The Girl Who Changed Pakistan: Malala Yousafzai
The teenage girls chatted to each other and their teachers as the school
bus rattled along the country road. Students from a girls’ high school
in Swat, they had just finished a term paper, and their joy was evident
as they broke into another Pashto song
. About a mile outside the city of
Mingora, two men flagged down and boarded the bus, one of them pulling
out a gun. “Which one of you is Malala Yousafzai?” he demanded. No one
spoke—some out of loyalty, others out of fear. But, unconsciously, their
eyes turned to Malala. “That’s the one,” the gunman said, looking the
15-year-old girl in the face and pulling the trigger twice, shooting her
in the head and neck. He fired twice more, wounding two other girls,
and then both men fled the scene.
Over the screams and tears of the
girls, a teacher instructed the bus driver to drive to a local hospital a
few miles away. She stared in horror at Malala’s body, bleeding
profusely and slumped unconscious in her friend’s lap, then closed her
eyes and started to pray.
As
of this writing, Malala fights for her life at the Queen Elizabeth
Hospital in Birmingham, England. Her would-be killers have not yet been
caught. But it’s clear who bears responsibility. And in the days since
the Oct. 9 assault on her, sadness, fury, and indignation have swept the
world.
For
months a team of Taliban sharpshooters studied the daily route that
Malala took to school, and, once the attack was done, the
Tehrik-e-Taliban in Pakistan gleefully claimed responsibility, saying
Malala was an American spy who idolized the “black devil Obama.” She had
spoken against the Taliban, they falsely said, and vowed to shoot her
again, should she survive.
The
power of ignorance is frightening. My father, Salmaan Taseer, was
murdered last January after he stood up for Aasia Noreen, a voiceless,
forgotten Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for allegedly
committing blasphemy. My father, the governor of Punjab province at the
time, believed that our country’s blasphemy laws had been misused; that
far too frequently, they were taken advantage of to settle scores and
personal vendettas.
In
the days before my father’s murder, fanatics had called for a fatwa
against him and had burned him in effigy at large demonstrations. His
confessed shooter, a 26-year-old man named Mumtaz Qadri, said he had
been encouraged to kill my father after hearing a sermon by a cleric,
who, frothing at the mouth, screeched to 150 swaying men to kill my
father, the “blasphemer.” Qadri, a police guard, had been assigned to
protect my father. Instead, on the afternoon of Jan. 4, my brother
Shehryar’s 25th birthday, he killed my father, firing 27 bullets into
his back as he walked home.
My
father, one of the first members of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party,
was frequently imprisoned and tortured for his unwavering belief in
freedom and democracy under the harsh dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul Haq.
But
in later life, as he spoke against the blasphemy laws, his views were
distorted to suggest—wrongly—that he had spoken against Prophet
Muhammad—just as Malala’s views were twisted by both her Taliban
attackers and opportunistic politicians peddling poisonous falsehoods
for their own gain.
One
would think the nightmare and brutality of the Zia regime ended when
the tyrant’s aircraft fell out of the skies in 1988 and he was killed.
We were so wrong.