As people around me became silent, I spoke more. I shouted my message over the squares of Mingora. I tried to make everything I said simple and logical, so that everybody could understand. The journalists who were covering the conflict liked this quality.
The way I saw it was that I was playing my role in the future of a country. Standing up to the Taliban was the responsibility I took for our future generations. It was not just Malala’s dreams and rights I was protecting. It was the dreams and rights of all the girls in my school and in the beautiful valley of Swat. My pain and my anger was for my daughter and all the daughters of this country. I was running a school for girls. There were 50,000 other girls who were in school in Swat. What did this Talibanization mean? It meant no women in power; it meant no free women, no girls’ education. It meant women would be slaves.
I was so devastated when I contemplated Malala’s future in these terms. Can you imagine how that felt after everything I had tried to do for her? The pain felt almost physical.
Because of the way in which I spoke, I was often approached by journalists for quotes and information. One of the journalists covering the conflict was Abdul Hai Kakar, my friend who worked for BBC Urdu and for whom Malala started writing her secret diary under the pen name Gul Makai later in that year of 2009. Abdul Hai Kakar warned me that I was becoming too prominent. “Zia,” he said, “you are speaking too often. Danger will come. I have told my office that we must stop using your name and your voice so much.”
Journalists in the area were both under surveillance from the Pakistani army and at the same time receiving threats from the Taliban. “We will see you!” the Taliban commanders would say, which was how a death threat was spoken.
“We are all walking dead bodies, Zia,” Abdul Hai Kakar warned me. “We are carrying our funeral on our shoulders.” But he did not stop reporting despite these threats and neither did I stop speaking.
Nobody wants to die. Human life is precious. I didn’t want to die, but I knew that what I was doing might cost me my life. I started receiving death threats, pushed under the door and through the media. It is traumatic to think about your death, about leaving your small children on their own, bringing them into this world and then leaving it early. The most fearful thing for me was not that the Taliban was going to finish my life but that I would be leaving my children without a father. But at the same time, I thought, “I am on the right path. I am raising my voice for the very basic human rights, for education and peace in my country. And, God forbid, God forbid it ever happens, but if it does, I will not be repenting it.” Friends were often telling me to go carefully. Toor Pekai was terrified and would open the door herself, assuming that the Taliban would never kill a woman. Malala was terrified for me, too, but neither of them urged me to stop.
One friend said to me, “You have already received a death threat, Ziauddin. The way you are speaking, it will be fatal. You are inviting death.” And I remember what I told him. I said, “Right now, my happiness is the love I have for my family, my children, and my wife. But if I die? My mother and father will be there waiting for me. I will be going back to this first family.” This is how I justified my own activism to myself. I saw myself in a bigger picture. I saw my activism not as a large noble thing that would change the world but as something I could do for my community. And ultimately, I thought, “If I die? It’s worth it because protecting my rights or the rights of the people of my community is worth my life.” I received death threats in 2008 and in 2009, but the Taliban did not take my life. I did not stop my activism with these threats, although I took precautions such as changing my routine. But when ten months before Malala was attacked in 2012 there was a threat on her life? This was my Achilles’ heel. The Taliban had found a way of silencing me.
A Brave Bird
There is a general view, I think, that Malala was attacked just for going to school, or because she broke the ban on girls’ education in January 2009. We did break the ban on girls’ education then. For those who wanted to, we pretended the girls in the higher grades were in grade four, the cutoff, and then later we held their classes in secret. But Malala was shot by the Taliban because of the power of her voice. It had started to make a real difference in Pakistan. It had grown louder and more powerful between 2009 and 2012. The people of our country were listening to her. Malala’s voice was so much more powerful than my own voice because it was coming from a child’s heart. She was not political; she was innocent. She just believed in education. Her intentions were so pure. What had been a talent for debate on the school circuit grew into something much bigger. Never once did we think that the Taliban would attack a child. They had never attacked any child before.
The army had cleared the Taliban from Mingora in 2009 after a short period in which we fled as IDPs (internally displaced persons). Pekai took the children to Shangla while I stayed in Peshawar to campaign with my friends Fazal Maula, Ahmad Shah, and Muhammad Farooq.
When we returned to Mingora later that year, our city was like a ghost town. Our school, where the security forces had stayed, was covered in graffiti and rubbish, and the furniture was a mess. Malala and I continued to speak publicly about girls’ rights to education. In our minds, it was not fear we felt but great pride that Malala was raising her voice and speaking for the people of our country. As her voice grew louder and was heard all over the country, wherever she went, people would gather around her. At airports, people would ask for her autograph or her photograph. This support was huge, and if you are supported by your people, everything else becomes small. Those who could not raise their own voices were who mattered to her. She was their voice. Pekai said to both of us: “If you do not speak out, who else will?”
When I cast my mind back to those days, Malala’s activism together with mine, I see that we were both so busy in that fight. In Swat, this fight was not a solo fight. I was a member of the council of elders in Swat and I was the president of the Global Peace Council, which meant there were other men who were campaigning, too. Some of my close peace activist friends were killed in terrorist attacks and others were injured. There had been other girls in my school who had spoken out, but this stopped over time as their fathers had become scared.
When you are in the battle, you hardly think about other things, about what is happening around you. You are focused on the battle. For a very long time, I did not think about the threat to Malala’s life at all. This is because I took it for granted that she would be safe and nothing in the world would ever happen to her, a teenage girl. It is why I allowed her to keep the anonymous diary under the name of Gul Makai. I did not think she was at risk.
And when we both took part in a New York Times documentary that year called Class Dismissed, I did not imagine that placed her at risk, either. I suppose I thought, “Yes, the Taliban has destroyed more than four hundred schools, but they have never attacked a child. Why would they do it? And a girl? How could they come after a girl?” I took her safety for granted, which I see now as a kind of naïveté.
People who criticize Toor Pekai and me for allowing Malala to become a child activist in such a dangerous place have a right to do that. Of course, I know that people think, “You are an idealist. Your first priority should be your life,” but we are all human beings. We are alike in many things, but we are different in many things as well. The way I saw it was that our response was like the instinctive courage of a mother bird. When a bird sees its chicks in danger, when she sees a snake wrapping itself around her nest, she flies up and she cries. She chirps and shouts in her own language. She does not do nothing. She does not go and hide somewhere else in the forest.
Our whole family had lived in such a way that accepting Talibanization was impossible. We had read and believed in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., of Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela and Bacha Khan, people who had shown real bravery during great struggles. So I would not compromise. And Malala was the same. She was a born activist, and circumstances gave her a platform. You c
an’t “make” a Malala. You can’t “make” a Martin Luther King Jr. or a Rosa Parks. As a parent, all you can do is inspire them by your actions, by your own values. As Malala’s platform grew in Pakistan, Toor Pekai and I could see that Malala was not an ordinary girl, or rather that she was an ordinary girl but with extraordinary courage, talent, and wisdom. I used to tell her, “Jani, your speeches go to the core of people’s hearts.”
Two key moments of recognition of Malala’s influence in Pakistan came at the end of 2011. The first was that she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The citation read, “Malala dared to stand up for herself and the other girls and use national and international media to let the world know girls should have the right to go to school.” She did not win this prize, but we were so proud. She would win it two years later, after the attack. However, at the end of 2011, Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, decided to honor her bravery with our country’s first National Youth Peace Prize. The award was later named after her and became known as the National Malala Peace Prize. As a result of this, at Malala’s request, the prime minister directed the authorities to set up an IT campus in the Swat Degree College for Women.
Malala was already beginning to think about setting up her own organization to help poor girls go to school. Even then, aged fourteen, she had big ambitions. Her profile in Pakistan as a child activist was well established.
Pakistan is a country full of conspiracies. Dissenters said Malala’s fight was really mine, that her voice was my voice. But if I had wanted to make Malala my extension, part of me, part of my “campaign,” I think she would have remained very small. She would not have grown bigger than me in terms of her impact. She would not have completely overshadowed me. The way she was able to communicate was beautiful. It was key to her success.
But Malala’s success was a threat to the Taliban. They could no longer dismiss her as just a child.
In January 2012, the Sindh government informed us that it would be renaming a girls’ secondary school after Malala. We were invited to Karachi by Geo TV. We decided to fly to Karachi—Malala’s first time on a plane—as a family, except without Khushal who was at his boarding school in Abbottabad.
While we were in Karachi, a Pakistani journalist from Alaska who was a supporter of Malala’s came to the hostel where we were staying and told me of a threat from the Taliban on Malala’s life, and that of another female women’s rights activist. “Both of them are not good people,” the Taliban quote said. “They are working for the West and they are on our target list.” More threats were to follow.
This was the worst day of my life so far, the worst. It was the first time I felt an icy fear that Malala could be in danger grip me. That day, somebody was hosting a lunch for us, but I could not eat. I felt so traumatized. I had been prepared for my own death, but this threat to my daughter’s life? It was intolerable. I think I must have gone to the bathroom seven times, with a nervous need to pass urine. These absences from the table were so obvious that I had to apologize to my hosts. I told Malala of the threat, but unlike me she was calm.
What should I do? I did not know. When we returned to Mingora from Karachi, I went to the police, and they showed me a file on Malala and how her national and international profile had attracted the attention of the Taliban. They told me she needed guards, but I did not like this idea. I doubted that a guard would keep her safe, as other activists in Swat had been killed despite having guards. I was worried, too, about the other children in the Khushal School.
Instead, I rang a friend, Haider Ali Hamdard, who was a doctor in Abbottabad, for advice. We discussed a famous girls’ boarding school there and we decided that it would be wise to move Malala from the Khushal School in Mingora to Abbottabad, which was much more peaceful. We were lucky. The school said it would accept her. I could not afford the fees, but her high profile meant she would be an honorary student. We were working towards her enrollment in January 2013, which was the start of the school year. Then I went to the security authorities and I told them, “I will be shifting Malala to Abbottabad,” but they replied, “Well, if you keep a low profile, there is no difference between Swat and Abbottabad. Why shift her there?”
I stopped speaking out myself so that people in Mingora began to think, “Why has he gone so quiet?” We became very selective about what Malala did. I refused to let her accept the offer to become the peace ambassador for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government. I told them, “I am sorry, but at the moment she will not be a peace ambassador for anything.”
Malala did speak at engagements during 2012, but not as much. I used to say to her, “Please don’t say the word ‘Taliban.’ Just call them ‘terrorists’ instead.”
“Aba,” she would say, “they call themselves Taliban. So what should I call them? This is their name. This is their identity.”
If I had said to her “Stop campaigning now!” I do not think she would have obeyed. I could have refused to accompany her, but this would have felt like a betrayal of both what Malala herself wanted and our family’s values. Her conviction was so strong. She knew her own power by then.
All around us people were scared of the Taliban, and their fear was real and justified. This real fear makes our courage look unreal. For us, because everybody else had fled from the battlefield and only a handful of people were left, it was a reason for us to carry on. We were the only chance left. It sounds crazy, but this is in our DNA.
Still, this year of 2012 in Pakistan was a terrible one for me. I lived in fear constantly. I was no longer a lion on the battlefield. I was jumpy and agitated, not because of the threat to me, but because of the threat to Malala. The Taliban’s threats were often empty, I knew that. How many times had there been threats, only for nothing to happen? But I had also lost friends. A large part of me still thought, “Not a child! Never a child!” But I was always looking over my shoulder, far more than in the beginning of 2009, when I could have been taken off in the night and beheaded.
The Taliban attacked Malala on October 9, 2012. The facts of what happened to her have been told many times in the past six years, in newspapers, on televisions all over the world, and in her bestselling book and an award-winning film. In what you have read here, I, too, have tried to relive those days so you can understand how nearly losing her affected not only me but the whole family. But for Malala, the attack on her life is like a myth. She describes it now as just a story. I know that sounds very odd, but she cannot remember anything about the attack or much of the days afterwards. She says, “Aba, when I hear the stories—that there’s a girl named Malala who was shot by the Taliban—it’s just a story for me. I just don’t link it to my life at all. I’m still the same.” So this is our second blessing. Our daughter might bear the physical scars of what happened to her, but somehow she has managed to cut herself free from the most distressing elements of her story and soar above them, looking down on the evidence of how she nearly lost her life with a soul unmarked by tragedy and a resolve undiminished. Malala is right. She is the same. She is the same calm, hardworking girl she has always been. She is that same brave bird she was in Mingora, committed and free.
The Women Are Coming to Win You an Honor
Malala has said that she knew her life of activism would continue as she was lying in the hospital in Birmingham, even before we got to her bedside: “I was in a kind of puzzle about what other people thought,” she told me later. “Did anybody even know I’d been attacked?” One of the nurses brought her a box of get-well cards, containing best wishes sent from Japan, from America, from people six years old to ninety-two. “Wow,” she said to the nurse. “So many people supporting me!” The nurse looked astonished. “This is just one box, Malala. We have thousands of cards. We have boxes and boxes and boxes. You are seeing a fraction of it.”
“As soon as I started realizing that I did not stand alone in this fight, this is what gave me courage and hope for the future. I have surv
ived for a reason.” This is what Malala said to us.
Her life was so nearly taken. The bullet had been so near to her brain. But she had survived. “I will never look back,” she said.
Around this time, I had been working on memory tests with her. I had asked her to recite to me some Tapey, old Pashtun poetry that goes back centuries. She told me about one she remembered but that she wanted to change.
She recited the original: “If the men cannot win the battle, O my country, / Then the women will come forth and win you an honor.”
“But, Aba,” she said, “I would like 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 honor.”
I said to her, “Oh, Malala, what are you saying? You are amazing.”
And I cried more tears, but no longer just in sorrow.
The Categorization of Barack Obama
While Malala was in the hospital, first full-time, then visiting for ongoing treatment, Pekai and I needed somebody to drive us to and from the facility. One day, our driver, Shahid Hussain, who had become our friend, arrived with news of Time magazine’s 2013 list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Malala was on the cover, and inside she was ranked number fifteen. President Barack Obama was fifty-one. “I am such a big fan of Malala,” our friend told us. “Please, I request you show this report to her. She will be so happy.” He gave me his mobile phone to show her. I took the phone and I showed it to Malala. I was so proud of what was on the screen.
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