{"id":199964,"date":"2013-10-23T15:37:09","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T10:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=199964"},"modified":"2013-10-23T15:37:09","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T10:07:09","slug":"the-sanctification-of-malala-yousafzai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/the-sanctification-of-malala-yousafzai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sanctification of Malala Yousafzai"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
The medium or the message?<\/strong> Malala with her father Ziauddin.\u00a0Photo: AFP<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThe subtitle for Malala Yousafzai\u2019s autobiography, I Am Malala, seeks to ensure that casual browsers at bookshops aren\u2019t confused in the least. \u201cThe Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban,\u201d it proclaims. If a poll were to be held on what people know about the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, that subtitle would probably sum up the response of the overwhelming majority.
\nEver since she was shot in the head last year by a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) while returning home from school, the canonisation of Malala has been swift and sure. It\u2019s every spin doctor\u2019s dream: a teenaged Muslim girl standing up to Muslim fundamentalism and nearly dying as a result, a champion of Western values who can easily be cast as a hero in a complex, alien culture that the West has proven to be historically inept at understanding. A person who can be reduced to a tagline on a book cover. Helen Keller, Anne Frank and Joan of Arc rolled into one.
\nOf course, the obvious way in which TV anchors, politicians and celebrities have fallen over each other in a mad rush to anoint her and use her to further their own agenda \u2014 Rahman Malik, for instance, held up Malala\u2019s parents\u2019 efforts to reach Birmingham and be by her side because he wanted to go with them for a photo-op \u2014 has led to a backlash against Malala that ranges from the uncharitable to the downright vicious. She has been accused of lusting for publicity, of blasphemy, of even faking her own shooting in order to leave Pakistan and live comfortably abroad, a claim that thankfully died down once the TTP took responsibility for the attack. Op-ed pieces are regularly churned out by both sides, each accusing the other with increasing viciousness of misunderstanding and misrepresenting Malala\u2019s message.
\nReading Malala\u2019s book is an instructive exercise in understanding her, once you get past the sanctimonious declarations she makes; expected, given the number of times she has said she wants to some day be Prime Minister of Pakistan. (\u201cAt night I would pray, \u2018God, give me Sanju\u2019s pencil [from her favourite television show, Shaka Laka Boom Boom]\u2026 I will use it to make everyone happy.\u2019\u201d) It is as much her story as it is of her father, Ziauddin, a Swati activist who was one of the most prominent voices in the Valley against the Taliban. Her ideas are received from her father, whom she idolises. Most of what she has to say about politics begins with some variant of \u201cMy father used to say\u2026\u201d
\nIt was Ziauddin who founded the Khushal School where Malala studied, who refused to allow the Taliban to close the school once they invaded Swat. It was he who founded the Swat Qaumi Jirga, which came together to politically oppose the Taliban, largely by highlighting their excesses in the media. As journalists began covering the situation, they found his young, articulate daughter saying much the same things, a far more compelling interviewee. When Christina Lamb, a veteran Pakistan correspondent who has ghostwritten the book, met Ziauddin in Birmingham, he reminded her that she had interviewed him in 2009. \u201cIn those days people wanted to talk to me, not my daughter,\u201d he had joked.
\nUltimately, it was the fame Malala gained as a result of these interviews that got her shot, not her efforts to promote education, which consisted mainly of delivering platitudes about its importance at different fora. The Taliban by 2012 had largely been driven out of Swat, and there really wasn\u2019t much of an opposition to girls\u2019 education. Shooting Malala was an ill-conceived attempt at reasserting their authority in the Valley, which had been lost through the efforts of the military, not activists. It was a political act, part of a ruthless winner-take-all war in the region.
\nEarlier this month, Dawn<\/em> published an obviously satirical piece, where they claimed that DNA analysis of Malala\u2019s earwax and an extended investigation had revealed that Malala wasn\u2019t really Malala, but a Polish Christian called Jane. That she had been killed by an Italian Robert de Niro lookalike (\u201cThose tiny yellow bits that you see in the wax are bits of pizza,\u201d their alleged expert said, asking the writer to look at the assailant\u2019s earwax under a microscope). Despite a disclaimer at the bottom, later also posted at the top, a large section of commenters as well as those on social media were fooled.
\nThe episode demonstrates how, in this cynical age, we are willing to give currency to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories regarding Malala. Incidents like this have been used by the Western media to illustrate that Pakistani society harbours resentment against Malala due to some vague jealousy at the amount of attention she\u2019s been getting.
\nBut in choosing to slay that straw man, Malala\u2019s cheerleaders ignore the real reasons for the dissatisfaction. Malala is by no means the only person in Pakistan, or even Swat, to have spoken out against, or even to be shot for speaking out against the patriarchal notion that girls should not be educated. Neither has she done anything tangible to promote education in the region, though she has donated most of the money she has been awarded to a fund for girls\u2019 education. Nor was she highlighting an extraordinarily bad situation; the province of Khyber Pakhtunwa, of which Swat is a part, has female enrolment numbers that, while by no means great, outperform the country as a whole. Yes, education of girls is an issue of great importance in Pakistani society, but it isn\u2019t a game of heroes and villains, rather a complicated interplay of tradition, political expediency and the volatile state the country finds itself in.
\n
\"I
I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai (with Christina Lamb)
Hachette
276 pp | Rs 399<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nSo when Western television anchors use Malala\u2019s story to demonstrate the backwardness of the Taliban, and by extension Islam, they completely ignore the role the West has played in maintaining that volatility. Malala herself hasn\u2019t rocked the boat \u2013 she has seldom spoken out against the consequences of the US War on Terror, even though the influx of the Taliban into Swat was a direct result. But when she did speak out, telling Barack Obama that drone strikes would cause terrorism to intensify \u2014 there was no mention of the 150 or so schoolchildren that drones have killed in Pakistan \u2014 that particular comment was completely ignored in the coverage given to her high-profile meeting.
\nThe American media\u2019s sense of righteousness also displays their Islamophobia \u2013 it is a politically correct form of racism that has characterised most of its engagement with this alien culture ever since 9\/11. But the same anchors who laud Malala\u2019s courage in standing up to the oppression of religion have for years given free publicity to fundamental Christians who fought to have the theory of evolution expunged from the school curriculum, and to \u2018experts\u2019 who deny that climate change is real. They also ignore that Malala and her family are practising Muslims, whose faith in Islam never wavered despite them having to engage in an ideological battle with the Taliban on a daily basis. That despite his bluster, even Ziauddin made a series of compromises with the Taliban in order to keep his school open.
\nMalala Yousafzai had greatness thrust upon her in the form of an assassin\u2019s bullet. That one brutal, senseless act changed a precocious child with political ambitions into a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. But in the reams that have been written about Malala ever since that act, not one concrete suggestion has emerged that will carry tangible benefits for girls, or boys, who are denied an education. Like with all icons, the medium has become more important than the message.
\n\u201cWhen people talk about the way I was shot and what happened,\u201d she writes at the end of her book, \u201cI think it\u2019s the story of Malala; \u2018a girl shot by the Taliban\u2019; I don\u2019t feel it\u2019s a story about me at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shot in the head by the Taliban for the crime of being outspoken, Malala is now a creation of Western self-regard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":199973,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8068,7056,8480,8481,8482,48,8483,5750,6981,849,8484,8485],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199964"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}