I Am Malala Read online

  With such a large number of people killed, there were many children orphaned – 11,000 of them. In our culture orphans are usually taken in by the extended family, but the earthquake was so bad that entire families had been wiped out or lost everything so were in no position to take in children. The government promised they would all be looked after by the state, but that felt as empty as most government promises. My father heard that many of the boys were taken in by the JuD and housed in their madrasas. In Pakistan, madrasas are a kind of welfare system as they give free food and lodging, but their teaching does not follow a normal curriculum. The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and that man never went to the moon.

  The whole nation was in shock for a long time after the earthquake. Already so unlucky with our politicians and military dictators, now, on top of everything else, we had to deal with a natural disaster. Mullahs from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a warning from God. If we did not mend our ways and introduce shariat or Islamic law, they shouted in their thundering voices, more severe punishment would come.

  PART TWO

  The Valley of Death

  Rabab mangia wakht de teer sho

  Da kali khwa ta Talibaan raaghali dena

  Farewell Music! Even your sweetest tunes are best kept silent

  The Taliban on the edge of the village have stilled all lips

  9

  Radio Mullah

  I WAS TEN when the Taliban came to our valley. Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books and longed to be vampires. It seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the night just like vampires. They appeared in groups, armed with knives and Kalashnikovs, and first emerged in Upper Swat, in the hilly areas of Matta. They didn’t call themselves Taliban to start with and didn’t look like the Afghan Taliban we’d seen in pictures with their turbans and black-rimmed eyes.

  These were strange-looking men with long straggly hair and beards and camouflage vests over their shalwar kamiz, which they wore with the trousers well above the ankle. They had jogging shoes or cheap plastic sandals on their feet, and sometimes stockings over their heads with holes for their eyes, and they blew their noses dirtily into the ends of their turbans. They wore black badges which said SHARIAT YA SHAHADAT – SHARIA LAW OR MARTYRDOM – and sometimes black turbans, so people called them Tor Patki or the Black-Turbaned Brigade. They looked so dark and dirty that my father’s friend described them as ‘people deprived of baths and barbers’.

  Their leader was Maulana Fazlullah, a 28-year-old who used to operate the pulley chair to cross the Swat River and whose right leg dragged because of childhood polio. He had studied in the madrasa of Maulana Sufi Mohammad, the founder of the TNSM, and married his daughter. When Sufi Mohammad was imprisoned in a round-up of militant leaders in 2002, Fazlullah had taken over the movement’s leadership. It was shortly before the earthquake that Fazlullah had appeared in Imam Deri, a small village just a few miles outside Mingora on the other side of the Swat River, and set up his illegal radio station.

  In our valley we received most of our information from the radio because so many had no TV or are illiterate. Soon everyone seemed to be talking about the radio station. It became known as Mullah FM and Fazlullah as the Radio Mullah. It broadcast every night from eight to ten and again in the morning from seven to nine.

  In the beginning Fazlullah was very wise. He introduced himself as an Islamic reformer and an interpreter of the Quran. My mother is very devout, and to start with she liked Fazlullah. He used his station to encourage people to adopt good habits and abandon practices he said were bad. He said men should keep their beards but give up smoking and using the tobacco they liked to chew. He said people should stop using heroin, and chars, which is our word for hashish. He told people the correct way to do their ablutions for prayers – which body part to wash first. He even told people how they should wash their private parts.

  Sometimes his voice was reasonable, like when adults are trying to persuade you to do something you don’t want to, and sometimes it was scary and full of fire. Often he would weep as he spoke of his love for Islam. Usually he spoke for a while, then his deputy Shah Douran came on air, a man who used to sell snacks from a tricycle in the bazaar. They warned people to stop listening to music, watching movies and dancing. Sinful acts like these had caused the earthquake, Fazlullah thundered, and if people didn’t stop they would again invite the wrath of God. Mullahs often misinterpret the Quran and Hadith when they teach them in our country as few people understand the original Arabic. Fazlullah exploited this ignorance.

  ‘Is he right, Aba?’ I asked my father. I remembered how frightening the earthquake had been.

  ‘No, Jani,’ he replied. ‘He is just fooling people.’

  My father said the radio station was the talk of the staffroom. By then our schools had about seventy teachers, around forty men and thirty women. Some of the teachers were anti-Fazlullah but many supported him. People thought that he was a good interpreter of the Holy Quran and admired his charisma. They liked his talk of bringing back Islamic law as everyone was frustrated with the Pakistani justice system, which had replaced ours when we were merged into the country. Cases such as land disputes, common in our area, which used to be resolved quickly now took ten years to come to court. Everyone wanted to see the back of the corrupt government officials sent into the valley. It was almost as if they thought Fazlullah would recreate our old princely state from the time of the wali.

  Within six months people were getting rid of their TVs, DVDs and CDs. Fazlullah’s men collected them into huge heaps on the streets and set them on fire, creating clouds of thick black smoke that reached high into the sky. Hundreds of CD and DVD shops closed voluntarily and their owners were paid compensation by the Taliban. My brothers and I were worried as we loved our TV, but my father reassured us that we were not getting rid of it. To be safe we moved it into a cupboard and watched it with the volume low. The Taliban were known to listen at people’s doors then force their way in, take the TVs and smash them to pieces on the street. Fazlullah hated the Bollywood movies we so loved, which he denounced as un-Islamic. Only the radio was allowed, and all music except for Taliban songs was declared haram.

  One day my father went to visit a friend in hospital and found lots of patients listening to cassettes of Fazlullah’s sermons. ‘You must meet Maulana Fazlullah,’ people told him. ‘He’s a great scholar’.

  ‘He’s actually a high-school dropout whose real name isn’t even Fazlullah,’ my father retorted, but they wouldn’t listen. My father became depressed because people had begun to embrace Fazlullah’s words and his religious romanticism. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ my father would say, ‘that this so-called scholar is spreading ignorance.’

  Fazlullah was particularly popular in remote areas where people remembered how TNSM volunteers had helped during the earthquake when the government was nowhere to be seen. On some mosques they set up speakers connected to radios so his broadcasts could be heard by everyone in the village and in the fields. The most popular part of his show came every evening when he would read out people’s names. He’d say, ‘Mr So-and-so was smoking chars but has stopped because it’s sinful,’ or, ‘Mr X has kept his beard and I congratulate him,’ or, ‘Mr Y voluntarily closed down his CD shop.’ He told them they would have their reward in the hereafter. People liked to hear their names on the radio; they also liked to hear which of their neighbours were sinful so they could gossip: ‘Have you heard about So-and-so?’

  Mullah FM made jokes about the army. Fazlullah denounced Pakistani government officials as ‘infidels’ and said they were opposed to bringing in sharia law. He said that if they did not implement it, his men would ‘enforce it and tear them to pieces’. One of his favourite subjects was the injustice of the feudal system of the khans. Poor people were happy to see the khans getting their comeuppance. They saw Fazlulla
h as a kind of Robin Hood and believed that when Fazlullah took over he would give the khans’ land to the poor. Some of the khans fled. My father was against ‘khanism’ but he said the Taliban were worse.

  My father’s friend Hidayatullah had become a government official in Peshawar and warned us, ‘This is how these militants work. They want to win the hearts and minds of the people so they first see what the local problems are and target those responsible, and that way they get the support of the silent majority. That’s what they did in Waziristan when they went after kidnappers and bandits. After, when they get power, they behave like the criminals they once hunted down.’

  Fazlullah’s broadcasts were often aimed at women. He must have known that many of our men were away from home, working in coal mines in the south or on building sites in the Gulf. Sometimes he would say, ‘Men, go outside now. I am talking to the women.’ Then he’d say, ‘Women are meant to fulfil their responsibilities in the home. Only in emergencies can they go outside, but then they must wear the veil.’ Sometimes his men would display the fancy clothes that they said they had taken from ‘decadent women’ to shame them.

  My friends at school said their mothers listened to the Radio Mullah although our headmistress Madam Maryam told us not to. At home we only had my grandfather’s old radio, which was broken, but my mother’s friends all listened and told her what they heard. They praised Fazlullah and talked of his long hair, the way he rode a horse and behaved like the Prophet. Women would tell him their dreams and he would pray for them. My mother enjoyed these stories, but my father was horrified.

  I was confused by Fazlullah’s words. In the Holy Quran it is not written that men should go outside and women should work all day in the home. In our Islamic studies class at school we used to write essays entitled ‘How the Prophet Lived’. We learned that the first wife of the Prophet was a businesswoman called Khadijah. She was forty, fifteen years older than him, and she had been married before, yet he still married her. I also knew from watching my own mother that Pashtun women are very powerful and strong. Her mother, my grandmother, had looked after all eight children alone after my grandfather had an accident and broke his pelvis and could not leave his bed for eight years.

  A man goes out to work, he earns a wage, he comes back home, he eats, he sleeps. That’s what he does. Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children. In our house my mother managed everything because my father was so busy. It was my mother who would wake up early in the morning, iron our school clothes, make our breakfast and teach us how to behave. It was my mother who would go to the market, shop for us and cook. All those things she did.

  In the first year of the Taliban I had two operations, one to take out my appendix and the other to remove my tonsils. Khushal had his appendix out too. It was my mother who took us to hospital; my father just visited us and brought ice cream. Yet my mother still believed it was written in the Quran that women should not go out and women should not talk to men other than relatives they cannot marry. My father would say to her, ‘Pekai, purdah is not only in the veil, purdah is in the heart.’

  Lots of women were so moved by what Fazlullah said that they gave him gold and money, particularly in poor villages or households where the husbands were working abroad. Tables were set up for the women to hand over their wedding bangles and necklaces and women queued up to do so or sent their sons. Some gave their life savings, believing that this would make God happy. He began building a vast red-brick headquarters in Imam Deri complete with a madrasa, a mosque and walls and levees to protect it from the Swat River. No one knew where he got the cement and iron bars from but the workforce was local. Every village had to take turns sending their men for a day to help build it. One day one of our Urdu teachers, Nawab Ali, told my father, ‘I won’t be coming to school tomorrow.’ When my father asked why, he explained it was his village’s turn to work on Fazlullah’s buildings.

  ‘Your prime responsibility is to teach the students,’ replied my father.

  ‘No, I have to do this,’ said Nawab Ali.

  My father came home fuming. ‘If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year,’ he said. ‘The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa.’

  A few weeks later the same teacher told him that he could no longer teach girls as ‘the maulana doesn’t like it’.

  My father tried to change his mind. ‘I agree that female teachers should educate girls,’ he said. ‘But first we need to educate our girls so they can become teachers!’

  One day Sufi Mohammad proclaimed from jail that there should be no education for women even at girls’ madrasas. ‘If someone can show any example in history where Islam allows a female madrasa, they can come and piss on my beard,’ he said. Then the Radio Mullah turned his attention to schools. He began speaking against school administrators and congratulating girls by name who left school. ‘Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,’ he’d say, or, ‘Miss X of Y village has stopped education at Class 5. I congratulate her.’ Girls like me who still went to school he called buffaloes and sheep.

  My friends and I couldn’t understand why it was so wrong. ‘Why don’t they want girls to go to school?’ I asked my father.

  ‘They are scared of the pen,’ he replied.

  Then another teacher at our school, a maths teacher with long hair, also refused to teach girls. My father fired him, but some other teachers were worried and sent a delegation to his office. ‘Sir, don’t do this,’ they pleaded. ‘These are bad days. Let him stay and we will cover for him.’

  Every day it seemed a new edict came. Fazlullah closed beauty parlours and banned shaving so there was no work for barbers. My father, who only has a moustache, insisted he would not grow a beard for the Taliban. The Taliban told women not to go to the bazaar. I didn’t mind not going to the Cheena Bazaar. I didn’t enjoy shopping, unlike my mother, who liked beautiful clothes even though we didn’t have much money. My mother always told me, ‘Hide your face – people are looking at you.’

  I would reply, ‘It doesn’t matter; I’m also looking at them,’ and she’d get so cross.

  My mother and her friends were upset about not being able to go shopping, particularly in the days before the Eid holidays, when we beautify ourselves and go to the stalls lit up by fairy lights that sell bangles and henna. All of that stopped. The women would not be attacked if they went to the markets, but the Taliban would shout at them and threaten them until they stayed at home. One Talib could intimidate a whole village. We children were cross too. Normally there are new film releases for the holidays, but Fazlullah had closed the DVD shops. Around this time my mother also got tired of Fazlullah, especially when he began to preach against education and insist that those who went to school would also go to hell.

  Next Fazlullah began holding a shura, a kind of local court. People liked this as justice was speedy, unlike in Pakistani courts, where you could wait years and have to pay bribes to be heard. People began going to Fazlullah and his men to resolve grievances about anything from business matters to personal feuds. ‘I had a thirty-year-old problem and it’s been resolved in one go,’ one man told my father. The punishments decreed by Fazlullah’s shura included public whippings, which we had never seen before. One of my father’s friends told him he had seen three men publicly flogged after the shura had found them guilty of involvement in the abduction of two women. A stage was set up near Fazlullah’s centre, and after going to hear him give Friday prayers, hundreds of people gathered to watch the floggings, shouting ‘Allahu akbar! ’ – ‘God is great!’ with each lash. Sometimes Fazlullah appeared galloping in on a black horse.

  His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an Americ
an plot to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out. ‘To cure a disease before its onset is not in accordance with sharia law,’ said Fazlullah on the radio. ‘You will not find a single child to drink a drop of the vaccine anywhere in Swat.’

  Fazlullah’s men patrolled the streets looking for offenders against his decrees just like the Taliban morality police we had heard about in Afghanistan. They set up volunteer traffic police called Falcon Commandos, who drove through the streets with machine guns mounted on top of their pick-up trucks.

  Some people were happy. One day my father ran into his bank manager. ‘One good thing Fazlullah is doing is banning ladies and girls from going to the Cheena Bazaar, which saves us men money,’ he said. Few spoke out. My father complained that most people were like our local barber, who one day grumbled to my father that he had only eighty rupees in his till, less than a tenth of what his takings used to be. Just the day before the barber had told a journalist that the Taliban were good Muslims.

  After Mullah FM had been on air for about a year, Fazlullah became more aggressive. His brother Maulana Liaquat, along with three of Liaquat’s sons, were among those killed in an American drone attack on the madrasa in Bajaur at the end of October 2006. Eighty people were killed including boys as young as twelve, some of whom had come from Swat. We were all horrified by the attack and people swore revenge. Ten days later a suicide bomber blew himself up in the army barracks at Dargai, on the way from Islamabad to Swat, and killed forty-two Pakistani soldiers. At that time suicide bombings were rare in Pakistan – there were six in total that year – and it was the biggest attack that had ever been carried out by Pakistani militants.