Thus spoke Malala

Having survived the Taliban, brave Malala now takes on the Land of the Pure

“They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school,” are perhaps the most powerful words uttered by Malala Yousafzai to the United Nations Youth Assembly on Saturday, July 13. These are words that can only be spoken with the innocence of a child.

After Malala delivered what many considered a landmark speech, the venom of her fellow Pakistanis continued to greet her. Those who believed the conspiracy theory that Malala was never shot in the first place and the entire episode on October 9, 2012 was a façade orchestrated with the complicity of the CIA, the MI-5, Mossad, ISI, the Pakistan army and the Pakistani government thought they were vindicated.

Questions were asked to suggest that either Malala possessed limited agency or was completely aware that she was an “agent of Empire.” Only a couple of days ago, the same pages in this newspaper carried a cartoon suggesting that Malala could only see the United States of America (USA) that is fighting the Taliban, and not the USA that was funding and arming the Al-Qaeda led Syrian insurgents.

Her message was beautiful: “Even the children of the Taliban should be educated.” While Malala must be lauded, there are serious pitfalls in starting to look at the world through the lens of a 16-year-old girl. This does not mean that we begin to see Malala as a ‘CIA agent’ or an ‘Illuminati agent’ (what in the world is this in the first place), but we must understand that the simplified worldview, that “one child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world,” does not stand on its own turf.

We must accept that the simplified narrative to come out of the attack on Malala that “the West drops bombs to save girls like Malala” is nonsense. Rather our celebration of Malala has to be beyond that.

More importantly this is a mistake that Malala herself is wise enough not to make. For someone shot in the head for being a vocal advocate of education for girls, it would have been easy to have become a poster child for the US war effort. She chose not to.

Instead she spoke of providing access to every child – and the Taliban – to a ridiculously poor education system in Pakistan. She also spoke of the non-violent legacy of Bacha Khan, stating that “even if I had a gun in her hand and the Talib who shot me came in plain sight, I would not shoot him.” She went on to say, “Peace is necessary for education. In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, wars and conflicts stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars.”

This is a clear sense that this is a girl that is grounded in her understanding of the world – and her own politics. She both understands that “war is not the answer” and is grounded in “non-violent politics,” more than what can be said for both her supporters and detractors.

Of course, this does not prevent us from examining whether Malala’s claim that “education will end the Taliban” is merely wishful thinking. There are a number of reasons why it may be so:

One: the Taliban are not just a mix of madrassa graduates and uneducated men. From its early days, the Taliban was attractive to university graduates of all varieties, attracted to the ideologies of the single Muslim ummah and jihad.

Two: that the education system of Pakistan is geared towards producing Taliban-like mentalities. The changes made in the education system during the Zia-era with the US backing have not yet been weeded out – and cannot be as long as Pakistan remains committed to the Two Nation Theory.

Three: that her Facebook critics are mostly ‘educated’ folks in the formal sense. Some very ‘educated’ folks were calling Malala the “biggest drama in the world.”

Four: in the face of the bombs of the Taliban, would someone (not necessarily the military) not have to protect schools with arms?

Five: at a more basic level, to claim that madrassa education is not education is to not understand what education is.

Education is instruction in a particular ideology. Students of the British colonial education system would tell one that the system was geared towards producing “subjects of the Empire.” When the same system was taken over and extended by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the aim was to produce “subjects of the State” – elsewhere known as ‘citizens of Pakistan.’

Know it does not require much genius to understand that a “citizen of Pakistan” that has completely absorbed what was taught in school cannot be a “liberal, progressive” citizen of the mould that those advocating for ‘education as the solution to the Taliban’ desire.

Thus if we understand this, then while we shall continue to cherish Malala’s speech to the United Nations (UN) Youth Assembly as the hallmark of the struggle of a brave girl who is going strong despite a near fatal wound in her skull, we shall also remain wary that the only way to achieve Malala’s vision is to undertake a radical transformation of the foundations of the State of Pakistan.

Malala may be too young to be able to take up that task. We need to be the one’s ready to take the next bullet. Surely the power of a pen to counter a bullet has always been overstated in the short-term – and in many cases, the long-term too.

One must only ask: what became of dear Saleem Shahzad? His pen survived him, yes, but it did not change the status quo. One must perhaps add a little qualifier: ‘the pen is more powerful than the bullet in the presence of on-ground resistance.’

And in dear old Pakistan there is very little on-ground resistance to the Taliban, apart from some tribal lashkars in Khyber Pakthunkhwa and some NGO-walas in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.

We must also not forget that the ‘West’ still harbours the biggest war criminals living in the world today and these are still able to tout themselves as Presidents and Prime Ministers (both former and serving). Are these not educated gentlemen (for the most part)?

The educated-uneducated binary is one of the laziest binaries to have been accepted by mankind. There is a need to move beyond it and ask: what kind of education?

We should also gear up for Malala to become the first Pakistani to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – but in many ways we must continue to ask: what does the international attention mean for the brave teenage girl from Swat who began resisting by scribbling on a diary during the Taliban insurgency?

Shall that girl be able to live the life she wishes for? Shall she be able to work with her fellow students towards furthering the education of girls in her area? Or will she, having survived the Taliban, now be unable to return to her home country – and become another of those candles of hope that burn their life out outside Pakistan?

The writer is the general secretary (Lahore) of the Awami Workers Party. He is a journalist and a researcher. Contact: [email protected]