I Am Malala

or lion?’

Our school was a haven from the horrors outside. All the other girls in my class wanted to be doctors, but I decided I wanted to be an inventor and make an anti-Taliban machine which would sniff them out and destroy their guns. But of course at school we were under threat too, and some of my friends dropped out. Fazlullah kept broadcasting that girls should stay at home and his men had started blowing up schools, usually during night-time curfew when the children were not there.

The first school to be blown up was Shawar Zangay, a government girls’ primary school in Matta. We couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing. Then many more bombings followed, almost every day. Even in Mingora, there were explosions. Twice bombs went off when I was in the kitchen, so close by that the whole house rattled and the fan above the window fell down. I became very scared of going into the kitchen and would only run in and out.

On the last day of February 2008 I was in the kitchen when we heard an enormous blast. It was ear- shatteringly loud and obviously close by. As we always did, we called to each other to make sure we were all safe. ‘Khaista, Pisho, Bhabi, Khushal, Atal!’ Then we heard sirens, one after another as if all the ambulances of Mingora were passing. A suicide bomber had struck in the basketball court at Haji Baba High School. Funeral prayers had been under way for a popular local police officer, Javid Iqbal, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in a remote area while trying to escape from the Taliban. He was from Mingora, and his body had been brought back for the funeral and a police salute. Now the Taliban had bombed the mourners. More than fifty-five people were killed, including Javid Iqbal’s young son and many people we knew. Ten members of Moniba’s family were there and were either killed or injured. Moniba was devastated and the whole town was in shock. There were condolences in every mosque.

‘Are you scared now?’ I asked my father.

‘At night our fear is strong, Jani,’ he told me, ‘but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again.’ And this is true for my family. We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage. ‘We must rid our valley of the Taliban, and then no one has to feel this fear,’ he said.

In times of crisis we Pashtuns resort to the old trusted ways, so in 2008 elders in Swat created an assembly called the Qaumi Jirga to challenge Fazlullah. Three local men, Mukhtar Khan Yousafzai, Khurshid Kakajee and Zahid Khan went from hujra to hujra persuading elders to join together. The senior elder was a white-bearded man of seventy-four called Abdul Khan Khaliq who had been one of the Queen’s bodyguards when she had visited Swat to stay with our wali. Even though my father was not an elder or a khan, he was chosen as spokesperson as he was not afraid to speak out. Though he was more poetic in Pashto, he could speak our national language, Urdu, and English fluently, which meant he was an effective communicator outside Swat as well as inside.

Every day, on behalf of the Swat Council of Elders, he was at seminars or on the media challenging Fazlullah. ‘What are you doing?’ he would ask. ‘You are playing havoc with our lives and our culture.’

My father would say to me, ‘Any organisation which works for peace, I will join. If you want to resolve a dispute or come out from conflict, the very first thing is to speak the truth. If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomach ache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear.’

When he met his fellow activists, particularly his old friends Ahmad Shah, Mohammad Farooq and Zahid Khan, I often went with him. Ahmad Shah also had a school, where Mohammad Farooq worked, and they would sometimes gather on his lawn. Zahid Khan was a hotel owner and had a big hujra. When they came to our house I would bring them tea then sit quietly listening as they discussed what to do. ‘Malala is not just the daughter of Ziauddin,’ they would say; ‘she is the daughter of all of us.’

They went back and forth to Peshawar and Islamabad and gave lots of interviews on the radio, particularly to the Voice of America and the BBC, taking turns so there would always be one of them available. They told people that what was happening in Swat was not about Islam. My father said the Taliban presence in Swat was not possible without the support of some in the army and the bureaucracy. The state is meant to protect the rights of its citizens, but it’s a very difficult situation when you can’t tell the difference between state and non-state and can’t trust the state to protect you against non-state.

Our military and ISI are very powerful and most people did not like to voice these things publicly, but my father and many of his friends were not scared. ‘What you are doing is against our people and against Pakistan,’ he would say. ‘Don’t support Talibanisation, it’s inhuman. We are told that Swat is being sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan, but no one and nothing should be sacrificed for the state. A state is like a mother, and a mother never deserts or cheats her children.’

He hated the fact that most people would not speak up. In his pocket he kept a poem written by Martin Niemoller, who had lived in Nazi Germany.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

I knew he was right. If people were silent nothing would change.

At school my father organised a peace march and encouraged us to speak out against what was happening. Moniba put it well. ‘We Pashtuns are a religion-loving people,’ she said. ‘Because of the Taliban, the whole world is claiming we are terrorists. This is not the case. We are peace-loving. Our mountains, our trees, our flowers – everything in our valley is about peace.’ A group of us girls gave an interview on ATV Khyber, the only privately owned Pashto television channel, about girls dropping out of school due to militancy. Teachers helped us beforehand on how to respond to questions. I wasn’t the only one to be interviewed. When we were eleven and twelve, we did them together, but as we turned thirteen or fourteen my friends’ brothers and fathers didn’t allow them because they had entered puberty and should observe purdah and also they were afraid.

One day I went on Geo, which is one of the biggest news channels in our country. There was a wall of screens in their office. I was astonished to see so many channels. Afterwards I thought, The media needs interviews. They want to interview a small girl, but the girls are scared, and even if they’re not, their parents won’t allow it. I have a father who isn’t scared, who stands by me. He said, ‘You are a child and it’s your right to speak.’ The more interviews I gave, the stronger I felt and the more support we received. I was only eleven but I looked older, and the media seemed to like hearing from a young girl. One journalist called me takra jenai – a ‘bright shining young lady’ and another said you are ‘pakha jenai’ – you are wise beyond your years. In my heart was the belief that God would protect me. If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so. God wants to see how we behave in such situations. There is a saying in the Quran, ‘The falsehood has to go and the truth will prevail.’ If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it? I wondered. I prayed to God every night to give me strength.

The media in Swat were under pressure to give positive coverage to the Taliban – some even respectfully called the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan ‘School dada’, when in reality he was destroying schools. But many local journalists were unhappy about what was happening to their valley and they gave us a powerful platform as we would say things they didn’t dare to.

We didn’t have a car so we went by rickshaw, or one of my father’s friends would take us to the interviews.