they did in Waziristan when they went after kidnappers and bandits. After, when they get power, they behave like the criminals they once hunted down.’
Fazlullah’s broadcasts were often aimed at women. He must have known that many of our men were away from home, working in coal mines in the south or on building sites in the Gulf. Sometimes he would say, ‘Men, go outside now. I am talking to the women.’ Then he’d say, ‘Women are meant to fulfil their responsibilities in the home. Only in emergencies can they go outside, but then they must wear the veil.’ Sometimes his men would display the fancy clothes that they said they had taken from ‘decadent women’ to shame them.
My friends at school said their mothers listened to the Radio Mullah although our headmistress Madam Maryam told us not to. At home we only had my grandfather’s old radio, which was broken, but my mother’s friends all listened and told her what they heard. They praised Fazlullah and talked of his long hair, the way he rode a horse and behaved like the Prophet. Women would tell him their dreams and he would pray for them. My mother enjoyed these stories, but my father was horrified.
I was confused by Fazlullah’s words. In the Holy Quran it is not written that men should go outside and women should work all day in the home. In our Islamic studies class at school we used to write essays entitled ‘How the Prophet Lived’. We learned that the first wife of the Prophet was a businesswoman called Khadijah. She was forty, fifteen years older than him, and she had been married before, yet he still married her. I also knew from watching my own mother that Pashtun women are very powerful and strong. Her mother, my grandmother, had looked after all eight children alone after my grandfather had an accident and broke his pelvis and could not leave his bed for eight years.
A man goes out to work, he earns a wage, he comes back home, he eats, he sleeps. That’s what he does. Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children. In our house my mother managed everything because my father was so busy. It was my mother who would wake up early in the morning, iron our school clothes, make our breakfast and teach us how to behave. It was my mother who would go to the market, shop for us and cook. All those things she did.
In the first year of the Taliban I had two operations, one to take out my appendix and the other to remove my tonsils. Khushal had his appendix out too. It was my mother who took us to hospital; my father just visited us and brought ice cream. Yet my mother still believed it was written in the Quran that women should not go out and women should not talk to men other than relatives they cannot marry. My father would say to her, ‘Pekai, purdah is not only in the veil, purdah is in the heart.’
Lots of women were so moved by what Fazlullah said that they gave him gold and money, particularly in poor villages or households where the husbands were working abroad. Tables were set up for the women to hand over their wedding bangles and necklaces and women queued up to do so or sent their sons. Some gave their life savings, believing that this would make God happy. He began building a vast red-brick headquarters in Imam Deri complete with a madrasa, a mosque and walls and levees to protect it from the Swat River. No one knew where he got the cement and iron bars from but the workforce was local. Every village had to take turns sending their men for a day to help build it. One day one of our Urdu teachers, Nawab Ali, told my father, ‘I won’t be coming to school tomorrow.’ When my father asked why, he explained it was his village’s turn to work on Fazlullah’s buildings.
‘Your prime responsibility is to teach the students,’ replied my father.
‘No, I have to do this,’ said Nawab Ali.
My father came home fuming. ‘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,’ he said. ‘The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa.’
A few weeks later the same teacher told him that he could no longer teach girls as ‘the
My father tried to change his mind. ‘I agree that female teachers should educate girls,’ he said. ‘But first we need to educate our girls so they can become teachers!’
One day Sufi Mohammad proclaimed from jail that there should be no education for women even at girls’ madrasas. ‘If someone can show any example in history where Islam allows a female madrasa, they can come and piss on my beard,’ he said. Then the Radio Mullah turned his attention to schools. He began speaking against school administrators and congratulating girls by name who left school. ‘Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,’ he’d say, or, ‘Miss X of Y village has stopped education at Class 5. I congratulate her.’ Girls like me who still went to school he called buffaloes and sheep.
My friends and I couldn’t understand why it was so wrong. ‘Why don’t they want girls to go to school?’ I asked my father.
‘They are scared of the pen,’ he replied.
Then another teacher at our school, a maths teacher with long hair, also refused to teach girls. My father fired him, but some other teachers were worried and sent a delegation to his office. ‘Sir, don’t do this,’ they pleaded. ‘These are bad days. Let him stay and we will cover for him.’
Every day it seemed a new edict came. Fazlullah closed beauty parlours and banned shaving so there was no work for barbers. My father, who only has a moustache, insisted he would not grow a beard for the Taliban. The Taliban told women not to go to the bazaar. I didn’t mind not going to the Cheena Bazaar. I didn’t enjoy shopping, unlike my mother, who liked beautiful clothes even though we didn’t have much money. My mother always told me, ‘Hide your face – people are looking at you.’
I would reply, ‘It doesn’t matter; I’m also looking at them,’ and she’d get so cross.
My mother and her friends were upset about not being able to go shopping, particularly in the days before the Eid holidays, when we beautify ourselves and go to the stalls lit up by fairy lights that sell bangles and henna. All of that stopped. The women would not be attacked if they went to the markets, but the Taliban would shout at them and threaten them until they stayed at home. One Talib could intimidate a whole village. We children were cross too. Normally there are new film releases for the holidays, but Fazlullah had closed the DVD shops. Around this time my mother also got tired of Fazlullah, especially when he began to preach against education and insist that those who went to school would also go to hell.
Next Fazlullah began holding a
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. ‘To cure a disease before its onset is not in accordance with sharia law,’ said Fazlullah on the radio. ‘You will not find a single child to drink a drop of the vaccine anywhere in Swat.’
Fazlullah’s men patrolled the streets looking for offenders against his decrees just like the Taliban morality police we had heard about in Afghanistan. They set up volunteer traffic police called Falcon Commandos, who drove through the streets with machine guns mounted on top of their pick-up trucks.
Some people were happy. One day my father ran into his bank manager. ‘One good thing Fazlullah is doing is banning ladies and girls from going to the Cheena Bazaar, which saves us men money,’ he said. Few spoke out. My father complained that most people were like our local barber, who one day grumbled to my father that he had only eighty rupees in his till, less than a tenth of what his takings used to be. Just the day before the barber had told a journalist that the Taliban were good Muslims.
After Mullah FM had been on air for about a year, Fazlullah became more aggressive. His brother Maulana Liaquat, along with three of Liaquat’s sons, were among those killed in an American drone attack on the madrasa in Bajaur at the end of October 2006. Eighty people were killed including boys as young as twelve, some of whom
