Malala a polarizing figure
KARACHI, PAKISTAN» Provincial police in Pakistan this week raided bookshops and seized copies of an elementary school social studies textbook that include a picture of education rights activist Malala Yousafzai, a polarizing figure in the country.
The picture of Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, appeared in a chapter on national heroes, alongside Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
The world’s youngest Nobel laureate, Malala, as the 24-yearold is universally known, has been hailed worldwide as a figure of courage for her activism, despite being shot in the head as a schoolgirl by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan’s Swat Valley in 2012.
Her biography, “I am Malala,” was an international bestseller.
But in her own country, she is the subject of fierce debate.
“For many in Pakistan, Malala has come to symbolize everything they imagine they hate about the West,” said Nida Kirmani, a professor of sociology at Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. “For others, she is a symbol of women’s rights and resistance against Islamist forces. For these reasons, she has become a divisive figure.”
Critics say the book seizures show a desire to suppress critical thinking and a growing intolerance of opinions contrary to conservative Islamic beliefs and cultural norms.
In 2012, Taliban fighters attempted
to assassinate Yousafzai on a bus returning from school after the BBC website published an article about her experiences under their rule. She moved to Britain and graduated from Oxford University last year.
Last month, in an interview with British Vogue magazine, Yousafzai, pondering where her young life may head, questioned the need for marriage, triggering a backlash in Pakistan.
“I still don’t understand why people have to get married,” she said, according to the article. “If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers? Why can’t it just be a partnership?”
In May her tweet that “violence in Jerusalem — especially against children — is unbearable,” enraged a number of Pakistanis
for neither mentioning the Palestinians nor condemning Israel.
The police and officials from the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board, a provincial authority, began conducting raids on shops across the city Monday to confiscate copies of the book. The Board would not say how many stores were raided or how many books confiscated.
On Monday, Yousafzai’s birthday, which is celebrated by some in Pakistan as Malala Day, authorities seized the entire stock of textbooks from the Lahore office of the publisher, Oxford University Press, saying the company had failed to obtain a no-objection certification, or NOC, from the government.
“No NOC means breaking the law,” Punjab province’s education minister, Murad Raas, said in a tweet.
On Tuesday, the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, a body that claims to represent 150,000 schools, launched a documentary, “I am not Malala,” to highlight what it called her controversial views on Islam, marriage and her pursuit of a Western agenda.
“Parents do not want their children to follow Malala’s footsteps, even if she keeps on winning the awards,” said Kashif Mirza, the federation’s president.
In recent years, as the influence of Pakistan’s Taliban and other militant Islamist groups has grown, textbooks and other educational materials have come under greater scrutiny.
Riaz Shaikh, an academic based in the eastern city of Karachi who was involved in textbook development in Sindh province, said he and his group included in textbooks Yousafzai and Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani Christian child activist who campaigned against abusive child labor and was murdered at 11. Afterward Islamist groups targeted the textbook authors with death threats. “Sadly, Pakistani society has been developed on hatred, conspiracy theories and politicization of religion,” Shaikh said.
Last year, Punjab’s curriculum and textbook board banned 100 schoolbooks in a single day because of content they described as “anti-pakistan” and “blasphemous.”
Among those banned were a children’s math textbook that included images of pigs — pork is prohibited by Islam — to explain an arithmetic problem.