I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (14 page)

Rabab mangia wakht de teer sho
Da kali khwa ta Talibaan raaghali dena

Farewell Music! Even your sweetest tunes are best kept silent
The Taliban on the edge of the village have stilled all lips

9

Radio Mullah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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