By: Imran O Kazmi

Malala Yousafzai

This is a short and sweet article, if you may call it such, in the avalanche of news reports and opinions on this brave kid… more of a critical look at what happened, why and what’s to come.

Much is being spoken today of the young girl from Swat, Pakistan – Malala Yousafzai, a 14 year-old who faced bullets just to fight for the right of the girl-child for education. While many genuinely condemn the attackers, the TTP (Tehrik e Taliban of Pakistan), many stand to gain profit politically or otherwise by aligning with Malala, after all she’s the hottest news topic! And anybody who’s somebody is talking about her. Why such a sudden sense of attachment with a girl who’s one of tens of millions in a similar fate, day in and day out? One is compelled to ask sans any reasonable answer.

Few are aware that TTP or not, the fate of girls like Malala in Pakistan is doomed from birth, a gender biased society that rewards “sons” and frowns at newborn girls to the extent that a woman may have to give birth half a dozen or more times to appease her husband and in-laws with a prized “boy” and if not, she’s either tortured and/or a new wife is brought in her place. In such a backdrop, we have sweet Malala, born in the summer of 1997 to Ziauddin Yousafzai… a poet, school owner and educational activist and lucky she was for in her environment, girls are often denied education and are made to work like slave labor at their parents’ home first and then the same is repeated at their husband’s home. Boys don’t fare significantly better either, poverty is almost raison d’etre of the masses. Few are aware that boys go through sodomization at the “Madressah” or Islamic Religious School oft times (much like the Church scandals, only worse) and are made to work as mechanics under tons of trailers, trucks or cars from a tender age, whereas in the US or Europe or MidEast they play with toys at home or playschool. Ironically, Islam has from its inception, advocated education or “Ilm” as the foundation for all Muslims, regardless of any discrimination and it is in the name of the SAME Islam that these girls and boys are persecuted by the TTP!

Malala grew up with the loving encouragement of her family, into an educational activist and blogger from the tender age of 11. Since 2009, she started writing for the BBC courtesy of her dad’s journalist friend who wanted a school girl’s view of the prevailing academic atmosphere. Later on, Adam B. Ellick of the New York Times made a documentary, with appearances at press conferences, on the status quo which resulted in the wrath of the TTP as death threats were made to her dad, Ziauddin. Seeing all this mayhem and madness, Malala decided to pursue politics so she could save her country.

Through the wicked circle of poverty, illiteracy and narrow minded perception of so-called custodians of Islam, the TTP, Malala met a bullet on October 9, 2012. While riding home in a bus from school, they were intercepted by masked gunmen who asked for her by name and threatened that if they hid her, they would shoot all of them. They shot her twice in the neck and head, and left her to die.

Today she’s still on a ventilator at the Army Hospital amidst “talks” of airlifting her to Dubai or Germany, something that should have been done much earlier. However, Malala is still not out of danger as I write these words and my fingers tremble to write what if she were to be no more? And then I remember the Swat school girlfriend of Malala, who, after her assassination attempt said, “Every girl in Swat is Malala. We will educate ourselves. We will win. They can’t defeat us,” – and I could feel hope somewhere in the dark corners of my mind.

Back in 2009, when Malala was learning to speak her mind from the beautiful yet chained frontiers of NWFP/Swat, I wrote a blog: http://learningpays.wordpress.com/, aimed specifically at using education to eradicate terror and poverty from the masses. It is “the” future were someone to action it.

Few takers, but an assassination attempt seems to have momentarily woken up all around, for how long I ask? And to what end?