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I AM MALALA
The Girl Who Stood Up for Education
and was Shot by the Taliban

Malala Yousafzai
with Christina Lamb

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
LONDON

To all the girls who have faced injustice and been silenced
...


Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: The Day my World Changed
PART ONE: BEFORE THE TALIBAN

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

A Daughter Is Born
My Father the Falcon
Growing up in a School
The Village
Why I Don’t Wear Earrings and Pashtuns Don’t Say Thank You
Children of the Rubbish Mountain
The Mufti Who Tried to Close Our School
The Autumn of the Earthquake

PART TWO: THE VALLEY OF DEATH

9
10
11
12
13
14
15

Radio Mullah
Toffees, Tennis Balls and the Buddhas of Swat
The Clever Class
The Bloody Square
The Diary of Gul Makai
A Funny Kind of Peace
Leaving the Valley

PART THREE: THREE BULLETS, THREE GIRLS

16
17
18
19
20

The Valley of Sorrows
Praying to Be Tall
The Woman and the Sea
A Private Talibanisation
Who is Malala?

PART FOUR: BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

21 ‘God, I entrust her to you’
22 Journey into the Unknown

PART FIVE: A SECOND LIFE

23 ‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’
24 ‘They have snatched her smile’
Epilogue: One Child, One Teacher, One Book, One Pen
...
When I almost died it was just after midday
...
I was shot by a Taliban bullet and was
flown out of Pakistan unconscious
...
To be torn from the country that you love is not something to wish on anyone
...
Instead I am in a country which is five hours
behind my beloved homeland Pakistan and my home in the Swat Valley
...
Here there is any convenience you can imagine
...
Here everything is so modern
one can even find food ready cooked in packets
...
I close my eyes
and for a moment I am back in my valley – the high snow-topped mountains, green waving fields
and fresh blue rivers – and my heart smiles when it looks at the people of Swat
...
I meet my best friend
Moniba and we sit together, talking and joking as if I had never left
...

The day when everything changed was Tuesday, 9 October 2012
...

That morning we arrived in the narrow mud lane off Haji Baba Road in our usual procession of
brightly painted rickshaws, sputtering diesel fumes, each one crammed with five or six girls
...

For us girls that doorway was like a magical entrance to our own special world
...
At the top of the steps was an open courtyard with doors to all the
classrooms
...
One girl commanded, ‘Assaan bash! ’ or
‘Stand at ease!’ and we clicked our heels and responded, ‘ Allah
...
‘Allah
...
We went to school six mornings a week and as
a fifteen-year-old in Year 9 my classes were spent chanting chemical equations or studying Urdu
grammar; writing stories in English with morals like ‘Haste makes waste’ or drawing diagrams of
blood circulation – most of my classmates wanted to be doctors
...
Yet, outside the door to the school lay not only the noise and craziness of

Mingora, the main city of Swat, but also those like the Taliban who think girls should not go to
school
...
It was exam time so school
started at nine instead of eight, which was good as I don’t like getting up and can sleep through the
crows of the cocks and the prayer calls of the muezzin
...
‘Time
to get up, Jani mun,’ he would say
...
‘A few more minutes, Aba, please,’ I’d beg, then burrow deeper under the quilt
...
‘Pisho,’ she would call
...
At
this point I’d realise the time and shout, ‘Bhabi, I’m late!’ In our culture, every man is your ‘brother’
and every woman your ‘sister’
...
When my father first brought his
wife to school, all the teachers referred to her as ‘my brother’s wife’ or Bhabi
...
We all call her Bhabi now
...
On some shelves were all the gold-coloured
plastic cups and trophies I had won for coming first in my class
...
I was determined it would not happen
again
...
It was a journey of just five minutes
along the stinky stream, past the giant billboard for Dr Humayun’s Hair Transplant Institute where we
joked that one of our bald male teachers must have gone when he suddenly started to sprout hair
...
He made us all laugh with
his crazy stories
...
We had been
getting threats all year
...
My mother was worried about me, but the Taliban had never come for a girl and I was more
concerned they would target my father as he was always speaking out against them
...
’
Our street could not be reached by car, so coming home I would get off the bus on the road below
by the stream and go through a barred iron gate and up a flight of steps
...
Like my father I’ve always been a daydreamer, and sometimes in lessons
my mind would drift and I’d imagine that on the way home a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on
those steps
...
Maybe I’d take off my shoes and hit him, but then I’d think if
I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist
...
What you are doing is wrong
...
’
I wasn’t scared but I had started making sure the gate was locked at night and asking God what
happens when you die
...
We’d lived on the same street when
we were little and been friends since primary school and we shared everything, Justin Bieber songs
and Twilight movies, the best face-lightening creams
...

It’s hard for girls in our society to be anything other than teachers or doctors if they can work at all
...
Moniba always knew if something was wrong
...

‘The Taliban have never come for a small girl
...
The other girls all covered their heads before
emerging from the door and climbing up into the back
...

It was cramped with twenty girls and three teachers
...

After that it is all a bit hazy
...
The cooler days
were late coming and only the faraway mountains of the Hindu Kush had a frosting of snow
...
All we could see was a little stamp of open sky out of the back and
glimpses of the sun, at that time of day a yellow orb floating in the dust that streamed over everything
...
I don’t remember any more
...

In reality what happened was we suddenly stopped
...
We must have been less than 200 metres from the checkpoint
...

‘Is this the Khushal School bus?’ he asked our driver
...
‘Yes,’ he said
...

‘You should go to the office,’ said Usman Bhai Jan
...
‘Look, it’s one of
those journalists coming to ask for an interview,’ said Moniba
...

The man was wearing a peaked cap and had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as if he had
flu
...
Then he swung himself onto the tailboard at the back and leaned
in right over us
...

No one said anything, but several of the girls looked at me
...

That’s when he lifted up a black pistol
...
Some of the girls screamed
...

My friends say he fired three shots, one after another
...
I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the

other two bullets hit the girls next to me
...
The third went
through her left shoulder and into the upper right arm of Kainat Riaz
...

By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba’s lap were full of blood
...


PART ONE

Before the Taliban
Sorey sorey pa golo rashey
Da be nangai awaz de ra ma sha mayena
Rather I receive your bullet-riddled body with honour
Than news of your cowardice on the battlefield
(Traditional Pashto couplet)

1
A Daughter Is Born

WHEN I WAS born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my
father
...
We Pashtuns see this as an auspicious sign
...
My
parents’ first child was stillborn but I popped out kicking and screaming
...

For most Pashtuns it’s a gloomy day when a daughter is born
...
Yet, he brought with him a vast family tree of our clan, the Dalokhel Yousafzai, going right
back to my great-great-grandfather and showing only the male line
...
He took the tree, drew a line like a lollipop from his name and at the end of it
he wrote, ‘Malala’
...
My father didn’t care
...
He told people, ‘I know there is something different about
this child
...

I was named after Malalai of Maiwand, the greatest heroine of Afghanistan
...
We live as we have for centuries by a
code called Pashtunwali, which obliges us to give hospitality to all guests and in which the most
important value is nang or honour
...
Shame
is a very terrible thing for a Pashtun man
...
’ We fight and feud among ourselves so much that our word for cousin – tarbur – is the same
as our word for enemy
...

All Pashtun children grow up with the story of how Malalai inspired the Afghan army to defeat the
British in 1880 in one of the biggest battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War
...
When she was a teenager, both her father and the man she was supposed to marry were
among thousands of Afghans fighting against the British occupation of their country
...
She saw
their men were losing, and when the flag-bearer fell she lifted her white veil up high and marched
onto the battlefield in front of the troops
...
‘If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand then, by God, someone is
saving you as a symbol of shame
...

They destroyed an entire brigade, one of the worst defeats in the history of the British army
...
In high school I read some Sherlock Holmes and laughed to see that this was the same battle
where Dr Watson was wounded before becoming partner to the great detective
...
Many girls’ schools in Afghanistan are named after her
...
‘It’s a sad name,’ he said
...
’
When I was a baby my father used to sing me a song written by the famous poet Rahmat Shah Sayel
of Peshawar
...
I loved hearing the story and
the songs my father sang to me, and the way my name floated on the wind when people called it
...
My valley, the Swat Valley, is a heavenly
kingdom of mountains, gushing waterfalls and crystal-clear lakes
...
In olden times Swat was called Uddyana, which means ‘garden’
...
People
often call Swat the Switzerland of the East – we even had Pakistan’s first ski resort
...
And so did many foreigners, all of whom we called angrezan – ‘English’ – wherever they
came from
...

We have a special history too
...
We were once
a princely state, one of three with the neighbouring lands of Chitral and Dir
...
When the British gave India
independence in 1947 and divided it, we went with the newly created Pakistan but stayed
autonomous
...
The wali administered justice, kept the peace between warring tribes and collected
ushur – a tax of ten per cent of income – with which he built roads, hospitals and schools
...
The journey took at least five hours by road over the Malakand Pass, a vast
bowl of mountains where long ago our ancestors led by a preacher called Mullah Saidullah (known
by the British as the Mad Fakir) battled British forces among the craggy peaks
...
At the end of the pass is a green-domed
shrine where people throw coins to give thanks for their safe arrival
...
Before the troubles came, most people, like my mother, had
never been outside Swat
...
It used to be a small place
but many people had moved in from surrounding villages, making it dirty and crowded
...
The Marghazar stream loops through it, milky brown from the plastic bags
and rubbish thrown into it
...
Our house
was in Gulkada, which means ‘place of flowers’, but it used to be called Butkara, or ‘place of the

Buddhist statues’
...

Islam came to our valley in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from
Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom
...

Chinese explorers wrote stories of how there were 1,400 Buddhist monasteries along the banks of the
River Swat, and the magical sound of temple bells would ring out across the valley
...
We would often picnic among rock carvings of a smiling fat Buddha sitting crosslegged on a lotus flower
...

Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek
...
My father wrote a poem, ‘The
Relics of Butkara’, which summed up perfectly how temple and mosque could exist side by side:
‘When the voice of truth rises from the minarets,/ The Buddha smiles,/ And the broken chain of
history reconnects
...
Our house was one storey and proper concrete
...
It was our playground
...
Sometimes I sat on the roof too, watching the smoke rise from
the cooking fires all around and listening to the nightly racket of the crickets
...
There was a plum tree in our front yard which
gave the most delicious fruit
...
The birds
loved that tree
...

For as long as I can remember my mother has talked to birds
...
We knew what it was like to be hungry so my mother always
cooked extra and gave food to poor families
...
In Pashto we
love to sing tapey, two-line poems, and as she scattered the rice she would sing one: ‘Don’t kill
doves in the garden
...
’
I liked to sit on the roof and watch the mountains and dream
...
To us it’s a sacred mountain and so high that it always wears a
necklace of fleecy clouds
...
At school we learned that in 327
BC, even before the Buddhists came to Swat, Alexander the Great swept into the valley with
thousands of elephants and soldiers on his way from Afghanistan to the Indus
...
But
Alexander was a determined and patient leader
...
Then he climbed up so he could catch hold of the star of
Jupiter as a symbol of his power
...
In the autumn chill winds would
come
...
We raced around, building snowmen and snow bears and trying to catch

snowflakes
...
Eucalyptus blossom blew into the house,
coating everything white, and the wind carried the pungent smell of the rice fields
...

When I was born we were very poor
...
I slept with my mother and father in one
room and the other was for guests
...
Our home was always full of people
visiting from the village
...

Two years after I was born my brother Khushal arrived
...
My mother had been waiting for a son
and could not hide her joy when he was born
...
It seemed to me that his every wish
was her command
...
She
wanted to buy a new cradle for him – when I was born my father couldn’t afford one so they used an
old wooden one from the neighbours which was already third or fourth hand – but my father refused
...
‘So can he
...
After that, said my father, we were complete
...

I played mostly with Khushal because he was just two years younger than me, but we fought all the
time
...
‘What’s wrong, Jani?’ he would
ask
...
And my
ankles click when I walk, which makes adults squirm
...
Her name Tor Pekai means ‘raven tresses’ even though
her hair is chestnut brown
...
I wished I had her white-lily skin, fine features and green
eyes, but instead had inherited the sallow complexion, wide nose and brown eyes of my father
...
Black-skinned people
are often called white and short people tall
...
My father was known
in the family as Khaista dada, which means beautiful
...
’
‘It’s like when one mixes milk with tea,’ I said
...
It was only
when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin
...

In our society marriages are usually arranged by families, but theirs was a love match
...
They came from neighbouring villages in a remote valley

in the upper Swat called Shangla and would see each other when my father went to his uncle’s house
to study, which was next door to that of my mother’s aunt
...
Instead he sent her poems
she could not read
...

‘And me, her beauty,’ he laughs
...
My two grandfathers did not get on
...
His own father said it was up to him and agreed to send a barber as a messenger, which is
the traditional way we Pashtuns do this
...
Janser Khan’s hujra was a
gathering place for people to talk politics, and my father was often there, so they had got to know each
other
...

My mother comes from a family of strong women as well as influential men
...
To get him
released she walked forty miles alone over mountains to appeal to a powerful cousin
...
Though she cannot read or write, my father shares everything with
her, telling her about his day, the good and the bad
...
Most
Pashtun men never do this, as sharing problems with women is seen as weak
...
I see my parents happy and laughing a lot
...

My mother is very pious and prays five times a day, though not in the mosque as that is only for the
men
...
I think I am a bit of
a disappointment to her as I am so like my father and don’t bother with clothes and jewels
...

Growing up, we children spent most of our time with our mother
...
My father came from a backward village yet through education
and force of personality he made a good living for us and a name for himself
...
We would sit on the
floor around a long plastic sheet which my mother laid with food, and eat with our right hand as is our
custom, balling together rice and meat
...
In the summer months there would
often be thunder and lightning crashing outside and I would crawl closer to my father’s knee
...
Like most people in Swat we
are from the Yousafzai tribe
...

Our ancestors came to Swat in the sixteenth century from Kabul, where they had helped a Timurid

emperor win back his throne after his own tribe removed him
...
So one night he invited all the chiefs to a
banquet and set his men on them while they were eating
...
Only
two escaped, and they fled to Peshawar along with their tribesmen
...
But they were so
captivated by the beauty of Swat they instead decided to stay there and forced the other tribes out
...
It was a peculiar
system called wesh under which every five or ten years all the families would swap villages and
redistribute the land of the new village among the men so that everyone had the chance to work on
good as well as bad land
...
Villages were
ruled by khans, and the common people, craftsmen and labourers, were their tenants
...
They also had to help the khans form a militia by
providing an armed man for every small plot of land
...

As the Yousafzai in Swat had no ruler, there were constant feuds between the khans and even
within their own families
...
In the early part of the last century they became worried about being taken over
by the British, who by then controlled most of the surrounding lands
...
So they decided to try and find an impartial man to rule the whole area and
resolve their disputes
...
We know him affectionately as Badshah Sahib, and though he was
completely illiterate, he managed to bring peace to the valley
...
Instead he built forts on mountains all
across Swat and created an army
...
He set up the first telephone system and built the first
primary school and ended the wesh system because the constant moving between villages meant no
one could sell land or had any incentive to build better houses or plant fruit trees
...
My father always says, ‘While Badshah Sahib brought peace, his son brought
prosperity
...
He had studied in a
British school in Peshawar, and perhaps because his own father was illiterate he was passionate
about schools and built many, as well as hospitals and roads
...
But there was no freedom of expression, and if anyone criticised the
wali, they could be expelled from the valley
...

So I was born a proud daughter of Pakistan, though like all Swatis I thought of myself first as Swati
and then Pashtun, before Pakistani
...
We all played cricket on the street or rooftops together, but I knew

as we got older the girls would be expected to stay inside
...
While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go
out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five-year-old boy! This was the
tradition
...
My father always said, ‘Malala will be free as a
bird
...
But, as I watched my brothers running across the roof, flying their kites and
skilfully flicking the strings back and forth to cut each other’s down, I wondered how free a daughter
could ever be
...
Sometimes they would get stuck and he would
repeat the same syllable over and over like a record caught in a groove as we all waited for the next
syllable to suddenly pop out
...
M’s, p’s and k’s
were all enemies lying in wait
...
A stutter was a terrible thing for a man who so loved words and
poetry
...
But it was almost certainly
made worse by his father, whose own voice was a soaring instrument that could make words thunder
and dance
...
My
grandfather’s name was Rohul Amin, which means ‘honest spirit’ and is the holy name of the Angel
Gabriel
...
He was an impatient man at the best of times and would fly into a rage
over the smallest thing – like a hen going astray or a cup getting broken
...
I never knew my grandmother, but my father says she used to
joke with my grandfather, ‘By God, just as you greet us only with a frown, when I die may God give
you a wife who never smiles
...
It was a long journey by bus, then an hour’s walk up the hill to where he
lived
...
The holy man was called
Lewano Pir, Saint of the Mad, because he was said to be able to calm lunatics
...
Then he took some
gur, dark molasses made from sugar cane, and rolled it around his mouth to moisten it with spit
...
The
treatment did not cure the stutter
...
So when my father was
thirteen and told my grandfather he was entering a public speaking competition he was stunned
...
‘You take one or two minutes to utter just one sentence
...
‘You write the speech and I will learn it
...
He taught theology in the government high school in
the village of Shahpur
...
He was a mesmerising speaker
...

My father comes from a large family
...
Their village of Barkana was very primitive and they lived
crammed together in a one-storey ramshackle house with a mud roof which leaked whenever it rained
or snowed
...
‘They were
just waiting to be married,’ says my father
...
In the morning when my father was given
cream or milk, his sisters were given tea with no milk
...
When a chicken was slaughtered for dinner, the girls would get the wings and the neck while the
luscious breast meat was enjoyed by my father, his brother and my grandfather
...

There was little to do in my father’s village
...
On Fridays the brothers would creep into the mosque and watch in
wonder as my grandfather stood in the pulpit and preached to the congregation for an hour or so,
waiting for the moment when his voice would rise and practically shake the rafters
...
Baba, as I called him, had
even witnessed the moment of freedom from the British colonialists at midnight on 14 August 1947
...
His sermons were
often illustrated by world events or historical happenings as well as stories from the Quran and the
Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet
...
Swat became part of Pakistan
in 1969, the year my father was born
...
My grandfather would rail against the class system, the continuing power of the khans and the
gap between the haves and have-nots
...
There are still many pictures of
him around
...
He arrested our elected prime minister, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, and had him tried for treason then hanged from a scaffold in Rawalpindi jail
...
They say he was the first Pakistani leader to
stand up for the common people, though he himself was a feudal lord with vast estates of mango
fields
...
The
Americans cut off aid
...
He told our people it was their duty to obey his government because it was
pursuing Islamic principles
...
Before then mullahs had almost been figures of fun – my father said at wedding parties
they would just hang around in a corner and leave early – but under Zia they became influential and
were called to Islamabad for guidance on sermons
...

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted
...
There are two powers
in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen
...
’ But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to
count for only half that of a man’s
...
A woman couldn’t even open a bank
account without a man’s permission
...

Many of our madrasas or religious schools were opened at that time, and in all schools religious
studies, what we call deeniyat, was replaced by Islamiyat, or Islamic studies, which children in
Pakistan still have to do today
...
Anyone reading them might think we won the three wars we have fought
and lost against our great enemy India
...
Just after Christmas 1979 the Russians invaded our
neighbour Afghanistan
...

Vast camps of white tents sprang up mostly around Peshawar, some of which are still there today
...
It started a massive
programme to train Afghan refugees recruited from the camps as resistance fighters or mujahideen
...

The Russian invasion transformed Zia from an international pariah to the great defender of freedom
in the Cold War
...
Next door to us the Shah of Iran had been overthrown in a revolution a few months
earlier so the CIA had lost their main base in the region
...
Billions of dollars
flowed into our exchequer from the United States and other Western countries, as well as weapons to
help the ISI train the Afghans to fight the communist Red Army
...
They lavished praise on him
...
He called him his ‘monkey’
...
He made Afghanistan a rallying point not only for the West, which wanted to stop the
spread of communism from the Soviet Union, but also for Muslims from Sudan to Tajikistan, who saw
it as a fellow Islamic country under attack from infidels
...

We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don’t really recognise the border that
the British drew more than 100 years ago
...
The clerics of the mosques would often talk about the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan in their sermons, condemning the Russians as infidels and urging people to
join the jihad, saying it was their duty as good Muslims
...
My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much
encouraged by the CIA
...
They had examples like, ‘If out
of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left’ or ‘15 bullets – 10 bullets = 5
bullets’
...
My father remembers that one
day a maulana called Sufi Mohammad came to the village and asked young men to join him to fight
the Russians in the name of Islam
...
Little did we know that years later the same maulana’s organisation would become the
Swat Taliban
...
But the
Russians ended up stuck in Afghanistan for ten years, through most of the 1980s, and when he became
a teenager my father decided he too wanted to be a jihadi
...
At that time talib simply meant ‘religious
student’
...

The talib talked of jihad in such glorious terms that my father was captivated
...
Our family owned little land, and my father did not want to end up going south to work
in the coal mines like many of his classmates
...
The best that most village boys could
hope for was to go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai and work in construction
...
Every night my father would pray to God, ‘O Allah, please make war
between Muslims and infidels so I can die in your service and be a martyr
...
He began to
sign himself ‘Ziauddin Panchpiri’ (the Panchpiri are a religious sect) and sprouted the first signs of a
beard
...
He believes he might even have thought of becoming a
suicide bomber had there been such a thing in those days
...

It was around the time he was praying to go to heaven as a martyr that he met my mother’s brother,
Faiz Mohammad, and started mixing with her family and going to her father’s hujra
...
A famous poem was written at that time by Rahmat Shah Sayel, the same Peshawar poet who
wrote the poem about my namesake
...
My father often used to recite the poem to
me when I was a child but I didn’t know then what it meant
...
He found himself torn between the two
extremes, secularism and socialism on one side and militant Islam on the other
...

My father was in awe of my grandfather and told me wonderful stories about him, but he also told
me that he was a man who could not meet the high standards he set for others
...
In Pashtun society it is
very hard to stomach a cousin being more popular, wealthier or more influential than you are
...
When he got the job he gave his age
as much younger than my grandfather
...
We tend to remember years by events, like an
earthquake
...
He was so
angry that he made the day-long bus journey to Mingora to see the Swat minister of education
...
’ So the minister said, ‘OK, Maulana, what shall I write down for you? Would you like
to have been born in the year of the earthquake of Quetta?’ My grandfather agreed, so his new date of
birth became 1935, making him much younger than his cousin
...
They knew he was
insecure about his looks because at school the teachers always favoured the handsome boys for their
fair skin
...
In our society you have to take revenge for such slights, but my father was
much smaller than his cousins
...
Baba had beautiful handwriting
and my father would spend hours painstakingly drawing letters but Baba never once praised him
...
She loved him so much that she would slip him extra meat and the cream off the milk while
she went without
...

He used to read by the light of the oil lamp in the hujra, and one evening he went to sleep and the oil
lamp fell over
...
It was my grandmother’s
faith in my father that gave him the courage to find his own proud path he could travel along
...

Yet she too got angry with him once
...
One day while his parents were out some of them
came to the house
...
When my grandparents came home they were furious and beat him
...
If any of his children accidentally spilt their food he would fly into a rage
...
As a teacher he was
eligible for a discount on his sons’ school fees for sports and joining the Boy Scouts
...
Of
course my father detested doing this
...
‘It felt as if my honour was at stake for five
rupees,’ he told me
...
Instead he would tell his best
students to keep their old books for my father at the end of the year and then he would be sent to their
homes to get them
...
All his
books were inscribed with other boys’ names, never his own
...
‘It’s just I so wanted a new book,
unmarked by another student and bought with my father’s money
...
He became determined to end the traditional rivalry between him and his cousins
...
The man was astonished and

apologised for having tormented him
...

He sent my father to the government high school to learn English and receive a modern education
rather than to a madrasa, even though as an imam people criticised him for this
...
In my grandfather’s Friday addresses he would talk about the poor and the
landowners and how true Islam is against feudalism
...
He read the great poems of Saadi, Allama Iqbal and Rumi to my father with such
passion and fire it was as if he was teaching the whole mosque
...
That’s why he
decided he would make his father proud by entering the district’s annual public speaking competition
...
His teachers and friends tried to dissuade him and his father was
reluctant to write the speech for him
...
He committed every word to memory while walking in the hills, reciting it to
the skies and birds as there was no privacy in their home
...
Other boys, some known as good speakers, gave their speeches
...
‘I stood at the lectern,’ he told me, ‘hands shaking and knees knocking, so short I
could barely see over the top and so terrified the faces were a blur
...
’ He tried desperately not to think about the treacherous consonants lying
ahead of him, just waiting to trip him up and stick in his throat, but when he spoke, the words came
out fluently like beautiful butterflies taking flight
...

At the end of the speech there were cheers and applause
...
‘It was,’ he says, ‘the first thing I’d done that made him smile
...
My grandfather wrote his speeches
and he almost always came first, gaining a reputation locally as an impressive speaker
...
For the first time Baba started praising him in front of others
...

‘Write your name as “Ziauddin Shaheen”,’ he told him
...
Instead he just called himself
Ziauddin Yousafzai, our clan name
...
She was unusual in the
village as she had a father and brothers who encouraged her to go to school
...
She carried her bag of books proudly into school and claims she was brighter than the
boys
...

There seemed no point in going to school just to end up cooking, cleaning and bringing up children, so
one day she sold her books for nine annas, spent the money on boiled sweets and never went back
...
She says he didn’t even notice, as he would set off early every morning after
a breakfast of cornbread and cream, his German pistol strapped under his arm, and spend his days
busy with local politics or resolving feuds
...

It was only when she met my father that she felt regret
...
As
his wife, she wanted to help him achieve that
...
He thought there was nothing more important than knowledge
...

His own village school had been just a small building
...
There were no toilets and the pupils went to the fields to answer the call of
nature
...
His sisters – my aunts – did not go to school at all, just like
millions of girls in my country
...
He believed that lack of
education was the root of all Pakistan’s problems
...
He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor,
boys and girls
...

My grandfather had a different dream for his youngest son – he longed for him to be a doctor – and
as one of just two sons, he expected him to contribute to the household budget
...
He and his family lived
with my grandfather, and whenever he saved up enough of his salary, they built a small concrete hujra
at the side of the house for guests
...
He also helped Baba with
heavy tasks like clearing snow from the roof
...
His own
education in Delhi had been free – he had lived like a talib in the mosques, and local people had
provided the students with food and clothes
...
Pakistan doesn’t have student loans and he had never even set foot in a bank
...

There was no other college in Shangla, and if he didn’t go to college, he would never be able to move

out of the village and realise his dream
...
His beloved mother had died just before
he graduated from school
...
He
pleaded with his father but to no avail
...
My
grandfather suggested that he might take my father in so he could go to college there
...

My father prayed they would agree, but my grandfather asked them as soon as they arrived,
exhausted after the three-day bus journey, and his son-in-law refused outright
...
My father felt he had lost his chance and
would end up like his brother teaching in a local school
...
It didn’t
even have its own building
...

The people in Sewoor were Gujars, Kohistanis and Mians
...

Their children are usually dirty and they are looked down upon by Pashtuns, even if they are poor
themselves
...
‘Let them be illiterate
...
If the school has two teachers, each
goes in for three days and signs the other in
...

Once there, all they do is keep the children quiet with a long stick as they cannot imagine education
will be any use to them
...
He liked the hilly people and respected their tough lives
...
After my father had graduated from
school he had nothing to do so he volunteered to help his brother
...
Another of
my aunts had married a man in that village and they had a relative visiting called Nasir Pacha, who
saw my father at work
...
My father told him he had just finished school and had won a
college place at Jehanzeb
...

‘Why don’t you come and live with us?’ asked Nasir Pacha
...
Pacha and his wife Jajai became his second family
...
He went there by bus, and it seemed so big
to him compared to his home village that he thought he’d arrived in a city
...
Jajai replaced his late mother as the most important woman in my father’s life
...
‘Ziauddin is as clean as an egg with no hair,’ she said
...
’
It was in Spal Bandi that my father came across women who had great freedom and were not
hidden away as in his own village
...
It was unusual for
women to have a special place to meet outside the home
...
Like my mother, Akbar Khan may not have had much of a formal education, but he had another
kind of wisdom
...

My father arrived at college at an important moment in Pakistan’s history
...
During my father’s first term at
college national elections were held, which were won by Benazir Bhutto, daughter of the prime
minister who had been executed when my father was a boy
...
Suddenly there was a lot of optimism about the future
...
My father quickly got
involved in student politics and became known as a talented speaker and debater
...

The most important jobs in the army, bureaucracy and government are all taken by Punjabis because
they come from the biggest and most powerful province
...
They provided free
textbooks and grants to students but held deeply intolerant views and their favourite pastime was to
patrol universities and sabotage music concerts
...
The president of the students’ group in Jehanzeb College was Ihsan ul-Haq
Haqqani
...
Haqqani says he is sure my father would have been president of the PSF and become a
politician if he had been from a rich khan family
...

One of their most heated debates in that first year was over a novel
...
Muslims
widely considered it blasphemous and it provoked so much outrage that it seemed people were
talking of little else
...
Soon mullahs all over Pakistan were
denouncing the book, calling for it to be banned, and angry demonstrations were held
...
Police fired into the
crowd, and five people were killed
...
Two days later Ayatollah
Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination
...
Many students argued that the book
should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld
...
‘First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with
our own book,’ he suggested
...
But the salary was low, just 1,600 rupees a month (around £12), and my
grandfather complained he was not contributing to the household
...

One of my father’s colleagues at the school was his friend Mohammad Naeem Khan
...
They were also both frustrated as the school was very strict and
unimaginative
...
My father
longed for the freedom that would come with running his own school
...
So when Naeem lost his job after a dispute with the college
administration, they decided to start their own school
...
But when they went
there to look for a building, there were banners everywhere advertising a school opening – someone
had beaten them to it
...

As my father was still teaching, Naeem wandered the streets looking for somewhere to rent
...
It was the ground floor of a twostorey building in a well-off area called Landikas with a walled courtyard where students could
gather
...
The owner had called it that
because he had once been to Turkey and seen a Ramada Hotel! But the school had gone bankrupt,
which perhaps should have made them think twice
...

My father went to see the building after work
...
‘I felt so happy,’ he recalls
...
’
Naeem and my father invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees
...
Unfortunately the demand for English tuition turned out to be low, and there
were unexpected drains on their income
...
Every day his fellow activists came to the shack or the school for lunch
...
It was also becoming clear that while they were
best friends, they found it hard to work as business partners
...
We Pashtuns cannot turn away relatives or friends, however inconvenient
...
Visitors can turn up
whenever they wish and can stay as long as they want
...
He joked to my father that if either of them had relatives
to stay, they should pay a fine
...
‘We are supposed to be collecting money in enrolment
fees
...


‘I can’t take any more!’
By this time the two former friends were hardly speaking to each other and had to call in local
elders to mediate
...
He had no idea how
...
The new partners
again went from door to door, telling people they had started a new kind of school
...
But while people were happy to talk to him, they preferred to send their
children to established schools
...
Near the entrance they painted a motto: WE ARE COMMITTED TO BUILD FOR
YOU THE CALL OF THE NEW ERA
...
’ My father wanted us to be inspired by our
great hero, but in a manner fit for our times – with pens, not swords
...

Unfortunately not many people were convinced
...
Even so my father insisted on starting the day in style by singing the national anthem
...

With so few students, they had little money to equip the school and soon ran out of credit
...

There was worse in store when my father went to register the school
...
‘What kind of school is this?’ asked the official,
laughing at his application
...

Everyone thinks they can open a school just like that!’
The other people in the office laughed along, ridiculing him
...
It was clear the
superintendent wanted money
...
He and Hidayatullah hardly had money to pay for food, let
alone bribes
...
And schools were expected to treat officials regularly to a good lunch of chicken or trout from
the river
...
My father used to grumble, ‘We’re a school not a poultry farm
...
‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ he demanded
...
He knew that to do this he needed some power of
his own, so he joined an organisation called the Swat Association of Private Schools
...

The other principals took paying bribes for granted, but my father argued that if all the schools
joined together they could resist
...
‘Why should you be

paying bribes? You are not running brothels; you are educating children! Government officials are not
your bosses,’ he reminded them; ‘they are your servants
...
You are the ones educating their children
...

Suddenly the school owners were in a position of power
...
To try and boost
their income they ran a tuck shop at school, going off in the mornings and buying snacks to sell to the
children
...

‘I would get very depressed and sometimes collapse seeing the problems all around us,’ said
Hidayatullah, ‘but when Ziauddin is in a crisis he becomes strong and his spirits high
...
One day Hidayatullah came back from trying to
enrol pupils to find my father sitting in the office talking about advertising with the local head of
Pakistan TV As soon as the man had gone, Hidayatullah burst into laughter
...

have a TV he pointed out
...
’ But my father is an
,’
optimistic man and never deterred by practicalities
...
He was
actually getting married, but he didn’t tell any of his friends in Mingora as he could not afford to
entertain them
...
In fact, as my mother often reminds
my father, he was not present for the actual ceremony
...
For many
couples in arranged marriages this is the first time they see each other’s faces
...

It is our tradition for the bride to receive furniture or perhaps a fridge from her family and some
gold from the groom’s family
...
After the wedding my mother moved in with my grandfather and my
uncle
...
The plan was to get his
school going then, once it was successful, send for his wife
...
She had a little money of her own so they
used it to hire a van and she moved to Mingora
...
‘We just
knew my father didn’t want us there,’ said my father
...
’
He had however neglected to tell his partner
...
‘We’re not in a position to support a family,’ he told my father
...
‘She will cook and wash for us
...
To her it was a modern town
...
When it was my mother’s turn she said, ‘I want to live in
the city and be able to send out for kebabs and naan instead of cooking it myself
...
The shack had just two rooms, one where Hidayatullah and my father
slept and one which was a small office
...
When my mother arrived,
Hidayatullah had to move into the office and sleep on a hard wooden chair
...
‘Pekai, help me resolve my confusion on this’, he
would say
...

‘Ziauddin was a family man and they were unusually close,’ said Hidayatullah
...
’
Within a few months my mother was expecting
...
‘I think there was some problem with hygiene in that muddy place,’ says my father
...
My mother gave birth to ten children in this way
...
Months would pass and they could not pay the teachers’
wages or the school rent
...
My father would make him good tea and offer him biscuits in the hope that would
keep him satisfied
...
‘You think he will be happy with tea? He wants his money
...
In our culture
wedding jewellery is a bond between the couple
...
My mother had already offered her
bangles to pay for my father’s nephew to go to college, which my father had rashly promised to fund –
fortunately, my father’s cousin Jehan Sher Khan had stepped in – and she did not realise the bangles
were only partly paid for
...

Just when it seemed matters could not get worse, the area was hit by flash floods
...
Everyone had to
leave the district
...
He
went outside, shouting ‘Ziauddin, Ziauddin!’ The search almost cost Hidayatullah his life
...
There were live
electric cables hanging loose and swaying in the wind
...
Had they done so, he would have been electrocuted
...
Then he helped them save their fridge
...
‘You saved this woman’s husband but not your own house!’ he said
...
They had nowhere to
sleep and no clean clothes to change into
...
It took them a week to clear the debris
...
Shortly afterwards they had a visit from an
official of WAPDA, the water and power company, who claimed their meter was rigged and
demanded a bribe
...
There was no way they
could pay this so my father asked one of his political friends to use his influence
...
Besides, he had a family to provide for
...
My mother was
helped by a neighbour who had delivered babies before
...
My mother was worried about telling him he had a daughter
not a son, but he says he looked into my eyes and was delighted
...
‘When she was born our luck changed
...
On Pakistan’s fiftieth anniversary on 14 August 1997 there were parades and
commemorations throughout the country
...
They wore black armbands to
protest, saying the celebrations were for nothing, and were arrested
...

A few months after I was born the three rooms above the school became vacant and we all moved
in
...
That first school was a mixed primary school and very small
...
My father was
teacher, accountant and principal
...
He used to climb up electricity poles to hang banners advertising the school, even though
he was so afraid of heights that when he got to the top of the ladder his feet shook
...
When I saw him disappear down
there I would cry, thinking he wouldn’t come back
...
We drank green tea as we could not afford milk for regular tea
...


I had the run of the school as my playground
...
Some of the female staff like Miss Ulfat would pick
me up and put me on their lap as if I was their pet or even take me home with them for a while
...
I used to sit in wonder, listening
to everything they were being taught
...
You could say I grew up
in a school
...
Eventually
Hidayatullah left to start his own school and they divided the students, each taking two of the four
years
...
Though Hidayatullah and my father were not speaking at that time, Hidayatullah missed
me so much he used to visit me
...
They said there had been a big attack on a building in New York
...
I was only four and too young to understand
...
It seemed very far away
...
The school was
my world and my world was the school
...


4
The Village

IN OUR TRADITION on the seventh day of a child’s life we have a celebration called Woma (which
means ‘seventh’) for family, friends and neighbours to come and admire the newborn
...
When my brothers came along and Baba
wanted to pay, my father refused as he hadn’t done this for me
...
My parents say I have
qualities of both grandfathers – humorous and wise like my mother’s father and vocal like my father’s
father! Baba had grown soft and white-bearded in his old age and I loved going to visit him in the
village
...
Pa tool
jehan ke da khushala da,’ he sang
...
’
We always went to the village for the Eid holidays
...
Eid happens twice a year – Eid ul-Fitr or ‘Small Eid’ marks
the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Eid ul-Azha or ‘Big Eid’ commemorates the Prophet
Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail to God
...
As soon as we heard the
broadcast on the radio, we set off
...
The journey usually took about five
hours as long as the road had not been washed away by rains or landslides, and the Flying Coach left
early in the morning
...
Some people took sacks of sugar and flour, and most of the baggage was tied to the top of
the bus in a towering pile
...
The sides of Swat buses are painted with
scenes of bright pink and yellow flowers, neon-orange tigers and snowy mountains
...

We drove out of the bazaar, past the grinning red mouth signs for dentists, the carts stacked with
wooden cages crammed with beady-eyed white chickens with scarlet beaks, and jewellery stores
with windows full of gold wedding bangles
...
Then we were on the main road built by the last wali, which follows
the wide Swat River on the left and hugs the cliffs to the right with their emerald mines
...
On the road we
passed dusty-faced children bent double with huge bundles of grass on their backs and men leading

flocks of shaggy goats that wandered hither and thither
...
Occasionally we passed small marble works over streams which
ran milky white with the discharge of chemicals
...
‘Look at what these
criminals are doing to pollute our beautiful valley,’ he always said
...
On top
of some of the peaks were ruins where vultures circled, the remains of forts built by the first wali
...
My brothers loved this, and they would taunt me and my mother by pointing out the
wreckage of vehicles on the mountainside
...
Up there we were higher than the rocky peaks all around us
...
By the roadside were fresh springs
and waterfalls, and when we stopped for a break and to drink some tea, the air was clean and fragrant
with cedar and pine
...
Shangla is all mountain, mountain,
mountain and just a small sky
...
The only way to cross the river is by rope bridges
or on a pulley system by which people swing themselves across in a metal box
...

If you look at a map of Swat you’ll see it is one long valley with little valleys we call darae off to the
sides like the branches of a tree
...
It’s in the Kana
dara, which is enclosed by craggy mountain walls and so narrow there is not even room for a cricket
ground
...
At either end is a huge mountain – Tor Ghar, the Black Mountain to the south, and
Spin Ghar, the White Mountain, to the north
...
Like almost all
the houses in the area, it was flat-roofed and made of stone and mud
...
My mother and I stayed in the women’s quarters downstairs
...
I slept with my cousins Aneesa and Sumbul in a room which had a clock in the shape
of a mosque and a cabinet on the wall containing a rifle and some packets of hair dye
...
In the morning
the sun reflected off the top of Tor Ghar; when we got up for the fajr prayers, the first of our five
daily prayers, we would look left and see the golden peak of Spin Ghar lit with the first rays of the
sun like a white lady wearing a jumar tika – a gold chain on her forehead
...
Dotted around were hives of bees
...
Down on the river at the Karshat end were
water buffaloes
...
Next to

that was a smaller shed containing a panel with a confusion of wires sprouting from it
...

As the day went on and the sun climbed higher in the sky, more and more of the White Mountain
would be bathed in golden sun
...
We timed our prayers by the shadow on the mountains
...
Then in the evening, when the white peak of Spin Ghar was
even more beautiful than in the morning, we said the makkam or evening prayers
...
When he was a child he thought this small valley
was the entire world and that if anyone went beyond the point where either mountain kissed the sky,
they would fall off
...
I loved the rich soil, the
greenness of the plants, the crops, the buffaloes and the yellow butterflies that fluttered about me as I
walked
...
There would be bowls of chicken, rice, local spinach and spicy mutton, all cooked over the fire
by the women, followed by plates of crunchy apples, slices of yellow cake and a big kettle of milky
tea
...
The boys played cricket in a gully and even the ball was
made from plastic bags tied together with elastic bands
...
Water was carried from the spring
...
There are forty million of us Pashtuns, of which ten million live outside
our homeland
...
There were many families with no men
...

Scattered up and down the hills there were houses made of wattle and daub, like my grandfather’s,
and these often collapsed when there were floods
...
There
was no hospital
...

If it was anything serious they would have to make the long bus journey to Mingora unless they were
lucky enough to know someone with a car
...
Of course this only applied to the men; women in
our area don’t vote
...

My cousins made fun of me for my city ways
...
I read books and I had a
different accent and used slang expressions from Mingora
...
My relatives would ask me, ‘Would you like to cook chicken for us?’ and I’d
say, ‘No, the chicken is innocent
...
’ They thought I was modern because I came
from town
...


Sometimes we went up to the mountains and sometimes down to the river on family trips
...
The boys would fish using
earthworms threaded like beads on a string hanging from a long stick
...
They weren’t particularly tasty fish
...
We called them chaqwartee
...
Our favourite game was ‘weddings’
...
Everyone wanted me in their family as I was from Mingora and
modern
...

The most important part of the mock wedding was jewellery
...
Then we would put make-up
on her face that we’d taken from our mothers, dip her hands in hot limestone and soda to make them
white, and paint her nails red with henna
...
‘Marriage is part of life,’ we said
...
Take care of your husband and be
happy
...
The brides would wear exquisite clothes and be draped in gold, necklaces
and bangles given by both sides of the family
...

Sometimes a plywood coffin would be brought back from one of the mines
...

At night the village was very dark with just oil lamps twinkling in houses on the hills
...
My grandmother was particularly good at them
...
‘No Pashtun leaves his land of his own sweet will,’ she would say
...
’ Our aunts scared us with ghost stories, like the one about Shalgwatay,
the twenty-fingered man, who they warned would sleep in our beds
...
To
make us wash, our aunts told stories about a scary woman called Shashaka, who would come after
you with her muddy hands and stinking breath if you didn’t take a bath or wash your hair, and turn you
into a dirty woman with hair like rats’ tails filled with insects
...
In the winter
when parents didn’t want their children to stay outside in the snow they would tell the story about the
lion or tiger which must always make the first step in the snow
...

As we got older the village began to seem boring
...

Women in the village hid their faces whenever they left their purdah quarters and could not meet or
speak to men who were not their close relatives
...
One of my male cousins was angry and asked my father, ‘Why
isn’t she covered?’ He replied, ‘She’s my daughter
...
’ But some of the

family thought people would gossip about us and say we were not properly following Pashtunwali
...
A woman named Shahida who worked for us
and had three small daughters, told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to
an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one
...
There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Seema
...
In our society for a girl to flirt with
any man brings shame on the family, though it’s all right for the man
...

We have a custom called swara by which a girl can be given to another tribe to resolve a feud
...
In our village there was a widow called Soraya who married a
widower from another clan which had a feud with her family
...
When Soraya’s family found out about the union they were furious
...
The
jirga decided that the widower’s family should be punished by handing over their most beautiful girl
to be married to the least eligible man of the rival clan
...
Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she
had nothing to do with?
When I complained about these things to my father he told me that life was harder for women in
Afghanistan
...
They were forcing men to grow beards as long
as a lantern and women to wear burqas
...
At least I didn’t have to wear one
...
Women were being locked up and beaten just for wearing
nail varnish
...

I read my books like Anna Karenina and the novels of Jane Austen and trusted in my father’s
words: ‘Malala is free as a bird
...
‘Here a girl can go to school,’ I used to say
...
For me the valley was a sunny place and I couldn’t see the clouds
gathering behind the mountains
...
Carry on
with your dreams
...
I was the one who would help other pupils
who had difficulties
...
I was also known for
participating in everything – badminton, drama, cricket, art, even singing, though I wasn’t much good
...
Her name
means ‘Queen of Light’ and she said she wanted to be Pakistan’s first female army chief
...
To begin with
she didn’t say much in class
...
So when we did the end-of-year exams and Malka-e-Noor came first, I was shocked
...

Around that time we moved away from where we had been living on the same street as Moniba to
an area where I didn’t have any friends
...
She was a pampered girl who had lots of dolls
and a shoebox full of jewellery
...
My father was always talking on his
mobile so I loved to copy him and pretend to make calls on mine
...

A few days later I saw Safina playing with a phone exactly the same as mine
...
‘I bought it in the bazaar,’ she said
...
I used to go to her house to study, so whenever I was there I would
pocket her things, mostly toy jewellery like earrings and necklaces
...
At first stealing gave
me a thrill, but that did not last long
...
I did not know how to stop
...
‘Hello,
Bhabi!’ I called
...
My mother was sitting on the floor pounding
spices, brightly coloured turmeric and cumin, filling the air with their aroma
...
Her eyes would not meet mine
...

When I opened my cupboard, I saw that all the things I had taken were gone
...

My cousin Reena came into my room
...
‘They were waiting
for you to come clean but you just kept on
...
I walked back to my mother with my head bowed
...
‘Are you trying to bring shame on us that we can’t
afford to buy such things?’
‘It’s not true!’ I lied
...
’
But she knew I had
...
‘She took the pink phone that Aba bought me
...
‘Safina is younger than you and you should have taught her better,’ she
said
...
’
I started crying and apologised over and over again
...
I couldn’t bear for
him to be disappointed in me
...


It wasn’t the first time
...
They looked so tasty that I couldn’t resist grabbing a handful
...
He was furious and would not be placated
...
‘Can you sell them to me for ten
rupees?’ she asked
...
‘Almonds are very costly
...
He immediately went and bought the whole lot from
the man and put them in a glass dish
...
‘If you eat them with milk just before bed it makes you brainy
...
I promised
myself I’d never do such a thing again
...
My mother took me to say sorry to Safina and
her parents
...
Safina said nothing about my phone, which didn’t seem fair, but I didn’t
mention it either
...
Since that day I have never lied or stolen
...
I also stopped wearing jewellery because I asked myself, What are these
baubles which tempt me? Why should I lose my character for a few metal trinkets? But I still feel
guilty, and to this day I say sorry to God in my prayers
...
I could
see in his eyes that I had failed him
...
Or the day our kindergarten teacher Miss Ulfat told
him I had written, ‘Only Speak in Urdu,’ on the blackboard for my classmates at the start of an Urdu
lesson so we would learn the language faster
...
He told me that Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include
the freedom to make mistakes
...
As a boy
in Karachi he would study by the glow of street lights because there was no light at home
...
Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham
Lincoln to his son’s teacher, translated into Pashto
...

‘Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books
...
‘Teach him it
is far more honourable to fail than to cheat
...
The important thing is what you learn
from it
...
We are supposed to take revenge for
wrongs done to us, but where does that end? If a man in one family is killed or hurt by another man,
revenge must be exacted to restore nang
...
Then that family in turn must take revenge
...
There is no time limit
...
’
We are a people of many sayings
...
That’s also why we rarely say thank you, manana, because we believe
a Pashtun will never forget a good deed and is bound to reciprocate at some point, just as he will a
bad one
...
It can’t be repaid with expressions like ‘thank
you’
...
We knew many victims of feuds
...
My grandfather and uncle used to drive my father mad,
teasing him, ‘You’re not as good as Sher Zaman,’ so much he once wished that rocks would come
down the mountain and flatten him
...
His family became embroiled in a dispute with their cousins over
a small plot of forest
...
All three brothers were killed
...
He did not
believe in badal – revenge – and would try to make people see that neither side had anything to gain
from continuing the violence, and it would be better for them to get on with their lives
...
They had been locked in a feud for so long no one
even seemed to remember how it had started – probably some small slight as we are a hot-headed
people
...
Then vice versa
...

Our people say it is a good system, and our crime rate is much lower than in non-Pashtun areas
...
I am inspired by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the man who some call the Frontier Gandhi,
who introduced a non-violent philosophy to our culture
...
Some people, like me, get caught and vow they will never do it again
...
’ But the second time they will steal
something bigger and the third something bigger still
...
They are rich and we are a poor country yet they loot and loot
...
They take out loans from state banks but they don’t pay them back
...
Many of them
own expensive flats in London
...
My father says that Pakistan has been cursed with more than its fair share of politicians
who only think about money
...

I had been born into a sort of democracy in which for ten years Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif
kept replacing each other, none of their governments ever completing a term and always accusing
each other of corruption
...
It happened in a
manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie
...
At the time
General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka
...
He
ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block
the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another
country
...
The local commander, General

Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf ’s plane could land
...
Some people celebrated by handing out
sweets as Sharif was unpopular, but my father cried when he heard the news
...
Sharif was accused of treason and only saved by his friends in the
Saudi royal family, who arranged his exile
...
Like all our dictators, he started by addressing the nation
on TV beginning, ‘ Mere aziz hamwatano’ – ‘My dear countrymen’ – then went into a long tirade
,
against Sharif, saying that under him Pakistan had ‘lost our honour, dignity and respect’
...
He promised
he would make his own assets and tax return public
...
General Zia had promised to be in power for ninety days and had
stayed more than eleven years until he was killed in an air crash
...
Musharraf promised to end the old feudal
system by which the same few dozen families controlled our entire country, and bring fresh young
clean faces into politics
...
Once again our
country was expelled from the Commonwealth and became an international black sheep
...

With such a history, you can see why the people of Swat did not always think it was a good idea to
be part of Pakistan
...
It seemed to us that these bureaucrats came to our
province simply to get rich, then went back home
...
Our
people are used to being subservient because under the wali no criticism was tolerated
...
So when the DCs came from Pakistan,
they were the new kings and no one questioned them
...
Back then, they said, the mountains were all still covered in trees, there were
schools every five kilometres and the wali sahib would visit them in person to resolve problems
...
My father
always says it’s important to treat friends well
...
I have three good friends – Safina
from my area, Sumbul from the village and Moniba from school
...
She is a
wise girl, though we often fall out, particularly when we go on school trips
...
I think of her as my big sister even though I am six months
older than her
...
We don’t have secrets from each other
and we don’t share our secrets with anyone else
...
She always says, ‘I have four brothers, and if I do even the slightest thing wrong they can stop
me going to school
...
One day our neighbours
asked me to buy some maize for them from the bazaar
...
But I still went and bought the maize, took it
to my neighbours and then went home
...
Shortly after that I found the perfect way to

try to win back the respect of my father
...
I remembered the story of my father surprising
my grandfather and longed to do the same
...
It was ‘Honesty is the best policy’
...
She was beautiful and spoke in an
animated way
...
Moniba and I longed to be like her and studied her carefully
...
They tend to be in
English or Urdu, not in our native Pashto
...
We were wrong, of course
...
Moniba’s speech was written by one of her older
brothers
...
My father wrote my speech
...
In the same way, if
you choose a good method to do something bad it’s still bad
...

On the day only eight or nine boys and girls turned up
...
I was so nervous before the speech, I was trembling with fear
...
I remembered what my father had said about taking a deep breath before starting, but then I
saw that all eyes were on me and I rushed through
...
He was smiling
...
I came second
...
Lincoln also wrote in the letter to his son’s teacher, ‘Teach him how to gracefully
lose
...
But I realised that, even if you win three or four times,
the next victory will not necessarily be yours without trying – and also that sometimes it’s better to
tell your own story
...


6
Children of the Rubbish Mountain

AS THE KHUSHAL School started to attract more pupils, we moved again and finally had a television
...
Everything he drew became real
...
If he accidentally drew a snake he
could erase it and the snake would disappear
...

At night I would pray, ‘God, give me Sanju’s pencil
...
Just leave it in my
cupboard
...
’ As soon as I finished praying, I would check the
drawer
...
Just along the street from our
new house was an abandoned strip of land that people used as a rubbish dump – there is no rubbish
collection in Swat
...
I didn’t like walking near it as it smelt so
bad
...

One day my brothers were not home and my mother had asked me to throw away some potato peel
and eggshells
...
As I threw the rubbish on the mountain of rotting food, I saw something
move and I jumped
...
Her hair was matted and her skin was covered in
sores
...
The girl had a big sack and was sorting rubbish into piles, one for cans, one for
bottle tops, another for glass and another for paper
...
I wanted to talk to the children but I was too scared
...
He tried to talk to them but they ran away
...
The shop would then
sell it on at a profit
...

‘Aba, you must give them free places at your school,’ I begged
...
My mother and I had
already persuaded him to give free places to a number of girls
...
She was always out helping people
...
Then he would find she was at the hospital visiting someone who was ill,
or had gone to help a family, so he could not stay cross
...

Wherever we lived my mother filled our house with people
...
Shehnaz and her sister had also been
sent out to collect garbage after their father had died leaving them very poor
...
Sultana was very short-tempered and my mother did not like having

her in the house, but my father arranged a small allowance for her and a place for Shehnaz and her
other brother at his school
...

There was also Nooria, whose mother Kharoo did some of our washing and cleaning, and Alishpa,
one of the daughters of Khalida, the woman who helped my mother with the cooking
...
Her own family would not take her back because it is believed that a woman who has
left her husband has brought shame on her family
...
Her story was like something out of the novels I had started reading
...
We had about 800 students in total, and
although the school was not really making money, my father gave away more than a hundred free
places
...
They were friends from the village
...
My father
was happy to be able to repay his kindness
...
When we went on school
trips to visit the mountains, I knew she couldn’t afford them so I would pay for her with my pocket
money
...
Some of the richer parents
took their children out of the school when they realised they were sharing classrooms with the sons
and daughters of people who cleaned their houses or stitched their clothes
...
My mother said it was hard for the
poor children to learn when they were not getting enough food at home so some of the girls would
come to our house for breakfast
...

Having so many people around made it hard to study
...
But now I had two other girls in the
room
...
But then I felt guilty as I knew we were lucky
...
I kept seeing the dirty face of the girl from the dump and
continued to pester my father to give them places at our school
...
However, he got a wealthy philanthropist, Azaday Khan, to pay
for him to produce a leaflet asking, ‘Kia hasool e elum in bachun ka haq nahe? ’ – ‘Is education not
the right of these children?’ My father printed thousands of these leaflets, left them at local meetings
and distributed them around town
...
Even though he was not a khan or a
rich man, people listened to him
...
He was becoming known to the army too, and friends told him that the local commander had
called him ‘lethal’ in public
...

One of his pet hates was the ‘ghost schools’
...
Instead they used the buildings for their
hujras or even to keep their animals
...
Aside from corruption and bad government, my father’s
main concern in those days was the environment
...
The beautiful trees on our hills and mountains were being chopped down for
timber
...
So he and his friends set up something called the Global Peace
Council which, despite its name, had very local concerns
...

My father also loved to write poetry, sometimes about love, but often on controversial themes such
as honour killings and women’s rights
...
It was mentioned as the most inspiring in
the closing speech, and some in the audience asked him to repeat whole stanzas and couplets,
exclaiming ‘Wah wah’ when a particular line pleased them, which is a bit like ‘Bravo’
...
‘Son, may you be the star in the sky of knowledge,’ he used to say
...
It was always our
mother who shopped for our clothes and took us to hospital if we were ill, even though in our culture,
particularly for those of us from villages, a woman is not supposed to do these things alone
...
When my father was at home, he and his friends sat on
the roof at dusk and talked politics endlessly
...
It might have
changed the whole world but we were living right in the epicentre of everything
...

In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the
1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan
...

Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W
...
There was a major problem, however
...
Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and
shared some of their beliefs
...

We were not fans of the Taliban as we had heard they destroyed girls’ schools and blew up giant
Buddha statues – we had many Buddhas of our own that we were proud of
...
We did not
know then that Musharraf was also letting the Americans use our airfields
...
In the bazaar you could buy posters
of him on a white horse and boxes of sweets with his picture on them
...
Our people see conspiracies
behind everything, and many argued that the attack was actually carried out by Jews as an excuse for
America to launch a war on the Muslim world
...
My father said this was rubbish
...
He said they
had told him, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,’ and threatened to ‘bomb us back
to the Stone Age’ if we stood against them
...
They even persuaded the
Americans to let them fly hundreds of Pakistani fighters out of northern Afghanistan
...

In our province Maulana Sufi Mohammad, who had fought in Afghanistan against the Russians,
issued a fatwa against the US
...
The Pakistani government didn’t stop him
...
Some 12,000
young men from Swat went to help the Taliban
...
They were most likely killed,
but as there is no proof of death, their wives can’t be declared widows
...
My
father’s close friend Wahid Zaman’s brother and brother-in-law were among the many who went to
Afghanistan
...
I remember visiting them and feeling
their longing
...
Afghanistan is less
than a hundred miles away, but to get there you have to go through Bajaur, one of the tribal areas
between Pakistan and the border with Afghanistan
...
They escaped through these and over the
mountains into Kurram, another tribal agency
...

Anyone could see that Musharraf was double-dealing, taking American money while still helping
the jihadis – ‘strategic assets’, as the ISI calls them
...
Musharraf built a
mansion by Rawal Lake in Islamabad and bought an apartment in London
...
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, was found in a house just a mile
from the army chief ’s official residence in Rawalpindi
...
My father and his friends were disgusted
...

From an early age I was interested in politics and sat on my father’s knee listening to everything he
and his friends discussed
...
I told my friends at school about the rubbish-dump children and that we should help
...
They also said it wasn’t up to us to sort
out the problem
...
‘We can sit by and hope the government will help but they won’t
...
’

I knew it was pointless appealing to Musharraf
...
I wrote a letter to God
...
But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on
my road living on a rubbish dump
...
Malala
...
Somehow I thought it needed to go deep into
the earth, so first I buried it in the garden
...
But that didn’t seem much use
...
Surely God would find it there
...
His name was Ghulamullah and he called himself a mufti, which means he is
an Islamic scholar and authority on Islamic law, though my father complains that anyone with a turban
can call themselves a maulana or mufti
...
For the first time my mother
could buy nice clothes and even send out for food as she had dreamed of doing back in the village
...
He watched the girls going in and out of our school every
day and became angry, particularly as some of the girls were teenagers
...
He was right
...
These girls should be in purdah
...
If you do this you will get paid now and also receive a reward in
the next world
...
‘This maulana is starting a campaign against
you,’ he warned
...
’
My father was angry
...

I am proud that our country was created as the world’s first Muslim homeland, but we still don’t
agree on what this means
...
We have many strands of Islam in Pakistan
...
It was as if there
was a feud between two brothers and they agreed to live in different houses
...
It could hardly have been a
bloodier beginning
...
Almost two million of them were killed trying to cross the new border
...
My own grandfather
narrowly escaped death in the riots when his train was attacked by Hindus on his way home from
Delhi, where he had been studying
...
We also have around two million Christians and more than two million Ahmadis, who
say they are Muslims though our government says they are not
...

Jinnah had lived in London as a young man and trained as a barrister
...
Our people often quote the famous speech he made a few days before independence: ‘You
are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in
this State of Pakistan
...
’ My father says the problem is that Jinnah negotiated a piece of real estate
for us but not a state
...
We have had three wars against India and what seems like endless killing
inside our own country
...
The man chosen to be the leader or caliph was Abu Bakr, a close
friend and adviser of the Prophet and the man he chose to lead prayers as he lay on his deathbed
...
But a smaller
group believed that leadership should have stayed within the Prophet’s family and that Ali, his son-inlaw and cousin, should have taken over
...

Every year Shias commemorate the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein Ibn Ali at the battle
of Karbala in the year 680 with a festival called Muharram
...
One of my father’s friends
is a Shia and he cries whenever he talks about Hussein’s death at Karbala
...
Our own
founder, Jinnah, was a Shia, and Benazir Bhutto’s mother was also a Shia from Iran
...
By far the biggest group is the Barelvis, who are named after a nineteenth-century madrasa in
Bareilly, which lies in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh
...
They
are very conservative and most of our madrasas are Deobandi
...
This group is more Arab-influenced and even more
conservative than the others
...
They don’t accept our
saints and shrines – many Pakistanis are also mystical people and gather at Sufi shrines to dance and
worship
...

The mufti on Khushal Street was a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a Deobandi group that holds a huge
rally every year at its headquarters in Raiwind, near Lahore, attended by millions of people
...
Many of the imams appointed to preach in army barracks were Tablighis and army officers
would often take leave and go on preaching tours for the group
...
There
were seven people – some other senior Tablighis, a mosque keeper, a former jihadi and a shopkeeper
– and they filled our small house
...
‘I am representing the Ulema and Tablighian and Taliban,’ Mullah Ghulamullah
said, referring to not just one but two organisations of Muslim scholars to give himself gravitas
...
You should
close it
...
‘A girl is so sacred she should be in
purdah, and so private that there is no lady’s name in the Quran as God doesn’t want her to be
named
...
‘Maryam is mentioned everywhere in the Quran
...
‘She is only there to prove that Isa [Jesus] was the son of Maryam, not the
son of God!’
‘That may be,’ replied my father
...
’
The mufti started to object but my father had had enough
...
’
The mullah looked down embarrassed because greeting someone properly is important in Islam
...
‘That’s why I don’t want to greet you
...
‘I’d heard you were an infidel,’ he said to my father, ‘but there
are Qurans in your room
...
‘I am a
Muslim
...
‘There are men in the reception area of the school, and they see the girls enter, and this
is very bad
...
‘The school has another gate
...
’
The mullah clearly wasn’t happy as he wanted the school closed altogether
...

My father suspected this would not be the end of the matter
...
So a few days later my father called the mufti’s
elder brother, the girl’s father
...
‘What kind of mullah is he? He’s driving us crazy
...
‘I have trouble in my home too
...
Our wives are like sisters to him and his is like a sister to us, but
this madman has made our house a hell
...
’
My father was right to think this man was not going to give up – mullahs had become more
powerful figures since Zia’s rule and campaign of Islamisation
...
Though he usually dressed in
uniform, he occasionally wore Western suits and he called himself chief executive instead of chief
martial law administrator
...
Instead of Zia’s
Islamisation he began what he called ‘enlightened moderation’
...
The
celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve was allowed
...

He did something which our democratic rulers hadn’t, even Benazir, and abolished the law that for a
woman to prove she was raped, she had to produce four male witnesses
...
He even
announced we would have female guards at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi
...


In 2002 Musharraf held elections for ‘controlled democracy’
...
In our province these elections brought
what we called a ‘mullah government’ to power
...
People jokingly referred to the MMA as the Mullah Military
Alliance and said they got elected because they had Musharraf ’s support
...

Our area had always been more conservative than most of the rest of Pakistan
...
That was the start of what my father calls the
‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan
...
Sometimes when I
walked along the main road I saw chalked messages on the sides of buildings
...
In those days jihadi groups were free to do
whatever they wanted
...
There
was even a headmaster from Shangla who would boast that his greatest success was to send ten boys
in Grade 9 for jihad training in Kashmir
...
The idea was they would be able to stop a woman accompanied by a man
and require her to prove that the man was her relative
...

Then MMA activists launched attacks on cinemas and tore down billboards with pictures of women
or blacked them out with paint
...
They
harassed men wearing Western-style shirts and trousers instead of the traditional shalwar kamiz and
insisted women cover their heads
...

My father’s high school opened in 2003
...
That
changing climate made Ghulamullah bold
...
He said that one
day, when a male member of staff took a female teacher out to the main road to get a rickshaw, the
maulana asked, ‘Why did this man escort her to the road, is he her brother?’
‘No,’ replied the clerk, ‘he is a colleague
...

My father told the clerk to call him next time he saw the maulana
...

‘Maulana, you have driven me to the wall!’ my father said
...
You think I enter the school and take my clothes off? When you see a boy and a
girl you see a scandal
...
I think you should go and see Dr Haider Ali!’
Dr Haider Ali was a well-known psychiatrist in our area, so to say, ‘Shall we take you to Dr
Haider Ali?’ meant ‘Are you mad?’
The mufti went quiet
...
For us a turban is a public
symbol of chivalry and Pashtunness, and for a man to lose his turban is considered a great humili–
ation
...
‘I never said those things to your clerk
...
’

My father had had enough
...
‘Go away!’
The mufti had failed to close our school but his interference was an indication of how our country
was changing
...
He and his fellow activists were holding endless meetings
...

In 2004, after resisting pressure from Washington for more than two and a half years, General
Musharraf sent the army into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), seven agencies that
lie along the border with Afghanistan, where the government had little control
...
From there they were running
training camps and launching raids across the border on NATO troops
...
One of the agencies, Bajaur, is next to Swat
...

The tribal agencies were created in British times as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and what
was then India, and they are still run in the same way, administered by tribal chiefs or elders known
as maliks
...
In truth the tribal areas are not governed at
all
...
(The
average annual income is just $250 – half the Pakistani average
...
Hardly any
women from these areas can read
...

Our army had never before gone into the FATA
...

Sending in the regular army was a tough decision
...
The
first tribal area that the army entered was South Waziristan, in March 2004
...
All the men there carry weapons and hundreds of
soldiers were killed when the locals revolted
...
Some men refused to fight, not wishing to battle their own people
...
This involved the army bribing them to halt all attacks
and keep out foreign fighters
...
A few months later came the first attack on Pakistan by a US drone
...
He and the men around
him were killed instantly
...
Whatever you thought about Nek Mohammad, we were not at war
with the Americans and were shocked that they would launch attacks from the sky on our soil
...

Then there were more attacks
...
In January 2006 a drone supposedly targeting him landed
on a village called Damadola, destroying three houses and killing eighteen people
...
That same year, on 30 October, another US Predator hit a

madrasa on a hill near the main town of Khar, killing eighty-two people, many of them young boys
...
Within a few hours of the attack, an
influential local cleric called Faqir Mohammad, who had run the madrasa, announced that the deaths
would be avenged by suicide bombings against Pakistani soldiers
...
It was a bitterly cold night in January but 150 people gathered
...
‘The fire is reaching the valley
...
’
But no one would listen
...

‘Mr Khan,’ my father said to him, ‘you know what happened to the people of Afghanistan
...
The same is happening with Bajaur
...
’
But the expression on the man’s face was mocking
...
‘I am a khan
...
‘I have a school, but I am neither a khan nor a political leader
...
‘I am only one small man
...

Our classes were still mixed at that age, and all the boys and girls yelled, ‘Earthquake!’ We ran
outside as we had been taught to do
...

Swat lies on a geological fault line and we often had earthquakes, but this felt different
...
Most of us were crying and
our teachers were praying
...

Once the shaking had stopped we were all sent home
...
Whenever there is trouble people pray a lot
...
But the aftershocks kept coming
all afternoon so we remained very scared
...
It was high for Mingora, two storeys with a big water tank on the roof
...
My father did not get
home till late that evening as he had been busy checking all the other school buildings
...
Every time we
felt a tremor we thought it was the Day of Judgement
...
She
insisted we leave, but my father was exhausted and we Muslims believe our fate is written by God
...

‘Go wherever you want,’ he told my mother and cousin
...
If you believe in God
you will stay here
...
But God has also given us
the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal
...

That earthquake of 8 October 2005 turned out to be one of the worst in history
...
6 on the
Richter Scale and was felt as far away as Kabul and Delhi
...
Even in Islamabad buildings collapsed
...
When the TV news began to show the devastation
we saw that entire villages had been turned to dust
...
The earthquake had affected 30,000 square
kilometres, an area as big as the American state of Connecticut
...

More than 73,000 people had been killed and 128,000 injured, many of them permanently disabled
...
Roads, bridges, water and power had all
gone
...
Many of those killed
were children who like me had been at school that morning
...


We remembered how scared we had been that morning and started raising money at school
...
My father went to everybody he knew, asking for donations of
food, clothing and money, and I helped my mother collect blankets
...
The total came to more than one million rupees
...

We were terribly worried about our family in Shangla, jammed between those narrow mountains
...
In my father’s small village eight people had been killed and
many homes destroyed
...
I wanted to go to Shangla with my father and the trucks but
he told me it would be too dangerous
...
He told us that the last part of the journey had
been very difficult
...
Our family and friends said they had thought it was the end of the world
...
As the tremors
continued they had spent the entire day outdoors and then the night too, huddling together for warmth,
even though it was bitterly cold in the mountains
...
Sufi Mohammad had been in jail since 2002 when Musharraf arrested a number of
militant leaders after American pressure, but his organisation still continued and was being run by his
son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah
...
We saw an official from the United Nations say on television that it was the ‘worst logistical
nightmare that the UN had ever faced’
...
There were lots of pictures on the news of
army helicopters laden with supplies and tents, but in many of the small valleys the helicopters could
not land and the aid packages they dropped often rolled down slopes into rivers
...

But some aid did get in
...

For many in the remote areas it was the first time they had seen a foreigner
...
The most visible of all was Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD), the welfare wing of LashkareTaiba
...
The leader of LeT is a fiery professor
from Lahore called Hafiz Saeed, who is often on television calling on people to attack India
...
Everyone knew these men belonged to LeT, and soon their
black and white banners with crossed swords were flying everywhere in the mountains and valleys
...
Doctors and
surgeons offered their services along with thousands of young volunteers
...
They helped
clear and rebuild destroyed villages as well as leading prayers and burying bodies
...
My cousin who was studying in the UK said they raised lots of money from
Pakistanis living there
...

With such a large number of people killed, there were many children orphaned – 11,000 of them
...
The
government promised they would all be looked after by the state, but that felt as empty as most
government promises
...
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
...
They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that
dinosaurs never existed and that man never went to the moon
...
Already so unlucky with our
politicians and military dictators, now, on top of everything else, we had to deal with a natural
disaster
...
If we did
not mend our ways and introduce shariat or Islamic law, they shouted in their thundering voices,
more severe punishment would come
...
Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books
and longed to be vampires
...

They appeared in groups, armed with knives and Kalashnikovs, and first emerged in Upper Swat, in
the hilly areas of Matta
...

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 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
...

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
...
When Sufi
Mohammad was imprisoned in a round-up of militant leaders in 2002, Fazlullah had taken over the
movement’s leadership
...

In our valley we received most of our information from the radio because so many had no TV or
are illiterate
...
It became known as Mullah
FM and Fazlullah as the Radio Mullah
...

In the beginning Fazlullah was very wise
...
My mother is very devout, and to start with she liked Fazlullah
...
He said
men should keep their beards but give up smoking and using the tobacco they liked to chew
...
He told people the correct
way to do their ablutions for prayers – which body part to wash first
...

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
...
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
...
Sinful acts like these had caused the earthquake, Fazlullah thundered,
and if people didn’t stop they would again invite the wrath of God
...

Fazlullah exploited this ignorance
...
I remembered how frightening the earthquake had been
...
‘He is just fooling people
...
By then our schools had about seventy
teachers, around forty men and thirty women
...
People thought that he was a good interpreter of the Holy Quran and admired his
charisma
...
Cases such
as land disputes, common in our area, which used to be resolved quickly now took ten years to come
to court
...
It
was almost as if they thought Fazlullah would recreate our old princely state from the time of the
wali
...
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
...
My brothers and I were worried as we loved our TV, but my father
reassured us that we were not getting rid of it
...
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
...
Only the radio was allowed, and all music except for
Taliban songs was declared haram
...
‘You must meet Maulana Fazlullah,’ people told him
...

‘He’s actually a high-school dropout whose real name isn’t even Fazlullah,’ my father retorted, but
they wouldn’t listen
...
‘It’s ridiculous,’ my father would say, ‘that this so-called
scholar is spreading ignorance
...
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
...
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
...
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
...
He said that if they did not implement
it, his men would ‘enforce it and tear them to pieces’
...
Poor people were happy to see the khans getting their comeuppance
...
Some of the khans fled
...

My father’s friend Hidayatullah had become a government official in Peshawar and warned us,

‘This is how these militants work
...
That’s what they did in Waziristan when they went after kidnappers and bandits
...
’
Fazlullah’s broadcasts were often aimed at women
...
Sometimes
he would say, ‘Men, go outside now
...
’ Then he’d say, ‘Women are meant to
fulfil their responsibilities in the home
...
’ Sometimes his men would display the fancy clothes that they said they had taken from
‘decadent women’ to shame them
...
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
...
Women would tell him their
dreams and he would pray for them
...

I was confused by Fazlullah’s words
...
In our Islamic studies class at school we used to write
essays entitled ‘How the Prophet Lived’
...
She was forty, fifteen years older than him, and she had been
married before, yet he still married her
...
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
...
That’s what he
does
...
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
...
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
...
All
those things she did
...
Khushal had his appendix out too
...
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
...
’
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
...
Some gave their life savings, believing that this would make God happy
...
No one knew where he got the cement and iron
bars from but the workforce was local
...
One day one of our Urdu teachers, Nawab Ali, told my father, ‘I won’t be coming to

school tomorrow
...

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

My father came home fuming
...
‘The only charity they know is to give to mosque and madrasa
...

My father tried to change his mind
...
‘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
...
Then the Radio Mullah turned his attention to schools
...

‘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
...
’ Girls like me who still went to school he
called buffaloes and sheep
...
‘Why don’t they want girls to go to
school?’ I asked my father
...

Then another teacher at our school, a maths teacher with long hair, also refused to teach girls
...
‘Sir, don’t
do this,’ they pleaded
...
Let him stay and we will cover for him
...
Fazlullah closed beauty parlours and banned shaving so
there was no work for barbers
...
The Taliban told women not to go to the bazaar
...
I didn’t enjoy shopping, unlike my mother, who liked beautiful clothes even though
we didn’t have much money
...
’
I would reply, ‘It doesn’t matter; I’m also looking at them,’ and she’d get so cross
...
All of that stopped
...
One Talib could
intimidate a whole village
...
Normally there are new film releases for the
holidays, but Fazlullah had closed the DVD shops
...

Next Fazlullah began holding a shura, a kind of local court
...

People began going to Fazlullah and his men to resolve grievances about anything from business
matters to personal feuds
...
The punishments decreed by Fazlullah’s shura included public whippings, which we
had never seen before
...
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
...

His men stopped health workers giving polio drops, saying the vaccinations were an American plot
to make Muslim women infertile so that the people of Swat would die out
...
‘You will not find a single
child to drink a drop of the vaccine anywhere in Swat
...
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
...
One day my father ran into his bank manager
...
Few spoke out
...
Just the day before the barber had told a journalist that the Taliban were good Muslims
...
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
...
We were all horrified by the attack and
people swore revenge
...
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
...
But Fazlullah said, ‘On this Eid twolegged animals will be sacrificed
...
His men began killing khans and
political activists from secular and nationalist parties, especially the Awami National Party (ANP)
...
His name was Malak Bakht Baidar
...
His body was found dumped in his family’s ancestral graveyard
...
It was the first targeted killing in Swat, and people said it was because
he had helped the army find Taliban hideouts
...
Our provincial government was still made up of mullah parties
who wouldn’t criticise anyone who claimed to be fighting for Islam
...
But Fazlullah’s headquarters were just a few miles away, and
even though the Taliban were not near our house they were in the markets, in the streets and the hills
...

During Eid we went to our family village as usual
...
I was
in the back with my mother
...
The
Taliban were dressed in black and carried Kalashnikovs
...
You must wear burqas
...
‘Sir, the school you
are running is Western and infidel,’ it said
...

Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you
...

My father decided to change the boys’ uniform from shirt and trousers to shalwar kamiz, baggy
pyjama-like trousers and a long shirt
...

His friend Hidayatullah told him to stand firm
...
‘Life isn’t just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide
...
’
My father told us what Hidayatullah had said
...
‘To the Fedayeen of Islam [or Islamic sacrificers], this is not the right way to implement
Islam,’ he wrote
...
You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren
...
The letter had been buried on an inside page and the editor
had published his name and the address of the school, which my father had not expected him to do
...
‘You have put the first stone in standing water,’ they
said
...
’

10
Toffees, Tennis Balls and the Buddhas of Swat

F IRST THE TALIBAN took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history
...
We were lucky to live in a paradise like Swat with so many beautiful
places to visit – waterfalls, lakes, the ski resort, the wali’s palace, the Buddha statues, the tomb of
Akhund of Swat
...
We would talk about the trips for weeks
beforehand, then, when the day finally came, we dressed up in our best clothes and piled into buses
along with pots of chicken and rice for a picnic
...
At the
end of the day my father would make us all take turns standing on a rock and tell stories about what
we had seen
...
Girls were not supposed to be
seen outside
...
They believed
any statue or painting was haram, sinful and therefore prohibited
...
Archaeologists say it was almost as important as
the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Afghan Taliban blew up
...
The first time they drilled holes in the rock and filled them with
dynamite, but that didn’t work
...
This time they
obliterated the Buddha’s face, which had watched over the valley since the seventh century
...
The Swat museum moved its
collection away for safekeeing
...
The Taliban
took over the Emerald Mountain with its mine and began selling the beautiful stones to buy their ugly
weapons
...

Their radio coverage spread across the valley and neighbouring districts
...
Moniba and I could no longer watch our favourite
Bollywood shows like Shararat or Making Mischief
...
They even banned one of our favourite board games called Carrom in which we flick
counters across a wooden board
...
We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control,
telling us what to do and how to dress
...

One day we found our teacher Miss Hammeda in floods of tears
...
It was the first Taliban attack on the police in our valley
...
The black and white flags of Fazlullah’s TNSM started appearing on police
stations
...
In a short
time they had taken over fifty-nine villages and set up their own parallel administrations
...

All this happened and nobody did a thing
...
My father said
people had been seduced by Fazlullah
...

My father tried to counter their propaganda but it was hard
...
He even dared to enter the Radio Mullah’s own village one day to speak at a school
...

On the way he saw smoke so high it touched the clouds, the blackest smoke he’d ever seen
...

In the school my father told the people, ‘I saw your villagers burning these things
...
’
Meanwhile the authorities, like most people, did nothing
...
The rest of Pakistan was preoccupied with
something else – the Taliban had moved right into the heart of our nation’s capital, Islamabad
...

The women were from Jamia Hafsa, the biggest female madrasa in our country and part of Lal
Masjid – the Red Mosque in Islamabad
...
It’s
just a few blocks from parliament and the headquarters of ISI, and many government officials and
military used to pray there
...
It was run by
two brothers, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid, and had become a centre for spreading propaganda
about bin Laden whom Abdul Rashid had met in Kandahar when visiting Mullah Omar
...

When President Musharraf agreed to help America in the ‘War on Terror’, the mosque broke off its
long links with the military and became a centre of protest against the government
...
Investigators said the explosives used had been stored in Lal Masjid
...

When Musharraf sent troops into the FATA, starting with Waziristan in 2004, the brothers led a
campaign declaring the military action un-Islamic
...

Around the same time as our Taliban were emerging in Swat, the girls of the Red Mosque madrasa
began terrorising the streets of Islamabad
...
When it suits the Taliban, women can be vocal and visible
...
The mosque also set up its
own courts to dispense Islamic justice, saying the state had failed
...

The Musharraf government didn’t seem to know what to do
...
But by the middle of 2007 the situation was so bad that people

began to worry the militants could take over the capital
...
Finally on the evening of 3 July
commandos with tanks and armoured personnel carriers surrounded the mosque
...
The troops
blasted holes in the wall surrounding the mosque and fired mortars at the compound as helicopter
gunships hovered overhead
...

Many of the militants in the mosque had fought in Afghanistan or Kashmir
...
Worried parents
gathered outside, calling their daughters on mobile phones, begging them to come out
...

The next evening a small group of girls emerged
...
But his wife and younger brother stayed inside, along with many
students, and there were daily exchanges of gunfire between the militants and the troops outside
...
The siege went on until late on 9 July,
when the commander of the special forces outside was killed by a sniper in one of the minarets
...

They called it Operation Silence although it was very loud
...
Commandos fought from room to room for hours until they finally tracked
Abdul Rashid and his followers to a basement where they killed him
...
The news showed shocking pictures of the wreckage, everywhere blood and
broken glass, and dead bodies
...
Some of the students at the two madrasas
were from Swat
...

It was after the Red Mosque siege that the Swat Taliban changed
...
He raged against the Lal Masjid attack and vowed to avenge the death of Abdul Rashid
...

This was the start of real trouble
...
A few days later they attacked an army convoy travelling in
the direction of Swat and killed thirteen soldiers
...
There was an
enormous protest by tribesmen in Bajaur and a wave of suicide bombings across the country
...
The Americans were worried that their ally
General Musharraf was too unpopular in Pakistan to be effective against the Taliban so they had
helped broker an unlikely power-sharing deal
...
In return he would drop corruption
charges against her and her husband and agree to hold elections, which everyone assumed would
result in Benazir becoming prime minister
...

Benazir had been in exile since I was two years old, but I had heard so much about her from my
father and was very excited that she would return and we might have a woman leader once more
...
She
was our role model
...
She was also our only political
leader to speak out against the militants and even offered to help American troops hunt for bin Laden
inside Pakistani borders
...
On 18 October 2007 we were all glued to the TV as she
walked down the steps of the plane in Karachi and wept as she stepped onto Pakistani soil after
almost nine years in exile
...
They had travelled from all over the country and many of them
were carrying small children
...
The crowds were so large that the bus moved at a walking pace
...

I had gone to bed when just before midnight the militants struck
...
My father told me the news when I woke up the next morning
...
Luckily, Benazir survived because
she had gone downstairs to an armoured compartment to rest her feet just before the explosions, but
150 people had been killed
...
Many of the
dead were students who had made a human chain around the bus
...
At school that day everyone was subdued, even those who had opposed Benazir
...

About a week later the army came to Swat, making lots of noise with their jeeps and helicopters
...
We ran outside and they
threw toffees and tennis balls down to us, which we rushed to catch
...

We used to hold competitions for who would collect the most toffees
...
We didn’t know what a curfew was and were anxious
...
‘What does it
mean this curfew?’ we asked
...
Later the curfew took over our lives
...

They occupied all government and private buildings which they thought were of strategic importance
...
The
following day a suicide bomber attacked another army truck in Swat, killing seventeen soldiers and
thirteen civilians
...
It was hard to sleep
...
School was
closed and we stayed at home, trying to understand what was going on
...
The military said it had killed more than a
hundred militants, but then on the first day of November around 700 Taliban overran an army position
at Khwazakhela
...
Fazlullah’s men humiliated them by taking their uniforms and guns
and giving them each 500 rupees to make their way back
...
Very

quickly the Taliban controlled most of Swat outside Mingora
...
The army was everywhere
...
They then launched an operation against Fazlullah which later became known as the first
battle of Swat
...
Police once tried to capture Fazlullah when he was speaking at a gathering, but a giant
sandstorm blew up and he managed to escape
...

The militants did not give up easily
...
Again local police fled without a fight
...
We worried about our family in Shangla, though my
father said the village was too remote for the Taliban to bother with and local people had made it
clear they would keep them out
...
They took Imam Deri, the headquarters of Fazlullah
...

Fazlullah retreated into the mountains
...
‘This will not last,’ my father predicted
...
All across north-western Pakistan different
militant groups had emerged led by people from various tribal groups
...
They agreed to form a united front under the banner of Tehrik-i-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP), or
the Pakistan Taliban, and claimed to have 40,000 fighters between them
...
Fazlullah was made
chief of the Swat sector
...
There
was much more to come
...

On 27 December Benazir Bhutto addressed an election rally in Liaquat Bagh, the park in
Rawalpindi where our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali, was assassinated
...
She was in a
special bulletproof Toyota Land Cruiser, and as it left the park she stood up on the seat and popped
her head through the sunroof to wave to supporters
...
Benazir slid back down
...

We were watching the TV when the news came through
...
We all started crying and praying for
her
...
’ It felt as if my country was running out of hope
...
Baitullah denied responsibility, which was unusual for the Taliban
...
By the time the Taliban came I had finished my recitation of the complete
Quran, what we call Khatam ul-Quran, much to the delight of Baba, my grandfather the cleric
...
To my horror one qari sahib tried to justify Benazir’s assassination
...
‘When she was alive she was useless
...
If she had lived there would have been anarchy
...
‘We don’t have any option
...
‘But you just use him to learn the literal meaning of the words; don’t
follow his explanations and interpretation
...
His words are divine
messages, which you are free and independent to interpret
...
When I was in the street it felt as though every
man I passed might be a talib
...
My father always
said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform,
but now we were afraid to wear them
...
Madam Maryam said no one wanted to teach our class as we
asked so many questions
...
When we decorated our hands
with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers
and butterflies
...
She usually came second and Moniba third
...
Moniba had the most beautiful
writing and presentation of the three of us, but I always told her she did not trust herself enough
...
I was weakest in maths – once I got zero in a test – but I worked hard at it
...
’
Some parents complained that I was being favoured because my father owned the school, but
people were always surprised that despite our rivalry we were all good friends and not jealous of
each other
...
These would select the best students
from private schools in the district, and one year Malka-e-Noor and I got exactly the same marks
...
So people
wouldn’t think I was getting special treatment, my father arranged for us to do papers at another
school, that of his friend Ahmad Shah
...

There was more to school than work
...
I wrote a sketch based on Romeo
and Juliet about corruption
...
The
first candidate is a beautiful girl, and he asks her very easy questions such as, ‘How many wheels
does a bicycle have?’ When she replies, ‘Two,’ he says, ‘You are so brilliant
...
’ ‘How could I possibly know?’ asks the candidate
...
He decides to give the job to the girl
...
Everyone laughed a lot
...
With all the bad stuff going on in those days, we needed small, small reasons to laugh
...
The army had stayed in Swat and
were everywhere in the town, yet Fazlullah still broadcast every day on the radio and throughout
2008 the situation was even worse than before with bomb blasts and killings
...
Attiya
used to tease me by saying, ‘Taliban is good, army not good
...
All the other girls in my class wanted to be
doctors, but I decided I wanted to be an inventor and make an anti-Taliban machine which would sniff
them out and destroy their guns
...
Fazlullah kept broadcasting that girls should stay at home and his men had started
blowing up schools, usually during night-time curfew when the children were not there
...

We couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing
...
Even in Mingora, there were explosions
...
I became very
scared of going into the kitchen and would only run in and out
...
It was earshatteringly loud and obviously close by
...
‘Khaista, Pisho, Bhabi, Khushal, Atal!’ Then we heard sirens, one after another as if
all the ambulances of Mingora were passing
...
Funeral prayers had been under way for a popular local police officer, Javid
Iqbal, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in a remote area while trying to escape from the
Taliban
...
Now the Taliban had bombed the mourners
...
Ten members of Moniba’s family were there and
were either killed or injured
...
There were
condolences in every mosque
...

‘At night our fear is strong, Jani,’ he told me, ‘but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage
again
...
We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage
...

In times of crisis we Pashtuns resort to the old trusted ways, so in 2008 elders in Swat created an
assembly called the Qaumi Jirga to challenge Fazlullah
...
The
senior elder was a white-bearded man of seventy-four called Abdul Khan Khaliq who had been one
of the Queen’s bodyguards when she had visited Swat to stay with our wali
...
Though
he was more poetic in Pashto, he could speak our national language, Urdu, and English fluently, which
meant he was an effective communicator outside Swat as well as inside
...
‘What are you doing?’ he would ask
...
’
My father would say to me, ‘Any organisation which works for peace, I will join
...
If you have a
headache and tell the doctor you have a stomach ache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the
truth
...
’

When he met his fellow activists, particularly his old friends Ahmad Shah, Mohammad Farooq and
Zahid Khan, I often went with him
...
Zahid Khan was a hotel owner and had a big
hujra
...
‘Malala is not just the daughter of Ziauddin,’ they would say; ‘she is the daughter of all of
us
...
They told people that what was happening in Swat was not about Islam
...
The state is meant to protect the rights of its citizens, but it’s a very difficult situation
when you can’t tell the difference between state and non-state and can’t trust the state to protect you
against non-state
...
‘What you are doing is against our people and
against Pakistan,’ he would say
...
We are told that Swat is
being sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan, but no one and nothing should be sacrificed for the state
...
’
He hated the fact that most people would not speak up
...

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist
...

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist
...

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Catholic
...


I knew he was right
...

At school my father organised a peace march and encouraged us to speak out against what was
happening
...
‘We Pashtuns are a religion-loving people,’ she said
...
This is not the case
...

Our mountains, our trees, our flowers – everything in our valley is about peace
...
Teachers helped us beforehand on how to respond to
questions
...
When we were eleven and twelve, we did them
together, but as we turned thirteen or fourteen my friends’ brothers and fathers didn’t allow them
because they had entered puberty and should observe purdah and also they were afraid
...
There was a wall
of screens in their office
...
Afterwards I thought, The media
needs interviews
...
I have a father who isn’t scared, who stands by me
...
’ The more interviews I gave, the stronger I felt and the more
support we received
...
One journalist called me takra jenai – a ‘bright shining young lady’ and another said you
are ‘pakha jenai’ – you are wise beyond your years
...
If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong
...
God wants to see how we behave in such situations
...
’ If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why
can’t one girl change it? I wondered
...

The media in Swat were under pressure to give positive coverage to the Taliban – some even
respectfully called the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan ‘School dada’, when in reality he was
destroying schools
...

We didn’t have a car so we went by rickshaw, or one of my father’s friends would take us to the
interviews
...
We went with my father’s friend Fazal Maula and his
daughter
...
To represent the Taliban they had Muslim Khan, who
wasn’t in the studio
...
‘How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?’ I said
...
How can a
recording respond to live questions?
Afterwards people congratulated me
...
‘Even as
a toddler you talked like a politician,’ he teased
...
I knew these
were very small steps
...
The destruction
of schools continued
...
The next
morning we learned that masked militants had entered the Sangota Convent School for girls and the
Excelsior College for boys and blown them up using improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
...
These were famous schools,
particularly Sangota, which dated from the time of the last wali and was well known for academic
excellence
...
My father
went there after the bombings and found the buildings completely razed to the ground
...
‘It’s
all just rubble,’ he said
...
What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools – the furniture, the
books, the computers were all stolen by local people
...
’
The next day he went on a live show on the V
oice of America and angrily condemned the attacks
...
‘What was so wrong with these two schools
that you should bomb them?’ my father asked him
...
‘Both things are false!’ replied my father
...
And Excelsior is only co-educational in the primary section
...
‘What about their own daughters?’ I asked my father
...
The monthly school
fees were never enough to cover all our outgoings so the extra fees were welcome, but my father was
unhappy
...
Once he spoke
at a big gathering and held up an audience member’s baby girl and said, ‘This girl is our future
...
The new girls had horrible stories
...
The Sangota girls were also very bright, which meant more
competition
...
She became a good friend of mine
and of Moniba’s, which sometimes caused fights as three is a tricky number
...
‘Are you my friend or Rida’s?’ I asked Moniba
...
’
By the end of 2008, around 400 schools had been destroyed by the Taliban
...
I told people things would be different if Zardari’s own daughters were at school in Swat
...

In Swat it was safer in the town than in the remote areas and many of our family came from the
countryside to stay with us
...
There was little to do
...
We played marbles in the yard over and over again
...
Never in history have Khushal and Malala been friends
...
Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short
like my brothers because of lice and also to make it easier to wash and brush as it would get messed
up under my shawl
...
Unlike Moniba,
who has straight hair, mine is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits
...
‘Our guests need the bathroom and everyone is having
to wait for you
...
During Ramadan no food or
drink can pass a Muslim’s lips in daylight hours
...
The price of the
gas cylinders we used to buy from the market doubled so my mother had to cook on a fire like we did
in the village
...
But there was no clean water and people started dying from cholera
...

Though we had no generator at home, my father bought one to install at the school, and fresh water
was pumped from a bore-hole, which all the children in the neighbourhood went to collect
...
One of the neighbours got
frightened
...
‘If the Taliban find out you’re giving water in the month
of Ramadan they will bomb us!’
My father replied that people would die either of thirst or bombings
...
No one would venture
from their homes after sunset
...
A holiday paradise turned into a hell where no tourist would
venture
...
From 15 January girls must not go to school, he warned
...
‘How can they stop us from going to school?’ I asked my friends
...
They are saying they will destroy the mountain but they can’t even control the road
...
‘Who will stop them?’ they asked
...
’
My father used to say the people of Swat and the teachers would continue to educate our children
until the last room, the last teacher and the last student was alive
...
Though we loved school, we hadn’t realised how important
education was until the Taliban tried to stop us
...

That winter it snowed and we built snow bears but without much joy
...
We believed school would start again
...


12
The Bloody Square

THE BODIES WOULD

be dumped in the square at night so that everyone would see them the next
morning on their way to work
...
m
...
’ On
some of the nights of the killings there would also be earthquakes, which made people even more
scared as we connect every natural disaster with a human disaster
...
She lived in Banr Bazaar, a narrow
street in our town of Mingora which is famous for its dancers and musicians
...
She went to put on her dancing
clothes, and when she returned to dance for them, they pulled out their guns and threatened to slit her
throat
...
m
...
Leave me, for God’s sake! I am a woman, a Muslim
...
So many bodies
had been left there that people started calling it the Bloody Square
...
On Mullah FM, Fazlullah said she deserved to
die for her immoral character and any other girls found performing in Banr Bazaar would be killed
one by one
...
Musicians took out adverts in the papers saying they had stopped playing and
were pledging to live pious lives to appease the Taliban
...
A khan’s daughter can’t marry a barber’s son and a
barber’s daughter can’t marry a khan’s son
...
Manual workers made a great
contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined
the Taliban – to finally achieve status and power
...
Some even agreed with her killing, out of fear of the Taliban or because they were in favour
of them
...
‘She was bad, and it was right that she was killed
...
Around the time of Shabana’s murder every day seemed like the
worst day; every moment was the worst
...
The stories were endless and overwhelming
...
He told them that nowhere in Islam is this required
...

I couldn’t understand what the Taliban were trying to do
...
‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion?
If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good
Muslims first?’
Regularly my father would come home shaken up due to the terrible things he had witnessed and

heard about such as policemen beheaded, their heads paraded through the town
...
My father told me about a woman who had donated
generously to the Taliban while her husband was working abroad
...
One night there was a small explosion in their village
and the wife cried
...
‘That is the sound of your earrings and nose studs
...
’
Yet still so few people spoke out
...
None of the
lawyers and academics he invited from Swat to speak turned up
...
It seemed that people had decided the Taliban were here to stay and they had better get along
with them
...

That’s why they volunteered their young men
...
Many of the rich fled
...
So
many of our men had gone to the mines or to the Gulf to work, leaving their families fatherless, the
sons were easy prey
...
One day Ahmad Shah received a warning from unknown
people that they would kill him, so for a while he left for Islamabad to try to raise awareness there of
what was happening to our valley
...
Fingers were even pointed at my father
...
He had given a press conference in Peshawar demanding that the
military act against the Taliban and go after their commanders
...

My father brushed it off
...
He was outspoken and involved in so many groups and
committees that he often wouldn’t come home till midnight
...
He couldn’t bear the thought of being killed in
front of us
...
When he was at home my
mother would place a ladder in the back yard up to the outside wall so he could get down to the street
below if he was in sudden danger
...
‘Maybe Atal the squirrel could make it but
not me!’
My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came
...
I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the
police
...
Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make
the Taliban disappear
...
‘What are you doing?’ I asked
him
...
Our news bulletins were full of killings and death so it was natural for
Atal to think of coffins and graves
...
They made rockets from branches and used sticks for Kalashnikovs; these
were their sports of terror
...
Our own deputy commissioner, Syed Javid, was going to Taliban
meetings, praying in their mosque and leading their meetings
...
One target of

the Taliban were non-governmental organisations or NGOs, which they said were anti-Islam
...
Once in a meeting my father challenged him: ‘Whose orders are you
representing? Fazlullah’s or the government’s?’ We say in Arabic, ‘People follow their king
...

We like conspiracy theories in Pakistan and we had many
...
They said the army wanted the Taliban in Swat because the
Americans wanted to use an airbase there to launch their drones
...
It was
also a way to answer growing American criticism that our military was helping the Taliban rather
than trying to stop them
...
‘But what’s happening
is not simple, and the more you want to understand the more complex it becomes
...
He was said to be more moderate than his son-in-law Fazlullah, and there was hope that he
would make a peace deal with the government to impose sharia law in Swat and release us from
Taliban violence
...
We knew this would not be the end, but my father
argued that if we had shariat the Taliban would have nothing more to fight for
...
If they did not, he said, this would expose them for what
they really were
...
We would lie in bed
listening to them boom boom all night
...
Sometimes we covered our ears or buried our heads under
pillows, but the guns were close by and the noise was too loud to block out
...

Both the army and the Taliban were powerful
...
They would stop us but seemed unaware of each other’s
presence
...
No one understood why we were not being defended
...
My father said we common people were like chaff caught
between the two stones of a water mill
...
He said we should continue to
speak out
...
Sometimes I was very
afraid but I said nothing, and it didn’t mean I would stop going to school
...
Terror had made people
cruel
...

I tried to distract myself by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered
big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backwards
...

We Pashtuns know the stone of revenge never decays, and when you do something wrong you will
face the music
...


13
The Diary of Gul Makai

IT WAS DURING one of those dark days that my father received a call from his friend Abdul Hai Kakar,
a BBC radio correspondent based in Peshawar
...
He wanted to show the human side of the catastrophe in
Swat
...

When I overheard my father talking about this, I said, ‘Why not me?’ I wanted people to know what
was happening
...
Just as it is our right to sing
...
The Quran says we should seek knowledge,
study hard and learn the mysteries of our world
...
Although we had a computer,
there were frequent power cuts and few places had Internet access
...
He used his wife’s phone to protect us as he said his own phone
was bugged by the intelligence services
...
We would speak for half an hour or
forty-five minutes in Urdu, even though we are both Pashtun, as the blog was to appear in Urdu and he
wanted the voice to be as authentic as possible
...
He told me about Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish
girl who hid from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam during the war
...
It
was very sad as in the end the family was betrayed and arrested and Anne died in a concentration
camp when she was only fifteen
...

Hai Kakar told me it could be dangerous to use my real name and gave me the pseudonym Gul
Makai, which means ‘cornflower’ and is the name of the heroine in a Pashtun folk story
...
But they
are from different tribes so their love causes a war
...
Gul Makai uses the Quran to teach her elders that war is bad and they
eventually stop fighting and allow the lovers to unite
...
I have had such dreams since the launch
of the military operation in Swat
...
I also described something that happened on my way
home from school: ‘I heard a man behind me saying, “I will kill you
...
To my huge relief I saw he was speaking on his
phone, he must have been talking to someone else
...
I was a bit shy to start with but after a while I got
to know the kind of things Hai Kakar wanted me to talk about and became more confident
...


I wrote a lot about school as that was at the centre of our lives
...
One
extract was called DO NOT WEAR COLOURFUL CLOTHES
...
’
I also wrote about the burqa
...
But when you are made to wear it, that’s a different matter
...
When a man tried to help her she refused and said
...
” When we entered the shop we
were going to, the shopkeeper laughed and told us he got scared thinking we might be suicide
bombers as many suicide bombers wore the burqa
...
One girl even printed it out and brought it in to
show my father
...

I wanted to tell people it was me, but the BBC correspondent had told me not to as it could be
dangerous
...
And I almost gave the game away in one entry when I said, ‘My
mother liked my pen name Gul Makai and joked to my father we should change my name
...
’
The diary of Gul Makai received attention further afield
...
The
BBC even made a recording of it using another girl’s voice, and I began to see that the pen and the
words that come from it can be much more powerful than machine guns, tanks or helicopters
...
And we were learning how powerful we are when we speak
...
One said he had been ordered by Mullah Fazlullah
to help build his centre in Imam Deri
...
Many people were scared
...

By the start of January 2009 there were only ten girls in my class when once there had been twentyseven
...
‘Swat has given us so much
...

One night we all went for dinner at the house of my father’s friend Dr Afzal, who runs a hospital
...
We were terrified
...
The constant gunfire and curfews had made it impossible for the hospital to function, so he
had moved it to Barikot
...
He had asked for my father’s advice
...
’ A hospital protected by the Taliban was not a good idea so he
refused
...
As he and my father drove back, Dr Afzal nervously
asked him, ‘What names shall we give if they stop us?’
‘You are Dr Afzal and I am Ziauddin Yousafzai,’ replied my father
...
We
haven’t done anything wrong
...
’
Fortunately the Taliban had disappeared
...

I didn’t want to give in either
...
How could they stop more than 50,000 girls from going to school in the twenty-first
century? I kept hoping something would happen and the schools would remain open
...
We were determined that the Khushal School bell would be the last to stop
ringing
...
Her family had moved to
Karachi to get away from the conflict and, as a woman, she could not live alone
...
A Pakistani journalist called Irfan Ashraf was following me around, even as
I said my prayers and brushed my teeth
...
One of his friends had persuaded him to participate in a
documentary for the New York Times website to show the world what was happening to us
...
It was a funny
meeting as he conducted a long interview with my father in English and I didn’t say a word
...
After about ten
minutes of this he realised from my facial expressions that I could understand him perfectly
...

‘Yes, I was just saying there is a fear in my heart,’ I replied
...
‘What’s wrong with you people?’ he asked Irfan and my father
...

The original idea for the documentary had been to follow my father on the last day of school, but at
the end of the meeting Irfan asked me, ‘What would you do if there comes a day when you can’t go
back to your valley and school?’ I said this wouldn’t happen
...
I
think it was then that Adam decided he should focus on me
...
When Irfan and a
cameraman arrived in Mingora, our uncle, who was staying with us, said over and over that it was too
risky to have cameras in our house
...
But they had
come a long way and it’s hard for us as Pashtuns to refuse hospitality
...
His friend had told him it would make far more impact
than him roaming from pillar to post
...
But I had never done anything like this
...
That
wasn’t easy with a camera trained on me everywhere I went even as I brushed my teeth
...

We had a special assembly that final morning but it was hard to hear with the noise of helicopters
overhead
...
The bell rang for the very
last time, and then Madam Maryam announced it was the winter holidays
...
Even so, some teachers still gave us homework
...
I looked at the honours board and wondered if my name would ever
appear on it again
...
When someone takes away your pens you realise quite how
important education is
...

That’s the closing shot in one part of the documentary
...
My friends and I
didn’t want that day to end so we decided to stay on for a while longer
...
Then we played
mango mango, where you make a circle and sing, then when the song stops everyone has to freeze
...

We came home from school late that day
...
m
...
Before we left, Moniba and I had an argument over something so silly I can’t remember what it
was
...
‘You two always argue when there’s an important occasion!’
they said
...

I told the documentary makers, ‘They cannot stop me
...
This is our request to the world – to save our schools, save our Pakistan, save our
Swat
...
I didn’t want to stop learning
...
I had told everyone in my class that the Taliban wouldn’t go
through with it
...
But then they went ahead and closed our school and I felt embarrassed
...
I was crying, my mother was crying but my father insisted, ‘You will go to school
...
The boys’ school would reopen
after the winter holidays but the loss of the girls’ school represented a big cut in our income
...

That night the air was full of artillery fire and I woke up three times
...
I began to think that maybe I should go to Peshawar or abroad or maybe I could ask our
teachers to form a secret school in our home, as some Afghans had done during Taliban rule
...
‘They can stop us going to school
but they can’t stop us learning,’ I said
...
My father and
I went to Peshawar and visited lots of places to tell people what was happening
...

Once Muslim Khan had said girls should not go to school and learn Western ways
...
‘What
would Muslim Khan use instead of the stethoscope and the thermometer?’ my father asked
...

But I said, ‘Education is education
...
’ Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human
...
But she never banned me from doing anything
...
People often said the Taliban might kill my father but not me
...
’
But my grandmother wasn’t so sure
...
’
After my school closed down I continued to write the blog
...
‘I am quite surprised,’ I wrote, ‘because these schools had closed
so why did they also need to be destroyed? No one has gone to school following the Taliban’s
deadline
...
They are sitting in their bunkers on top of the hills
...
’ I also wrote about people going to watch the floggings
announced on Mullah FM, and the fact that the police were nowhere to be seen
...
Her name was Shiza
Shahid and she came from Islamabad
...
We saw then the power of the media and she became
a great support to us
...
‘Look at her,’ he told Adam Ellick
...

Adam took us to Islamabad
...
Islamabad was a beautiful place
with nice white bungalows and broad roads, though it has none of the natural beauty of Swat
...

General Musharraf was in exile in London
...
I loved it and
dreamed of one day going to New York and working on a magazine like her
...
Our own museum in Swat had
closed
...
He was a Pashtun like us, and when my
father asked if he was from Islamabad he replied, ‘Do you think Islamabad can ever belong to us
Pashtuns?’ He said he came from Mohmand, one of the tribal areas, but had to flee because of a
military operation
...

Lots of buildings were surrounded by concrete blocks, and there were checkpoints for incoming
vehicles to guard against suicide bombs
...
‘Was that a bomb blast?’ he asked
...
Any small disturbance or noise could be a bomb or gunfire
...
But we returned to the threats and danger as we
entered our valley once again
...

Back in Mingora the first thing I saw when I opened my wardrobe was my uniform, school bag and
geometry set
...
The visit to Islamabad had been a lovely break, but this was my reality
now
...
I was cross
...
It felt strange to have no
school
...

Someone gave me a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who
travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it’s at home
...
‘When you want something all the universe conspires in helping you achieve
it,’ it says
...

What I didn’t know was that Hai Kakar was holding secret talks with Fazlullah and his
commanders
...

‘Listen, Maulana,’ he told Fazlullah
...
But when you banned girls’
education people spoke out
...
’
The pressure from the whole country worked, and Fazlullah agreed to lift the ban for girls up to ten
years old – Year 4
...
We
started going to school again, dressed in ordinary clothes and hiding our books under our shawls
...
We were lucky too that Madam Maryam was
brave and resisted the pressure to stop working
...

I didn’t write anything about it in my diary
...
Some people are afraid of ghosts, some of spiders or snakes – in
those days we were afraid of our fellow human beings
...
Most of the
time they hid their faces
...
The streets of Mingora were very
empty as a third of the inhabitants had left the valley
...
There were now 12,000 army troops in the region – four
times as many as their estimates of the Taliban – along with tanks, helicopters and sophisticated
weapons
...

About a week after we had returned to school, on 16 February 2009, we were woken one night by
the sound of gunfire
...
So at first we thought we were in danger
...
The gunfire was in celebration
...
The
government had agreed to impose sharia law throughout Swat and in return the militants would stop

fighting
...

We were happy too – my father and I had often spoken in favour of a peace deal – but we
questioned how it would work
...
They convinced themselves that the shariat in Swat would be
different to the Afghan version – we would still have our girls’ schools and there would be no
morality police
...
I wanted to believe this but I
was worried
...

And it was hard to believe it was all over! More than a thousand ordinary people and police had
been killed
...
We had suffered barbaric public courts and violent justice and had lived in a constant state of
fear
...

At breakfast I suggested to my brothers that we should talk of peace now and not of war
...
Khushal had a toy helicopter and Atal a pistol
made of paper, and one would shout, ‘Fire!’ and the other, ‘Take position
...
I went and
looked at my uniform, happy that I would soon be able to wear it openly
...
It was time to get back to my
books
...
Just two days later I was on the roof of the Taj Mahal Hotel
giving an interview about the peace deal to a well-known reporter called Hamid Mir when we got the
news that another TV reporter we knew had been killed
...
That day he had been covering a peace march led by Sufi Mohammad
...
Afterwards Musa Khan’s body was found nearby
...
He was twenty-eight years old
...
She was worried that
violence had returned to the valley so soon after the peace deal
...

A few days later, on 22 February, a ‘permanent ceasefire’ was announced by Deputy
Commissioner Syed Javid at the Swat Press Club in Mingora
...

The Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan then confirmed they had agreed an indefinite ceasefire
...
The government also agreed to pay
compensation to the families of victims
...
The Taliban said girls could go to school after the peace agreement but they should be
veiled and covered
...

Not everyone was happy about the deal
...
‘I think the Pakistan
government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists,’ said Hillary Clinton, the US
Secretary of State
...
The Pakistani newspaper
Dawn wrote in an editorial that the deal sent ‘a disastrous signal – fight the state militarily and it will
give you what you want and get nothing in return’
...
We needed peace whoever brought it
...
He made a ‘peace camp’ in Dir and

sat there in our famous mosque, Tabligh Markaz, like the master of our land
...
People visited him to
pay homage and kiss his hand because they were tired of war and suicide bombings
...
But to
our horror things didn’t change much
...
They were
now state-sanctioned terrorists
...
The peace deal was merely
a mirage
...

They were still patrolling the Cheena Bazaar
...
A talib accosted them and blocked
their way
...
My mother is not
easily scared and remained composed
...
We will wear burqas in future,’ she told him
...

We also heard that Taliban had attacked a shopkeeper because an unaccompanied woman was
looking at the lipsticks in his beauty shop
...
He
was badly beaten and nobody helped him
...
It was a shocking scene
...
‘Please stop it!’ she begged in Pashto in
between screams and whimpers as each blow was delivered
...
Hold her hands down
...
They hit
her thirty-four times
...
One of the woman’s relatives even
volunteered to help hold her down
...
A woman film-maker in Islamabad got hold of it and it
was shown on Pakistan TV over and over, and then round the world
...
I wished their outrage extended to the Taliban’s banning of girls’ education
...
‘Islam teaches us to treat women politely,’ he said
...
Others said that the flogging had taken place in
January, before the peace deal, and had been released now to sabotage it
...
‘She came out of her house with a man who was not her husband so we had
to punish her,’ he said
...
’
Around the same time in early April another well-known journalist called Zahid Hussain came to
Swat
...
There were several senior Taliban commanders with armed
escorts including Muslim Khan and even Faqir Mohammad, the leader of the militants in Bajaur, who
were in the middle of a bloody fight with the army
...
We also heard that an army brigadier
went to prayers led by Fazlullah
...
‘There cannot be two

kings in one land
...
Everyone was looking forward to a big outdoor public meeting on
20 April when Sufi Mohammad would address the people of Swat
...
My father and brothers were standing outside when a group of
teenage Taliban went past playing victory songs on their mobiles
...
‘If I had a Kalashnikov I would kill them
...
Everyone was excited because they hoped Sufi Mohammad would
proclaim peace and victory and ask the Taliban to lay down their arms
...
He watched it from the roof of Sarosh Academy, the school run by his friend Ahmad Shah
where he and other activists often gathered in the evenings
...

There was a huge crowd – between 30,000 and 40,000 people – wearing turbans and singing
Taliban and jihadi songs
...
Liberal
progressives like him did not enjoy the singing and chanting
...

Sufi Mohammad was sitting on the stage with a long queue of people waiting to pay homage
...
They were all very enthusiastic as each one was hoping to be made the
amir of their district so they could be in charge of imposing shariat
...
So everyone spoke with great authority,
celebrating like the Prophet when he conquered Mecca, though his speech was one of forgiveness not
cruel victory
...
He was not a good speaker
...
He said totally unexpected things as if he had
someone else’s tongue in his mouth
...
Islam does not allow democracy
or elections
...
He didn’t tell the Taliban to lay down their arms and
leave the hujras
...
‘Now wait, we are coming to
Islamabad,’ he shouted
...
It was like when you pour water onto a blazing fire – the flames are suddenly
extinguished
...
‘What did that devil say?’
people asked
...
’ My mother put it best
...
Our mood on the way home was the exact
opposite of what we had felt on the way to the meeting
...
Sufi Mohammad didn’t do what he should have done
...

People had different conspiracy theories about what had happened
...
Others said he had been ordered to deliver this speech and been warned, ‘If you don’t,
there are four or five suicide bombers who will blast you and everyone there
...
They muttered about hidden hands and unseen forces
...
The point is we are a Taliban state
...
At one the
information minister for our province said Talibanisation was the result of our country’s policy of
training militants and sending them to Afghanistan, first to fight the Russians, then to fight the
Americans
...

It soon became clear that the Americans had been right in their assessment of the deal
...
They streamed into
Buner, the next district to the south-east of Swat and only sixty-five miles from Islamabad
...
As
the militants arrived with their RPGs and guns, the police abandoned their posts, saying the Taliban
had ‘superior weapons’, and people fled
...

Just as they had in Swat, they burned TV sets, pictures, DVDs and tapes
...
People would visit to pray
for spiritual guidance, cures for their ailments and even happy marriages for their children
...

People in the lower districts of Pakistan became very worried as the Taliban moved towards the
capital
...
What more would it take for the army and government to resist them?
In Washington the government of President Obama had just announced it was sending 21,000 more
troops to Afghanistan to turn round the war against the Taliban
...
Not because of girls like me and my school but because our
country has more than 200 nuclear warheads and they were worried about who was going to control
them
...

At the start of May our army launched Operation True Path to drive the Taliban out of Swat
...

More troops appeared in Mingora too
...
They announced over
megaphones that all residents should leave
...
But the gunfire kept us awake most nights
...
One night we were woken up by screaming
...
Atal was only five then and really loved that rabbit so it used to
sleep under my parents’ bed
...
Around
midnight a cat came and killed it
...
Atal would not stop
weeping
...
‘I will kill him
...


15
Leaving the Valley

LEAVING THE VALLEY

was harder than anything I had done before
...
/ Either he leaves from
poverty or he leaves for love
...

Leaving our home felt like having my heart ripped out
...
I
looked at the trees all coming into leaf
...
Everything was silent, pin-drop silent
...

I wanted to cry because I felt in my heart I might never see my home again
...
At the time I had
thought it was a stupid question, but now I saw that everything I could not imagine happening had
happened
...
I thought we would never leave Swat and
we were just about to
...
I started to cry
...
My cousin’s wife, Honey, started weeping, then all of us were crying
...

I put all my books and notebooks in my school bag then packed another bag of clothes
...
I took the trousers from one set and the top from another so I had a bag of things which
didn’t match
...
We didn’t own anything expensive like a
laptop or jewellery – our only valuable items had been our TV a fridge and a washing machine
...
Our house has
holes in the walls, and every plate and cup is cracked
...
But then some of my parents’ friends had lost a relative
in gunfire so they went to the house to offer prayers of condolences even though nobody was really
venturing out
...
She told my father, ‘You don’t
have to come, but I am going and I will take the children to Shangla
...
My mother had had enough of the gunfire and tension and called Dr Afzal and begged him to
persuade my father to leave
...
We didn’t have a
car so we were lucky that our neighbours, Safina and her family, were also leaving and could fit some
of us in their car while the rest would go with Dr Afzal
...
Internally displaced persons
...

There were a lot of us – not just us five but also my grandmother, my cousin, his wife, Honey, and
their baby
...
It wouldn’t revive even when I put it in a shoebox in the house to keep
it warm and got everyone in the neighbourhood to pray for it
...
What if they make a mess in the car? she asked
...
She also said I must leave my school bag because there was
so little room
...
I went and whispered Quranic verses over the books to try and protect
them
...
My mother, father, grandmother, my cousin’s wife and baby and my
brothers all squashed into the back of Dr Afzal’s van along with his wife and children
...
I was luckier – there were fewer
people in Safina’s car – but I was devastated by the loss of my school bag
...

We all said surahs from the Quran and a special prayer to protect our sweet homes and school
...
We did not know if we would ever see our town again
...

The streets were jam-packed
...
There were cars everywhere,
as well as rickshaws, mule carts and trucks laden with people and their belongings
...
Thousands of people were leaving with just the
clothes they had on their backs
...
Some people believe
that the Pashtuns descend from one of the lost tribes of Israel, and my father said, ‘It is as though we
are the Israelites leaving Egypt, but we have no Moses to guide us
...
This was the biggest exodus in Pashtun history
...
We were an ocean
of people
...
They
were keeping the cars in lines but with weapons not whistles
...
At regular intervals along the road we passed army and Taliban checkpoints side
by side
...

‘Maybe they have poor eyesight,’ we laughed, ‘and can’t see them
...
It was a long slow journey and we were all very sweaty
crammed in together
...

But this was different
...

Inside Dr Afzal’s van my father was talking to the media, giving a running commentary on the
exodus from the valley
...
My father’s voice is so loud my mother often jokes that he doesn’t need to make phone
calls, he can just shout
...
It was late afternoon
by the time we reached Mardan, which is a hot and busy city
...
Everything will be fine
...

In Mardan there were already big camps of white UNHCR tents like those for Afghan refugees in
Peshawar
...
Almost two
million of us were fleeing Swat and you couldn’t have fitted two million people in those camps
...
My father said he had heard rumours that some Taliban were even hiding inside the camps

and harassing the women
...
Amazingly threequarters of all the IDPs were put up by the people of Mardan and the nearby town of Swabi
...
In our culture women are
expected not to mix with men they are not related to
...
They became voluntary IDPs
...
We were convinced that if the exodus had been
managed by the government many more would have died of hunger and illness
...
So far we had driven in the opposite direction, but we had had to take the only lift we could
get out of Swat
...
My father then left us to go to Peshawar and alert
people to what was happening
...
My mother tried very hard to
persuade him to come with us but he refused
...

We said goodbye and were terribly worried we wouldn’t see him again
...
There we met up
with my cousin Khanjee, who was heading north like us
...
He was going to Besham, from where we would need
another lift to take us to Shangla
...
We spent the night in
a cheap dirty hotel while my cousin tried to arrange a van to take us to Shangla
...
She had hit him so hard
that when she looked at the shoe it was broken
...

It was not easy to get from Besham to our village and we had to walk twenty-five kilometres
carrying all our things
...
‘Our home is in Shangla
...
My grandmother started
crying and saying her life had never been so bad
...
The army and their
machine guns were everywhere
...
We were afraid that the army wouldn’t know
who we were and would shoot us
...
Everyone believed the Taliban
would return to Shangla so they couldn’t understand why we hadn’t remained in Mardan
...
We had
to borrow clothes from our relatives as we hadn’t brought much
...
Once we were settled I started going to school with her
...
There were only three girls in that year as most of
the village girls of that age do not go to school, so we were taught with boys as they didn’t have
enough room or staff to teach just three girls separately
...
But I tried to be obedient and
polite, always saying, ‘Yes, sir
...
I was shocked when the teacher hit my hand with a stick to punish me, but
then decided that at least it meant they were accepting me and not treating me differently
...

One day at school there was a parents’ day and prize-giving ceremony, and all the boys were
encouraged to make speeches
...
Instead we spoke
into a microphone in our classrooms and our voices were then projected into the main hall
...
Then I asked the teacher if I could read some more poetry
...
‘A diamond must be cut many times before it
yields even a tiny jewel,’ I said
...

People in the audience seemed surprised and I wondered whether they thought I was showing off or
whether they were asking themselves why I wasn’t wearing a veil
...
I kept thinking of my school bag at home
with copies of Oliver Twist and Romeo and Juliet waiting to be read and the Ugly Betty DVDs on the
shelf
...
We had been so happy, then something very bad had
come into our lives and we were now waiting for our happy ending
...

We’d heard on the radio that the army had started the battle for Mingora
...
The Taliban were using hotels and
government buildings as bunkers
...
Then they captured
the airport and in a week they had taken back the city
...
In Shangla it was hard to find a mobile phone signal
...
But after we had been in Shangla for about six weeks, my
father said we could travel to Peshawar, where he had been staying in one room with three friends
...
Then, a complete family once more, we travelled down to
Islamabad, where we stayed with the family of Shiza, the lady who had called us from Stanford
...

We almost missed it as I hadn’t set the alarm properly so my father was barely speaking to me
...
I
sat next to him and he asked me how old I was
...
‘Respected Ambassador, I request you, please help us girls to get an education,’ I said
...
‘You already have lots of problems and we are doing lots for you,’ he replied
...
but your country faces a lot of problems
...
They liked it very much and told us they
had a guesthouse in Abbottabad where we could all go
...
Moniba and I
had not spoken since our fight on the last day before becoming IDPs
...
‘It was all your fault,’ she told me
...
I didn’t mind; I just
wanted to be friends
...
It
was our fourth city in two months
...
It was there I spent my
twelfth birthday
...
Even my father forgot, he was so busy hopping about
...
I had shared a cake with my friends
...
Once again I wished for peace in our
valley
...
We had been away from our valley for almost three months and as
we drove back past
Churchill’s Picket, past the ancient ruins on the hill and the giant Buddhist stupa, we saw the wide
Swat River and my father began to weep
...
The
vehicle we were in even had to pass through an explosives check before we could head up the
Malakand Pass
...

As we drove through villages we saw buildings in ruins and burned-out vehicles
...
When we reached Mingora
we were shocked
...
There was the rubble of blown-up buildings which the Taliban had
used as hideouts, and piles of wreckage, twisted metal and smashed-up signs
...
The city was silent and emptied of people and
traffic as if a plague had descended
...
Usually it’s a
complete confusion of Flying Coaches and rickshaws, but now it was completely deserted
...
We had never seen our city like this
...

It was 24 July 2009, a week after our prime minister had announced that the Taliban had been
cleared out
...
In the end as many as half of its 1
...
From what we could see, most of them weren’t convinced it was safe to return
...
Our home
was near Circuit House, the army headquarters, so we were worried it might have been destroyed in
the shelling
...
We held our breath as my father
unlocked the gate
...

My brothers immediately rushed off to check on their pet chickens
...
All that
remained of the chickens was a pile of feathers and the bones of their small bodies entangled as if
they had died in an embrace
...

I felt so sad for my brothers but I had to check on something of my own
...
I took out my books one by one and just stared at them
...
Finally I would be able to return to school
without fear
...
I was overwhelmed
...
Four or five of the houses on our street had
been looted and TVs and gold jewellery had been taken
...

My father was anxious to check on the school
...
We found that the building opposite
the girls’ school had been hit by a missile but the school itself looked intact
...
We ran up the steps anticipating the worst
...
There were
cigarette stubs and empty food wrappers all over the floor
...
My father had taken down the Khushal School sign and left it in the courtyard
...
Underneath were the rotting heads of goats
...

Then we went into the classrooms
...

Someone had written army zindabad (Long live the army) on a whiteboard in permanent marker
...
One soldier had even written corny love poems in one of my
classmate’s diaries
...
The soldiers had made a hole in the wall through
which you could see the city below
...
I felt sorry
that our precious school had become a battlefield
...
‘Don’t open it,
Malala!’ my father ordered
...
It blamed citizens like us for allowing the
Taliban to control Swat
...
Long live Pak Army,’ he read
...
‘We people of Swat were first seduced by the Taliban, then killed by
them and now blamed for them
...
’
In some ways the army did not seem very different to the militants
...
Now their
helicopters flew in pairs overhead like big black buzzing insects, and when we walked home we
stayed close to the walls so they wouldn’t see us
...
The army was sending them to a special
camp for jihadis to de-radicalise them
...

Fazlullah himself was still at large
...
Then they said he was badly
injured and that they had his spokesman, Muslim Khan, in custody
...
Some people
said that Fazlullah had been captured but that the army and the ISI couldn’t agree on what to do with
him
...

Muslim Khan and another commander called Mehmud seemed to be the only members of the
Taliban leadership who were in custody – all the others were still free
...
I sometimes had nightmares, but
at least his radio broadcasts had stopped
...
But gradually
people returned to the valley because Swat is beautiful and we cannot bear to be away from it for
long
...
It was wonderful to hear that sound and run
through the doorway and up the steps as we used to
...
We
had so many stories from our time as IDPs
...
We knew we were lucky
...
And one of my friends, Sundus, had lost her father, who had
been killed in an explosion
...
Some thought my father had done it for
me but Madam Maryam, our principal, told them, ‘No
...
’
That summer there was only one topic of conversation in my class
...
Those from my class were me, Moniba, Malka-e-Noor,
Rida, Karishma and Sundus, and we were chaperoned by my mother and Madam Maryam
...
Most of the girls had only ever left the valley when we became IDPs
...
We stayed in a guesthouse and did
lots of workshops on how to tell our stories so people outside would know what was going on in our
valley and help us
...
‘It’s a room full of Malalas!’ she told my father
...
And we saw the
sights
...
It is huge and white and looks like a shimmering tent suspended between
minarets
...
We ate at restaurants and had our first visit to a McDonald’s
...
To this day I still haven’t got to try duck pancakes!
Islamabad was totally different to Swat
...

Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us
that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions
...
I stopped wearing my shawl over my head
in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl
...

We were there one week and predictably Moniba and I quarrelled
...
’
Shiza wanted to introduce us to influential people
...
One of our meetings was with Major General Athar Abbas, the chief spokesman for the army
and its head of public relations
...
Our eyes widened when we saw that the army headquarters was so much neater than the rest of
the city with perfect green lawns and blossoming flowers
...
Inside the HQ we saw offices
with banks of televisions, men monitoring every channel, and one officer showed my father a thick
file of cuttings which contained every mention of the army in that day’s papers
...
The
army seemed much more effective at PR than our politicians
...
On the walls were photographs of all our army
chiefs, the most powerful men in our country including dictators like Musharraf and scary Zia
...
When General Abbas came in we all stood up
...
He
said 128 soldiers and 1,600 terrorists had been killed in the operation
...
We had been told to prepare questions in advance and I
had made a list of seven or eight
...

I sat in the front row and was the first to be called on
...
How did they get there? If you have so much information, why can’t
you catch them?’
His reply went on for about ten to fifteen minutes and I couldn’t work out what his answer was!
Then I asked about reconstruction
...

Moniba asked something similar
...

The general replied in a very military way
...
’
All of us girls made it clear that we wanted to see the Taliban brought to justice, but we weren’t
very convinced this would happen
...

On the last day we all had to give a speech at the Islamabad Club about our experiences in the
valley under Taliban rule
...
Soon everyone was
weeping
...
In my speech I told the audience
that until I had watched the English play I had no idea there were so many talented people in Pakistan
...
We’d had a wonderful time, and
when we got back to Swat I felt so hopeful about the future I planted a mango seed in the garden
during Ramadan as they are a favourite fruit to eat after breaking the fast
...
While we had been IDPs and for all the months the school had
been closed he had collected no fees, but the teachers still expected to be paid
...
All the private schools were in the same boat
...
The
teachers at the Khushal School demanded something
...

My father was in a fix
...
It was because

of the army operation to expel the Taliban that we had all had to leave and found ourselves in this
situation now
...
He
was very kind and sent us 1,100,000 rupees so my father could pay everyone three months’ back pay
...
Most had never received so much money at once
...

This didn’t mean we went easy on the army
...
We were
often joined by my father’s friend Zahid Khan, a fellow member of the Swat Qaumi Jirga
...
Like my father he was very outspoken and had been threatened
too
...
Zahid Khan was returning to his
home from a meeting with army officials at Circuit House late at night when he was ambushed
...

Then on 1 December 2009 there was a suicide attack on a well-known local ANP politician and
member of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly, Dr Shamsher Ali Khan
...
Dr Shamsher had been an outspoken critic of the Taliban
...
People said the bomber was about eighteen years old
...

A couple of weeks after that our school was asked to take part in the District Child Assembly
Swat, which had been set up by the charity UNICEF and by the Khpal Kor (My Home) Foundation for
orphans
...
They were mostly boys
although eleven girls from my school went along
...
We held an election for speaker and I won! It was strange to stand up there
on the stage and have people address me as Madam Speaker, but it felt good to have our voices heard
...
We passed nine resolutions
calling for an end to child labour and asking for help to send the disabled and street children to
school, as well as for the reconstruction of all the schools destroyed by the Taliban
...

Moniba, Ayesha and I also started learning about journalism from a British organisation called the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which ran a project called Open Minds Pakistan
...
I had become interested in journalism after seeing how my
own words could make a difference and also from watching the Ugly Betty DVDs about life at an
American magazine
...

All too soon it was another year of exams
...
Our headmistress had tried to persuade her to be a school prefect but she said she couldn’t
do anything that might distract her from her studies
...
‘It’s just as important as your education
...
’ But I
couldn’t blame her
...

It wasn’t the same Swat as before – maybe it never would be – but it was returning to normal
...
We enjoyed peace festivals with music and dancing, unheard of under the
Taliban
...
There was music all night long
...
We normally don’t have monsoons in Swat and at first we were happy, thinking
the rain would mean a good harvest
...
Environmentalists had warned that our mountains had been stripped of
trees by the Taliban and timber smugglers
...

We were in school when the floods started and were sent home
...
The next bridge we
came to was also submerged but the water wasn’t too deep so we splashed our way across
...
We were wet and filthy by the time we got home
...
It took days for the water to drain away
and when we returned we could see chest-high tide marks on the walls
...
Our desks and chairs were covered with it
...
There was
so much damage that it cost my father 90,000 rupees to repair – equivalent to the monthly fees for
ninety students
...
The mighty Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas
down through KPK and Punjab to Karachi and the Arabian Sea, and of which we are so proud, had
turned into a raging torrent and burst its banks
...

Around 2,000 people drowned and 14 million people were affected
...
It was the worst flood in living memory
...
We read that more lives had been affected
and more damage had been caused by the floods than the Asian tsunami, our 2005 earthquake,
Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake combined
...
Thirty-four of our forty-two bridges had been washed
away, cutting off much of the valley
...
Our own street was on a hill so we were a bit better protected from the overflowing river, but
we shivered at the sound of it, a growling, heavy-breathing dragon devouring everything in its path
...
The tourist areas were the hardest hit parts of Swat
...

We soon heard from our relatives that the damage in Shangla was unimaginable
...
Many of the houses on the hilly terraces of Karshat, Shahpur and Barkana had been taken
by mudslides
...

People had desperately tried to protect what little they owned, moving their animals to higher
ground, but the floods saturated the corn they had harvested, destroyed the orchards and drowned
many of the buffaloes
...
They had no power, as all their makeshift
hydroelectric projects had been smashed to pieces
...
So strong was the force of the water that even concrete buildings had been

reduced to rubble
...

No one could understand how this had happened
...

Now we had become ‘the valley of sorrows’, said my cousin Sultan Rome
...
People were desperately worried that the Taliban would
take advantage of the chaos and return to the valley
...
Our friend Shiza and some of the activists we had met in Islamabad came to
Mingora and distributed lots of money
...
Many
said the floods were another reproof from God for the music and dancing we had enjoyed at the recent
festivals
...
‘I am confused,
Aba,’ I told my father
...
Not just our army
...
One theory was that the devastation had been
created by the Americans using something called HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research
Program) technology, which causes huge waves under the ocean, thus flooding our land
...

Even when the rains finally ceased life was still very difficult
...
In August we had our first case of cholera in Mingora and soon there was a tent of patients
outside the hospital
...
It was the peach and onion season and farmers were desperate to save their
harvests
...
When we found peaches for sale we were so
happy
...
The rich countries of the
West were suffering from an economic crisis, and President Zardari’s travels around Europe had
made them less sympathetic
...
Foreign aid agencies were also worried about the safety of their staff after a Taliban
spokesperson demanded that the Pakistan government reject help from Christians and Jews
...
The previous October, the World Food Programme office in Islamabad
had been bombed and five aid workers were killed
...
Two more schools were
blown up and three foreign aid workers from a Christian group were kidnapped as they returned to
their base in Mingora and then murdered
...
My father’s friend Dr
Mohammad Farooq, the vice chancellor of Swat University, had been killed by two gunmen who burst
into his office
...

We felt frustrated and scared once again
...
Our country had so many crises and no real
leaders to tackle them
...
I had always looked older than I was but suddenly all my
friends were taller than me
...
I felt
embarrassed when I was with my friends
...
I measured
myself on my bedroom wall with a ruler and a pencil
...
But the pencil mark stayed stubbornly at five feet
...

I was speaking at a lot of events but because I was so short it wasn’t easy to be authoritative
...
I did not like high-heeled shoes but I started to wear
them
...
She had been married off as soon as
she entered puberty
...
A while later we heard that
she had two children
...

We had begun to think about other things besides the Taliban, but it wasn’t possible to forget
completely
...
People across Pakistan were glued to a
series on prime-time TV called Beyond the Call of Duty, which was supposed to consist of real-life
stories of soldiers battling militants in Swat
...
But though their sacrifice was supposed to have restored government
control, we were still waiting for the rule of law
...
Hundreds of men had gone missing during the military
campaign, presumably picked up by the army or ISI, but no one would say
...
Some of them were in
desperate situations as they had no way to support themselves
...

My mother gave them tea and food but that wasn’t why they came
...

Because of his role as spokesman for the Swat Qaumi Jirga, he acted as a kind of liaison between the
people and the army
...
‘If they killed him then I
can put the children in an orphanage
...
’ Another lady told me
her son was missing
...
Yet these
innocent men were being held while the Taliban leaders went free
...
Her brother
had been picked up by the army, put in leg irons and tortured, and then kept in a fridge until he died
...
He was just a simple shopkeeper
...

It wasn’t just poor women who came to our house
...
He told my father that his brother and five or six nephews had all disappeared,
and he wanted to know if they had been killed or were being held so he knew whether to find new
husbands for their wives
...

This wasn’t just happening in Swat
...

Many people protested outside courthouses or put up posters of their missing but got nowhere
...
In Pakistan we have something called the
Blasphemy Law, which protects the Holy Quran from desecration
...

One day in November 2010 there was a news report about a Christian woman called Asia Bibi
who had been sentenced to death by hanging
...
One hot day she had fetched water for her fellow workers but some of
them refused to drink it, saying that the water was ‘unclean’ because she was a Christian
...
One of them was her neighbour,
who was angry because she said Asia Bibi’s goat had damaged her water trough
...
One version was that they tried to persuade Asia Bibi to convert to Islam
...
One of the fruit pickers reported her to the local imam, who informed the police
...

Since Musharraf had allowed satellite television, we now had lots of channels
...
There was outrage round the world and all the talk shows covered
the case
...
He himself had been a political prisoner as well as a close ally of Benazir
...
He went to visit Asia Bibi in jail and said that President Zardari
should pardon her
...
Then some imams at Friday prayers in the largest mosque in
Rawalpindi condemned the governor
...
The man shot him twentysix times
...

We were shocked by how many people praised the killer
...
Meanwhile the imam at the late governor’s mosque refused to
perform his funeral prayers and the president did not attend his funeral
...
How was it possible that we were now garlanding murderers?
Shortly after that my father got another death threat
...
At the event my father had spoken
passionately
...
‘Why hasn’t he been caught?’
Afterwards people told him to be very careful
...
It started with ‘Asalaamu alaikum’ – ‘Peace be upon you’ – but it wasn’t

peaceful at all
...
The
mujahideen will find you wherever you go
...

*
In those days it seemed like everyone was talking about America
...
Everyone complained about the drone attacks
which were happening in the FATA almost every week
...

Then a CIA agent called Raymond Davis shot and killed two men in Lahore who had approached his
car on a motorbike
...
The Americans claimed he was not CIA
but an ordinary diplomat, which made everyone very suspicious
...

Our media claimed Davis was part of a vast secret army that the CIA had sent to Pakistan because
they didn’t trust our intelligence agencies
...

They were thought to be behind the terrible Mumbai massacre of 2008
...
Other people said Davis was really spying on our nuclear weapons
...
There were protests all
over the country
...
Then the widow of one of the men Davis had murdered took rat poison and
killed herself, despairing of receiving justice
...
What they did was like our traditional jirgas – the
Americans paid ‘blood money’ amounting to $2
...
Pakistan then demanded that the CIA send home many of its contractors and
stopped approving visas
...
The attack seemed to send the message that the CIA could do as it pleased in our
country
...
My father’s friends had arrived with news that was hard to
believe
...
He
had been living in a large walled compound less than a mile from our military academy
...
The newspapers said that the cadets
even did their training in the field alongside his house
...
Bin Laden lived on the top floor with his youngest wife, a Yemeni woman
named Amal
...
An American senator said
that the only thing missing from bin Laden’s hideaway was a ‘neon sign’
...
What was odd was that the residents never went out and the house
had no phone or Internet connections
...
They acted as couriers for bin Laden
...
It didn’t
sound as though he had put up a fight
...
The Americans dumped bin Laden’s body at sea
...

At first we assumed our government had known and been involved in the American operation
...
This didn’t sit well with our people
...
They
had entered the country at night, flying low and using special quiet helicopters, and had blocked our
radar with electronic interference
...
Most of the army leadership learned
about it on TV
...
The director of
the CIA said Pakistan was ‘either involved or incompetent
...
’
My father said it was a shameful day
...
Others were asking the same thing
...
ISI is a huge organisation with agents everywhere
...
Two of his children were even born in the
Abbottabad hospital
...
Before Abbottabad he’d
been in Haripur and before that hidden away in our own Swat Valley, where he met Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11
...

To avoid detection he used human couriers rather than phone calls or emails
...
After that they monitored the house with a kind of giant drone that has X-ray vision,
which spotted a very tall bearded man pacing round the compound
...

People were intrigued by the new details that came every day, but they seemed angrier at the
American incursion than at the fact that the world’s biggest terrorist had been living on our soil
...
The story was that they had then planted the body in Abbottabad and faked
the raid to embarrass Pakistan
...
‘We were there for you in 1948, 1965 and 1971,’ said one message, referring to our three wars
with India
...
’ But there were also text
messages which ridiculed the army
...
can’t
detect US helicopters but gets cable TV just fine,’ said another
...
Our country had been humiliated and we wanted to
know why
...
They complained that they had given
us $20 billion over an eight-year period to cooperate and it was questionable which side we were on
...
Most of it had gone to the army; ordinary
people received nothing
...
My name had been put forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South
Africa
...
My father was disappointed
when I didn’t win but I pointed out to him that all I had done was speak out; we didn’t have an
organisation doing practical things like the award winners had
...
He was building a network of new schools he calls Daanish Schools and giving
free laptops to students, even if they did have his picture on their screens when you switched them on
...
I was presented with a cheque for half a million rupees, about $4,500, for my campaign
for girls’ rights
...
‘I know the importance of education because my pens
and books were taken from me by force,’ I said
...
We
have continued with our education
...
I couldn’t believe it
...

The ceremony was on 20 December 2011 at the prime minister’s official residence, one of the big
white mansions on the hill at the end of Constitution Avenue which I had seen on my trip to
Islamabad
...
I was not nervous though my father tried to
intimidate me by saying Prime Minister Gilani came from a family of saints
...
I told him that we wanted
our schools rebuilt and a girls’ university in Swat
...
I thought, One day I will be a politician and do these things myself
...
I noticed my father was not very happy with this
...
In Pakistan we don’t have a culture of honouring people while they
are alive, only the dead, so he thought it was a bad omen
...
She herself would never appear in public
...
She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture
...
She
never said she regretted the work my father and I had undertaken, but when I won prizes, she said, ‘I
don’t want awards, I want my daughter
...
’
My father argued that all he had ever wanted was to create a school in which children could learn
...
‘My only
ambition,’ he said, ‘is to educate my children and my nation as much as I am able
...
One
has to speak out
...
First I thought of wearing a very
beautiful dress, but then I decided to wear something more modest for the interview as I wanted
people to focus on my message and not my clothes
...
‘Surprise!’ they shouted when I walked in
...
It was
wonderful that my friends wanted to share in my success
...

‘Now you can get back to school work,’ said Madam Maryam as we finished off the cake
...
Five days after I got the award, Aunt Babo, my mother’s eldest
sister, died suddenly
...
She was diabetic and had seen a TV advert for
a doctor in Lahore with some miracle treatment and persuaded my uncle to take her there
...
My father said the doctor
was a charlatan and this was why we needed to keep struggling against ignorance
...
Major General Ghulam Qamar, the local army commander, also gave our school
100,000 rupees to build a science laboratory and a library
...
I was reminded
of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is
won
...
They were little jewels without much
meaning
...

My father used some of the money to buy me a new bed and cabinet and pay for tooth implants for
my mother and a piece of land in Shangla
...
I wanted to start an education foundation
...
I still could not shake the image of the black rats I had
seen there, and the girl with matted hair who had been sorting rubbish
...

As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges
...
I
took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her
...


18
The Woman and the Sea

AUNT NAJMA WAS

in tears
...
My family and I sat on the rocks,
gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea
...
At that moment I was very happy
...

‘What is she saying?’ asked my aunt as if I were talking about something impossible
...
Her husband would not take her to the beach,
and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the
signs to the sea because she could not read
...
In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive
working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely
on men
...
She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents
...
But it does not mean that
...
We want to be free to go to school or to go to work
...
The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us
that every woman should listen to a man
...
‘What are you
dreaming about?’
‘Just about crossing oceans, Aba’, I replied
...
‘We’re at the beach and I want to go for a camel ride!’
It was January 2012 and we were in Karachi as guests of Geo TV after the Sindh government
announced they were renaming a girls’ secondary school on Mission Road in my honour
...
We flew to
Karachi, and it was the first time any of us had ever been on a plane
...
It would have taken us at least two days by bus
...
I had a
window seat and could see the deserts and mountains of our land below me
...
I was already missing the green of Swat
...

Driving from the airport to the hostel, I was amazed by the number of people and houses and cars
...
It was strange to think it was just a port of 300,000
people when Pakistan was created
...
Today it has around twenty million people
...

Unfortunately, Karachi has also become a very violent city and there is always fighting between the
mohajirs and Pashtuns
...
The mohajirs almost all support a party called the MQM led by
Altaf Hussain, who lives in exile in London and communicates with his people by Skype
...
By contrast we Pashtuns
are very divided, some following Imran Khan because he is Pashtun, a khan and a great cricketer,
some Maulana Fazlur Rehman because his party JUI is Islamic, some the secular ANP because it’s a
Pashtun nationalist party and some the PPP of Benazir Bhutto or the PML(N) of Nawaz Sharif
...
Then we went to visit
some schools including the one that was being named after me
...
‘We must all work together for
the rights of girls,’ I said
...
It was both odd and wonderful to see my name on a school just like my namesake
Malalai of Maiwind, after whom so many schools in Afghanistan are named
...
‘We will be like preachers of education,’ I
said
...
They lived in a very small house and so at last my
father understood why they had refused to take him in when he was a student
...
My father was angry
...
We needed to visit the mausoleum of
our founder and great leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah
...
It felt sacred to us
...

The guard explained that the tomb in the main room under a giant chandelier from China did not
contain Jinnah’s body
...
Next to it is the tomb of our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was
assassinated
...
The walls were covered with photographs
...
His skin looked paper-thin
...
Jinnah smoked fifty cigarettes a day
...
Afterwards he said that had he known Jinnah was dying he would have delayed and
there would have been no Pakistan
...

Then, a little more than three years after that, our first prime minister was killed
...


Some of Jinnah’s most famous speeches were displayed
...
And another where he had spoken about the
important role of women
...
But his wife died young
and was a Parsee, and their only daughter Dina stayed in India and married a Parsee, which didn’t sit
very well in the new Muslim homeland
...
So most of the pictures I found
were of his sister Fatima
...
He would probably say that this was not the country he had wanted
...
He wanted everyone to be free
whatever their beliefs
...
It seemed to me that before Pakistan there was endless fighting between Hindus and Muslims
...
Instead of celebrating each other, our four
provinces struggle to get along
...
Did all this fighting mean we needed
to divide our country yet again?
When we left the museum some young men with flags were protesting outside
...

There seemed to be so many things about which people were fighting
...
They think their greatest concern is defending Islam and are being led astray
by those like the Taliban who deliberately misinterpret the Quran
...
We have so many people in our country who are illiterate
...
We live in a place where schools are blown up
...
Not a single day passes without the killing of at least one Pakistani
...
She was a Pakistani journalist living in
Alaska and wanted to meet me after she had seen the documentary about us on the New York Times
website
...
I noticed she had tears in her eyes
...
‘These two are spreading secularism and should be killed,’ it said
...

That evening my father received a call from the family who had been sharing our home for the last
eighteen months
...
They
had three children, and we liked them living with us as we all played cops and robbers on the roof
...
When my father heard this, he called the deputy superintendent, who asked him
the same thing
...


After that my father was restless and could not enjoy Karachi
...
I knew my mother was still mourning my aunt and they had been feeling uneasy
about me receiving so many awards, but it seemed to be about more than that
...
‘You’re worried about something but you’re not telling us
...
I don’t
know why, but hearing I was being targeted did not worry me
...
My feeling was that nobody can stop death; it doesn’t matter if it comes from a
talib or cancer
...

‘Maybe we should stop our campaigning, Jani, and go into hibernation for a time,’ said my father
...
‘You were the one who said if we believe in something greater
than our lives, then our voices will only multiply even if we are dead
...
How could I refuse, saying there was a security
problem? We couldn’t do that, especially not as proud Pashtuns
...

Still, it was with a heavy heart that we returned to Swat
...
They told him that my national and international profile meant I had
attracted attention and death threats from the Taliban and that I needed protection
...
Many elders in Swat had been killed despite having bodyguards
and the Punjab governor had been killed by his own bodyguard
...
When he had had
threats before he always said, ‘Let them kill me but I’ll be killed alone
...

He also met the local army colonel, who said being in college in Abbottabad would not really be any
safer and that as long as I kept a low profile we would be OK in Swat
...

At home I started bolting the main gate of our house at night
...
He was very unhappy
...

‘Aba, this is a very strange situation,’ I told him
...
’
‘Yes, Malala,’ he replied
...
The rest of Swat is OK
...
This is Talibanisation for particular people, and we are among them
...
After the
exams in March the cup that went into my new cabinet was for second place
...
We

were on a school trip to Marghazar, a beautiful green valley where the air is cool, and there is a tall
mountain and a crystal-clear river where we were planning to have a picnic
...

It was April 2012, the month after our exams so we were all feeling relaxed
...
Our teachers and my parents were there too
...
It wasn’t very comfortable, especially because we also had giant pots of
chicken and rice on the floor for the picnic, but it was only half an hour’s drive
...
Moniba was looking very beautiful, her skin porcelain-pale
...

‘The same one you’re using,’ she replied
...
‘No
...
Sadly we could not see the wali’s room as it had been damaged by the floods
...
The drops sparkled in the sun
...
Then Moniba started splashing me again
...
I walked off with two other girls she didn’t
like
...
It was a recipe
for another argument between Moniba and me
...
Usman Bhai Jan, our driver, made us laugh
as usual
...

Lunch was a disaster
...
We said it was ‘the worst lunch ever’
...
’
Like on all our trips my father got us all to stand on a rock and talk about our impressions of the day
before we left
...
My father was
embarrassed and for once, short of words
...
My
father always answered the door as women must stay inside
...

When my father read it, he went pale
...
He read it out
...
It is a Hadith of the Holy Prophet
that if you see something bad or evil you should stop it with your own hand
...
I have no personal quarrel with the principal but
I am telling you what Islam says
...
If you don’t stop it you will have to answer to God on Doomsday
...


He put down the piece of paper
...
Anonymous
...

‘They know no one will ask the manager,’ said my father
...
’
‘We know what happened there
...

My father called my cousin Khanjee to find out how widely the letters had been distributed
...
There were also giant posters pasted on the front of the mosque with the
same accusations
...
‘Sir, they are saying very bad things about our school,’
they said to my father
...
‘Why are you afraid?’ he asked
...
You just splashed water and took pictures,
so don’t be scared
...
Down with them!
You have the right to enjoy greenery and waterfalls and landscape just as boys do
...
Only one
person came and withdrew his sister from the school, but we knew that was not the end of it
...
I was on the way to meet him with my parents when
we were approached by a short man who was frantically talking on two different phones
...
‘There is a suicide bomber over there!’ We’d promised to meet the peace
walker, so we went by a different route, placed a garland round his neck, then left quickly for home
...
Strangers came to the house asking
questions about my family
...
The visits became
more frequent after my father and the Swat Qaumi Jirga held a meeting in our school to protest against
army plans for the people of Mingora and our community defence committees to conduct night
patrols
...
‘So why do we need flag marches and night
patrols?’
Then our school hosted a painting competition for the children of Mingora sponsored by my
father’s friend who ran an NGO for women’s rights
...
That morning two men from the intelligence
services came to our school to see my father
...

‘This is a school,’ he replied
...
’ The men got very angry and so did my father
...
‘Why don’t you do your real work and find Fazlullah
and those whose hands are red with the blood of Swat?’
That Ramadan a friend of my father’s in Karachi called Wakeel Khan sent clothes for the poor,
which he wanted us to distribute
...
Before we had even started,

intelligence agents came and asked, ‘What are you doing? Who brought these outfits?’
On 12 July I turned fourteen, which in Islam means you are an adult
...

He was on his way from home to his hotel in Mingora Bazaar when they ambushed him in a field
...
But whereas in 2008–9
there were many threats to all sorts of people, this time the threats were specific to those who spoke
against militants or the high-handed behaviour of the army
...
‘It’s a mentality, and this mentality is everywhere in Pakistan
...
’
It was late in the evening of 3 August when my father received an alarming phone call from a Geo
TV correspondent called Mehboob
...
People used to say both Zahid Khan and my father were on the
Taliban radar and both would be killed; the only thing they didn’t know was which would be killed
first
...

When he heard the news my father said the earth fell away from his feet
...
‘I was sure it was my turn next
...
But he said not to go would be cowardly
...
So he called my cousin to take him
...

When he got to the hospital only one other member of the jirga committee was there
...
But he had been lucky
...
Strangely it went through his neck and out through his nose
...
Then darkness overcame him as if he had fallen into a black hole
...

After praying for his friend, my father talked to the media
...
‘It’s a big question for the army and administration
...
‘Ziauddin, it’s midnight and you’re here! Don’t be
stupid!’ they said
...
Don’t take any more risks!’
Finally Zahid Khan was transferred to Peshawar to be operated on and my father came home
...
After that I double-checked all the locks every night
...
Hidayatullah was one of the first to call
...
‘It could
have been you
...
You are the spokesman – how can they
possibly let you live?’
My father was convinced the Taliban would hunt him down and kill him, but he again refused
security from the police
...
‘At least I’ll be killed alone
...
‘Where can I go?’ he asked my mother
...
I am president of the
Global Peace Council, the spokesperson of the council of elders, the president of the Swat
Association of Private Schools, director of my school and head of my family
...
One day he would go to the primary school first,
another day to the girls’ school, the next day to the boys’ school
...

Despite the risks, my father and his friends continued to be very active, holding protests and press
conferences
...

‘Since we’ve come back from being IDPs we haven’t seen any attacks on army and police
...
’
The local army commander was not happy
...
‘Our reports say so
...

Zahid Khan was in hospital for twelve days then at home recuperating for a month after having
plastic surgery to repair his nose
...
If anything he became more outspoken,
particularly against the intelligence agencies, as he was convinced they were behind the Taliban
...
‘I know
who targeted me
...
He
demanded that the chief justice set up a judicial commission to investigate who had brought the
Taliban into our valley
...

But the police did nothing to find him
...
The bus dropped me at
the steps leading up to our street
...

Sometimes there was a boy called Haroon with them, who was a year older than me and used to live
on our street
...
But
then a pretty cousin came to stay with our neighbour Safina and he fell in love with her instead
...
After that they moved to another
street and we moved into their house
...

But he came back for the holidays, and one day when I returned home from school he was hanging
around on the street
...

I told a small girl to fetch it for me
...
This is my number, call me
...
He called Haroon and told him he would tell his
father
...
After that the boys stopped coming to our street, but one of
the small boys who played with Atal would call out suggestively, ‘How is Haroon?’ whenever I
passed by
...
I shouted at him so
angrily that he stopped
...
She was always very careful about
interactions with boys because her brothers watched everything
...
But really I wished that being hassled by a boy was
my biggest problem
...
He loved that painting and had hung it over his bed
...
‘Please
put it straight,’ he asked my mother in an unusually sharp tone
...
She told my
father that she’d had a nightmare in which I came to school with my leg badly burned and she had
tried to protect it
...
My father gave
money instead and she was distraught, saying that wasn’t the same
...
I didn’t say
anything to my parents but whenever I went out I was afraid that Taliban with guns would leap out at
me or throw acid in my face, as they had done to women in Afghanistan
...
Sometimes I thought I heard
footsteps behind me or imagined figures slipping into the shadows
...
At night I would wait until everyone was asleep – my mother,
my father, my brothers, the other family in our house and any guests we had from our village – then I’d
check every single door and window
...
Then I
would check all the rooms, one by one
...
I wanted to be able to see everything, though my father told me not to
...
But I worried someone would put a ladder
against the house, climb over the wall and break in through a window
...
At night I used to pray a lot
...
We
believe in God more than they do and we trust him to protect us
...
This is a very
special verse and we believe that if you say it three times at night your home will be safe from
shayatin or devils
...
So I’d say it seven times or even more
...
First our
father and family, then our street, then our whole mohalla, then all Swat
...
’ Then, ‘No, not just Muslims; bless all human beings
...
It was the one time when my friends and I did all
five prayers a day like my mother was always trying to get me to do
...

high marks though our teachers used to warn us, ‘God won’t give you marks if you don’t work hard
...
’
So I studied hard too
...
But when they
came round in October 2012 I felt under pressure
...
Then she had beaten me by not just one or two marks, the usual difference
between us, but by five marks! I had been taking extra lessons with Sir Amjad who ran the boys’

school
...

The first paper, on Monday, 8 October, was physics
...
As we waited for the signal to start the exam, I recited holy verses to
myself
...
I was so cross with
myself I almost cried
...

When I got home that afternoon I was sleepy, but the next day was Pakistan Studies, a difficult
paper for me
...
When my mother came she tried it and liked it and drank the rest
...
’ But there was no more coffee left in the cupboard
...

In the morning my parents came to my room as usual and woke me up
...
My mother made our usual breakfast of sugary tea,
chapatis and fried egg
...
It
was a big day for my mother as she was going to start lessons that afternoon to learn to read and write
with Miss Ulfat, my old teacher from kindergarten
...
‘Look, Atal, when
Malala is prime minister, you will be her secretary,’ he said
...
‘No, no, no!’ he said
...
I will be prime minister and
she will be my secretary
...

The Pakistan Studies paper went better than I thought it would
...
It was strange to think that Bangladesh was once part of Pakistan
despite being a thousand miles away
...
I
was happy when the exam was over, chatting and gossiping with my friends as we waited for Sher
Mohammad Baba, a school assistant, to call for us when the bus arrived
...
We liked staying on at
school and Moniba said, ‘As we’re tired after the exam, let’s stay and chat before going home
...
I had no worries that day
...
I ate a little bit of it then gave it to another girl to finish
...
We all ran down the steps
...
I wore my
scarf over my head but never over my face
...
He has
a collection of extremely funny stories
...
‘Show us how you did it!’ we all clamoured, but he wouldn’t
...
Another little girl cried, saying she wanted to ride there too
...
But I felt sorry for her and persuaded him to let

her in the cab
...
He liked to hang off the tailboard at the back, which made Usman Bhai Jan cross as it was
dangerous
...
‘Sit inside, Atal Khan, or
I won’t take you!’ he said
...

Usman Bhai Jan started the dyna and we were off
...

Some girls were singing, I was drumming rhythms with my fingers on the seat
...
At that time of day Haji Baba
Road was always a jumble of coloured rickshaws, people on foot and men on scooters, all zigzagging
and honking
...
A man was chopping off chickens’ heads, the
blood dripping onto the street
...
Chop, chop, chop
...
Funny, when
I was little we always said Swatis were so peace-loving it was hard to find a man to slaughter a
chicken
...
But we were
used to it
...

The bus turned right off the main road at the army checkpoint
...
The picture at the
top of a man with a black turban and beard was Fazlullah
...
We were grateful to the army but
couldn’t understand why they were still everywhere, in machine-gun nests on roofs and manning
checkpoints
...

The road up the small hill is usually busy as it is a short cut but that day it was strangely quiet
...
All the girls were singing and chatting and our voices
bounced around inside the bus
...

I didn’t see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt
...

The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day
...


PART FOUR

Between Life and Death
Khairey ba waley darta na kram
Toora topaka woranawey wadan korona
Guns of Darkness! Why would I not curse you?
You turned love-filled homes into broken debris

21
‘God, I entrust her to you’

AS SOON AS Usman Bhai Jan realised what had happened he drove the dyna to Swat Central Hospital
at top speed
...
I was lying on Moniba’s lap, bleeding from my head
and left ear
...
One girl felt my neck for a pulse
...
‘We
must get her to hospital
...
My
father was at the Swat Press Club for a meeting of the Association of Private Schools and had just
gone on stage to give a speech when his mobile rang
...
‘Your school bus has been fired
on,’ he whispered urgently to my father
...
He immediately thought, Malala could be on that bus!
Then he tried to reassure himself, thinking it might be a boy, a jealous lover who had fired a pistol in
the air to shame his beloved
...

As president of their association, my father felt he couldn’t let all those people down so he delivered
his speech as planned
...

As soon as he had finished, my father did not wait to take questions from the audience and instead
rushed off to the hospital with Ahmad Shah and another friend, Riaz, who had a car
...
They arrived to find crowds gathered outside and photographers and TV
cameras
...
My father’s heart sank
...
Inside I was lying on a trolley, a bandage
over my head, my eyes closed, my hair spread out
...
He didn’t know why he was speaking to me in English
...
My father said later, ‘I can’t explain
it
...
’ Someone said I had smiled
...
Seeing me like that was the worst
thing that had ever happened to him
...
I had been his comrade in arms for so long, first secretly as Gul Makai, then quite openly
as Malala
...

He said he felt as if he had been hit by a thunderbolt
...

Kill Malala and silence me for ever
...
There were people everywhere
...
‘Pray for Malala,’ he told them
...
They cleaned and bandaged the wound
...
She had not been at
school that day but at home nursing her baby when she received a phone call from her brother-in-law
checking she was safe
...
As soon as she heard I had been shot she called her husband
...
‘Malala, Malala
...

I grunted
...
A doctor she knew told her the bullet had
passed through my forehead, not my brain, and that I was safe
...
Shazia had been hit twice, in the left collarbone and palm, and had been
brought to the hospital with me
...

My father knew he should go and check on them but did not want to leave my bedside for a minute
...
The chief minister of KPK was the first person who called
...
‘Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar is expecting you
...
At 3 p
...
the local commander arrived and announced they were sending
an army helicopter to take me and my father to Peshawar
...
Maryam’s family was not happy
about this as she was still nursing her baby boy, who had recently undergone a small operation
...

When I was put in the ambulance my father was afraid the Taliban would attack again
...
The helipad was only a mile away, a five-minute drive,
but he was scared the whole way
...
Finally it landed and I was taken on board with
my father, my cousin Khanjee, Ahmad Shah and Maryam
...

As it took off we flew over an army sports gala with patriotic music pounding from speakers
...
He normally liked singing along,
but a patriotic song hardly seemed appropriate when here was a fifteen-year-old girl shot in the head,
an almost dead daughter
...
When she heard that I had been
hurt she was having her reading lesson with Miss Ulfat and struggling to learn words like ‘book’ and
‘apple’
...
She rushed home and told my grandmother, who was staying with us at the time
...
We believe Allah listens more closely to the
white-haired
...
There were pictures of me
everywhere receiving the awards she had disapproved of
...
All
around was Malala, Malala
...
In our culture, if someone dies women come to the home of the
deceased and the men to the hujra – not just family and close friends but everyone from the
neighbourhood
...
She sat on a prayer mat and recited from the
Quran
...
Atal, who had

walked home from school, had turned on the television and seen the news that I had been shot
...
The phone did not stop ringing
...
My mother was very confused by all the different stories, first that my foot had been injured,
then that I had been shot in the head
...
One of my father’s friends
phoned her to tell her I was being taken to Peshawar by helicopter and she should come by road
...
‘I don’t want keys, I want my daughter!’ my mother cried
...

The helipad was just a mile from our house and all the women rushed up to the roof
...
As they watched the helicopter fly overhead, my mother took her scarf off her
head, an extremely rare gesture for a Pashtun woman, and lifted it up to the sky, holding it in both
hands as if it was an offering
...
‘We didn’t accept
security guards – You are our protector
...
’
Inside the helicopter I was vomiting blood
...
He was starting to lose hope
...
‘Look, she is responding!’ she said
...
’
When we landed in Peshawar, they assumed we’d be taken to Lady Reading Hospital, where there
was a very good neurosurgeon called Dr Mumtaz who had been recommended
...
CMH is a large sprawling brick
hospital with 600 beds and dates from British rule
...
Peshawar is the gateway to the FATA and since the army went into those areas in
2004 to take on the militants, the hospital had been very busy tending wounded soldiers and victims of
the frequent suicide bombs in and around the city
...

I was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit, which is in a separate building
...
m
...
In the next room was a soldier who had been horrifically burned in an IED attack
and had a leg blown off
...
My father became even more disturbed
...
‘Is she your daughter?’ asked the colonel
...

Colonel Junaid examined me
...
The colonel stitched the wound above my left brow where the bullet had entered,
but he was surprised not to see any bullet in the scan
...
He palpated my spine and located the bullet lying next to my left shoulder blade
...

They took me for another CT scan
...
He told him that the scan in Swat had been done from only one angle, but this
new scan showed the injury was more serious
...
‘The CT scan shows the
bullet went very close to the brain
...
‘We

can pray to God
...
‘We’re not going to operate at this stage
...
In Swat the doctors had told him this was something simple, now
it seemed very serious
...
In our country, where the army has seized power so many times, people are often
wary of the military, particularly those from Swat, where the army had taken so long to act against the
Taliban
...
We don’t
want her to become shaheed millat [a martyr of the nation] like Liaquat Ali Khan
...

‘I’m confused,’ he told Colonel Junaid
...
’
Then he asked, ‘Please, can you bring in Dr Mumtaz?’
‘How would that look?’ replied Colonel Junaid who was, not surprisingly, offended
...
He
had joined the military as a doctor because of their superior facilities, following in the footsteps of
his uncle, who was also an army neurosurgeon
...
‘I’ve treated thousands of
Malalas,’ he later said
...
‘Do whatever you think,’ he
said
...
’
The next few hours were a wait-and-see time, the nurses monitoring my heartbeat and vital signs
...
Then Maryam would say,
‘Malala, Malala
...
‘I never noticed before how beautiful her eyes
are,’ said Maryam
...
‘Don’t do that,’
Maryam said
...
Madam Maryam was a strict
headmistress
...
They had made the four-hour journey by road,
driven by my father’s friend Mohammad Farooq
...
She can hear you even if you think she can’t
...
He wanted to protect her
...
‘Here is Atal,’ she told me
...
’
Atal was overwhelmed and cried a lot
...
’
My mother was in a state of shock and could not understand why the doctors were not operating to
remove the bullet
...
Atal was making so much
noise that eventually an orderly took them to the hospital’s military hostel, where they were being put
up
...
Even the governor was there; he gave
my father 100,000 rupees for my treatment
...
But now he was irritated
...

Later, while they were eating, Atal turned on the TV My father immediately turned it off
...


couldn’t face seeing news of my attack at that moment
...
Every channel was showing footage of me with a commentary of prayers and moving poems as if I
had died
...

Around midnight Colonel Junaid asked to meet my father outside the ICU
...
’ My father didn’t understand what this meant
...
Colonel Junaid
ordered a third CT scan
...

‘But I thought the bullet hadn’t entered her brain,’ said my father
...
He needed to remove some of my skull to give the brain space to
expand, otherwise the pressure would become unbearable
...
‘If we don’t, she may die
...
’
Cutting away some of my skull sounded very drastic to my father
...

It was a brave decision by Colonel Junaid, whose superiors were not convinced and were being
told by other people that I should be sent abroad
...
My father
told him to go ahead, and Colonel Junaid said he would bring in Dr Mumtaz to help
...
There in black and white were the words ‘the patient may die’
...
30 a
...
My mother and father sat outside the operating theatre
...
He made bargains with God
...
O God, let
me give the rest of my life to her; I have lived enough
...
’
Eventually my mother interrupted him
...
‘He will give me back my
daughter as she was
...

‘I had never seen someone praying like her,’ said Madam Maryam
...
’
My father tried not to think about the past and whether he had been wrong to encourage me to speak
out and campaign
...
He then cut into the subcutaneous tissue
on the left of my stomach and placed the piece of bone inside to preserve it
...
He also removed clots from my
brain and the bullet from my shoulder blade
...
The
operation took almost five hours
...
Some of them, his friends and sympathisers, were very upset,
but he felt that others were jealous of our high profile and believed we had got what was coming to
us
...
‘Are you Malala’s father?’ Once again my father’s heart sank
...

He thought she was going to say, ‘We’re sorry, I’m afraid we have lost her
...
’ He was relieved but baffled
...
One of his friends went instead
...
30 a
...
when the surgeons came out
...
In our culture doctors don’t explain
things to patients or relatives, and my father asked humbly, ‘If you don’t mind, I have a stupid
question
...
‘We did our job –
we removed the piece of skull
...
’
‘I have another stupid question,’ said my father
...
‘It’s very simple, just like this
...

The next morning the news was good
...
Then three top surgeons from the
province came to examine me
...

While I was hovering between life and death, the Taliban issued a statement assuming
responsibility for shooting me but denying it was because of my campaign for education
...
‘Malala has been targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching
secularism
...
She was proWest; she was speaking against the Taliban; she was calling President Obama her idol
...
After I won the National Peace Prize the year before, I
had done many TV interviews and in one of them I had been asked to name my favourite politicians
...
I had read about
Obama and admired him because as a young black man from a struggling family he had achieved his
ambitions and dreams
...

A Taliban spokesman said that Fazlullah had ordered the attack at a meeting two months earlier
...
‘You will see
...
’ He added they had used two local Swati men who
had collected information about me and my route to school and had deliberately carried out the attack
near an army checkpoint to show they could strike anywhere
...
Then General Kayani, the army chief, swept in
...
I had met General Kayani when
he came to Swat for a big meeting at the end of 2009 after the campaign against the Taliban
...
‘Now you just need to catch
Fazlullah
...

Colonel Junaid gave the general a briefing on the surgery and the proposed treatment plan, and
General Kayani told him he should send the CT scans abroad to the best experts for advice
...
But many kept coming:
Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician; Mian Iftikhar Hussein, the provincial information minister

and outspoken critic of the Taliban, whose only son had been shot dead by them; and the chief
minister of our province, Haider Hoti, with whom I had appeared on talk-show discussions
...

‘Rest assured Malala will not die,’ Hoti told people
...
’
Then around 3 p
...
in the afternoon two British doctors arrived by helicopter from Rawalpindi
...
Our
country is full of shocking statistics, not just on education, and one of them is that one in seven
children in Pakistan gets hepatitis, largely because of dirty needles, and many die of liver disease
...
He had asked the doctors to brief him on their progress before flying home,
which happened to be the morning after I had been shot
...

The army chief and the doctor were not related despite sharing a surname but knew each other well
so the general told Dr Javid he was worried about the conflicting reports he was receiving and asked
him to assess me before flying back to the UK
...
She was nervous about going to Peshawar,
which has become a no-go area for foreigners, but when she heard that I was a campaigner for girls’
education she was happy to help as she herself had been lucky to go to a good school and train to
become a doctor
...
There was some argument
until Dr Javid made it clear who had sent them
...
First they turned on a tap to wash their hands and discovered there was no water
...
She asked when my
blood pressure had last been checked
...
She said it needed to be
checked all the time and asked a nurse why there was no arterial line
...

My father was glad he didn’t hear what she had told Dr Javid
...
After neurosurgery it is essential to monitor breathing and gas exchange, and CO2
levels are supposed to be kept in the normal range
...
Dr Javid said it was ‘like flying an aircraft – you can only do it using the right
instruments’, and even if the hospital had them they weren’t being used properly
...

Among the visitors who came and were not allowed in was Rehman Malik, the interior minister
...
My father thanked him but he was very upset
...

‘This is Malala’s, but I don’t know whether it’s to go abroad or to the heavens,’ he said
...
In their bubble inside the hospital they did not realise that my story had travelled all round the
world and that people were calling for me to be sent abroad for treatment
...
One of the few he

took was from the parents of Arfa Karim, a child computer genius from Punjab with whom I had
spoken during forums
...
But tragically she had died that January of a heart attack following an epileptic fit
...
When her father called, my father cried
...


22
Journey into the Unknown

I WAS SHOT ON a Tuesday at lunchtime
...
I had
been put into an induced coma, my vital signs were deteriorating, my face and body were swollen and
my kidneys and lungs failing
...
As far as he could see, I was medically dead
...
‘It’s too early, she’s only 15,’ he kept thinking
...
Faiz Mohammad had told her she should recite
the Surah of the Haj, the chapter of the Quran about pilgrimage, and she recited over and over again
the same twelve verses (58–70) about the all-powerfulness of God
...

When Colonel Junaid came to check on me, my father again asked him, ‘Will she survive?’
‘Do you believe in God?’ the doctor asked him
...
Colonel Junaid seemed to be a man of great spiritual depth
...

Late on Wednesday night two military doctors who were intensive care specialists had arrived by
road from Islamabad
...
They wanted to move me but suggested that in the
meantime a top doctor be brought in
...

The hospital staff had made none of the changes Dr Fiona had recommended, and my condition had
deteriorated as the night went on
...
On Thursday morning one of the specialists,
Brigadier Aslam, called Dr Fiona
...
I had developed something
called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), which meant my blood was not clotting, my
blood pressure was very low and my blood acid had risen
...
It seemed that everything that could go wrong,
had
...

She arrived back in Peshawar at lunchtime on Thursday
...
He couldn’t see how a
child so sick could fly, but Dr Fiona assured him that she did this all the time so not to worry
...
‘Had there been no hope I would not be here,’ she replied
...

Later that day a nurse came and put drops in my eyes
...
‘Dr Fiona
is right because the nurses put eye drops in Malala’s eyes
...
’ One of the other girls who had been shot, Shazia, had been moved to the same hospital and
Fiona went to check on her
...
The helicopter flight was one hour and fifteen minutes
...
She was doing what she had been doing for years
...
But she had never
been in a situation quite like this
...
‘If anything had happened to her it would have been
blamed on the white woman,’ she said afterwards
...
’
As soon as we landed in Rawalpindi we were taken by ambulance with another military escort to a
hospital called the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology
...
Her own nurses from
Birmingham were there waiting and had explained to the cardiology nurses the specific procedures
for dealing with head injuries
...
Finally they said I was
stable
...
There was an entire battalion of soldiers
guarding it and even snipers on the rooftops
...
An
army major was assigned to my parents and followed them everywhere
...
’ My family was given three rooms in the officers’ hostel
...
Any time my parents wanted to take the short walk from the hostel to the hospital they
first had to be cleared via walkie-talkie, which took at least half an hour
...
No visitors could get in – even when the Prime
Minister came to see me he was not allowed inside
...

We were all at risk from a Taliban attack
...
He was very concerned because at that time Khushal was still in Mingora, although later he
was brought down to Rawalpindi to join them
...

Yaseem told them he felt proud to prepare my family’s food
...
He wanted to nourish them with food and ease their suffering
...
One mealtime Khushal said that the dining table felt empty with only the four of them
...

It was in one of Yaseem’s newspapers that my father read for the first time some of the incredible
international reaction to my shooting
...
Ban Ki-moon, the
UN Secretary General, called it ‘a heinous and cowardly act’
...
But some of the reaction in Pakistan was not so
positive
...
All sorts of stories were made up,
particularly in the Urdu press, such as one that claimed I had criticised the growing of beards
...
She called me an American stooge and showed a photograph of me sitting next
to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as evidence of me ‘hobnobbing with US military authority’!
Dr Fiona was a great comfort to us
...
’
She became a messenger for my parents, not only a doctor
...
My father was astonished and pleased
– in our country few doctors bother explaining anything to an illiterate woman
...
Individual Americans also offered to help, including Senator John
Kerry, a rich man who had visited Pakistan many times, and Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman
who had been shot in the head while meeting constituents at a shopping mall in Arizona
...

Nobody consulted my mother and father on what should happen to me
...
General Kayani asked Dr Javid whether I should be sent abroad or not
...
He
was hoping to build a political consensus behind launching an all-out attack on the Taliban
...
His own father was just an ordinary soldier and
died young, leaving him as the eldest son of eight to support his entire family
...

Dr Fiona said it was likely I would have a speech impediment and a weak right arm and right leg,
so I would need extensive rehabilitation facilities, which Pakistan didn’t have
...

General Kayani was adamant that the Americans should not be involved because of the ongoing
bad relations between the two countries after the Raymond Davis episode and the bin Laden raid as
well as the killing of some Pakistani soldiers at a border post by a US helicopter
...
‘Why not your
own hospital?’ General Kayani asked
...
Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham is known for
treating British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq
...
He called his boss Kevin Bolger, the hospital’s chief operating officer
...
’ Moving me – a foreign minor – to the Queen Elizabeth
Hospital was not a simple exercise, and Bolger soon found himself tangled in the hoops of British and
Pakistani bureaucracy
...
Although my condition had been stabilised
it was felt that I needed to be moved within forty-eight hours, seventy-two at the most
...
Dr Javid suggested taking up an offer from the Royal Air Force as they
were used to transporting wounded soldiers from Afghanistan, but General Kayani refused
...
There were already too many
conspiracy theories floating around about my shooting, people saying I was a CIA agent and such
things, and the army chief did not want to further fuel them
...

The British government had offered assistance but needed a formal request from the Pakistan
government
...
Fortunately at this point
the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates stepped in
...
I was to be flown out of Pakistan for the first time in my life in the early hours
of Monday, 15 October
...
Naturally they assumed that wherever I was sent, they would accompany me
...
On Sunday afternoon my father was
informed by the colonel that I would be leaving the next morning for the UK and only he was to
accompany me, not my mother or my brothers
...

My father shares everything with my mother and there was no way he would keep such a thing
secret
...
My mother was sitting with uncle Faiz Mohammad,
who was furious and worried about her and my brothers’ security
...
‘I have informed my family and they are very unhappy
...
’ This caused a big problem because I was a minor so couldn’t be sent alone and many people
got involved to try and convince my father to come with me, including Colonel Junaid, Dr Javid and
Dr Fiona
...
He explained to Dr Javid, ‘My daughter is now in safe
hands and going to a safe country
...
They are at risk
...
I am a father – my sons are
as important to me as my daughter
...
‘Are you sure this is the only reason you are not
coming?’ he asked
...

‘My wife told me, “You can’t leave us,”’ my father said
...
‘Isn’t it a miracle you all
happened to be here when Malala was shot?’ said my father
...

My father then signed an ‘in loco parentis’ document making Dr Fiona my guardian for the trip to
the UK
...

‘Fiona, I trust you
...
’
Then my mother and father came to my bedside to say goodbye
...
m
...
I could not speak, my eyes were shut and it was only my breath
that reassured them I was still alive
...
All those deadlines they’d given at the beginning – when they said the next
twenty-four hours were dangerous, forty-eight were crucial, seventy-two were critical – had all

passed without incident
...
My family
trusted that Dr Fiona and Dr Javid would give me the best possible care
...
Just after midnight someone
knocked at their door
...
He told my father that he absolutely had to travel with me or I
might not be taken at all
...
‘Why did you wake me? I’m not
leaving my family
...
‘You must go
...

‘What’s done is done,’ my father insisted
...
We will all follow in a few
days when the documents are sorted out
...
’
My father became suspicious
...
He didn’t want to go alone
with the officials and insisted my mother come too
...
It was from the story of Yunus who is
swallowed by a whale like the story of Jonah in the Bible
...
It reassures us that there is a way out of even the worst
trouble and danger if we keep faith
...
It was simple
...
The whole episode had been a matter of botched bureaucracy
...
My father did not
want me to come round in a strange country without my family there
...
My last memory would be of the school bus, and he was distraught that I would
feel abandoned by them
...
m
...
The roads to the airport
had been closed and there were snipers on the rooftops of the buildings lining the route
...
I am told it is the height of luxury with a plush double bed, sixteen first-class seats
and a mini-hospital at the back staffed with European nurses led by a German doctor
...
The plane flew to Abu Dhabi for refuelling then headed on to
Birmingham, where it landed in the late afternoon
...
They assumed their passports and visas were being processed and
they would join me in a few days
...
They had no phone and no access to a
computer to check on my progress
...


PART FIVE

A Second Life
Watan zama za da watan yam
Ka da watan da para mram khushala yama!
I am a patriot and I love my country
And for that I would gladly sacrifice all

23
‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Birmingham’

I WOKE UP on 16 October, a week after the shooting
...
I was on the way back to critical care after
another CT scan, and flitted between consciousness and sleep until I woke properly
...
But I had no idea where
I was
...
The nurses and doctors were speaking English though they
seemed to all be from different countries
...
To start with my left eye was very blurry and everyone had two noses and four
eyes
...

Dr Javid, who was there when I was brought round, says he will never forget the look of fear and
bewilderment on my face
...
The only thing I knew was that Allah had blessed
me with a new life
...
Then she started saying prayers in Urdu and reciting verses of the
Quran
...
Her voice was soft and
her words were soothing, and I drifted back to sleep
...

When I woke again the next day I noticed I was in a strange green room with no windows and very
bright lights
...
Everything was very
clean and shiny, not like the hospital in Mingora
...
I couldn’t write properly
...
I
wanted to write my father’s phone number
...
Dr Javid brought me an alphabet
board so I could point to the letters
...
The nurse
told me I was in Birmingham, but I had no idea where that was
...
I didn’t know what had happened
...
Even my name
...
My left
ear kept bleeding and my left hand felt funny
...
The nurses
asked me questions and told me to blink twice for yes
...
I thought they didn’t know themselves
...
If I looked at the nurses or doctors for too long my left eye watered
...
I gestured to
people to stand on my right
...
She said I should call it
Junaid and she would explain why later
...
She also
brought me a pink exercise book to write in
...
Who will pay for all this?’
‘Your father is safe,’ she replied
...
Don’t worry about payment
...
They all said the same
...
I

had no idea what had happened to me and I didn’t trust anyone
...
I didn’t believe my parents were safe
...
I kept having flashbacks to lying on a bed with men around me, so many
that you couldn’t count, and asking, ‘Where is my father?’ I thought I had been shot but wasn’t sure –
were these dreams or memories?
I was obsessed by how much this must be costing
...
Whenever I saw the doctors talking
to one another I thought they were saying, ‘Malala doesn’t have any money
...
’ One of the doctors was a Polish man who always looked sad
...
So I gestured at a nurse for paper and wrote,
‘Why are you sad?’ He replied, ‘No, I am not sad
...
‘We don’t have any
money
...
Afterwards he always smiled when he
saw me
...
But my brain was telling me, You don’t
have the money to pay for the call nor do you know the country code
...

Everything was so mixed up in my mind
...
‘Where’s the green teddy?’ I kept asking, even though I was
told over and over there was no green teddy
...

I kept forgetting English words
...
It felt like
something was stuck between them and I meant floss
...
The only thing that calmed me was when Rehanna came
...
The
television was kept off, except once when they let me watch Masterchef which I used to watch in
Mingora and loved but everything was blurred
...

I was terrified that my father could be dead
...
I could just see her feet
...

Later that day Dr Javid came in with his mobile phone
...

My eyes shone with excitement
...
He was gruff but
very kind, like he had known me for ever
...
’ I nodded
...

There was my father’s voice
...
But I was so happy to
hear him
...
‘I’ll come
soon,’ he promised
...
’ Later he told me that Dr
Javid had also ordered him not to cry as that would make us all sadder
...
The call did not last long because my parents did not want to tire me out
...

I still presumed that the reason they weren’t with me was because my father didn’t have the money
to pay for my treatment
...
But our land was small and I knew our school buildings and our house were rented, so
what could he sell? Perhaps he was asking rich people for a loan
...
They hadn’t actually heard my voice
and were still cut off from the outside world
...
One of those visitors was Major General Ghulam Qamar, head of military operations in
Swat
...
‘We are very happy our daughter
has survived
...

The general told my father that they were carrying out door-to-door searches throughout Swat and
monitoring the borders
...

My father said nothing but he was outraged
...
Now this general was telling him that there
had been twenty-two of them in our town for at least two months
...
Now they were saying I had been targeted by
the same Taliban as him
...
You knew they wanted to kill my daughter and you didn’t stop them?’ But he realised it
would get him nowhere
...
He told my father that although it was good news that I had regained
consciousness there was a problem with my eyesight
...
How could the officer
have information he didn’t? He was worried that I would be blind
...
Instead he told God, ‘This is unacceptable
...
’
But then he was worried that at forty-three years old his own eyes might not be very good
...
The next morning he asked the major in charge of security if he could borrow his
phone to call Colonel Junaid
...

‘That’s nonsense,’ he replied
...
’
Far away in Birmingham, not only could I see but I was asking for a mirror
...
The nurses brought me a small white mirror which I
still have
...
My long hair, which I used to spend ages styling, had
gone, and the left side of my head had none at all
...
I
thought the Taliban had cut it off
...
My
face was distorted like someone had pulled it down on one side, and there was a scar to the side of
my left eye
...
‘What happened to me?’

I also wrote ‘Stop lights’ as the bright lights were making my head ache
...

‘Was I shot? Was my father shot?’ I wrote
...
She said two of my friends on the bus had also

been shot, but I didn’t recognise their names
...
It could have taken out my eye or gone into my brain
...

I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied
...
’ My only regret was that I hadn’t had a
chance to speak to them before they shot me
...
I didn’t even
think a single bad thought about the man who shot me – I had no thoughts of revenge – I just wanted to
go back to Swat
...

After that images started to swim around in my head but I wasn’t sure what was a dream and what
was reality
...
I was in
another school bus with my father and friends and another girl called Gul
...
One of them put a gun to my head and the
small bullet that came out of it entered my body
...
Then everything
is dark, I’m lying on a stretcher and there is a crowd of men, a lot of men, and my eyes are searching
for my father
...
Other times I am in
a lot of places, in Jinnah Market in Islamabad, in Cheena Bazaar, and I am shot
...

As I grew more alert, I wanted more details
...
When she
put it down, I grabbed it to search for my name on Google
...
I also wanted to check my email, but I couldn’t remember the
password
...
When Rehanna came in we
talked about the shooting from an Islamic perspective
...

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she replied
...
‘My mother, for example, would say they can’t be Muslims
...
’ We talked about how things happen for
different reasons, this happened to me, and how education for females not just males is one of our
Islamic rights
...

*
Once I got my voice back, I talked to my parents on Dr Javid’s phone
...
‘Do I sound different?’ I asked my father
...
‘You sound the same and your voice will only get better
...

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but this headache is so severe, I can’t bear the pain
...
I think he ended up with a bigger headache than me
...
’ I didn’t want to upset him and didn’t complain even when
they took the staples from my head and gave me big injections in my neck
...

By then they had been stuck in the army hostel at the hospital in Rawalpindi for a week with no
news about when they might come to Birmingham
...
’ Later that day my father went to
see the major in charge of security and told him
...
Within ten minutes my
father was told arrangements would be made for them to move to Islamabad later that day
...
All along I thought
Malala and I were the campaigners but you really know how to protest!’
They were moved to Kashmir House in Islamabad, a hostel for members of parliament
...

At least now they had their phones back and we could speak more easily
...
But when the doctor called the line was usually busy
...
He knew then that my
memory was fine
...
Dr Javid
was also baffled as to why they weren’t coming
...

Later they would discover that, rather than do whatever it took to get my parents on the first plane
to Birmingham to join their sick daughter, the interior minister Rehman Malik was hoping to fly with
them so they could have a joint press conference at the hospital, and it was taking some time to make
the arrangements
...
Eventually he asked my parents outright if this was their
plan
...

When my parents moved to Kashmir House they were visited by Sonia Shahid, the mother of Shiza,
our friend who had arranged the trip to Islamabad for all us Khushal School girls
...
They said they had been told there were no plane tickets to Birmingham
...

He called and left a message
...
‘I know what it’s like to be kept from one’s children,’ he said, referring to his years in jail
...
‘Bring my school bag,’ I
pleaded to my father
...
’ Of course I wanted to come first in class
...

I thought I’d be back home by November
...
Those ten days I spent in hospital without them
felt like a hundred days
...
I stared at the clock in my room
...
Every morning I longed for 7 a
...
when the nurses would come
...
QEH is not a children’s hospital so they brought over a play coordinator with
games
...
I usually drew with Dr Fiona but I could beat everyone
else
...

The only thing I had with me from Pakistan was a beige shawl which Colonel Junaid had given to

Dr Fiona as a present for me so they went clothes shopping to buy me things
...
They went to Next and
British Home Stores and came back with bags of T-shirts, pyjamas, socks and even bras
...
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked
...

They were worried I wasn’t eating
...
The only things I’d eat there were the nutritional milkshakes
...
‘What do you like?’ they asked me
...

Yma discovered there was a halal Kentucky Fried Chicken at Small Heath so would go there every
afternoon to buy me chicken and chips
...

To keep me occupied they brought me a DVD player
...
I was shocked when the girls took off their shirts to practise in sports bras and I
made the nurses switch it off
...
I watched all three
Shrek movies and A Shark’s Tale
...
One day I asked a nurse, ‘What is
this lump?’ placing her hand on my tummy
...

‘It’s the top of your skull,’ she replied
...

After I started to speak I also walked again for the first time
...
My first few steps were such hard work it felt
like I’d run a hundred kilometres
...

One day another Fiona came, Fiona Alexander, who told me she was in charge of the hospital press
office
...
I couldn’t imagine Swat Central Hospital having a press office
...
When I was flown from Pakistan there was
supposed to be a news blackout, but photographs were leaked from Pakistan of me leaving and saying
I was going to the UK, and the media soon found out my destination was Birmingham
...
Fiona Alexander had spent twenty years as a journalist herself, and had
been editor of the Birmingham Post, so she knew exactly how to feed them material and stop them
trying to get in
...

People just turned up wanting to see me – government ministers, diplomats, politicians, even an
envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury
...

One day Fiona Alexander brought me a bag of cards and toys and pictures
...
Then I saw the
postage dates, from 10 October, 11 October, days before, and I realised it was nothing to do with Eid
...
I was astonished and Fiona laughed
...
’ She told me
there were sacks and sacks more, about 8,000 cards in total, many just addressed, ‘Malala,
Birmingham Hospital’
...
There were offers to adopt me as if I had no family and even a marriage proposal
...
Then I realised that people had saved my life
...
People had sent other presents too
...
Most precious of all perhaps was the parcel that came from Benazir
Bhutto’s children Bilawal and Bakhtawar
...
I buried my nose in them to try and smell her perfume
...

I realised what the Taliban had done was make my campaign global
...
There were messages from heads of state and ministers and movie
stars and one from the granddaughter of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of our province
...
Beyoncé had written me a card and posted a photo of it on Facebook, Selena Gomez had
tweeted about me and Madonna had dedicated a song
...

I didn’t realise then I wouldn’t be going home
...
‘Where are the
mountains?’ I asked
...
I didn’t know then
that this was a land of little sun
...
The houses were red brick
and all looked exactly the same
...

Dr Javid told me my parents were coming and tilted my bed so that I was sitting up to greet them
when they arrived
...
In the sixteen days since that morning when I had run out of our
house in Mingora shouting goodbye, I had been in four hospitals and travelled thousands of miles
...
Then the door opened and there were the familiar voices saying ‘Jani’ and
‘Pisho’, and they were there, kissing my hands as they were frightened to touch me
...
All that time alone in hospital I hadn’t
cried even when I had all those injections in my neck or the staples removed from my head
...
My father and mother were also weeping
...
I felt that everything would be fine now
...
‘We missed you Malala’, said my brothers, though they were soon
more interested in all the teddies and gifts
...

I was shocked by my parents’ appearance
...
They tried to hide it, but I
could see they were also disturbed by how I looked
...
’ But they had
no idea that half my face was not working and that I couldn’t smile
...
It was as if my brain had forgotten it had a left face
...

My parents were put in a hostel in the university among all the students
...
My parents had very
little with them except the clothes they were wearing and what Shiza’s mother Sonia had given them
because when they left Swat on 9 October they had no idea they wouldn’t be going back
...
I had always been such a happy child
...
Now he lamented to my
mother, ‘That beautiful symmetrical face, that bright shining face has gone; she has lost her smile and
laughter
...
‘You can give
someone eyes or lungs but you cannot restore their smile
...
The doctors were not sure at that point if it was damaged and
might repair itself, or if it was cut
...
Me, who had always cared about my appearance, how my hair looked! But when you
see death, things change
...
The important thing is God has given me my life
...
It was
like a reverse mirror – when there was laughter on my face there was distress on my mother’s
...
One day my
father asked her, ‘Pekai, tell me truthfully
...
‘You didn’t send Malala out thieving or killing or to commit crimes
...
’
Even so, my father worried that in future every time I smiled it would be a reminder of the
shooting
...
Back in Swat I used to be a very fragile
and sensitive child who would cry at the slightest thing, but in hospital in Birmingham even when I
was in terrible pain I did not complain
...
Four days after my parents
arrived a group of politicians came to the hospital from the three countries that had helped me –
Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister, William Hague, the British foreign minister and Sheikh
Abdullah bin Zayed, foreign minister of the UAE
...
He was upset by the ministers’ visit because Rehman Malik said to him,
‘Tell Malala she should give a smile to the nation
...

Rehman Malik had revealed that my attacker was a talib called Ataullah Khan who he said had
been arrested in 2009 during the military operation in Swat but freed after three months
...
Malik claimed the plan to shoot
me was hatched in Afghanistan
...
We doubted that, as no one has ever been caught – not the killer of
Benazir Bhutto, not whoever was behind the plane crash that killed General Zia, not the assassin of
our first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan
...
He was
released after a few days but Usman Bhai Jan was still in army custody as they said they would need
him to identify people
...
Why had they arrested Usman Bhai Jan and not
Ataullah?
The United Nations announced they were designating 10 November, one month and a day after the
shooting, Malala Day
...
The doctors had done tests with electrical impulses and it had not
responded, so they concluded it was cut and they needed to operate soon or my face would remain
paralysed
...

I was taken into theatre on 11 November for a surgeon called Richard Irving to carry out the
operation
...
Repairing the

nerve was such delicate work that it took eight and a half hours
...
Then he
followed the facial nerve from the temporal bone where it enters the skull all the way to its exit, and
on the way removed many more fragments of bone which had been restricting my jaw movement
...

The operation went well, though it was a three-month wait before the left side of my face started
working bit by bit
...
Mr Irving told
me that after six months the nerve would start working though I would never be completely the same
...
Though it was my face, I could see it was my parents who were
happiest to have it back
...

The other good result was that finally my headaches lifted and I started reading again
...
I loved reading
about Dorothy and how even though she was trying to get back home she stopped and helped those in
need like the cowardly lion and the rusty tin man
...
I was so excited by the book that I read it quickly and afterwards told my father all
about it
...

I knew my parents were worried about my memory as I told them I didn’t remember anything about
the shooting and kept forgetting the names of my friends
...
One day my father
asked, ‘Malala, can you sing us some Pashto tapey?’I sang a verse we liked: ‘When you start your
journey from the end of a snake’s tail,/ You will end up on its head in an ocean of poison
...
Then I said, ‘Actually there’s a tapa I want to rewrite
...
Tapey are the centuries-old collected wisdom of our society; you don’t
change them
...

‘This one,’ I said
...


I wanted to change it to:
Whether the men are winning or losing the battle, O my country,
The women are coming and the women will win you an honour
...

I worked hard in the gym and with the physiotherapist to get my arms and legs working properly

again and was rewarded on 6 December with my first trip out of the hospital
...
They didn’t let my father come as they thought he would
be recognised, having been in the media a lot
...

They told me to sit in the back of the car in the middle, not next to a window, which was annoying
as I wanted to see everything in this new country
...
When we entered the gardens and I saw all the green plants and trees, it was a
powerful reminder of home
...
’ I
am very proud of the beautiful plants of my valley
...
I felt like Dorothy at the end of her journey
...
‘For the first time I am happy,’ she said
...

Two days after that I had my first visitor from outside the family – the president of Pakistan, Asif
Zardari
...
Not only was Mr Zardari our head of state but he had said the
government would pay all my medical bills, which would end up being around £200,000
...
The visit was on Saturday, 8 December, and the whole thing was like something out of a James
Bond movie
...
Instead I was wrapped up in a big purple parka with a hood,
taken down through the staff entrance and driven to the hospital offices
...
Then I
sat and waited in an office, playing a game called Elf Bowling on the computer and beating my
brother Atal even though it was the first time I had played it
...
He came with about ten people including his chief of
staff, his military secretary and the Pakistan High Commissioner in London, who had taken over from
Dr Fiona as my official guardian in the UK till my parents arrived
...
Then he came in to see me with
his youngest daughter Asifa, who is a few years older than me
...

He touched my head, which is our tradition, but my father was worried as I had nothing but skin, no
bone to protect my brain, and my head beneath the shawl was concave
...
‘She might have
survived in Pakistan but she wouldn’t have had the rehabilitation and would have been disfigured,’ he
said
...
’
Mr Zardari told the high commissioner to give my father a post as education attaché so he would
have a salary to live on and a diplomatic passport so he would not need to seek asylum to stay in the
UK
...
Gordon Brown, in his
UN role, had also asked him to be his adviser, an unpaid position, and the president said that was
fine; he could be both
...
But still not everyone in Pakistan was so positive
...

The new year of 2013 was a happy one when I was discharged from hospital in early January
finally to live with my family again
...
The apartments were
on the tenth floor, which was higher than any of us had ever been before
...
My father told me that when they arrived she had been so scared that she had said, ‘I
will die in this lift!’
We were so happy to be a family again
...
The boys
were bored cooped up waiting for me to recover, away from school and their friends, though Atal
was excited by everything new
...
It was a cold winter, and as I watched the snow falling outside through the big glass
windows I wished I could run around and chase the snowflakes like we used to back home
...

In the square was a fountain and a Costa coffee bar with glass walls through which you could see
men and women chatting and mixing in a way that would be unthinkable in Swat
...
We went to the shops though I
still did not like shopping
...
My mother was so horrified that she cried, ‘Gharqa shoma!’ – ‘I’m drowning’ – and begged
my father, ‘Please take me to Dubai
...
‘Are their legs
made of iron so they don’t feel cold?’ asked my mother
...

This made us laugh
...

I thought everyone had a gun
...
The teacher had brought to class my Pakistan Studies exam from that day, the day of
the shooting
...

Though I had been getting some schooling at the hospital, I worried that I was falling behind
...
‘It’s boring without you to compete with,’
Malka-e-Noor told me
...
I still had the top of my skull missing
...
When I went for walks I could not understand the
words of my mother and father in a crowd
...
On Saturday, 2 February I was back in QEH to be operated on – this time by a woman
...
First she removed the skull bone from my tummy, but after looking at it
decided not to put it back as it had not kept well and there was a risk of infection
...

While I was in surgery Mr Irving, the surgeon who had repaired my nerve, also had a solution for
my damaged left eardrum
...
I was in theatre five hours and I’d had three operations, but I didn’t feel like I’d had
major surgery and was back in the apartment within five days
...
To start with, everything was
like a robot sound, but soon it was getting better and better
...
He has given us an extraordinary brain and a
sensitive loving heart
...
As I found
with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose
one
...
Some people choose good ways and some choose bad ways
...
It swelled my brain, stole my hearing and cut the nerve of the left side of my
face in the space of a second
...
I was a good girl
...
It wasn’t about the awards or the money
...
’
A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them
...
My friend Shazia,
who was hit twice, was offered a scholarship at Atlantic College in Wales so has also come to the
UK for schooling, and I hope Kainat will too
...
It feels
like this life is a second life
...
When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think
it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all
...

Birmingham, August 2013

IN MARCH WE moved from the apartment to a rented house on a leafy street, but it feels as if we are
camping in it
...
Everywhere there are cardboard boxes full of the
kind letters and cards that people send, and in one room stands a piano none of us can play
...

Our house feels big and empty
...
At the back there is a large
garden with lots of trees and a green lawn for me and my brothers to play cricket on
...
We are just a wall’s distance from the next house but
it feels miles away
...
She looks as if she is singing, maybe that tapa she likes: ‘Don’t kill doves in the garden
...
’ She is giving the birds the remains of our dinner from the
night before and there are tears in her eyes
...
But there are always leftovers
...
I know she is
remembering all the children we fed in our house, so they would not go to school on empty stomachs,
and wondering how they are faring now
...
Here the
only sound is of the birds and Khushal’s Xbox
...

We didn’t have much money and my parents knew what it was like to be hungry
...
Once a poor woman came, hot, hungry and thirsty, to our door
...
‘I touched every door in the mohalla and this was
the only one open,’ she said
...
’
I know my mother is lonely
...
Now
she is always on the phone to everyone back home
...
Our house has all these facilities, but when she arrived they were all mysteries to her and
someone had to show us how to use the oven, washing machine and the TV
...
I tease him, ‘Aba, you talk of women’s rights, but my
mother manages everything! You don’t even clear the tea things
...
My mother misses going shopping in
Cheena Bazaar
...
He has a car and takes her

shopping, but it’s not the same as she can’t talk to her friends and neighbours about what she bought
...
She
often cries then hugs me’
...
Now she treats me as if I was her youngest
rather than eldest child
...
He cries when I push my hair to the side and he sees the scar on my
head, and he cries when he wakes from an afternoon nap to hear his children’s voices in the garden
and realises with relief that one of them is still mine
...
It’s hard for him
...
I know he felt proud at what he had created, a poor boy from that narrow village between
the Black and White Mountains
...
’
His dream in life was to have a very big school in Swat providing quality education, to live
peacefully and to have democracy in our country
...
He never imagined living abroad and he
gets upset when people suggest we wanted to come to the UK
...
Often over meals we talk about home and try to remember things
...
My father says, ‘If I had known this would happen, I would have
looked back for a last time just as the Prophet did when he left Mecca to migrate to Medina
...
’ Already some of the things from Swat seem like stories from a distant
place, like somewhere I have read about
...
I know it’s odd for him that
now people want to hear him because of me, not the other way round
...
When he went to France to collect an award for me he told
the audience, ‘In my part of the world most people are known by their sons
...
’
A smart new uniform hangs on my bedroom door, bottle green instead of royal blue, for a school
where no one dreams of being attacked for going to classes or someone blowing up the building
...
It’s wonderful going to school and not having
to feel scared as I did in Mingora, always looking around me on my way to school, terrified a talib
would jump out
...
Many subjects are the same as at home, but the teachers have PowerPoint and
computers rather than chalk and blackboards
...
Even though I recently got just forty percent in my physics exam, it is still my favourite
subject
...

But like my mother I am lonely
...
People say, ‘Oh, that’s Malala’ – they see me as ‘Malala, girls’
rights activist’
...
Oh, and who was always

quarrelling with her brother and best friend! I think every class has a very well behaved girl, a very
intelligent or genius girl, a very popular girl, a beautiful girl, a girl who is a bit shy, a notorious girl
...
but here I haven’t worked out yet who is who
...

My first question is always, ‘What’s the latest news at the school?’ I love to hear who is fighting with
who, and who got told off by which teacher
...
My
classmates still keep the seat for me with my name on it, and at the boys’ school Sir Amjad has put a
big poster of me at the entrance and says he greets it every morning before going into his office
...
I tell her of the streets with rows of identical houses, unlike
home, where everything is different and higgledy-piggledy and a shack of mud and stones can stand
next to a house as big as a castle
...
I tell her I like England because people
follow rules, they respect policemen and everything happens on time
...
I see women having jobs we couldn’t imagine
in Swat
...

I don’t often think about the shooting, though every day when I look in the mirror it is a reminder
...
I will never be exactly the same
...
My father’s friend Hidayatullah told him we should be proud of my
eye
...

It is still not definitely known who shot me, but a man named Ataullah Khan said he did it
...

Though I don’t remember exactly what happened that day, sometimes I have flashbacks
...
The worst one was in June, when we were in Abu Dhabi on the way to perform Umrah
in Saudi Arabia
...
I didn’t want one
...
As we were walking through the mall, suddenly I could see so many men
around me
...
I was terrified though I said
nothing
...
This is your second life
...

We believe that when we have our first sight of the Kaaba, the black-shrouded cube in Mecca that
is our most sacred place, any wish in your heart is granted by God
...
But
when we went to the other holy places in the desert of Mecca where the Prophet lived and preached, I
was shocked that they were littered with empty bottles and biscuit wrappers
...
I thought they had forgotten the Hadith that cleanliness is half of
faith
...
On the shelves of our rented living room are awards from around the
world – America, India, France, Spain, Italy and Austria, and many other places
...
When I received prizes for my work
at school I was happy as I had worked hard for them, but these prizes are different
...
I don’t want to be thought of as ‘the girl who was shot by the Taliban’ but ‘the

girl who fought for education’
...

On my sixteenth birthday I was in New York to speak at the United Nations
...
‘This is your chance Malala,’ I said to myself
...
I did not write the speech only
with the UN delegates in mind; I wrote it for every person around the world who could make a
difference
...
Deep in my heart I hoped to reach every child who
could take courage from my words and stand up for his or her rights
...
‘Let us pick up our books
and our pens,’ I said
...
One child, one teacher, one book and
one pen can change the world
...
My mother was in tears and my father said I had become everybody’s
daughter
...
My mother allowed herself to be publicly photographed for the
first time
...

At breakfast the next day Atal said to me in the hotel, ‘Malala, I don’t understand why you are
famous
...
They accused me of speaking out of ‘a teen lust for fame’
...
She would eventually get what she
was after, a life of luxury abroad
...
I know people say these things because they have seen leaders and politicians in our
country who make promises they never keep
...

The endless terrorist attacks have left the whole nation in shock
...

The most surprising letter I got after my speech was from a Taliban commander who recently
escaped from prison
...
He had
been in jail since 2003 for attempting to assassinate President Musharraf
...
He said he was writing to me because he was shocked by my shooting
and wished he could have warned me beforehand
...

Journalists urged me to answer him, but I thought, Who is this man to say that? The Taliban are not
our rulers
...
But Mohammed Hanif wrote an article pointing out
that the good thing about the Taliban letter was that many people claim I wasn’t shot yet here they
were accepting responsibility
...


‘ No, Jani, your treatment is not complete,’ he says, or, ‘These schools are good
...
’
He is right
...
Then I will be able
to fight more effectively for my cause
...
Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this
right
...
In the Quran it is written, God wants us
to have knowledge
...
I know it’s a
big struggle – around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school,
thirty-two million of them girls
...
1
million children don’t even go to primary school even though in our constitution it says every child
has that right
...

Girls continue to be killed and schools blown up
...
A bomb and a grenade were tossed into the school playground just as a
prize-giving ceremony was about to start
...
One eight-year-old was left disabled
...
‘When our children are sleeping we wouldn’t even disturb a hair
on their heads,’ she said, ‘but there are people who have guns and shoot them or hurl bombs
...
’ The most shocking attack was in June in the city of Quetta
when a suicide bomber blew up a bus taking forty pupils to their all-girls’ college
...
The wounded were followed to the hospital and some nurses were shot
...
Sometimes it’s drone attacks, sometimes it’s wars,
sometimes it’s hunger
...
In June two girls my age were murdered
in Gilgit, which is a little north of Swat, for posting a video online showing themselves dancing in the
rain wearing traditional dress and headscarves
...

Today Swat is more peaceful than other places, but there are still military everywhere, four years
after they supposedly removed the Taliban
...
Our valley, which was once a haven for tourists, is now seen as a place of fear
...

Hotels and craft shops are empty
...

Over the last year I’ve seen many other places, but my valley remains to me the most beautiful
place in the world
...
I wonder what
happened to the mango seed I planted in our garden at Ramadan
...


Today I looked at myself in a mirror and thought for a second
...
So I offered the hundred raakat nafl prayers that I had promised if I grew
...
I thank my Allah
...
He is the greatest
...
Peace in every home, every street, every
village, every country – this is my dream
...
To sit
down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right
...

I am Malala
...


Glossary
aba – affectionate Pashto term, ‘father’
ANP – Awami National Party, Pashtun nationalist political party
baba – affectionate term for grandfather or old man
badal – revenge
bhabi – affectionate Urdu term, literally ‘my brother’s wife’
bhai – affectionate Urdu term, literally ‘my brother’
chapati – unleavened flatbread made from flour and water
dyna – open-backed van or truck
FATA – Federally Administered Tribal Areas, region of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan governed
under a system of indirect rule started in British times
Hadith – saying or sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him
Haj – the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam (along with the confession of faith,
daily prayer, fasting during Ramadan and alms-giving), which every Muslim who can afford to
should perform once in their lifetime
haram – prohibited in Islam
hujra – traditional Pashtun meeting place for men
imam – local preacher
IDP – internally displaced person
ISI – Inter Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s biggest intelligence agency
Jamaat-e-Islami – Party of Islam, Pakistan conservative party
JUI – Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Assembly of Islamic clergy, Pakistan conservative political party
closely linked to the Afghan Taliban which advocates strict enforcement of Islamic law
jani – dear one
jani mun – soulmate
jihad – holy war or internal struggle
jirga – tribal assembly
khaista – handsome one
khan – local lord
KPK – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, literally ‘Area of Pashtuns’, until 2010 called North-West Frontier
Province, one of the four provinces of Pakistan
lashkar – local militia
LeT – Lashkar-e-Taiba, literally ‘Army of the Pure’, one of Pakistan’s oldest and most powerful
militant groups, active in Kashmir and with close links to the ISI
madrasa – school for Islamic instruction
maulana, mufti – Islamic scholar
mohalla – district
MQM – Muttahida Qaumi Movement, Karachi-based party representing Muslims who fled India at
Partition (1947)
nang – honour
PML – Pakistan Muslim League, conservative political party founded in 1962 as successor to the

Muslim League, the only major party in Pakistan at Partition, which was banned in 1958 along with
all other parties
PPP – Pakistan People’s Party, centre-left party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1967, later led by
his daughter Benazir and currently co-chaired by her husband Asif Zardari and their son Bilawal
Pashtunwali – traditional behavioural code of Pashtuns
pir – hereditary saint
pisho – cat
purdah – (of women) segregation or seclusion, wearing the veil
qaumi – national
sabar – patience
shalwar kamiz/salwar kamiz – traditional outfit of loose tunic and trousers worn by both men and
women
surah – chapter of the Holy Quran
swara – practice of resolving a tribal feud by handing over a woman or young girl
talib – religious student, but has come to mean member of Taliban militant group
tapa/tapey (plural) – genre of Pashto folk poetry having two lines, the first line with nine syllables,
the second with thirteen
...
So many
people have helped me that it would take a whole new book to name them all here, but I would like to
thank everyone in Pakistan and all round the world who prayed for me, all the schoolchildren,
students and other supporters who rose when I fell
...

I was very lucky to be born to a father who respected my freedom of thought and expression and
made me part of his peace caravan, and a mother who not only encouraged me but my father too in our
campaign for peace and education
...

Many people have described my recovery as miraculous, and for this I would particularly like to
thank the doctors and nurses at Swat Central Hospital, CMH Peshawar and AFIC Rawalpindi,
especially my heroes Colonel Junaid and Dr Mumtaz, who carried out the right operation at the right
time or I would have died
...

I am extremely grateful to General Kayani, who took a keen interest in my treatment, and to
President Zardari and his family, whose love and care kept me strong
...

Dr Javid Kayani made me laugh in my gloomy days and was like a father to me
...
Dr Fiona Reynolds was a great source of
comfort to my parents in Pakistan and to me in the UK, and I thank her too for daring to tell me the
truth about my tragedy
...
Julie and her team of nurses
were so kind to me, and Beth and Kate were not only nurses but like loving sisters
...

Richard Irving deserves a particular mention for his surgery to restore my smile, as does Mrs
Anwen White who restored my skull
...

Rehanna Sadiq has been a wonderful comfort with her spiritual therapy
...
Thank you to all the
wonderful people and partner organisations who have helped set up the Fund especially Megan
Smith, UN Foundation, Vital V
oices and BeeSpace
...

Great thanks to everyone at Edelman, especially Jamie Lundie and his colleague Laura Crooks
...
And to Ban Ki-moon for being so

supportive since the beginning
...
We
were strangers and they helped us adjust to this land and find a place to live
...

On the book, our special thanks to Christina, who turned into reality what was just a dream
...

We have been extremely lucky to have a literary agent like Karolina Sutton, who has thrown herself
into this project and our cause with such passion and commitment, and also an incredible team of
editors: Judy Clain and Arzu Tahsin were determined to tell our story in the best way possible
...

I would also like to thank Angelina Jolie for her generous contribution to the Malala Fund
...

We thank God for the day a lady called Shahida Choudhury walked through our door
...

Last and not least I would like to thank Moniba for being such a good and supportive friend and my
brothers Khushal and Atal for keeping me still a child
...
I would also like to thank General Asim Bajwa, Colonel Abid Ali Askari, Major Tariq and
the team at Inter Services Public Relations for facilitating my visit
...

In the UK, the staff of Queen Elizabeth Hospital could not have been more helpful, particularly
Fiona Alexander and Dr Kayani
...
I’m also grateful to Martin Ivens, my editor
at the Sunday Times, for allowing me the time for this important project
...

Above all, thanks to Malala and her wonderful family for sharing their story with me
...
I hope my story will
inspire girls to raise their voice and embrace the power within themselves, but my mission does not
end there
...

That is why I have set up the Malala Fund
...
To give girls this chance, the Fund aspires to invest in efforts that empower
local communities, develop innovative solutions that build upon traditional approaches, and deliver
not just basic literacy but the tools, ideas and networks that can help girls find their voice and create a
better tomorrow
...
Please join my mission
...
malalafund
...
facebook
...
twitter
...
It shows the
dream of interfaith harmony
...

SECTION 2
P2 top © Kh Awais
P2 bottom © Copyright Asad Hashim/Al Jazeera
...
com)
...
Used
with the kind permission of The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham
...

P6 top © UN Photo / Eskinder Debebe
...

bottom © UN Photo / Rick Bajornas
...

P8 © Antonio Olmos 2013
...
jinnaharchive
...
A
...

Rahmat Shah Sayel for use of his poems
...


Copyright
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2013
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2013
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © 2013 by Salarzais Limited
Map © John Gilkes 2013
The right of Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
...
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or
by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
...
The events,
locales and conversations are based on the author’s memories of them, and any unwitting errors that may appear in the
book are the author’s own
...

For additional copyright information, please see the page Additional Credits and Thanks
Every effort has been made to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material
...

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
...
orionbooks
...
uk



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