Passionate, precocious, preternatural. The likely adjectives to strike you when you observe 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai. Coming from a region where parents force marriage on their daughters once they enter teenage, her audacity to punch above her weight reminds you of an Oliver Twist discovering a strand of defiance in his character and daring to “ask for more” in a milieu tormented by timidity. Her father has a one-line explanation for this in the third chapter of this book, “Circumstances have made her so.”
Malala the book could have been just the third chapter, ‘Finding my voice,’ and still made a meaningful monograph. For, this is where we get a glimpse of how circumstances forced Malala to wield her quill rather than sink into lassitude. Faced with a situation where she had to choose between fatalism and audacity, she chose the latter. The third chapter is about how she found an expression to this audacity as she entered her teens — her transformation from a tomboyish class topper to a vocal education activist.
It was December 2008, just a month after the 26/11 attacks, a time when India had all but severed its links with the conjoined twin to the west. As the Indian intelligentsia heaped opprobrium on Pakistan for providing safe haven to non-state actors, Pashtuns from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) — later renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — fought another battle that would have repercussions for the entire country.
In the serene Swat valley, considered a ‘Switzerland in the subcontinent,’ a semi-literate ‘mullah’ had taken on the mantle of moral police. Though the model of governance he had in mind was regressive and medieval, the tool he used to propagate it was modern. By operating illegal radio networks, Mullah Fazlullah earned the epithet ‘Radio Mullah’ and, through his writ, succeeded in creating both terror and confusion in the minds of the proud Pashtuns. The most vulnerable victims of his wrath were school girls — his code dictated that education was not for them. And as if bombing more than 200 schools in the region in a single year, 2008, was not enough, he ordered girls to stop going to school, setting a deadline.
Here, through serendipity, 11-year-old Malala Yousafzai found a device, the ‘magic pencil’ she had long desired for and started writing a blog for BBC. Her first write up, under the pseudonym ‘Gul Makai,’ went online on January 3, 2009 and received much-needed attention.
The common narrative that emerges as we look into her blog entries and her subsequent media appearances is one of her yearning for a good taleem (education) and her conviction that educated girls would be part of her country’s mustaqbil (future).
How did Malala discover this ‘voice?’ The insurgency in the valley provided the initial impetus. And her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, perhaps the most courageous proponent of girls’ education in the region, provided the guiding beacon. He comes across as a first generation educationist struggling to keep his dream project — that of Khushal school in which Malala and other girls in the valley study — going. Ziauddin dreams of a country where girls can lead by example and inspire others to realise their ambitions. He wants the charity to begin from home and aspires to take Malala’s courage to the next level by moulding her into a politician.
Apart from Malala’s courage and tenacity, another trait that endears her to the observers is her distinctive sense of humour. Amid the disasters — natural and engineered — plaguing the valley, she manages to retain her sanity, thanks in no small part to her optimism, her sobriety, her humour.
The most poignant example of this comes toward the end of the book, when she is recovering in Birmingham, bruised after being shot by a misguided Talib a few weeks ago but not intimidated. As she glances into the mirror and sees a stranger at the other end, her reaction is not one of horror but of curiosity. That of a ‘scientist studying a specimen,’ is how she puts it. A gem of a statement here is, “[W]hen you’ve nearly lost your life, a funny face in the mirror is simply proof that you are still here on this earth.”
It is this optimism that came to her aid as she recovered, lived on to tell the tale and won the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the cause she champions still faces a perilous path. As per the figures provided by the Pakistani government for 2011-12, the literacy rate for women, in the whole of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is only about 35 per cent. Taliban’s assault on girls’ education continues: the insurgents have destroyed more than 400 schools in Swat between 2001 and 2009, 70 per cent of them being girls’ schools.
Malala is safe and was able to wield her quill to narrate her tale. Malala’s idealism requires more such quills of hope.
