Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

6: Children of the Rubbish Mountain

AS THE KHUSHAL School started to attract more pupils, we moved again and finally had a television.

My favourite programme was Shaka Laka Boom Boom, an Indian children’s series about a boy called Sanju who has a magic pencil. Everything he drew became real. If he drew a vegetable or a policeman, the vegetable or policeman would magically appear. If he accidentally drew a snake he could erase it and the snake would disappear. He used his pencil to help people - he even saved his parents from gangsters - and I wanted that magic pencil more than anything else in the world.

At night I would pray, ‘God, give me Sanju’s pencil. I won’t tell anyone. Just leave it in my cupboard. I will use it to make everyone happy.’ As soon as I finished praying, I would check the drawer. The pencil was never there, but I knew who I would help first. Just along the street from our new house was an abandoned strip of land that people used as a rubbish dump - there is no rubbish collection in Swat. Quickly, it became a rubbish mountain. I didn’t like walking near it as it smelt so bad. Sometimes we would spot rats running through it and crows would circle overhead.

One day my brothers were not home and my mother had asked me to throw away some potato peel and eggshells. I wrinkled my nose as I approached, swatting away flies and making sure I didn’t step on anything in my nice shoes. As I threw the rubbish on the mountain of rotting food, I saw something move and I jumped. It was a girl about my age. Her hair was matted and her skin was covered in sores. She looked like I imagined Shashaka, the dirty woman they told us about in tales in the village to make us wash. The girl had a big sack and was sorting rubbish into piles, one for cans, one for bottle tops, another for glass and another for paper. Nearby there were boys fishing in the pile for metal using magnets on strings. I wanted to talk to the children but I was too scared.

That afternoon, when my father came home from school, I told him about the scavenger children and begged him to go with me to look. He tried to talk to them but they ran away. He explained that the children would sell what they had sorted to a garbage shop for a few rupees. The shop would then sell it on at a profit. On the way back home I noticed that he was in tears.

‘Aba, you must give them free places at your school,’ I begged. He laughed. My mother and I had already persuaded him to give free places to a number of girls.

Though my mother was not educated, she was the practical one in the family, the doer while my father was the talker. She was always out helping people. My father would get angry sometimes - he would arrive home at lunchtime and call out, ‘Tor Pekai, I’m home!’ only to find she was out and there was no lunch for him. Then he would find she was at the hospital visiting someone who was ill, or had gone to help a family, so he could not stay cross. Sometimes though she would be out because she was shopping for clothes in the Cheena Bazaar, and that would be a different matter.

Wherever we lived my mother filled our house with people. I shared my room with my cousin Aneesa from the village, who had come to live with us so she could go to school, and a girl called Shehnaz whose mother Sultana had once worked in our house. Shehnaz and her sister had also been sent out to collect garbage after their father had died leaving them very poor. One of her brothers was mentally ill and was always doing strange things like setting fire to their clothes or selling the electric fan we gave them to keep cool. Sultana was very short-tempered and my mother did not like having her in the house, but my father arranged a small allowance for her and a place for Shehnaz and her other brother at his school. Shehnaz had never been to school, so even though she was two years older than me she was put two classes below, and she came to live with us so that I could help her.

There was also Nooria, whose mother Kharoo did some of our washing and cleaning, and Alishpa, one of the daughters of Khalida, the woman who helped my mother with the cooking. Khalida had been sold into marriage to an old man who used to beat her, and eventually she ran away with her three daughters. Her own family would not take her back because it is believed that a woman who has left her husband has brought shame on her family. For a while her daughters also had to collect rubbish to survive. Her story was like something out of the novels I had started reading.

The school had expanded a lot by then and had three buildings - the original one in Landikas was a primary school, and then there was a high school for girls on Yahya Street and one for boys with a big garden of roses near the remains of the Buddhist temple. We had about 800 students in total, and although the school was not really making money, my father gave away more than a hundred free places. One of them was to a boy whose father, Sharafat Ali, had helped my father when he was a penniless college student. They were friends from the village. Sharafat Ali worked at the electricity company and he would give my father a few hundred rupees whenever he could spare them. My father was happy to be able to repay his kindness. Another was a girl in my class called Kausar, whose father embroidered clothes and shawls - a trade our region is famous for. When we went on school trips to visit the mountains, I knew she couldn’t afford them so I would pay for her with my pocket money.

Giving places to poor children didn’t just mean my father lost their fees. Some of the richer parents took their children out of the school when they realised they were sharing classrooms with the sons and daughters of people who cleaned their houses or stitched their clothes. They thought it was shameful for their children to mix with those from poor families. My mother said it was hard for the poor children to learn when they were not getting enough food at home so some of the girls would come to our house for breakfast. My father joked that our home had become a boarding house.

Having so many people around made it hard to study. I had been delighted to have my own room, and my father had even bought me a dressing table to work on. But now I had two other girls in the room. ‘I want space!’ I’d cry. But then I felt guilty as I knew we were lucky. I thought back to the children working on the rubbish heap. I kept seeing the dirty face of the girl from the dump and continued to pester my father to give them places at our school.

He tried to explain that those children were breadwinners so if they went to school, even for free, the whole family would go hungry. However, he got a wealthy philanthropist, Azaday Khan, to pay for him to produce a leaflet asking, ‘Kia hasool e elum in bachun ka haq nahe? ’ - ‘Is education not the right of these children?’ My father printed thousands of these leaflets, left them at local meetings and distributed them around town.

By then my father was becoming a well-known figure in Swat. Even though he was not a khan or a rich man, people listened to him. They knew he would have something interesting to say at workshops and seminars and wasn’t afraid to criticise the authorities, even the army, which was now running our country. He was becoming known to the army too, and friends told him that the local commander had called him ‘lethal’ in public. My father didn’t know what exactly the brigadier meant, but in our country, where the army is so powerful, it did not bode well.

One of his pet hates was the ‘ghost schools’. Influential people in remote areas took money from the government for schools which never saw a single pupil. Instead they used the buildings for their hujras or even to keep their animals. There was even a case of a man drawing a teacher’s pension when he had never taught a day in his life. Aside from corruption and bad government, my father’s main concern in those days was the environment. Mingora was expanding quickly - around 175,000 people now called it home - and our once-fresh air was becoming very polluted from all the vehicles and cooking fires. The beautiful trees on our hills and mountains were being chopped down for timber. My father said only around half the town’s population had access to safe drinking water and most, like us, had no sanitation. So he and his friends set up something called the Global Peace Council which, despite its name, had very local concerns. The name was ironic and my father often laughed about it, but the organisation’s aim was serious: to preserve the environment of Swat and promote peace and education among local people.

My father also loved to write poetry, sometimes about love, but often on controversial themes such as honour killings and women’s rights. Once he visited Afghanistan for a poetry festival at the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, where he read a poem about peace. It was mentioned as the most inspiring in the closing speech, and some in the audience asked him to repeat whole stanzas and couplets, exclaiming ‘Wah wah’ when a particular line pleased them, which is a bit like ‘Bravo’. Even my grandfather was proud. ‘Son, may you be the star in the sky of knowledge,’ he used to say.

We too were proud, but his higher profile meant we didn’t see him very much. It was always our mother who shopped for our clothes and took us to hospital if we were ill, even though in our culture, particularly for those of us from villages, a woman is not supposed to do these things alone. So one of my father’s nephews would have to go along. When my father was at home, he and his friends sat on the roof at dusk and talked politics endlessly. There was really only one subject - 9/11. It might have changed the whole world but we were living right in the epicentre of everything. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him.

In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast.

Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.

We were not fans of the Taliban as we had heard they destroyed girls’ schools and blew up giant Buddha statues - we had many Buddhas of our own that we were proud of. But many Pashtuns did not like the bombing of Afghanistan or the way Pakistan was helping the Americans, even if it was only by allowing them to cross our airspace and stopping weapons supplies to the Taliban. We did not know then that Musharraf was also letting the Americans use our airfields.

Some of our religious people saw Osama bin Laden as a hero. In the bazaar you could buy posters of him on a white horse and boxes of sweets with his picture on them. These clerics said 9/11 was revenge on the Americans for what they had been doing to other people round the world, but they ignored the fact that the people in the World Trade Center were innocent and had nothing to do with American policy and that the Holy Quran clearly says it is wrong to kill. Our people see conspiracies behind everything, and many argued that the attack was actually carried out by Jews as an excuse for America to launch a war on the Muslim world. Some of our newspapers printed stories that no Jews went to work at the World Trade Center that day. My father said this was rubbish.

Musharraf told our people that he had no choice but to cooperate with the Americans. He said they had told him, ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,’ and threatened to ‘bomb us back to the Stone Age’ if we stood against them. But we weren’t exactly cooperating as the ISI was still arming Taliban fighters and giving their leaders sanctuary in Quetta. They even persuaded the Americans to let them fly hundreds of Pakistani fighters out of northern Afghanistan. The ISI chief asked the Americans to hold off their attack on Afghanistan until he had gone to Kandahar to ask the Taliban leader Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden; instead he offered the Taliban help.

In our province Maulana Sufi Mohammad, who had fought in Afghanistan against the Russians, issued a fatwa against the US. He held a big meeting in Malakand, where our ancestors had fought the British. The Pakistani government didn’t stop him. The governor of our province issued a statement that anyone who wanted to fight in Afghanistan against NATO forces was free to do so. Some 12,000 young men from Swat went to help the Taliban. Many never came back. They were most likely killed, but as there is no proof of death, their wives can’t be declared widows. It’s very hard on them. My father’s close friend Wahid Zaman’s brother and brother-in-law were among the many who went to Afghanistan. Their wives and children are still waiting for them. I remember visiting them and feeling their longing. Even so, it all seemed far, far away from our peaceful garden valley. Afghanistan is less than a hundred miles away, but to get there you have to go through Bajaur, one of the tribal areas between Pakistan and the border with Afghanistan.

Bin Laden and his men fled to the White Mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, where he had built a network of tunnels while fighting the Russians. They escaped through these and over the mountains into Kurram, another tribal agency. What we didn’t know then was that bin Laden came to Swat and stayed in a remote village for a year, taking advantage of the Pashtunwali hospitality code.

Anyone could see that Musharraf was double-dealing, taking American money while still helping the jihadis - ‘strategic assets’, as the ISI calls them. The Americans say they gave Pakistan billions of dollars to help their campaign against al-Qaeda but we didn’t see a single cent. Musharraf built a mansion by Rawal Lake in Islamabad and bought an apartment in London. Every so often an important American official would complain that we weren’t doing enough and then suddenly some big fish would be caught. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, was found in a house just a mile from the army chief ’s official residence in Rawalpindi. But President Bush kept praising Musharraf, inviting him to Washington and calling him his buddy. My father and his friends were disgusted. They said the Americans always preferred dealing with dictators in Pakistan.

From an early age I was interested in politics and sat on my father’s knee listening to everything he and his friends discussed. But I was more concerned with matters closer to home - our own street to be exact. I told my friends at school about the rubbish-dump children and that we should help. Not everyone wanted to as they said the children were dirty and probably diseased, and their parents would not like them going to school with children like that. They also said it wasn’t up to us to sort out the problem. I didn’t agree. ‘We can sit by and hope the government will help but they won’t. If I can help support one or two children and another family supports one or two then between us we can help them all.’

I knew it was pointless appealing to Musharraf. In my experience, if my father couldn’t help with matters like these, there was only one option. I wrote a letter to God. ‘Dear God,’ I wrote, ‘I know you see everything, but there are so many things that maybe, sometimes, things get missed, particularly now with the bombing in Afghanistan. But I don’t think you would be happy if you saw the children on my road living on a rubbish dump. God, give me strength and courage and make me perfect because I want to make this world perfect. Malala.’

The problem was I did not know how to get it to him. Somehow I thought it needed to go deep into the earth, so first I buried it in the garden. Then I thought it would get spoilt, so I put it in a plastic bag. But that didn’t seem much use. We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there.

7: The Mufti Who Tried to Close Our School

JUST IN FRONT of the school on Khushal Street, where I was born, was the house of a tall handsome mullah and his family. His name was Ghulamullah and he called himself a mufti, which means he is an Islamic scholar and authority on Islamic law, though my father complains that anyone with a turban can call themselves a maulana or mufti. The school was doing well, and my father was building an impressive reception with an arched entrance in the boy’s high school. For the first time my mother could buy nice clothes and even send out for food as she had dreamed of doing back in the village.

But all this time the mufti was watching. He watched the girls going in and out of our school every day and became angry, particularly as some of the girls were teenagers. ‘That maulana has a bad eye on us,’ said my father one day. He was right.

Shortly afterwards the mufti went to the woman who owned the school premises and said, ‘Ziauddin is running a haram school in your building and bringing shame on the mohalla [neighbourhood]. These girls should be in purdah.’ He told her, ‘Take this building back from him and I will rent it for my madrasa. If you do this you will get paid now and also receive a reward in the next world.’

She refused and her son came to my father in secret. ‘This maulana is starting a campaign against you,’ he warned. ‘We won’t give him the building but be careful.’

My father was angry. ‘Just as we say, “Nim hakim khatrai jan” - “Half a doctor is a danger to one’s life,” so, “Nim mullah khatrai iman” - “A mullah who is not fully learned is a danger to faith”,’ he said.

I am proud that our country was created as the world’s first Muslim homeland, but we still don’t agree on what this means. The Quran teaches us sabar - patience - but often it feels that we have forgotten the word and think Islam means women sitting at home in purdah or wearing burqas while men do jihad. We have many strands of Islam in Pakistan. Our founder Jinnah wanted the rights of Muslims in India to be recognised, but the majority of people in India were Hindu. It was as if there was a feud between two brothers and they agreed to live in different houses. So British India was divided in August 1947, and an independent Muslim state was born. It could hardly have been a bloodier beginning. Millions of Muslims crossed from India, and Hindus travelled in the other direction. Almost two million of them were killed trying to cross the new border. Many were slaughtered on trains which arrived at Lahore and Delhi full of bloodied corpses. My own grandfather narrowly escaped death in the riots when his train was attacked by Hindus on his way home from Delhi, where he had been studying. Now we are a country of 180 million and more than 96 per cent are Muslim. We also have around two million Christians and more than two million Ahmadis, who say they are Muslims though our government says they are not. Sadly those minority communities are often attacked.

Jinnah had lived in London as a young man and trained as a barrister. He wanted a land of tolerance. Our people often quote the famous speech he made a few days before independence: ‘You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’ My father says the problem is that Jinnah negotiated a piece of real estate for us but not a state. He died of tuberculosis just a year after the creation of Pakistan and we haven’t stopped fighting since. We have had three wars against India and what seems like endless killing inside our own country.

We Muslims are split between Sunnis and Shias - we share the same fundamental beliefs and the same Holy Quran but we disagree over who was the right person to lead our religion when the Prophet died in the seventh century. The man chosen to be the leader or caliph was Abu Bakr, a close friend and adviser of the Prophet and the man he chose to lead prayers as he lay on his deathbed.

‘Sunni’ comes from the Arabic for ‘one who follows the traditions of the Prophet’. But a smaller group believed that leadership should have stayed within the Prophet’s family and that Ali, his son-inlaw and cousin, should have taken over. They became known as Shias, shortened from Shia-t-Ali, the Party of Ali.

Every year Shias commemorate the killing of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein Ibn Ali at the battle of Karbala in the year 680 with a festival called Muharram. They whip themselves into a bloody frenzy with metal chains or razor blades on strings until the streets run red. One of my father’s friends is a Shia and he cries whenever he talks about Hussein’s death at Karbala. He gets so emotional you would think the events had happened just the night before, not more than 1,300 years ago. Our own founder, Jinnah, was a Shia, and Benazir Bhutto’s mother was also a Shia from Iran.

Most Pakistanis are Sunnis like us - more than eighty per cent - but within that we are again many groups. By far the biggest group is the Barelvis, who are named after a nineteenth-century madrasa in Bareilly, which lies in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Then we have the Deobandi, named after another famous nineteenth-century madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, this time in the village of Deoband. They are very conservative and most of our madrasas are Deobandi. We also have the Ahl-e-Hadith (people of the Hadith), who are Salafists. This group is more Arab-influenced and even more conservative than the others. They are what the West calls fundamentalists. They don’t accept our saints and shrines - many Pakistanis are also mystical people and gather at Sufi shrines to dance and worship. Each of these strands has many different subgroups.

The mufti on Khushal Street was a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a Deobandi group that holds a huge rally every year at its headquarters in Raiwind, near Lahore, attended by millions of people. Our last dictator General Zia used to go there, and in the 1980s, under his regime, the Tablighis became very powerful. Many of the imams appointed to preach in army barracks were Tablighis and army officers would often take leave and go on preaching tours for the group.

One night, after the mufti had failed to persuade our landlady to cancel our lease, he gathered some of the influential people and elders of our mohalla into a delegation and turned up at our door. There were seven people - some other senior Tablighis, a mosque keeper, a former jihadi and a shopkeeper - and they filled our small house.

My father seemed worried and shooed us into the other room, but the house was small so we could hear every word. ‘I am representing the Ulema and Tablighian and Taliban,’ Mullah Ghulamullah said, referring to not just one but two organisations of Muslim scholars to give himself gravitas. ‘I am representing good Muslims and we all think your girls’ school is haram and a blasphemy. You should close it. Girls should not be going to school,’ he continued. ‘A girl is so sacred she should be in purdah, and so private that there is no lady’s name in the Quran as God doesn’t want her to be named.’

My father could listen no more. ‘Maryam is mentioned everywhere in the Quran. Was she not a woman and a good woman at that?’

‘No,’ said the mullah. ‘She is only there to prove that Isa [Jesus] was the son of Maryam, not the son of God!’

‘That may be,’ replied my father. ‘But I am pointing out that the Quran names Maryam.’

The mufti started to object but my father had had enough. Turning to the group, he said, ‘When this gentleman passes me on the street, I look to him and greet him but he doesn’t answer, he just bows his head.’

The mullah looked down embarrassed because greeting someone properly is important in Islam.

‘You run the haram school,’ he said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to greet you.’

Then one of the other men spoke up. ‘I’d heard you were an infidel,’ he said to my father, ‘but there are Qurans in your room.’

‘Of course there are!’ replied my father, astonished that his faith would be questioned. ‘I am a Muslim.’

‘Let’s get back to the subject of the school,’ said the mufti, who could see the discussion was not going his way. ‘There are men in the reception area of the school, and they see the girls enter, and this is very bad.’

‘I have a solution,’ said my father. ‘The school has another gate. The girls will enter through that.’

The mullah clearly wasn’t happy as he wanted the school closed altogether. But the elders were happy with this compromise and they left.

My father suspected this would not be the end of the matter. What we knew and they didn’t was that the mufti’s own niece attended the school in secret. So a few days later my father called the mufti’s elder brother, the girl’s father.

‘I am very tired of your brother,’ he said. ‘What kind of mullah is he? He’s driving us crazy. Can you help to get him off our backs?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Ziauddin,’ he replied. ‘I have trouble in my home too. He lives with us and has told his wife that she must observe purdah from us and that our wives must observe purdah from him, all in this small space. Our wives are like sisters to him and his is like a sister to us, but this madman has made our house a hell. I am sorry but I can’t help you.’

My father was right to think this man was not going to give up - mullahs had become more powerful figures since Zia’s rule and campaign of Islamisation.

In some ways General Musharraf was very different from General Zia. Though he usually dressed in uniform, he occasionally wore Western suits and he called himself chief executive instead of chief martial law administrator. He also kept dogs, which we Muslims regard as unclean. Instead of Zia’s Islamisation he began what he called ‘enlightened moderation’. He opened up our media, allowing new private TV channels and female newsreaders, as well as showing dancing on television. The celebration of Western holidays such as Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve was allowed. He even sanctioned an annual pop concert on the eve of Independence Day, which was broadcast to the nation.

He did something which our democratic rulers hadn’t, even Benazir, and abolished the law that for a woman to prove she was raped, she had to produce four male witnesses. He appointed the first woman governor of the state bank and the first women airline pilots and coastguards. He even announced we would have female guards at Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi.

However in our Pashtun homeland of the North-West Frontier Province things were very different.

In 2002 Musharraf held elections for ‘controlled democracy’. They were strange elections as the main party leaders Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto were in exile. In our province these elections brought what we called a ‘mullah government’ to power. The Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA) alliance was a group of five religious parties including the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), which ran the madrasas where the Taliban were trained. People jokingly referred to the MMA as the Mullah Military Alliance and said they got elected because they had Musharraf ’s support. But some people supported them because the very religious Pashtuns were angry at the American invasion of Afghanistan and the removal of the Taliban from power there.

Our area had always been more conservative than most of the rest of Pakistan. During the Afghan jihad many madrasas had been built, most of them funded by Saudi money, and many young men had passed through them as it was free education. That was the start of what my father calls the ‘Arabisation’ of Pakistan. Then 9/11 had made this militancy more mainstream. Sometimes when I walked along the main road I saw chalked messages on the sides of buildings. CONTACT US FOR JIHAD TRAINING, they would say, listing a phone number to call. In those days jihadi groups were free to do whatever they wanted. You could see them openly collecting contributions and recruiting men. There was even a headmaster from Shangla who would boast that his greatest success was to send ten boys in Grade 9 for jihad training in Kashmir.

The MMA government banned CD and DVD shops and wanted to create a morality police like the Afghan Taliban had set up. The idea was they would be able to stop a woman accompanied by a man and require her to prove that the man was her relative. Thankfully, our supreme court stopped this.

Then MMA activists launched attacks on cinemas and tore down billboards with pictures of women or blacked them out with paint. They even snatched female mannequins from clothing shops. They harassed men wearing Western-style shirts and trousers instead of the traditional shalwar kamiz and insisted women cover their heads. It was as though they wanted to remove all traces of womankind from public life.

My father’s high school opened in 2003. That first year they had boys and girls together, but by 2004 the climate had changed so it was unthinkable to have girls and boys in the same class. That changing climate made Ghulamullah bold. One of the school clerks told my father that the mufti kept coming into school and demanding why we girls were still using the main entrance. He said that one day, when a male member of staff took a female teacher out to the main road to get a rickshaw, the maulana asked, ‘Why did this man escort her to the road, is he her brother?’

‘No,’ replied the clerk, ‘he is a colleague.’

‘That is wrong!’ said the maulana.

My father told the clerk to call him next time he saw the maulana. When the call came, my father and the Islamic studies teacher went out to confront him.

‘Maulana, you have driven me to the wall!’ my father said. ‘Who are you? You are crazy! You need to go to a doctor. You think I enter the school and take my clothes off? When you see a boy and a girl you see a scandal. They are schoolchildren. I think you should go and see Dr Haider Ali!’

Dr Haider Ali was a well-known psychiatrist in our area, so to say, ‘Shall we take you to Dr Haider Ali?’ meant ‘Are you mad?’

The mufti went quiet. He took off his turban and put it in my father’s lap. For us a turban is a public symbol of chivalry and Pashtunness, and for a man to lose his turban is considered a great humili-ation. But then he started up again. ‘I never said those things to your clerk. He is lying.’

My father had had enough. ‘You have no business here,’ he shouted. ‘Go away!’

The mufti had failed to close our school but his interference was an indication of how our country was changing. My father was worried. He and his fellow activists were holding endless meetings.

These were no longer just about stopping people cutting down trees but were also about education and democracy.

In 2004, after resisting pressure from Washington for more than two and a half years, General Musharraf sent the army into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), seven agencies that lie along the border with Afghanistan, where the government had little control. The Americans claimed that al-Qaeda militants who had fled from Afghanistan during the US bombing were using the areas as a safe haven, taking advantage of our Pashtun hospitality. From there they were running training camps and launching raids across the border on NATO troops. For us in Swat this was very close to home. One of the agencies, Bajaur, is next to Swat. The people who live in the FATA are all from Pashtun tribes like us Yousafzai, and live on both sides of the border with Afghanistan.

The tribal agencies were created in British times as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and what was then India, and they are still run in the same way, administered by tribal chiefs or elders known as maliks. Unfortunately, the maliks make little difference. In truth the tribal areas are not governed at all. They are forgotten places of harsh rocky valleys where people scrape by on smuggling. (The average annual income is just $250 - half the Pakistani average.) They have very few hospitals and schools, particularly for girls, and political parties were not allowed there until recently. Hardly any women from these areas can read. The people are renowned for their fierceness and independence, as you can see if you read any of the old British accounts.

Our army had never before gone into the FATA. Instead they had maintained indirect control in the same way the British had, relying on the Pashtun-recruited Frontier Corps rather than regular soldiers.

Sending in the regular army was a tough decision. Not only did our army and ISI have long links with some of the militants, but it also meant our troops would be fighting their own Pashtun brothers. The first tribal area that the army entered was South Waziristan, in March 2004. Predictably the local people saw it as an attack on their way of life. All the men there carry weapons and hundreds of soldiers were killed when the locals revolted.

The army was in shock. Some men refused to fight, not wishing to battle their own people. They retreated after just twelve days and reached what they called a ‘negotiated peace settlement’ with local militant leaders like Nek Mohammad. This involved the army bribing them to halt all attacks and keep out foreign fighters. The militants simply used the cash to buy more weapons and resumed their activities. A few months later came the first attack on Pakistan by a US drone.

On 17 June 2004 an unmanned Predator dropped a Hellfire missile on Nek Mohammad in South Waziristan apparently while he was giving an interview by satellite phone. He and the men around him were killed instantly. Local people had no idea what it was - back then we did not know that the Americans could do such a thing. Whatever you thought about Nek Mohammad, we were not at war with the Americans and were shocked that they would launch attacks from the sky on our soil. Across the tribal areas people were angry and many joined militant groups or formed lashkars, local militias.

Then there were more attacks. The Americans said that bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was hiding in Bajaur and had taken a wife there. In January 2006 a drone supposedly targeting him landed on a village called Damadola, destroying three houses and killing eighteen people. The Americans said he had been tipped off and escaped. That same year, on 30 October, another US Predator hit a madrasa on a hill near the main town of Khar, killing eighty-two people, many of them young boys.

The Americans said it was the al-Qaeda training camp which had featured in the group’s videos and that the hill was riddled with tunnels and gun emplacements. Within a few hours of the attack, an influential local cleric called Faqir Mohammad, who had run the madrasa, announced that the deaths would be avenged by suicide bombings against Pakistani soldiers.

My father and his friends were worried and called together local elders and leaders for a peace conference. It was a bitterly cold night in January but 150 people gathered.

‘It’s coming here,’ my father warned. ‘The fire is reaching the valley. Let’s put out the flames of militancy before they reach here.’

But no one would listen. Some people even laughed, including a local political leader sitting in the front row.

‘Mr Khan,’ my father said to him, ‘you know what happened to the people of Afghanistan. They are now refugees and they’re living with us. The same is happening with Bajaur. The same will happen to us, mark my words, and we will have no shelter, no place to migrate to.’

But the expression on the man’s face was mocking. ‘Look at this man,’ he seemed to be saying of my father. ‘I am a khan. Who would dare kick me out of this area?’

My father came home frustrated. ‘I have a school, but I am neither a khan nor a political leader. I have no platform,’ he said. ‘I am only one small man.’

8: The Autumn of the Earthquake

ONE FINE OCTOBER day when I was still in primary school our desks started to tremble and shake.

Our classes were still mixed at that age, and all the boys and girls yelled, ‘Earthquake!’ We ran outside as we had been taught to do. All the children gathered around our teachers as chicks swarm to a mother hen.

Swat lies on a geological fault line and we often had earthquakes, but this felt different. All the buildings around us seemed to be shaking and the rumbling didn’t stop. Most of us were crying and our teachers were praying. Miss Rubi, one of my favourite teachers, told us to stop crying and to stay calm; it would soon be over.

Once the shaking had stopped we were all sent home. We found our mother sitting in a chair holding the Quran, reciting verses over and over. Whenever there is trouble people pray a lot. She was relieved to see us and hugged us, tears streaming down her face. But the aftershocks kept coming all afternoon so we remained very scared.

We had moved again - we would move seven times by the time I was thirteen - and were living in an apartment building. It was high for Mingora, two storeys with a big water tank on the roof. My mother was terrified it would collapse on top of us so we kept going outside. My father did not get home till late that evening as he had been busy checking all the other school buildings.

When nightfall came, there were still tremors and my mother was in a state of panic. Every time we felt a tremor we thought it was the Day of Judgement. ‘We will be buried in our beds!’ she cried. She insisted we leave, but my father was exhausted and we Muslims believe our fate is written by God.

So he put me and my brothers Khushal and Atal, then just a baby, to bed.

‘Go wherever you want,’ he told my mother and cousin. ‘I am staying here. If you believe in God you will stay here.’ I think when there is a great disaster or our lives are in danger we remember our sins and wonder how we will meet God and whether we will be forgiven. But God has also given us the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal. I trusted in my father’s faith, but I also shared my mother’s very real concerns.

That earthquake of 8 October 2005 turned out to be one of the worst in history. It was 7.6 on the Richter Scale and was felt as far away as Kabul and Delhi. Our town of Mingora was largely spared - just a few buildings collapsed - but neighbouring Kashmir and the northern areas of Pakistan were devastated. Even in Islamabad buildings collapsed.

It took a while for us to realise how bad it was. When the TV news began to show the devastation we saw that entire villages had been turned to dust. Landslides blocked access to the worst affected parts and all the phones and power lines were down. The earthquake had affected 30,000 square kilometres, an area as big as the American state of Connecticut. The numbers were unbelievable.

More than 73,000 people had been killed and 128,000 injured, many of them permanently disabled.

Around three and a half million people had lost their homes. Roads, bridges, water and power had all gone. Places we had visited like Balakot were almost completely destroyed. Many of those killed were children who like me had been at school that morning. Some 6,400 schools were turned to rubble and 18,000 children lost their lives.

We remembered how scared we had been that morning and started raising money at school.

Everyone brought what they could. My father went to everybody he knew, asking for donations of food, clothing and money, and I helped my mother collect blankets. My father raised money from the Swat Association of Private Schools and the Global Peace Council to add to what we had collected at school. The total came to more than one million rupees. A publishing company in Lahore which supplied our schoolbooks sent five trucks of food and other essentials.

We were terribly worried about our family in Shangla, jammed between those narrow mountains.

Finally we got news from a cousin. In my father’s small village eight people had been killed and many homes destroyed. One of them was the house of the local cleric, Maulana Khadim, which fell down crushing his four beautiful daughters. I wanted to go to Shangla with my father and the trucks but he told me it would be too dangerous.

When he returned a few days later he was ashen. He told us that the last part of the journey had been very difficult. Much of the road had collapsed into the river and large boulders had fallen and blocked the way. Our family and friends said they had thought it was the end of the world. They described the roar of rocks sliding down hills and everyone running out of their houses reciting the Quran, the screams as roofs crashed down and the howls of the buffaloes and goats. As the tremors continued they had spent the entire day outdoors and then the night too, huddling together for warmth, even though it was bitterly cold in the mountains.

To start with the only rescue workers who came were a few from a locally based foreign aid agency and volunteers from the Tehrike-Nifaz-e-Sharia-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) or Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, the group founded by Sufi Mohammad that had sent men to fight in Afghanistan. Sufi Mohammad had been in jail since 2002 when Musharraf arrested a number of militant leaders after American pressure, but his organisation still continued and was being run by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah. It was hard for the authorities to reach places like Shangla because most of the roads and bridges had gone and local government had been wiped out throughout the region. We saw an official from the United Nations say on television that it was the ‘worst logistical nightmare that the UN had ever faced’.

General Musharraf called it a ‘test of the nation’ and announced that the army had set up Operation Lifeline - our army likes giving their operations names. There were lots of pictures on the news of army helicopters laden with supplies and tents, but in many of the small valleys the helicopters could not land and the aid packages they dropped often rolled down slopes into rivers. In some places, when the helicopters flew in the locals all rushed underneath them, which meant they could not drop supplies safely.

But some aid did get in. The Americans were quick as they had thousands of troops and hundreds of helicopters in Afghanistan so could easily fly in supplies and show they were helping us in our hour of need, though some crews covered the American markings on their helicopters, fearing attack.

For many in the remote areas it was the first time they had seen a foreigner.

Most of the volunteers came from Islamic charities or organisations but some of these were fronts for militant groups. The most visible of all was Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD), the welfare wing of Lashkare-Taiba. LeT had close links to the ISI and was set up to liberate Kashmir, which we believe should be part of Pakistan not India as its population is mostly Muslim. The leader of LeT is a fiery professor from Lahore called Hafiz Saeed, who is often on television calling on people to attack India. When the earthquake happened and our government did little to help, JuD set up relief camps patrolled by men with Kalashnikovs and walkie-talkies. Everyone knew these men belonged to LeT, and soon their black and white banners with crossed swords were flying everywhere in the mountains and valleys.

In the town of Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir the JuD even set up a large field hospital with X-ray machines, an operating theatre, a well-stocked pharmacy and a dental department. Doctors and surgeons offered their services along with thousands of young volunteers.

Earthquake victims praised the activists who had trudged up and down mountains and through shattered valleys carrying medical help to remote regions no one else had bothered with. They helped clear and rebuild destroyed villages as well as leading prayers and burying bodies. Even today, when most of the foreign aid agencies have gone, shattered buildings still line the roadside and people are still waiting for compensation from the government to build new houses, the JuD banners and helpers are still present. My cousin who was studying in the UK said they raised lots of money from Pakistanis living there. People later said that some of this money had been diverted to finance a plot to bomb planes travelling from Britain to the US.

With such a large number of people killed, there were many children orphaned - 11,000 of them. In our culture orphans are usually taken in by the extended family, but the earthquake was so bad that entire families had been wiped out or lost everything so were in no position to take in children. The government promised they would all be looked after by the state, but that felt as empty as most government promises. My father heard that many of the boys were taken in by the JuD and housed in their madrasas. In Pakistan, madrasas are a kind of welfare system as they give free food and lodging, but their teaching does not follow a normal curriculum. The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and that man never went to the moon.

The whole nation was in shock for a long time after the earthquake. Already so unlucky with our politicians and military dictators, now, on top of everything else, we had to deal with a natural disaster. Mullahs from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a warning from God. If we did not mend our ways and introduce shariat or Islamic law, they shouted in their thundering voices, more severe punishment would come.

PART TWO: The Valley of Death

Rabab mangia wakht de teer sho

Da kali khwa ta Talibaan raaghali dena

Farewell Music! Even your sweetest tunes are best kept silent

The Taliban on the edge of the village have stilled all lips