Who Listens to Malala

Lena Mar­tins­son, Atiqa Shahid

Malala Yousafzai has become a glob­al geopo­lit­i­cal fig­ure. There are many dif­fer­ences in opin­ions about her not only in Pak­istan but also in the rest of the world. With­in Pak­istan, a num­ber of nar­ra­tives against her strug­gle por­tray her being anti-Islam, anti-state on one hand, and being pro-Amer­i­ca and pro-West on the oth­er. This right wing approach or con­ser­v­a­tive ide­al is more com­mon among those who have not read her book. It’s a rather inter­est­ing fact that the book ‘I am Malala’ writ­ten by Malala and Co-author Chiristi­na Lamb has still not been pub­lished in Urdu and its Eng­lish copy is extreme­ly hard to find in Khy­ber Pakhtunkhwa. Most of the right wing media in Pak­istan is in Urdu and of course not every­one can read the oppo­site to see the true pic­ture. There was a neg­a­tive hype in Pak­istan after the book I am Malala came into the mar­kets; many arti­cles were pub­lished negat­ing her book and the con­tent in it. For instance a famous Urdu colum­nist Orya Maq­bool Jan wrote in one of his columns that appeared in dai­ly Dun­ya:
“After read­ing ‘I am Malala’, what came into my mind was the sen­tence used by the US when they caught Aimal Kan­si, which is ‘Pak­ista­nis can do any­thing for Mon­ey’… I am sure that Malala has writ­ten in favor of Salman Rushdie, who is an apple of the West­ern eye, because he wrote against the Prophet and His wives.”

Then he writes:
“Malala has depict­ed a fun­ny pic­ture of Gen­er­al Zia. She says that women’s live were lim­it­ed under Zia’s regime, but that is not true. That was indeed the best time for the TV dra­mas in Pak­istan and many women writ­ers like Haseena Moeen, Fati­ma Suriya Bajiya, and Noor-ul-Huda Shah were writ­ing dra­mas in that era.”

It is worth not­ing that he is not only dis­tort­ing the his­to­ry, but also dis­cred­it­ing her efforts through labelling and con­spir­a­cy mon­ger­ing. All the neg­a­tive cov­er­age giv­en to Malala espe­cial­ly by the Urdu media has been fol­lowed by threats from the Tal­iban against sell­ing and read­ing of the book. Malala’s strug­gle for girls’ right to edu­ca­tion is not only being slan­dered, it is also being silenced.

How­ev­er, those who have read Malala’s book with open eyes will sure­ly dis­agree with these con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. Our region has wit­nessed a num­ber of girls like Malala strug­gling for their right to edu­ca­tion in their areas par­tic­u­lar­ly in Khy­ber PakhtunKhwa. There­fore, it is very sig­nif­i­cant to ask them what do they think about Malala and her strug­gle. A small illus­tra­tion of this was found in an exer­cise under­tak­en by the Bond­ed Labor Lib­er­a­tion Front Soci­eties (BLLF) Pak­istan. In this exer­cise, Malala’s UN speech was trans­lat­ed into Urdu and read before two sep­a­rate groups of school girls in KPK and Balochis­tan. While dis­cussing about Malala and her strug­gle with these young girls in BLLF’s schools, who are also strug­gling very hard for their edu­ca­tion, some of the strong reflec­tions noticed are being repro­duced here.

One of the par­tic­i­pants, a teacher, said: “After hear­ing her speech our opin­ion has changed because we believed in rumors and con­spir­a­cies against her. After lis­ten­ing to her speech, we under­stand that she is not at all anti-Islam or anti-state.”

A very coura­geous 15 year old girl gave this mes­sage to the ter­ror­ists: “Leave us alone, don’t try to con­trol us. It’s not easy to wear bur­ka, gloves and long shirts, I hate Bur­ka, I want to do make up and wear short shirts… please let us live in free­dom.”

When asked about nego­ti­a­tion with Tal­iban, a young girl gave a very fear­less reply: “First ask them not to do blasts, and if they don’t under­stand, then we should kill them.” Anoth­er one dis­agreed: “we should nego­ti­ate with them but not kill them because then the war will nev­er end.”

“I love Malala. She is my strength. I want her to come back to Pak­istan and con­tin­ue her stud­ies here. We’ll not let Tal­iban kill her”, said anoth­er girl from KPK.
“My mes­sage to Malala is to stay abroad and con­tin­ue your stud­ies. Your life is in dan­ger here, don’t come back at this moment, but do come back after Tal­iban accept the impor­tance of girls’ edu­ca­tion and stop killing inno­cents”, a girl from KPK men­tioned.

“Peo­ple think Malala is wrong, but I don’t think so… She has done the same thing we are doing… So what is wrong about it? Is it wrong to get an edu­ca­tion?”, one girl added.

One of the points of crit­i­cism used against Malala lies in fram­ing the dichoto­my of ‘West­ern and East­ern fem­i­nism’. The same argu­ment was also used by the right wing to sup­press women’s move­ment in Pak­istan in the 1980’s. As the voic­es of these girls demon­strate, the move­ment for girls’ edu­ca­tion is not being dri­ven by the west­ern world; it is our own strug­gle and rais­es in response to the oppres­sion and extrem­ism.

How peo­ple in the West think and talk about Malala is of huge impor­tance if the strug­gle going on in Pak­istan should avoid being called anti-Islam or pro-west­ern. When the West­ern­ers cel­e­brate and hon­or Malala Yousafzai, it could also be tak­en as a cri­tique of Pak­istan as being evil towards women and chil­dren. Some may take Malala as a native child being res­cued by the white man; ema­nat­ing from the colo­nial era nar­ra­tive of ‘the white man’s bur­den’. There also exists a strong cri­tique against this nar­ra­tive in Pak­istan. Relat­ed to it is the ques­tion that why the West seems to love Malala and not take the respon­si­bil­i­ty for all the chil­dren killed by drones. Or why do peo­ple in the West seem so occu­pied with Malala while at the same time they have incar­cer­at­ed Aafia Sid­diqui in USA?

The cel­e­bra­tion of Malala in the West could look strange if these, still very per­for­ma­tive nar­ra­tives, are not tak­en into account and prob­lema­tized. Malala Yousafzai can nev­er be under­stood mere­ly as the girl who strug­gles for girls’ rights; she is also, both in the West and the East, con­nect­ed to these his­tor­i­cal colo­nial nar­ra­tives. It is there­fore very impor­tant to learn from Malala, in the way she tries over and over again in her book and speech­es, to chal­lenge these nar­ra­tives. She is con­tin­u­al­ly refer­ring to the Pak­istani cul­ture and the Islam­ic reli­gion in her argu­ments for girls’ right to edu­ca­tion. She does not under­stand her­self as being res­cued by the West. She is actu­al­ly not talk­ing about her­self as a vic­tim that needs to be res­cued at all. Instead, she under­lines her own local­i­ty. She is there­by offer­ing an alter­na­tive sto­ry that the West needs to learn from and maybe be chal­lenged by. Peo­ple in the West need to rec­og­nize this alter­na­tive sto­ry as well as the oppor­tu­ni­ty that the strug­gle for girls’ right to edu­ca­tion could devel­op from oth­er con­texts than the West­ern one. That is one rea­son why it is impor­tant to tru­ly lis­ten to Malala, both in the East and in the West, and to her polit­i­cal under­stand­ing.

Malala Yousafzai not only chal­lenges the ter­ror­ists who are a threat to the girls’ edu­ca­tion as well as Pak­istan as a whole, she also ques­tions the colo­nial sto­ry, accord­ing to which the strug­gle for rights belongs only to the West­ern hemi­sphere. She is also very crit­i­cal of politi­cians who fair to per­form. It is a cri­tique she shares with a lot of peo­ple in Pak­istan.

Malala Yousafzai is not alone in her strug­gle, there are thou­sands of Pak­ista­nis like her work­ing for change. Peo­ple in the West need to stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Pak­istani strug­gle, with­out repro­duc­ing colo­nial nar­ra­tives.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the dis­course about ter­ror­ism is going on not only in the news­pa­pers, TV chan­nels, and among the peo­ple at large but also among the chil­dren in KPK. Though Malala’s book is not avail­able in KPK but every­one knows about her and her strug­gle. We must admit, how­ev­er, that there is a long way to go and we should not expect a sud­den change mere­ly through the move­ment for edu­ca­tion.
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Dr. Lena Mar­tins­son is a Pro­fes­sor of gen­der stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gothen­burg. One of her research areas is women´s move­ments in dif­fer­ent parts of the world and the transna­tion­al issues these move­ments raise.
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