I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (24)

I knew it was pointless appealing to Musharraf. In my experience, if my father couldn’t help with matters like these, there was only one option. I wrote a letter to God. ‘Dear God,’ I wrote, ‘I know you see everything, but there are so many things that maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.’

The problem was I did not know how to get it to him. Somehow I thought it needed to go deep into the earth, so first I buried it in the garden. Then I thought it would get spoilt, so I put it in a plastic bag. But that didn’t seem much use. We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.





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The Mufti Who Tried to Close Our School


JUST IN FRONT of the school on Khushal Street, where I was born, was the house of a tall handsome mullah and his family. His name was Ghulamullah and he called himself a mufti, which means he is an Islamic scholar and authority on Islamic law, though my father complains that anyone with a turban can call themselves a maulana or mufti. The school was doing well, and my father was building an impressive reception with an arched entrance in the boy’s high school. For the first time my mother could buy nice clothes and even send out for food as she had dreamed of doing back in the village. But all this time the mufti was watching. He watched the girls going in and out of our school every day and became angry, particularly as some of the girls were teenagers. ‘That maulana has a bad eye on us,’ said my father one day. He was right.

Shortly afterwards the mufti went to the woman who owned the school premises and said, ‘Ziauddin is running a haram school in your building and bringing shame on the mohalla [neighbourhood]. These girls should be in purdah.’ He told her, ‘Take this building back from him and I will rent it for my madrasa. If you do this you will get paid now and also receive a reward in the next world.’

She refused and her son came to my father in secret. ‘This maulana is starting a campaign against you,’ he warned. ‘We won’t give him the building but be careful.’

My father was angry. ‘Just as we say, “Nim hakim khatrai jan” – “Half a doctor is a danger to one’s life,” so, “Nim mullah khatrai iman” – “A mullah who is not fully learned is a danger to faith”,’ he said.

I am proud that our country was created as the world’s first Muslim homeland, but we still don’t agree on what this means. The Quran teaches us sabar – patience – but often it feels that we have forgotten the word and think Islam means women sitting at home in purdah or wearing burqas while men do jihad. We have many strands of Islam in Pakistan. Our founder Jinnah wanted the rights of Muslims in India to be recognised, but the majority of people in India were Hindu. It was as if there was a feud between two brothers and they agreed to live in different houses. So 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 travelled in the other direction. Almost two million of them were killed trying to cross the new border. Many were slaughtered on trains which arrived 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 per cent are Muslim. We also have around two million Christians and more than two million Ahmadis, who say they are Muslims though our government says they are not. Sadly those minority communities are often attacked.

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.