrible, the army was also guilty of crimes: “There was a teacher in our school who lived just a ten-minute walk from our house. Her brother had been picked up by the army, put in leg irons and tortured, and then kept in a fridge until he died. He’d had nothing to do with the Taliban. He was just a simple shopkeeper. Afterward the army apologized to her and said they’d been confused by his name and picked up the wrong person.” (207). Afghanistan eventually passed the Blasphemy Law, which punished people who committed blasphemy when it came to Islam. In another incident, “on 4 January 2011, Salman Taseer [a governor who protested the Blasphemy Law and said that it was unjust] was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards after lunch … The man shot him twenty-six times. He later said that he had done it for God after hearing the Friday prayers in Rawalpindi. We were shocked by how many people praised the killer. When he appeared in court even lawyers showered him with rose petals. Meanwhile the imam at the late governor’s mosque refused to perform his funeral prayers and the president did not attend his funeral. Our country was going crazy. How was it possible that we were now garlanding murderers?” (208-9). America’s drone attacks made the situation much more unstable, but they were somewhat successful, as Osama bin Laden had been slain (and rightly so for his atrocious deeds): “He had been living in a large walled compound less than a mile from our military academy. We couldn’t believe the army had been oblivious to bin Laden’s whereabouts. The newspapers said that the cadets even did their training in the field alongside his house. The compound had twelve-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire. Bin Laden lived on the top floor with his youngest wife, a Yemeni woman named Amal. Two other wives and his eleven children lived below them. An American senator said that the only thing missing from bin Laden’s hideaway was ‘a neon sign.’ … Their food was brought in by two brothers who also lived in the compound with their wives. They acted as couriers for bin Laden. One of the wives was from Swat! The SEALs had shot bin Laden in the head and his body had been flown out by helicopter … The two brothers and one of bin Laden’s grown-up sons had also been killed, but bin Laden’s wives and other children had been tied up and left behind and were then taken into Pakistani custody. The Americans dumped bin Laden’s body at sea.” (211). Malala writes that it was very embarrassing for Pakistan to have allowed bin Laden to have remained undetected in open sight for so many years: “he had been living in that house since the 2005 earthquake. Two of his children were even born in the Abbottabad hospital. And he’d been in Pakistan for more than nine years … the Americans had discovered one of his couriers, tracked the number plate of his car, and followed it from Peshawar to Abbottabad. After that they monitored the house with a kind of giant drone that has X-ray vision, which spotted a very tall bearded man pacing around the compound” (212-3). Malala later participated in the KidRights contest (she was one of five nominees) and was given $4500 dollars, which she used to help females get their deserved rights. She was also the recipient of the National Peace Prize, the very first which was passed in Pakistan. After she received it, “It was decided that the prize should be awarded annually to children under eighteen years old and be named the Malala Prize in my honor” (215). However, tragedy struck once again: “Five days after I got the award, Aunt Babo, my mother’s eldest sister, died suddenly. She wasn’t even fifty years old. She was diabetic and had seen a TV ad for a doctor in Lahore with some miracle treatment and persuaded my uncle to take her there. We don’t know what the doctor injected her with, but she went into shock and died. My father said the doctor was a charlatan and this was why we needed to keep struggling against ignorance.” (216).
Malala, for all her campaigning, was targeted by the Taliban, seeing that they saw that she was a large threat towards them. Her father believed he was the one who was going to be killed by the Taliban, and accepted his fate with resignation: “he again refused security from the police. ‘If you go around with a lot of security the Taliban will use Kalashnikovs or suicide bombers and more people will be killed,’ he said, ‘At least I’ll be killed alone.’ Nor would he leave Swat. ‘Where can I go?’ he asked my mother. ‘I cannot leave the area. I am president of the Global Peace Council, the spokesperson of the council of elders, the president of the Swat Association of Private Schools, director of my school and head of my family.’” (233). Although Malala took precautions against the Taliban coming to harm her family (she was the last to go to sleep: when everyone else is slumbering, she would check all the rooms and would make sure the doors are locked), she was still shot by two young men who served the Taliban as she was on a school bus that was taking her home: “I didn't see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt. I didn't get a chance to answer their question ‘Who is Malala?’ or I would have explained to them why they should let us girls go to school as well as their own sisters and daughters. The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day. The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing the heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one” (241-2). Malala was rushed to the hospital, where she was given basic treatment (there wasn’t the necessary medical equipment). In just a few hours, an army helicopter picked her up and delivered her to capable doctors in another area. After receiving multiple surgeries and weeks of intensive care, Malala finally recovered. She was close to dying multiple times (at one point she developed disseminated intravascular coagulation, or DIC), which “meant my blood was not clotting, my blood pressure was very low and my blood acid had risen. I wasn’t passing urine any more, so my kidneys were failing, and my lactate levels had risen.” (262). Also, it should be mentioned that Malala was flown to the UK to receive treatment: one of her doctors was entrusted by her parents for being her legal guardian, seeing that they didn't have passports. When Malala definitively awoke from her coma, it was one week after getting shot. Utterly bewildered, she didn't know where she was, and she was worried about the medical bills, as her family had only a scant amount of money. Fortunately for her, the Pakistan government paid for all her medical expenses (though many others weren’t so lucky - the right to adequate healthcare should, in an ideal world, be given to every human being). It was a miracle that Malala was alive, as the bullet could’ve easily pierced her brain or eye if it was only tilted in a different direction. Malala was sent to Birmingham, England for her safety and recovery - she thought she would only be there temporarily, and couldn’t have expected to live there for many more years. In the end, the Taliban had utterly failed in their purpose: they wanted to intimidate people, yet they only made the issue for women’s education go global, seeing how they drew almost universal condemnation from a variety of people. A facial nerve of Malala was damaged in the shooting, causing her, while recovering, to not be able to control her facial expressions. Also, the assassination attempt had led to certain action: “Rehman Malik [interior minister of Pakistan] … said he had put a $1 million bounty on the head of Ataullah and promised they would find him. We doubted that, as no one has ever been caught-not the killer of Benazir Bhutto, not whoever was behind the plane crash that killed General Zia, not the assassin of our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.” (293). Even more absurdly, her bus driver had been incarcerated, though he didn't commit any crime (Malala wrote that he had a good sense of humor and was friendly towards the students). Malala eventually underwent surgery to repair her facial nerve, and she recovered: over the course of a few months, she regained most of her facial ability. She also received other surgeries that helped her regain her bodily autonomy. Malala goes back to the present while she was writing the book, and recollects that while she was extremely lucky to have largely recovered, she and her family still misses home - her father, for instance, had spent years trying to provide students with a good place for education, only to be forced to leave by religious fanatics who almost murdered his daughter in cold blood. Furthermore, Malala writes that much needs to be done to improve the world: “there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them girls. Sadly, my own country, Pakistan, is one of the worst places: 5.1 million children don’t even go to primary school even though in our constitution it says every child has that right. We have almost fifty million illiterate adults, two thirds of whom are women, like my own mother. Girls continue to be killed and schools blown up … The most shocking attack was in June in the city of Quetta, when a suicide bomber blew up a bus taking forty pupils to their all-girls’ college. Fourteen of them were killed. The wounded were followed to the hospital and some nurses were shot. It’s not just the Taliban killing children. Sometimes it’s drone attacks, sometimes it’s wars, sometimes it’s hunger. And sometimes it’s their own family. In June two girls my age were murdered in Gilgit, which is a little north of Swat, for posting a video online showing themselves dancing in the rain wearing traditional dress and headscarves. Apparently their own stepbrother shot them.” (312). Malala describes that even though Swat is more peaceful in the present, the Taliban are still prominent and prevalent. Regardless, she says that she’s grateful for whatever she has, and “To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish. I am Malala. My world has changed but I have not.” (313).
Personal thoughts:
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai is a harrowing, inspirational, and powerful book that should be read by every human being due to the themes which it bravely discusses, from the dangers of religious fanaticism to the importance of education to the vitality of having basic human rights and freedoms. Indeed, when I read this book, I was shocked that groups like the Taliban still existed (while I knew they did exist in the world, I didn't know the exact details of their actions), as I believed that they were too dangerous and fanatical to have many followers. I was clearly mistaken in my previous viewpoint: after reading this book, I appreciate the freedoms that I have, including the freedom of speech, the freedom to travel as I will, the freedom to believe what I desire (so long as it doesn’t harm others, of course), and the freedom to govern my own life when it comes to many other fields. Malala is an inspirational heroine, as she clearly demonstrates that individual voices could have massive impacts, though doing so is frequently quite dangerous for those involved. While humanity does have potential, it still faces massive problems: if it wants to better itself as a whole, it must allow education for all people, regardless of their differences. I highly recommend I Am Malala to anyone interested in real-life heroes and heroines, conflicts, current events, the importance of education, and the dangers of bigotry and ignorance.
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