Beyond Malala.

When 12^th July is celebrated world over as “Malala Day” and as the smart little girl steps up to make a speech to the world audience, no Pakistani can deny the sense of pride that she brings home. But this episode of glory comes with a price. One segment of the country is celebrated for their rational course of thinking and bravado against extremism, while, almost simultaneously, another people of the same region is reduced to the status of a mad hound, unworthy of dialogue or trial, deserving to be shot down by fancy exploding darts.

Thus, today the pondering segment of Pakistanis find themselves torn in two groups, Team Malala and Team Taliban and one can not tell the story of one without mentioning the other.

“I remember that there was a boy in our school who was asked by a journalist, “Why are the Taliban against education?” He answered very simply. By pointing to his book he said, “A Talib doesn’t know what is written inside this book.” They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits. Pakistan is peace-loving democratic country. Pashtuns want education for their daughters and sons. And Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. Islam says that it is not only each child’s right to get education, rather it is their duty and responsibility.

One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. 

Education is the only solution. Education First”. (Malala Yousafzai)

Malala Yousafzai, was born on 12 July 1997 in the picturesque town of Mingora in the Swat District of Pakistan’s NorthWestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Her first claim to fame was in early 2009, at the age of 11–12, at the time, Taliban militants led by Maulana Fazlullah were taking over the Swat Valley, banning television, music and girls’ education.

A local girl under the pseudonym “Gul-Makai” started blogging for the BBC, the idea behind the blog entries was to show the world how ordinary people felt under Taliban hegemony, detailing the events of first and second battle of swat and their impact on the locals. How the once peaceful region was torn and its inhabitants forced to flee to co reside with relatives in safer cities. It showed how such events of war effect the psyche of innocent children, with special focus on the girls, who under the pretense of religion were devoid of their right to education, how their childhood was snatched away from them forcing them to mature well before their time. Within a very short span of time, her blogs began to gather local and international acclaim and she was compared to Anne Frank.

However, Malala’s BBC blogging identity was only revealed in articles by December 2009 when she began appearing on television to publicly advocate female education.

But behind kings there is a person of greater value, a king-maker, Yousafzai’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai who is a poet, school owner and an educational activist himself, running a chain of schools known as the Khushal Public School, was one of the few people to stand up against the Taliban and the same traits he inculcated in his daughter.

Both of them later featured in a documentary by New York Times reporter Adam B. Ellick In October 2011, Yousafzai was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and two months later in December she was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize.

As Malala’s popularity grew, she started receiving threats at the hands of Taliban, who claimed that she was acting like an infidel, propagating against them and conspiring with the West against Islam.

Making true on their threats, on 9 October 2012, a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai as she rode home on a bus after taking an exam. Following this incident, she under went several surgical procedures in various hospitals in Pakistan and was finally taken to Queen’s Hospital in Birmingham, where she recovered without any serious deformity or disability. Now, she continues to live and pursue her education in England under the protection of British government and hopes to return to Pakistan at a later age as a political figure.

For most young girls in Pakistan, Malala is a role model. In this bleak age and time she represents the sweet fruit of resilience, a flickering candle of hope that stands undaunted under the poring rain. But there is another school of thought operating against Malala, who claim that the 16 year old is nothing but a well placed political pawn, being used at the hands of her conniving father, who in turn serves the interest of the American government, on a mission to further demonize the Taliban and justify their drone attacks.

Malala on the front cover of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” issue.

Thus any story of Malala is incomplete without special attention to the protagonist Taliban. The word Taliban is derived from the Arab word Talib which means “the one who learns” In 1979, the Taliban emerged as a resistance movement aiming to eject the Soviet troops from Afghanistan funded and supported by United States and Pakistan, they were sheltered and brainwashed in madrassas in the north frontier province of Pakistan. As history depicts, Taliban were a militant organization provoked and mislead in the name of religion to serve the interest of three nations, namely, Pakistan, America and Saudi Arabia.

America exploited them to do their dirty work in Afghanistan and drive out the Soviet troops, Pakistan secretly harbored the hope that Taliban, a fierce fighting force, would help their cause in Kashmir and win the long disputed land for them and Saudi Arabia wished to use them to damage the Shiite dominant state of Iran with whom they have religious differences in opinion. Having said that, one thing is clear that Talib was nothing more than Victor’s Frankenstein and like most monsters this one too grew out of control. It wasn’t long before Taliban broke their masters leash and set out to set every thing right about the world, bring it back to Islam. The one problem however was that the Islam that they were taught in the name of war was far from a religion of peace and tranquility. Instead it was merely a shadow of the religion that miserably failed to capture the essence of it and the world will never be ready for it.

Hence began the war against terror, between the over zealous, terrified American govt. and the stubborn Taliban organization who are so ill conceived that most times they claim to achieve one thing while the actions that follow only negate the noble claims. A raging evidence of this is Malal herself, where they recognize women as a weaker sex and seek to protect them on the other hand they ruthlessly shoot a 12 year girl in the head on the ground that she propagates against them. America and UN is no different were the fate of one Muslim girl sends shock waves through the world media, those tortured in Guantanamo bay, those raped by US marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, far greater in number, fail to stir any feeling of sympathy or tears.

The question we must pose is why, where Malala is celebrated why do the other victims of this war remain unsung. The dictionary does not possess enough vocabulary to condemn the brutal acts of Taliban but the US troops, the Pakistani government and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are not very different from Taliban either. They all have their own state interests, causes so great in their eyes that the death and sufferings of several hundred common women is nothing more to them than collateral damage, until they come across one like, “Malala”.