The girl who forced the Taliban to retreat
Abrave teenager’s advocacy for girls’ educationwasbacked by her father, FRANCESELLIOTT writes.
Using her veil as a flag, a teenage girl called Malala inspired a demoralised band of Pashtun fighters to defeat the British at the Battle of Maiwand in the Second Anglo Afghan War.
More than a century later Ziauddin Yousufzai, a vocal opponent of the Taliban’s narrow, parochial conservatism and its dreary version of womanhood, knew just what he wanted to call his newborn daughter.
It was that name, Malala, that the young bearded gunman called out when he boarded a school bus in Mingora, in the Swat Valley, shortly after 1pm on October 9.
As heads turned towards her, he began firing into the 15-year-old girl’s face at close range.
The extraordinary reaction to her shooting changed Pakistan.
The depth and breadth of disgust rattled the Taliban as never before, and forced it to insist it now supported the education of girls. But as politicians from President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, crowd around her, it is becoming harder to see the girl behind the brand. Her story is wrapped up with that of Swat, a broad valley northwest of Islamabad and close enough to the border with Afghanistan to share elements of its culture – and troubles.
Malala’s father, an English graduate from a well-established local family, set up a private girls’ school in Mingora, the valley’s main city, shortly before she was born. When Malala was 4, 9/11 brought the War on Terror to her doorstep.
In the absence of an effective government, a Taliban faction began to make inroads amid the blowback from across the border.
Using FMradio, it spread a beguilingly simple message of oldfashioned religion and justice.
Yousufzai, a former student politician, became a rallying point for those who resisted the Taliban’s obscurantism and violence. ‘‘He was a very energetic guy,’’ recalls Ahmad Shah, another school owner.
‘‘He did a lot to regroup secular-
Political ties: minded people during the Taliban’s control of Swat.’’
Perhaps because his father was a respected religious scholar and school teacher, Yousufzai was not, at first, targeted; he even organised peace talks with the militants in 2005.
But by 2009 it was becoming clear the Taliban’s peace was no peace at all as the headless bodies of its opponents were heaped in the city’s main square.
At the suggestion of her father, Malala began writing an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu service under a pen name that translates as Flower-like Face.
Her father also allowed his family to be filmed for a documentary by Adam Ellick, of The New York Times. Both actions show remarkable courage.
Seen today, the film also restores something of Malala’s freshness of spirit and personality.
Critics accuse Yousufzai of using his daughter as a tool for his own political ends but the portrait of their relationship that emerges from Ellick’s film is more complex.
‘‘I want to become a doctor; it is my own dream but my father wants me to become a politician,’’ says Malala, then aged 11. ‘‘But I don’t like politics.’’ A few months later, while a refugee and separated from her father, she says she has changed her mind but explains her reasoning eloquently. Footage of a meeting during which she lectures the late Richard Holbrooke, then the American envoy to Pakistan, about girls’ education in Pakistan, lends credibility to her father’s estimation of his daughter’s ‘‘great potential’’.
The family’s return to their house in Mingora, abandoned during the offensive, remind viewers that Malala is still a child.
Her tears at discovering her pet chickens have died and her fear on discovering a goat’s head on the school roof are the film’s most moving moments.
Friends acknowledge that her father was her ‘‘driving force’’ but deny she was his cipher.
‘‘Yes he encouraged and supported her, which mostly parents do not do in Swat when it comes to their daughters,’’ said Muhammad Ali, who runs an orphanage in Mingora. But it was ‘‘too harsh’’ to suggest she was his tool. ‘‘We used to tease him that he had become Malala’s secretary,’’ Ahmad Shah said smiling.
Mercifully, Malala cannot remember the day of the attack and is making a good recovery from the injuries caused by a bullet that entered her forehead and lodged in her neck.
A spokeswoman for the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham said she was expected to need further reconstructive surgery.
About a month ago she started to use Twitter; interview requests are referred to a public relations firm. Her father has been asked to serve as a United Nations envoy on education and a fund has been established in her name to further girls’ schooling.
But she knows her fame is a danger to herself and others.
Last week she asked the Pakistani Government to stop renaming schools in her honour since to do so might expose their students to a greater chance of attack. It is heartening that Pakistan’s modern warrior poetess prefers to deal with reality, however depressing, than the specious symbolism preferred by so many who seek to use her name.