Rating: 4/5
Pakistani Malala Yousafzai was fifteen years old when, in October 2012, she was shot in the head by the Taliban for standing up to girls’ rights.
When the Taliban entered Pakistan, everyone was scared. But when they entered Malala’s beautiful homeland, Swat Valley, things began to get hideous. People were publicly flogged, shot, hanged, suffocated, even beheaded.
A Muslim extremist under the alias Fazlullah “ran” the Taliban. He organised the shootings, massacres and individual beheadings. One of his main rules was that girls could not go to school. He ordered all girls’ schools in the whole of Pakistan to be closed. When a few activists spoke out and failed to comply with Fazlullah’s order, the schools were blown up and the teachers, students and founders killed brutally.
Malala and her family were one of the few who dared to oppose Fazlullah. Malala and her father, Ziauddin, attended many interviews and public speaking sessions to speak out against the Taliban. “Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human,” said Malala at one interview when she heard that the Taliban thought educating girls was “Westernising” them. When the school which she attended, which her father had founded before she was born, was closed down, her father told her not to worry. “The Taliban can take our pens and books, but they can’t stop our minds from thinking.”
Before she was shot, Malala would never cover her face, and wouldn’t usually cover her head. When asked about this, she once said: “My mother always told me, ‘Hide your face, people are looking at you.’ I would reply, ‘It doesn’t matter; I am also looking at them.'”
Malala was on her way back from school in the Khushal School bus when it was stopped by two young men on the roadside. While one asked the driver for “information about some of the children”, the other went round the back of the bus and stuck his head in the window. He said, “Who is Malala?”
Malala later said that no one said anything, but a few girls looked at her. The Talib now took out a gun. He aimed it at her face. Malala wrote in this book, “Some of the girls screamed. Moniba tells me I squeezed her hand.”
The gunman fired three shots. One entered Malala’s left eye socket and came out under her left shoulder. She slumped forward onto her friend Moniba, so the other two bullets went into the girls next to her. One went into her other friend’s left hand. The third went through the same girl’s left shoulder and into the upper right arm of another girl.
Malala wrote in this book, “My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired.”
Malala was hurriedly taken to a Pakistani hospital, but a pair of English doctors who happened to be in the area came in and said they were doing it all wrong. After a few days, Malala and the doctors flew to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where she had many operations. When Malala awoke, she found herself in a strange new country with a throbbing headache and learnt that she was in England and that her parents had been forced to stay in Pakistan.
She felt a hard lump in her stomach, and writing to the nurse asking what it was (she used a notepad to communicate, as she was unable to speak), found that it was the top of her skull. It had been crushed by the bullet and fragments had dangerously struck her brain and cut a nerve that enabled her left eye to blink, her lips to smile and her left ear to hear. To avoid further injury, the large bit of skull had been taken out and put in her lower torso to keep from getting infected while they operated on her head. When the piece of skull was taken out again, there was a danger that it would infect the head so a titanium “skull” was made and screwed into Malala’s head in its place.
Malala’s parents arrived sixteen days later, sobbing and pleading to see their half-dead daughter. As the weeks wore on, Malala showed signs of making a miraculous recovery. A surgeon operated on the broken nerve and soon she was able to half-smile. A sort of hearing aid was put in her left ear which meant she could now nearly hear perfectly well, and although her left eye was now able to blink it often dragged and closed when she spoke, which she was able to do after a month or so.
Malala is my role model. She was fearless even when the Taliban came to Swat. She was fearless when death threats came to her door. She was fearless when the man came to the back of her bus and directed a gun at her head. She later recalled that a man had been severing the heads of chickens for meat on the street just before the bus was stopped. In this book, she wrote about what she felt like as the man raised his gun:
“The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day. The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing the heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one.”