Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

4: The Village

IN OUR TRADITION on the seventh day of a child’s life we have a celebration called Woma (which means ‘seventh’) for family, friends and neighbours to come and admire the newborn. My parents had not held one for me because they could not afford the goat and rice needed to feed the guests, and my grandfather would not help them out because I was not a boy. When my brothers came along and Baba wanted to pay, my father refused as he hadn’t done this for me. But Baba was the only grandfather I had as my mother’s father had died before I was born and we became close. My parents say I have qualities of both grandfathers - humorous and wise like my mother’s father and vocal like my father’s father! Baba had grown soft and white-bearded in his old age and I loved going to visit him in the village.

Whenever he saw me he would greet me with a song as he was still concerned about the sad meaning of my name and wanted to lend some happiness to it: ‘Malala Maiwand wala da. Pa tool jehan ke da khushala da,’ he sang. ‘Malala is of Maiwand and she’s the happiest person in the whole world.’

We always went to the village for the Eid holidays. We would dress in our finest clothes and pile into the Flying Coach, a minibus with brightly painted panels and jangling chains, and drive north to Barkana, our family village in Shangla. Eid happens twice a year - Eid ul-Fitr or ‘Small Eid’ marks the end of the Ramadan fasting month, and Eid ul-Azha or ‘Big Eid’ commemorates the Prophet Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Ismail to God. The dates of the feasts are announced by a special panel of clerics who watch for the appearance of the crescent moon. As soon as we heard the broadcast on the radio, we set off.

The night before we hardly slept because we were so excited. The journey usually took about five hours as long as the road had not been washed away by rains or landslides, and the Flying Coach left early in the morning. We struggled to Mingora bus station, our bags laden with gifts for our family - embroidered shawls and boxes of rose and pistachio sweets as well as medicine they could not get in the village. Some people took sacks of sugar and flour, and most of the baggage was tied to the top of the bus in a towering pile. Then we crammed in, fighting over the window seats even though the panes were so encrusted with dirt it was hard to see out of them. The sides of Swat buses are painted with scenes of bright pink and yellow flowers, neon-orange tigers and snowy mountains. My brothers liked it if we got one with F-16 fighter jets or nuclear missiles, though my father said if our politicians hadn’t spent so much money on building an atomic bomb we might have had enough for schools.

We drove out of the bazaar, past the grinning red mouth signs for dentists, the carts stacked with wooden cages crammed with beady-eyed white chickens with scarlet beaks, and jewellery stores with windows full of gold wedding bangles. The last few shops as we headed north out of Mingora were wooden shacks that seemed to lean on each other, in front of which were piles of reconditioned tyres for the bad roads ahead. Then we were on the main road built by the last wali, which follows the wide Swat River on the left and hugs the cliffs to the right with their emerald mines. Overlooking the river were tourist restaurants with big glass windows we had never been to. On the road we passed dusty-faced children bent double with huge bundles of grass on their backs and men leading flocks of shaggy goats that wandered hither and thither.

As we drove on, the landscape changed to paddy fields of deep lush green that smelt so fresh and orchards of apricot and fig trees. Occasionally we passed small marble works over streams which ran milky white with the discharge of chemicals. This made my father cross. ‘Look at what these criminals are doing to pollute our beautiful valley,’ he always said. The road left the river and wound up through narrow passes over steep fir-clad heights, higher and higher, until our ears popped. On top of some of the peaks were ruins where vultures circled, the remains of forts built by the first wali.

The bus strained and laboured, the driver cursing as trucks overtook us on blind bends with steep drops below. My brothers loved this, and they would taunt me and my mother by pointing out the wreckage of vehicles on the mountainside.

Finally we made it up onto Sky Turn, the gateway to Shangla Top, a mountain pass which feels as if it’s on top of the world. Up there we were higher than the rocky peaks all around us. In the far distance we could see the snows of Malam Jabba, our ski resort. By the roadside were fresh springs and waterfalls, and when we stopped for a break and to drink some tea, the air was clean and fragrant with cedar and pine. We breathed it into our lungs greedily. Shangla is all mountain, mountain, mountain and just a small sky. After this the road winds back down for a while then follows the Ghwurban River and peters out into a rocky track. The only way to cross the river is by rope bridges or on a pulley system by which people swing themselves across in a metal box. Foreigners call them suicide bridges but we loved them.

If you look at a map of Swat you’ll see it is one long valley with little valleys we call darae off to the sides like the branches of a tree. Our village lies about halfway along on the east. It’s in the Kana dara, which is enclosed by craggy mountain walls and so narrow there is not even room for a cricket ground. We call our village Shahpur, but really there is a necklace of three villages along the bottom of the valley - Shahpur, the biggest; Barkana, where my father grew up; and Karshat, which is where my mother lived. At either end is a huge mountain - Tor Ghar, the Black Mountain to the south, and Spin Ghar, the White Mountain, to the north.

We usually stayed in Barkana at my grandfather’s house, where my father grew up. Like almost all the houses in the area, it was flat-roofed and made of stone and mud. I preferred staying in Karshat with my cousins on my maternal side because they had a concrete house with a bathroom and there were lots of children to play with. My mother and I stayed in the women’s quarters downstairs. The women spent their days looking after the children and preparing food to serve to the men in their hujra upstairs. I slept with my cousins Aneesa and Sumbul in a room which had a clock in the shape of a mosque and a cabinet on the wall containing a rifle and some packets of hair dye.

In the village the day started early and even I, who liked to sleep late, woke with the sound of cocks crowing and the clatter of dishes as the women prepared breakfast for the men. In the morning the sun reflected off the top of Tor Ghar; when we got up for the fajr prayers, the first of our five daily prayers, we would look left and see the golden peak of Spin Ghar lit with the first rays of the sun like a white lady wearing a jumar tika - a gold chain on her forehead.

Often rain would then come to wash everything clean, and the clouds would linger on the green terraces of the hills where people grew radishes and walnut trees. Dotted around were hives of bees.

I loved the gloopy honey, which we ate with walnuts. Down on the river at the Karshat end were water buffaloes. There was also a shed with a wooden waterwheel providing power to turn huge millstones to grind wheat and maize into flour, which young boys would then pour into sacks. Next to that was a smaller shed containing a panel with a confusion of wires sprouting from it. The village received no electricity from the government so many villagers got their power from these makeshift hydroelectric projects.

As the day went on and the sun climbed higher in the sky, more and more of the White Mountain would be bathed in golden sun. Then as evening came it fell in shadow as the sun moved up the Black Mountain. We timed our prayers by the shadow on the mountains. When the sun hit a certain rock, we used to say our asr or afternoon prayers. Then in the evening, when the white peak of Spin Ghar was even more beautiful than in the morning, we said the makkam or evening prayers. You could see the White Mountain from everywhere, and my father told me he used to think of it as a symbol of peace for our land, a white flag at the end of our valley. When he was a child he thought this small valley was the entire world and that if anyone went beyond the point where either mountain kissed the sky, they would fall off.

Though I had been born in a city, I shared my father’s love of nature. I loved the rich soil, the greenness of the plants, the crops, the buffaloes and the yellow butterflies that fluttered about me as I walked. The village was very poor, but when we arrived our extended family would lay on a big feast. There would be bowls of chicken, rice, local spinach and spicy mutton, all cooked over the fire by the women, followed by plates of crunchy apples, slices of yellow cake and a big kettle of milky tea. None of the children had toys or books. The boys played cricket in a gully and even the ball was made from plastic bags tied together with elastic bands.

The village was a forgotten place. Water was carried from the spring. The few concrete houses had been built by families whose sons or fathers had gone south to work in the mines or to the Gulf, from where they sent money home. There are forty million of us Pashtuns, of which ten million live outside our homeland. My father said it was sad that they could never return as they needed to keep working to maintain their families’ new lifestyle. There were many families with no men. They would visit only once a year, and usually a new baby would arrive nine months later.

Scattered up and down the hills there were houses made of wattle and daub, like my grandfather’s, and these often collapsed when there were floods. Children sometimes froze to death in winter. There was no hospital. Only Shahpur had a clinic, and if anyone fell ill in the other villages they had to be carried there by their relatives on a wooden frame which we jokingly called the Shangla Ambulance.

If it was anything serious they would have to make the long bus journey to Mingora unless they were lucky enough to know someone with a car.

Usually politicians only visited during election time, promising roads, electricity, clean water and schools and giving money and generators to influential local people we called stakeholders, who would instruct their communities on how to vote. Of course this only applied to the men; women in our area don’t vote. Then they disappeared off to Islamabad if they were elected to the National Assembly, or Peshawar for the Provincial Assembly, and we’d hear no more of them or their promises.

My cousins made fun of me for my city ways. I did not like going barefoot. I read books and I had a different accent and used slang expressions from Mingora. My clothes were often from shops and not home-made like theirs. My relatives would ask me, ‘Would you like to cook chicken for us?’ and I’d say, ‘No, the chicken is innocent. We should not kill her.’ They thought I was modern because I came from town. They did not realise people from Islamabad or even Peshawar would think me very backward.

Sometimes we went up to the mountains and sometimes down to the river on family trips. It was a big stream, too deep and fast to cross when the snows melted in summer. The boys would fish using earthworms threaded like beads on a string hanging from a long stick. Some of them whistled, believing this would attract the fish. They weren’t particularly tasty fish. Their mouths were very rough and horny. We called them chaqwartee. Sometimes a group of girls would go down to the river for a picnic with pots of rice and sherbet. Our favourite game was ‘weddings’. We would get into two groups, each supposed to be a family, then each family would have to betroth a girl so we could perform a marriage ceremony. Everyone wanted me in their family as I was from Mingora and modern. The most beautiful girl was Tanzela, and we often gave her to the other group so we could then have her as our bride.

The most important part of the mock wedding was jewellery. We took earrings, bangles and necklaces to decorate the bride, singing Bollywood songs as we worked. Then we would put make-up on her face that we’d taken from our mothers, dip her hands in hot limestone and soda to make them white, and paint her nails red with henna. Once she was ready, the bride would start crying and we would stroke her hair and try to convince her not to worry. ‘Marriage is part of life,’ we said. ‘Be kind to your mother-in-law and father-in-law so they treat you well. Take care of your husband and be happy.’

Occasionally there would be real weddings with big feasts which went on for days and left the family bankrupt or in debt. The brides would wear exquisite clothes and be draped in gold, necklaces and bangles given by both sides of the family. I read that Benazir Bhutto insisted on wearing glass bangles at her wedding to set an example but the tradition of adorning the bride still continued.

Sometimes a plywood coffin would be brought back from one of the mines. The women would gather at the house of the dead man’s wife or mother and a terrible wailing would start and echo round the valley, which made my skin crawl.

At night the village was very dark with just oil lamps twinkling in houses on the hills. None of the older women had any education but they all told stories and recited what we call tapey, Pashto couplets. My grandmother was particularly good at them. They were usually about love or being a Pashtun. ‘No Pashtun leaves his land of his own sweet will,’ she would say. ‘Either he leaves from poverty or he leaves for love.’ Our aunts scared us with ghost stories, like the one about Shalgwatay, the twenty-fingered man, who they warned would sleep in our beds. We would cry in terror, though in fact as ‘toe’ and ‘finger’ in Pashto is the same, we were all twenty-fingered, but we didn’t realise. To make us wash, our aunts told stories about a scary woman called Shashaka, who would come after you with her muddy hands and stinking breath if you didn’t take a bath or wash your hair, and turn you into a dirty woman with hair like rats’ tails filled with insects. She might even kill you. In the winter when parents didn’t want their children to stay outside in the snow they would tell the story about the lion or tiger which must always make the first step in the snow. Only when the lion or tiger has left their footprint were we allowed to go outside.

As we got older the village began to seem boring. The only television was in the hujra of one of the wealthier families, and no one had a computer.

Women in the village hid their faces whenever they left their purdah quarters and could not meet or speak to men who were not their close relatives. I wore more fashionable clothes and didn’t cover my face even when I became a teenager. One of my male cousins was angry and asked my father, ‘Why isn’t she covered?’ He replied, ‘She’s my daughter. Look after your own affairs.’ But some of the family thought people would gossip about us and say we were not properly following Pashtunwali.

I am very proud to be a Pashtun but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned. A woman named Shahida who worked for us and had three small daughters, told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one. When girls disappeared it was not always because they had been married off. There was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl called Seema.

Everyone knew she was in love with a boy, and sometimes he would pass by and she would look at him from under her long dark lashes, which all the girls envied. In our society for a girl to flirt with any man brings shame on the family, though it’s all right for the man. We were told she had committed suicide, but we later discovered her own family had poisoned her.

We have a custom called swara by which a girl can be given to another tribe to resolve a feud. It is officially banned but still continues. In our village there was a widow called Soraya who married a widower from another clan which had a feud with her family. Nobody can marry a widow without the permission of her family. When Soraya’s family found out about the union they were furious. They threatened the widower’s family until a jirga was called of village elders to resolve the dispute. The jirga decided that the widower’s family should be punished by handing over their most beautiful girl to be married to the least eligible man of the rival clan. The boy was a good-for-nothing, so poor that the girl’s father had to pay all their expenses. Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with?

When I complained about these things to my father he told me that life was harder for women in Afghanistan. The year before I was born a group called the Taliban led by a one-eyed mullah had taken over the country and was burning girls’ schools. They were forcing men to grow beards as long as a lantern and women to wear burqas. Wearing a burqa is like walking inside big fabric shuttlecock with only a grille to see through and on hot days it’s like an oven. At least I didn’t have to wear one.

He said that the Taliban had even banned women from laughing out loud or wearing white shoes as white was ‘a colour that belonged to men’. Women were being locked up and beaten just for wearing nail varnish. I shivered when he told me such things.

I read my books like Anna Karenina and the novels of Jane Austen and trusted in my father’s words: ‘Malala is free as a bird.’ When I heard stories of the atrocities in Afghanistan I felt proud to be in Swat. ‘Here a girl can go to school,’ I used to say. But the Taliban were just around the corner and were Pashtuns like us. For me the valley was a sunny place and I couldn’t see the clouds gathering behind the mountains. My father used to say, ‘I will protect your freedom, Malala. Carry on with your dreams.’

5: Why I Don’t Wear Earrings and Pashtuns Don’t Say Thank You

BY THE AGE of seven I was used to being top of my class. I was the one who would help other pupils who had difficulties. ‘Malala is a genius girl,’ my class fellows would say. I was also known for participating in everything - badminton, drama, cricket, art, even singing, though I wasn’t much good.

So when a new girl named Malka-e-Noor joined our class, I didn’t think anything of it. Her name means ‘Queen of Light’ and she said she wanted to be Pakistan’s first female army chief. Her mother was a teacher at a different school, which was unusual as none of our mothers worked. To begin with she didn’t say much in class. The competition was always between me and my best friend Moniba, who had beautiful writing and presentation, which the examiners liked, but I knew I could beat her on content. So when we did the end-of-year exams and Malka-e-Noor came first, I was shocked. At home I cried and cried and had to be comforted by my mother.

Around that time we moved away from where we had been living on the same street as Moniba to an area where I didn’t have any friends. On our new road there was a girl called Safina, who was a bit younger than me, and we started to play together. She was a pampered girl who had lots of dolls and a shoebox full of jewellery. But she kept eyeing up the pink plastic pretend mobile phone my father had bought me, which was one of the only toys I had. My father was always talking on his mobile so I loved to copy him and pretend to make calls on mine. One day it disappeared.

A few days later I saw Safina playing with a phone exactly the same as mine. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. ‘I bought it in the bazaar,’ she said.

I realise now she could have been telling the truth but back then I thought, She is doing this to me and I will do the same to her. I used to go to her house to study, so whenever I was there I would pocket her things, mostly toy jewellery like earrings and necklaces. It was easy. At first stealing gave me a thrill, but that did not last long. Soon it became a compulsion. I did not know how to stop.

One afternoon I came home from school and rushed into the kitchen as usual for a snack. ‘Hello, Bhabi!’ I called. ‘I’m starving!’ There was silence. My mother was sitting on the floor pounding spices, brightly coloured turmeric and cumin, filling the air with their aroma. Over and over she pounded. Her eyes would not meet mine. What had I done? I was very sad and went to my room.

When I opened my cupboard, I saw that all the things I had taken were gone. I had been caught.

My cousin Reena came into my room. ‘They knew you were stealing,’ she said. ‘They were waiting for you to come clean but you just kept on.’

I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. I walked back to my mother with my head bowed.

‘What you did was wrong, Malala,’ she said. ‘Are you trying to bring shame on us that we can’t afford to buy such things?’

‘It’s not true!’ I lied. ‘I didn’t take them.’

But she knew I had. ‘Safina started it,’ I protested. ‘She took the pink phone that Aba bought me.’

My mother was unmoved. ‘Safina is younger than you and you should have taught her better,’ she said. ‘You should have set an example.’

I started crying and apologised over and over again. ‘Don’t tell Aba,’ I begged. I couldn’t bear for him to be disappointed in me. It’s horrible to feel unworthy in the eyes of your parents.

It wasn’t the first time. When I was little I went to the bazaar with my mother and spotted a pile of almonds on a cart. They looked so tasty that I couldn’t resist grabbing a handful. My mother told me off and apologised to the cart owner. He was furious and would not be placated. We still had little money and my mother checked her purse to see what she had. ‘Can you sell them to me for ten rupees?’ she asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Almonds are very costly.’

My mother was very upset and told my father. He immediately went and bought the whole lot from the man and put them in a glass dish.

‘Almonds are good,’ he said. ‘If you eat them with milk just before bed it makes you brainy.’ But I knew he didn’t have much money and the almonds in the dish were a reminder of my guilt. I promised myself I’d never do such a thing again. And now I had. My mother took me to say sorry to Safina and her parents. It was very hard. Safina said nothing about my phone, which didn’t seem fair, but I didn’t mention it either.

Though I felt bad, I was also relieved it was over. Since that day I have never lied or stolen. Not a single lie nor a single penny, not even the coins my father leaves around the house, which we’re allowed to buy snacks with. I also stopped wearing jewellery because I asked myself, What are these baubles which tempt me? Why should I lose my character for a few metal trinkets? But I still feel guilty, and to this day I say sorry to God in my prayers.

My mother and father tell each other everything so Aba soon found out why I was so sad. I could see in his eyes that I had failed him. I wanted him to be proud of me, like he was when I was presented with the first-in-year trophies at school. Or the day our kindergarten teacher Miss Ulfat told him I had written, ‘Only Speak in Urdu,’ on the blackboard for my classmates at the start of an Urdu lesson so we would learn the language faster.

My father consoled me by telling me about the mistakes great heroes made when they were children. He told me that Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.’ At school we had read stories about Mohammad Ali Jinnah. As a boy in Karachi he would study by the glow of street lights because there was no light at home. He told other boys to stop playing marbles in the dust and to play cricket instead so their clothes and hands wouldn’t get dirty. Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his son’s teacher, translated into Pashto. It is a very beautiful letter, full of good advice.

‘Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books . But also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside,’ it says. ‘Teach him it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat.’

I think everyone makes a mistake at least once in their life. The important thing is what you learn from it. That’s why I have problems with our Pashtunwali code. We are supposed to take revenge for wrongs done to us, but where does that end? If a man in one family is killed or hurt by another man, revenge must be exacted to restore nang. It can be taken by killing any male member of the attacker’s family. Then that family in turn must take revenge. And on and on it goes. There is no time limit. We have a saying: ‘The Pashtun took revenge after twenty years and another said it was taken too soon.’

We are a people of many sayings. One is ‘The stone of Pashto does not rust in water,’ which means we neither forget nor forgive. That’s also why we rarely say thank you, manana, because we believe a Pashtun will never forget a good deed and is bound to reciprocate at some point, just as he will a bad one. Kindness can only be repaid with kindness. It can’t be repaid with expressions like ‘thank you’.

Many families live in walled compounds with watchtowers so they can keep an eye out for their enemies. We knew many victims of feuds. One was Sher Zaman, a man who had been in my father’s class and always got better grades than him. My grandfather and uncle used to drive my father mad, teasing him, ‘You’re not as good as Sher Zaman,’ so much he once wished that rocks would come down the mountain and flatten him. But Sher Zaman did not go to college and ended up becoming a dispenser in the village pharmacy. His family became embroiled in a dispute with their cousins over a small plot of forest. One day, as Sher Zaman and two of his brothers were on their way to the land, they were ambushed by his uncle and some of his men. All three brothers were killed.

As a respected man in the community, my father was often called on to mediate feuds. He did not believe in badal - revenge - and would try to make people see that neither side had anything to gain from continuing the violence, and it would be better for them to get on with their lives. There were two families in our village he could not convince. They had been locked in a feud for so long no one even seemed to remember how it had started - probably some small slight as we are a hot-headed people. First a brother on one side would attack an uncle on the other. Then vice versa. It consumed their lives.

Our people say it is a good system, and our crime rate is much lower than in non-Pashtun areas. But I think that if someone kills your brother, you shouldn’t kill them or their brother, you should teach them instead. I am inspired by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the man who some call the Frontier Gandhi, who introduced a non-violent philosophy to our culture.

It’s the same with stealing. Some people, like me, get caught and vow they will never do it again.

Others say, ‘Oh it’s no big deal - it was just a little thing.’ But the second time they will steal something bigger and the third something bigger still. In my country too many politicians think nothing of stealing. They are rich and we are a poor country yet they loot and loot. Most of them don’t pay tax, but that’s the least of it. They take out loans from state banks but they don’t pay them back. They get kickbacks on government contracts from friends or the companies they award them to. Many of them own expensive flats in London.

I don’t know how they can live with their consciences when they see our people going hungry or sitting in the darkness of endless power cuts, or children unable to go to school as their parents need them to work. My father says that Pakistan has been cursed with more than its fair share of politicians who only think about money. They don’t care if the army is actually flying the plane, they are happy to stay out of the cockpit and sit in business class, close the curtains and enjoy the fine food and service while the rest of us are squashed in economy.

I had been born into a sort of democracy in which for ten years Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif kept replacing each other, none of their governments ever completing a term and always accusing each other of corruption. But two years after I was born the generals again took over. It happened in a manner so dramatic that it sounds like something out of a movie. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister at the time and had fallen out with his army chief General Pervez Musharraf and sacked him. At the time General Musharraf was on a plane of our national airline PIA coming back from Sri Lanka. Nawaz Sharif was so worried about his reaction that he tried to stop the plane from landing in Pakistan. He ordered Karachi airport to switch off its landing lights and to park fire engines on the runway to block the plane even though it had 200 other passengers on board and not enough fuel to get to another country. Within an hour of the announcement on television of Musharraf ’s sacking, tanks were on the streets and troops had taken over the newsrooms and the airports. The local commander, General Iftikhar, stormed the control tower at Karachi so that Musharraf ’s plane could land. Musharraf then seized power and threw Sharif into a dungeon in Attock Fort. Some people celebrated by handing out sweets as Sharif was unpopular, but my father cried when he heard the news. He had thought we were done with military dictatorships. Sharif was accused of treason and only saved by his friends in the Saudi royal family, who arranged his exile.

Musharraf was our fourth military ruler. Like all our dictators, he started by addressing the nation on TV, beginning, ‘ Mere aziz hamwatano’ - ‘My dear countrymen’ - then went into a long tirade against Sharif, saying that under him Pakistan had ‘lost our honour, dignity and respect’. He vowed to end corruption and go after those ‘guilty of plundering and looting the national wealth’. He promised he would make his own assets and tax return public. He said he would only run the country for a short time, but no one believed him. General Zia had promised to be in power for ninety days and had stayed more than eleven years until he was killed in an air crash.

It’s the same old story, my father said, and he was right. Musharraf promised to end the old feudal system by which the same few dozen families controlled our entire country, and bring fresh young clean faces into politics. Instead his cabinet was made up of the very same old faces. Once again our country was expelled from the Commonwealth and became an international black sheep. The Americans had already suspended most aid the year before when we conducted nuclear tests, but now almost everyone boycotted us.

With such a history, you can see why the people of Swat did not always think it was a good idea to be part of Pakistan. Every few years Pakistan sent us a new deputy commissioner, or DC, to govern Swat, just as the British had done in colonial days. It seemed to us that these bureaucrats came to our province simply to get rich, then went back home. They had no interest in developing Swat. Our people are used to being subservient because under the wali no criticism was tolerated. If anyone offended him, their entire family could be expelled from Swat. So when the DCs came from Pakistan, they were the new kings and no one questioned them. Older people often looked back nostalgically to the days of the last wali. Back then, they said, the mountains were all still covered in trees, there were schools every five kilometres and the wali sahib would visit them in person to resolve problems.

After what happened with Safina, I vowed that I would never treat a friend badly again. My father always says it’s important to treat friends well. When he was at college and had no money for food or books many of his friends helped him out and he never forgot that. I have three good friends - Safina from my area, Sumbul from the village and Moniba from school. Moniba had become my best friend in primary school when we lived near each other, and I persuaded her to come to our school. She is a wise girl, though we often fall out, particularly when we go on school trips. She comes from a large family with three sisters and four brothers. I think of her as my big sister even though I am six months older than her. Moniba sets down rules which I try to follow. We don’t have secrets from each other and we don’t share our secrets with anyone else. She doesn’t like me talking to other girls and says we must be careful of associating with people who are badly behaved or have a reputation for trouble. She always says, ‘I have four brothers, and if I do even the slightest thing wrong they can stop me going to school.’

I was so eager not to disappoint my parents that I ran errands for anyone. One day our neighbours asked me to buy some maize for them from the bazaar. On the way a boy on a bicycle crashed into me and my left shoulder hurt so much that my eyes watered. But I still went and bought the maize, took it to my neighbours and then went home. Only then did I cry. Shortly after that I found the perfect way to try to win back the respect of my father. Notices had gone up at school for a public speaking competition and Moniba and I both decided to enter. I remembered the story of my father surprising my grandfather and longed to do the same.

When we got the topic, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was ‘Honesty is the best policy’.

The only practice we’d had was reading out poems at morning assembly, but there was an older girl at school called Fatima who was a very good speaker. She was beautiful and spoke in an animated way. She could speak confidently in front of hundreds of people and they would hang on her every word. Moniba and I longed to be like her and studied her carefully.

In our culture speeches are usually written by our fathers, uncles or teachers. They tend to be in English or Urdu, not in our native Pashto. We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong, of course. It does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself. Moniba’s speech was written by one of her older brothers. She quoted beautiful poems by Allama Iqbal, our national poet. My father wrote my speech.

In it he argued that if you want to do good, but do it in a bad way, that’s still bad. In the same way, if you choose a good method to do something bad it’s still bad. He ended it with Lincoln’s words: ‘it is far more honourable to fail than to cheat’.

On the day only eight or nine boys and girls turned up. Moniba spoke well - she was very composed and her speech was more emotional and poetic than mine, though mine might have had the better message. I was so nervous before the speech, I was trembling with fear. My grandfather had come to watch and I knew he really wanted me to win the competition, which made me even more nervous. I remembered what my father had said about taking a deep breath before starting, but then I saw that all eyes were on me and I rushed through. I kept losing my place as the pages danced in my shaking hands, but as I ended with Lincoln’s words, I looked up at my father. He was smiling.

When the judges announced the results at the end, Moniba had won. I came second.

It didn’t matter. Lincoln also wrote in the letter to his son’s teacher, ‘Teach him how to gracefully lose.’ I was used to coming top of my class. But I realised that, even if you win three or four times, the next victory will not necessarily be yours without trying - and also that sometimes it’s better to tell your own story. I started writing my own speeches and changing the way I delivered them, from my heart rather than from a sheet of paper.

2: My Father the Falcon

I ALWAYS KNEW my father had trouble with words. Sometimes they would get stuck and he would repeat the same syllable over and over like a record caught in a groove as we all waited for the next syllable to suddenly pop out. He said it felt like a wall came down in his throat. M’s, p’s and k’s were all enemies lying in wait. I teased him that one of the reasons he called me Jani was because he found it easier to say than Malala. A stutter was a terrible thing for a man who so loved words and poetry. On each side of the family he had an uncle with the same affliction. But it was almost certainly made worse by his father, whose own voice was a soaring instrument that could make words thunder and dance.

‘Spit it out, son!’ he’d roar whenever my father got stuck in the middle of a sentence. My grandfather’s name was Rohul Amin, which means ‘honest spirit’ and is the holy name of the Angel Gabriel. He was so proud of the name that he would introduce himself to people with a famous verse in which his name appears. He was an impatient man at the best of times and would fly into a rage over the smallest thing - like a hen going astray or a cup getting broken. His face would redden and he would throw kettles and pots around. I never knew my grandmother, but my father says she used to joke with my grandfather, ‘By God, just as you greet us only with a frown, when I die may God give you a wife who never smiles.’

My grandmother was so worried about my father’s stutter that when he was still a young boy she took him to see a holy man. It was a long journey by bus, then an hour’s walk up the hill to where he lived. Her nephew Fazli Hakim had to carry my father on his shoulders. The holy man was called Lewano Pir, Saint of the Mad, because he was said to be able to calm lunatics. When they were taken in to see the pir, he instructed my father to open his mouth and then spat into it. Then he took some gur, dark molasses made from sugar cane, and rolled it around his mouth to moisten it with spit. He then took out the lump and presented it to my grandmother to give to my father, a little each day. The treatment did not cure the stutter. Actually some people thought it got worse. So when my father was thirteen and told my grandfather he was entering a public speaking competition he was stunned. ‘How can you?’ Rohul Amin asked, laughing. ‘You take one or two minutes to utter just one sentence.’

‘Don’t worry,’ replied my father. ‘You write the speech and I will learn it.’

My grandfather was famous for his speeches. He taught theology in the government high school in the village of Shahpur. He was also an imam at the local mosque. He was a mesmerising speaker. His sermons at Friday prayers were so popular that people would come down from the mountains by donkey or on foot to hear him.

My father comes from a large family. He had one much older brother, Saeed Ramzan who I call Uncle Khan dada, and five sisters. Their village of Barkana was very primitive and they lived crammed together in a one-storey ramshackle house with a mud roof which leaked whenever it rained or snowed. As in most families, the girls stayed at home while the boys went to school. ‘They were just waiting to be married,’ says my father.

School wasn’t the only thing my aunts missed out on. In the morning when my father was given cream or milk, his sisters were given tea with no milk. If there were eggs, they would only be for the boys. When a chicken was slaughtered for dinner, the girls would get the wings and the neck while the luscious breast meat was enjoyed by my father, his brother and my grandfather. ‘From early on I could feel I was different from my sisters,’ my father says.

There was little to do in my father’s village. It was too narrow even for a cricket pitch and only one family had a television. On Fridays the brothers would creep into the mosque and watch in wonder as my grandfather stood in the pulpit and preached to the congregation for an hour or so, waiting for the moment when his voice would rise and practically shake the rafters.

My grandfather had studied in India, where he had seen great speakers and leaders including Mohammad Ali Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan), Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, our great Pashtun leader who campaigned for independence. Baba, as I called him, had even witnessed the moment of freedom from the British colonialists at midnight on 14 August 1947.

He had an old radio set my uncle still has, on which he loved to listen to the news. His sermons were often illustrated by world events or historical happenings as well as stories from the Quran and the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. He also liked to talk about politics. Swat became part of Pakistan in 1969, the year my father was born. Many Swatis were unhappy about this, complaining about the Pakistani justice system, which they said was much slower and less effective than their old tribal ways. My grandfather would rail against the class system, the continuing power of the khans and the gap between the haves and have-nots.

My country may not be very old but unfortunately it already has a history of military coups, and when my father was eight a general called Zia ul-Haq seized power. There are still many pictures of him around. He was a scary man with dark panda shadows around his eyes, large teeth that seemed to stand to attention and hair pomaded flat on his head. He arrested our elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had him tried for treason then hanged from a scaffold in Rawalpindi jail. Even today people talk of Mr Bhutto as a man of great charisma. They say he was the first Pakistani leader to stand up for the common people, though he himself was a feudal lord with vast estates of mango fields. His execution shocked everybody and made Pakistan look bad all around the world. The Americans cut off aid.

To try to get people at home to support him, General Zia launched a campaign of Islamisation to make us a proper Muslim country with the army as the defenders of our country’s ideological as well as geographical frontiers. He told our people it was their duty to obey his government because it was pursuing Islamic principles. Zia even wanted to dictate how we should pray, and set up salat or prayer committees in every district, even in our remote village, and appointed 100,000 prayer inspectors. Before then mullahs had almost been figures of fun - my father said at wedding parties they would just hang around in a corner and leave early - but under Zia they became influential and were called to Islamabad for guidance on sermons. Even my grandfather went.

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, ‘No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.’ But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and become pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime. A woman couldn’t even open a bank account without a man’s permission. As a nation we have always been good at hockey, but Zia made our female hockey players wear baggy trousers instead of shorts, and stopped women playing some sports altogether.

Many of our madrasas or religious schools were opened at that time, and in all schools religious studies, what we call deeniyat, was replaced by Islamiyat, or Islamic studies, which children in Pakistan still have to do today. Our history textbooks were rewritten to describe Pakistan as a ‘fortress of Islam’, which made it seem as if we had existed far longer than since 1947, and denounced Hindus and Jews. Anyone reading them might think we won the three wars we have fought and lost against our great enemy India.

Everything changed when my father was ten. Just after Christmas 1979 the Russians invaded our neighbour Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans fled across the border and General Zia gave them refuge.

Vast camps of white tents sprang up mostly around Peshawar, some of which are still there today. Our biggest intelligence service belongs to the military and is called the ISI. It started a massive programme to train Afghan refugees recruited from the camps as resistance fighters or mujahideen.

Though Afghans are renowned fighters, Colonel Imam, the officer heading the programme, complained that trying to organise them was ‘like weighing frogs’.

The Russian invasion transformed Zia from an international pariah to the great defender of freedom in the Cold War. The Americans became friends with us once again, as in those days Russia was their main enemy. Next door to us the Shah of Iran had been overthrown in a revolution a few months earlier so the CIA had lost their main base in the region. Pakistan took its place. Billions of dollars flowed into our exchequer from the United States and other Western countries, as well as weapons to help the ISI train the Afghans to fight the communist Red Army. General Zia was invited to meet President Ronald Reagan at the White House and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. They lavished praise on him.

Prime Minister Zulfikar Bhutto had appointed Zia as his army chief because he thought he was not very intelligent and would not be a threat. He called him his ‘monkey’. But Zia turned out to be a very wily man. He made Afghanistan a rallying point not only for the West, which wanted to stop the spread of communism from the Soviet Union, but also for Muslims from Sudan to Tajikistan, who saw it as a fellow Islamic country under attack from infidels. Money poured in from all over the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia, which matched whatever the US sent, and volunteer fighters too, including a Saudi millionaire called Osama bin Laden.

We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don’t really recognise the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago. So our blood boiled over the Soviet invasion for both religious and nationalist reasons. The clerics of the mosques would often talk about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in their sermons, condemning the Russians as infidels and urging people to join the jihad, saying it was their duty as good Muslims. It was as if under Zia jihad had become the sixth pillar of our religion on top of the five we grow up to learn - the belief in one God, namaz or prayers five times a day, giving zakat or alms, roza - fasting from dawn till sunset during the month of Ramadan - and haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every able-bodied Muslim should do once in their lifetime. My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like, ‘If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left’ or ‘15 bullets - 10 bullets = 5 bullets’.

Some boys from my father’s district went off to fight in Afghanistan. My father remembers that one day a maulana called Sufi Mohammad came to the village and asked young men to join him to fight the Russians in the name of Islam. Many did, and they set off, armed with old rifles or just axes and bazookas. Little did we know that years later the same maulana’s organisation would become the Swat Taliban. At that time my father was only twelve years old and too young to fight. But the Russians ended up stuck in Afghanistan for ten years, through most of the 1980s, and when he became a teenager my father decided he too wanted to be a jihadi. Though later he became less regular in his prayers, in those days he used to leave home at dawn every morning to walk to a mosque in another village, where he studied the Quran with a senior talib. At that time talib simply meant ‘religious student’. Together they studied all the thirty chapters of the Quran, not just recitation but also interpretation, something few boys do.

The talib talked of jihad in such glorious terms that my father was captivated. He would endlessly point out to my father that life on earth was short and that there were few opportunities for young men in the village. Our family owned little land, and my father did not want to end up going south to work in the coal mines like many of his classmates. That was tough and dangerous work, and the coffins of those killed in accidents would come back several times a year. The best that most village boys could hope for was to go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai and work in construction. So heaven with its seventytwo virgins sounded attractive. Every night my father would pray to God, ‘O Allah, please make war between Muslims and infidels so I can die in your service and be a martyr.’

For a while his Muslim identity seemed more important than anything else in his life. He began to sign himself ‘Ziauddin Panchpiri’ (the Panchpiri are a religious sect) and sprouted the first signs of a beard. It was, he says, a kind of brainwashing. He believes he might even have thought of becoming a suicide bomber had there been such a thing in those days. But from an early age he had been a questioning kind of boy who rarely took anything at face value, even though our education at government schools meant learning by rote and pupils were not supposed to question teachers.

It was around the time he was praying to go to heaven as a martyr that he met my mother’s brother, Faiz Mohammad, and started mixing with her family and going to her father’s hujra. They were very involved in local politics, belonged to secular nationalist parties and were against involvement in the war. A famous poem was written at that time by Rahmat Shah Sayel, the same Peshawar poet who wrote the poem about my namesake. He described what was happening in Afghanistan as a ‘war between two elephants’ - the US and the Soviet Union - not our war, and said that we Pashtuns were ‘like the grass crushed by the hooves of two fierce beasts’. My father often used to recite the poem to me when I was a child but I didn’t know then what it meant.

My father was very impressed by Faiz Mohammad and thought he talked a lot of sense, particularly about wanting to end the feudal and capitalist systems in our country, where the same big families had controlled things for years while the poor got poorer. He found himself torn between the two extremes, secularism and socialism on one side and militant Islam on the other. I guess he ended up somewhere in the middle.

My father was in awe of my grandfather and told me wonderful stories about him, but he also told me that he was a man who could not meet the high standards he set for others. Baba was such a popular and passionate speaker that he could have been a great leader if he had been more diplomatic and less consumed by rivalries with cousins and others who were better off. In Pashtun society it is very hard to stomach a cousin being more popular, wealthier or more influential than you are. My grandfather had a cousin who also joined his school as a teacher. When he got the job he gave his age as much younger than my grandfather. Our people don’t know their exact dates of birth - my mother, for example, does not know when she was born. We tend to remember years by events, like an earthquake. But my grandfather knew that his cousin was actually much older than him. He was so angry that he made the day-long bus journey to Mingora to see the Swat minister of education.

‘Sahib,’ he told him, ‘I have a cousin who is ten years older than me and you have certified him ten years younger.’ So the minister said, ‘OK, Maulana, what shall I write down for you? Would you like to have been born in the year of the earthquake of Quetta?’ My grandfather agreed, so his new date of birth became 1935, making him much younger than his cousin.

This family rivalry meant that my father was bullied a lot by his cousins. They knew he was insecure about his looks because at school the teachers always favoured the handsome boys for their fair skin. His cousins would stop my father on his way home from school and tease him about being short and dark-skinned. In our society you have to take revenge for such slights, but my father was much smaller than his cousins.

He also felt he could never do enough to please my grandfather. Baba had beautiful handwriting and my father would spend hours painstakingly drawing letters but Baba never once praised him.

My grandmother kept his spirits up - he was her favourite and she believed great things lay in store for him. She loved him so much that she would slip him extra meat and the cream off the milk while she went without. But it wasn’t easy to study as there was no electricity in the village in those days.

He used to read by the light of the oil lamp in the hujra, and one evening he went to sleep and the oil lamp fell over. Fortunately my grandmother found him before a fire started. It was my grandmother’s faith in my father that gave him the courage to find his own proud path he could travel along. This is the path that he would later show me.

Yet she too got angry with him once. Holy men from a spiritual place called Derai Saydan used to travel the villages in those days begging for flour. One day while his parents were out some of them came to the house. My father broke the seal on the wooden storage box of maize and filled their bowls. When my grandparents came home they were furious and beat him.

Pashtuns are famously frugal (though generous with guests), and Baba was particularly careful with money. If any of his children accidentally spilt their food he would fly into a rage. He was an extremely disciplined man and could not understand why they were not the same. As a teacher he was eligible for a discount on his sons’ school fees for sports and joining the Boy Scouts. It was such a small discount that most teachers did not bother, but he forced my father to apply for the rebate. Of course my father detested doing this. As he waited outside the headmaster’s office, he broke out into a sweat, and once inside his stutter was worse than ever. ‘It felt as if my honour was at stake for five rupees,’ he told me. My grandfather never bought him new books. Instead he would tell his best students to keep their old books for my father at the end of the year and then he would be sent to their homes to get them. He felt ashamed but had no choice if he didn’t want to end up illiterate. All his books were inscribed with other boys’ names, never his own.

‘It’s not that passing books on is a bad practice,’ he says. ‘It’s just I so wanted a new book, unmarked by another student and bought with my father’s money.’

My father’s dislike of Baba’s frugality has made him a very generous man both materially and in spirit. He became determined to end the traditional rivalry between him and his cousins. When his headmaster’s wife fell ill, my father donated blood to help save her. The man was astonished and apologised for having tormented him. When my father tells me stories of his childhood, he always says that though Baba was a difficult man he gave him the most important gift - the gift of education.

He sent my father to the government high school to learn English and receive a modern education rather than to a madrasa, even though as an imam people criticised him for this. Baba also gave him a deep love of learning and knowledge as well as a keen awareness of people’s rights, which my father has passed on to me. In my grandfather’s Friday addresses he would talk about the poor and the landowners and how true Islam is against feudalism. He also spoke Persian and Arabic and cared deeply for words. He read the great poems of Saadi, Allama Iqbal and Rumi to my father with such passion and fire it was as if he was teaching the whole mosque.

My father longed to be eloquent with a voice that boomed out with no stammer, and he knew my grandfather desperately wanted him to be a doctor, but though he was a very bright student and a gifted poet, he was poor at maths and science and felt he was a disappointment. That’s why he decided he would make his father proud by entering the district’s annual public speaking competition.

Everyone thought he was mad. His teachers and friends tried to dissuade him and his father was reluctant to write the speech for him. But eventually Baba gave him a fine speech, which my father practised and practised. He committed every word to memory while walking in the hills, reciting it to the skies and birds as there was no privacy in their home.

There was not much to do in the area where they lived so when the day arrived there was a huge gathering. Other boys, some known as good speakers, gave their speeches. Finally my father was called forward. ‘I stood at the lectern,’ he told me, ‘hands shaking and knees knocking, so short I could barely see over the top and so terrified the faces were a blur. My palms were sweating and my mouth was as dry as paper.’ He tried desperately not to think about the treacherous consonants lying ahead of him, just waiting to trip him up and stick in his throat, but when he spoke, the words came out fluently like beautiful butterflies taking flight. His voice did not boom like his father’s, but his passion shone through and as he went on he gained confidence.

At the end of the speech there were cheers and applause. Best of all, as he went up to collect the cup for first prize, he saw his father clapping and enjoying being patted on the back by those standing around him. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘the first thing I’d done that made him smile.’

After that my father entered every competition in the district. My grandfather wrote his speeches and he almost always came first, gaining a reputation locally as an impressive speaker. My father had turned his weakness into strength. For the first time Baba started praising him in front of others. He’d boast, ‘Ziauddin is a shaheen’ - a falcon - because this is a creature that flies high above other birds.

‘Write your name as “Ziauddin Shaheen”,’ he told him. For a while my father did this but stopped when he realised that although a falcon flies high it is a cruel bird. Instead he just called himself Ziauddin Yousafzai, our clan name.