Pakistan:The Taliban and politicians are afraid of Malala’s book, they are afraid of her values

By ALISON ROBERTS

On the day that Malala was shot, her father Ziauddin Yousafzai was at the Swat Press Club for a meeting, and had just taken the stage to make a speech when his phone rang. Malala’s bus had been attacked. “I had a sixth sense as soon as it rang that it was something bad and it was something to do with Malala,” he says now. Later that day he took a call from the father of Arfa Karim, a female Pakistani computer prodigy whom Bill Gates invited to Microsoft and who died in 2011 from a heart attack at the age of 17. “Her father called out of sympathy and solidarity, and I remember asking him to tell me how does one live without a daughter? And after that I cried and cried. I couldn’t speak any more.”

Malala’s recovery has been good. Although she will never be the same physically — she has a titanium plate fixed with eight screws to the top of her head — in spirit she seems very like the girl she was. Yousafzai flicks through the photographs of his daughter in her book: “Yes, she had changed, but we all change with the passage of time.”

Some things don’t change though. Three days ago the planned launch of Malala’s best-selling memoir in her home province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in Pakistan was abruptly cancelled. Organisers of the event at Peshawar University claimed they’d come under intense pressure from senior local government officials, who themselves were likely influenced by the Taliban’s vehement opposition to the book. It was a masked member of the Taliban, of course, who in October 2012 shot 15-year-old Malala at point blank range for campaigning for girls education in a country where female literacy is still less than 50 per cent.

In the time I spend with Yousafzai, he speaks fervently but for the most part calmly; a slim, neat man, he is only 45, but seems older, perhaps because he has witnessed the kind of atrocities that we can only imagine in nightmares.

But on the subject of the scrapped launch for I Am Malala, Yousafzai is suddenly full of bright anger.

KP province is controlled by a coalition consisting of hard-line Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led by former cricketer Imran Khan, who on Monday night tweeted: “I am at a loss 2 understand why Malala’s book launch stopped in Peshawar. PTI believes in freedom of speech/debate, not censorship of ideas.”

Yousafzai doesn’t believe it. “It is the failure of the politicians!” he cries. “It’s the PTI that stopped the launch. What is the reason for this? The reason is that this book is challenging norms and traditions that go against human rights. The powers of regression, the powers of darkness and oppression, they are afraid of [Malala]. They are afraid of this book. They are afraid of her values. Because they want theirs to remain, and theirs are ignorance, illiteracy and ideology.” In KP province, extremists have threatened to attack bookshops that stock I Am Malala.

I meet Yousafzai in Birmingham, where the family — Malala has two younger brothers — are now reluctantly settled. In the days following the assassination attempt she was brought from Rawalpindi to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where some of the world’s best specialists work with soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The world reacted with horror to her suffering, and as she slowly recovered, her global fame grew. Malala became an icon for the rights of girls and women, fêted by the most powerful people in the world. Yet back in Pakistan, which the family misses enormously, Malala’s fame has been the cause of widespread suspicion, with some accusing her of being a puppet for the west and even questioning the truth of her shooting. For most of his life, Ziauddin has been an activist and teacher whose views are sought for their own sake. Now, he readily admits, he is “Malala’s dad”. Today in London, while his daughter knuckles down to study for A-levels, he accepts on Malala’s behalf an Anne Frank award for moral courage from the actress Naomie Harris, given by the Anne Frank Trust UK. And tomorrow, Yousafzai appears in the opening debate of the Being A Man festival at the Southbank Centre, discussing, with some irony, the education of boys. Yet a liberal education, which teaches boys to think critically, free from dogma, is key to the emancipation of girls and women, he says.

“In some divine books, it tells that a woman is evil. They say she is half a man. Some people say a woman cannot be wise, a woman cannot be powerful, cannot be a ruler or lead men. If this kind of education is imparted to boys, given to them by elders, then ultimately a boy always thinks himself to be dominant and superior and more important than his sister ... I sometimes say that indoctrination is worse than illiteracy. It is brainwashing, and a man is more harmful to society than if he had never been taught at all. The need is that boys [in many developing countries] be given a different kind of education.”

Yousafzai has been called a visionary. Her campaign is in many ways his: at the school he founded and still owns in the beautiful Swat Valley, where Malala grew up, Yousafzai encouraged the girls to speak out when they were expected to be silent by almost every other man. He is a UN special adviser on education, yet his family were devout, rural and poor, and no girl before Malala had ever learned to read or write. “I am a proud father, but not a proud brother,” he says. “My [five] sisters did not go to school, but I was the youngest and too small to teach them...”

His ambitions for Malala were great. “In Pakistan you need a lot of money to be a politician. If I’d had enough, I would have been in politics. Instead, I saw this great potential in my daughter to do the things I could not do,” he says. Yet during the darkest months of early 2009, when the Taliban controlled the war-ravaged Swat Valley, it was Yousafzai, not Malala, whom the family assumed the extremists would target. Malala began writing a blog for the BBC under a pseudonym, but her father was well-known for his resistance to the closure of girls’ schools ordered by the Taliban. He began to sleep away from the family home, never in the same place on consecutive nights.

“People were being taken from their houses at night and brought to the town square to be killed, and I was afraid that one night they would come for me. It would have been a terrible trauma and cruelty for my wife and children to have seen that. And my family could not sleep in my presence anyway, they were too worried. It was nightmarish.” Malala’s mother Tor Pekai put a ladder ready in the backyard, so that Yousafzai could make a quick escape over the wall if the Taliban came for him. They never did; and instead, he laughs, a burglar used the ladder to steal their television.

He sees many parallels between Malala and Anne Frank, and describes what happened to his people under the Taliban as a kind of “holocaust”. “Theirs was a fast and stormy holocaust. Ours is a long and slow one.” He quotes the famous “First they came ...” poem by pastor Martin Niemoller, in which successive cohorts of victims are taken by the Nazis and no one speaks out.

“Well, it happened to us too. First [the Taliban] came for the police, and no one said anything, then they came for the local notables and leaders, then for the barbers who shaved beards and for the CD shop owners and the dancers... And then they came for a child.”

Does he ever feel guilty that she suffered because of his activism, because of his ambition for her?

“This is a very difficult question for me,” he replies slowly. “I have asked my wife about it. And she said, no, no, don’t think like that — you didn’t send her to steal anything, to commit a crime or break the law. You motivated her and supported her for the cause of education, for the rights of other girls. And when my wife said that, it was ok.

“Why should I be guilty? The people who shot her are guilty. The government and the institutions who could not protect her should feel guilty. The people who are now making up false stories about her should feel guilty... “My dream [for Malala] has changed. I no longer want her to be prime minister [of Pakistan]. God saved her for a reason, and now I dream she will be a change-maker in whatever way she can. She has already done more for her country and for the children of the world than many prime ministers have ever done.”