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PART ONE Before the Taliban Sorey sorey pa golo rashey Da be nangai awaz de ra ma sha mayena Rather I receive your bullet-riddled body with honour Than news of your cowardice on the battlefield (Traditional Pashto couplet)
1 A Daughter Is Born WHEN I WAS born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father. I arrived at dawn as the last star blinked out. We Pashtuns see this as an auspicious sign. My father didn’t have any money for the hospital or for a midwife so a neighbour helped at my birth. My parents’ first child was stillborn but I popped out kicking and screaming. I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children. For most Pashtuns it’s a gloomy day when a daughter is born. My father’s cousin Jehan Sher Khan Yousafzai was one of the few who came to celebrate my birth and even gave a handsome gift of money. Yet, he brought with him a vast family tree of our clan, the Dalokhel Yousafzai, going right back to my great-great-grandfather and showing only the male line. My father, Ziauddin, is different from most Pashtun men. He took the tree, drew a line like a lollipop from his name and at the end of it he wrote, ‘Malala’. His cousin laughed in astonishment. My father didn’t care. He says he looked into my eyes after I was born and fell in love. He told people, ‘I know there is something different about this child.’ He even asked friends to throw dried fruits, sweets and coins into my cradle, something we usually only do for boys. I was named after Malalai of Maiwand, the greatest heroine of Afghanistan. Pashtuns are a proud people of many tribes split between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We live as we have for centuries by a code called Pashtunwali, which obliges us to give hospitality to all guests and in which the most important value is nang or honour. The worst thing that can happen to a Pashtun is loss of face. Shame is a very terrible thing for a Pashtun man. We have a saying, ‘Without honour, the world counts for nothing.’ We fight and feud among ourselves so much that our word for cousin – tarbur – is the same as our word for enemy. But we always come together against outsiders who try to conquer our lands. All Pashtun children grow up with the story of how Malalai inspired the Afghan army to defeat the British in 1880 in one of the biggest battles of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Malalai was the daughter of a shepherd in Maiwand, a small town on the dusty plains west of Kandahar. When she was a teenager, both her father and the man she was supposed to marry were among thousands of Afghans fighting against the British occupation of their country. Malalai went to the battlefield with other women from the village to tend the wounded and take them water. She saw their men were losing, and when the flag-bearer fell she lifted her white veil up high and marched onto the battlefield in front of the troops. ‘Young love!’ she shouted. ‘If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand then, by God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.’ Malalai was killed under fire, but her words and bravery inspired the men to turn the battle around. They destroyed an entire brigade, one of the worst defeats in the history of the British army. The Afghans were so proud that the last Afghan king built a Maiwand victory monument in the centre of
Page 3: I AM MALALA The Girl Who Stood Up f
Page 6 and 7: Contents Cover Title Page Dedicatio
Page 8 and 9: Prologue: The Day my World Changed
Page 10 and 11: we were little and been friends sin
Page 14 and 15: Kabul. In high school I read some S
Page 16 and 17: From the rooftop I watched the moun
Page 18 and 19: originally from Kandahar and are on
Page 20 and 21: 2 My Father the Falcon I ALWAYS KNE
Page 22 and 23: girl who was raped and become pregn
Page 24 and 25: popular and passionate speaker that
Page 26 and 27: 3 Growing up in a School MY MOTHER
Page 28 and 29: hidden away as in his own village.
Page 30 and 31: After three months Naeem had had en
Page 32 and 33: slept and one which was a small off
Page 34 and 35: 4 The Village IN OUR TRADITION on t
Page 36 and 37: I loved the gloopy honey, which we
Page 38 and 39: speak to men who were not their clo
Page 40 and 41: said. ‘You should have set an exa
Page 42 and 43: the plane even though it had 200 ot
Page 44 and 45: 6 Children of the Rubbish Mountain
Page 46 and 47: called him ‘lethal’ in public.
Page 48 and 49: out the problem. I didn’t agree.
Page 50 and 51: tolerance. Our people often quote t
Page 52 and 53: woman governor of the state bank an
Page 54 and 55: Then there were more attacks. The A
Page 56 and 57: gone. Places we had visited like Ba
Page 58 and 59: PART TWO The Valley of Death Rabab
Page 60 and 61: and if people didn’t stop they wo
Page 62 and 63:
walls and levees to protect it from
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through a river where the road had
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stations. The militants would enter
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father and was very excited that sh
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Musharraf blamed Benazir’s death
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The army action at the end of 2007
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One day I went on Geo, which is one
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hospital could not cope with all th
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If they want every person in the wo
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We Pashtuns know the stone of reven
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to know the kind of things Hai Kaka
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We had a special assembly that fina
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now.
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news. The gunfire was in celebratio
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he was sitting in a government offi
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15 Leaving the Valley LEAVING THE V
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million of us were fleeing Swat and
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electricity, gas . . . but your cou
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16 The Valley of Sorrows IT ALL SEE
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Taliban leadership who were in cust
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teachers at the Khushal School dema
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many of the buffaloes. The villager
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17 Praying to Be Tall WHEN I WAS th
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passionately. ‘Fazlullah is the c
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just sneak in under our radar? And
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took a photo of her and vowed I wou
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flooded by millions of Muslim refug
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the same thing. My father asked,
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told my mother. He read it out. Dea
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My father was convinced the Taliban
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20 Who is Malala? ONE MORNING IN la
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When everyone was ready he took Mis
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21 ‘God, I entrust her to you’
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neighbourhood. My mother was astoni
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one dignitary comes to your home. B
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General Kayani told him he should s
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22 Journey into the Unknown I WAS S
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It was in one of Yaseem’s newspap
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that reassured them I was still ali
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23 ‘The Girl Shot in the Head, Bi
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soon,’ he promised. ‘Now have a
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She told me that I had been shot on
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nurse, who would sit and hold my ha
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24 ‘They have snatched her smile
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I was taken into theatre on 11 Nove
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UK. My father was relieved as he wa
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EPILOGUE One Child, One Teacher, On
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But like my mother I am lonely. It
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that the good thing about the Talib
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Glossary aba - affectionate Pashto
Page 162 and 163:
Acknowledgements The last year has
Page 164 and 165:
Important Events in Pakistan and Sw
Page 166 and 167:
A note on the Malala Fund My goal i
Page 168 and 169:
My father’s friend Hidayatullah h
Page 170 and 171:
My father’s childhood home
Page 172 and 173:
Reading with my brother Khushal
Page 174 and 175:
A school picnic
Page 176 and 177:
At the beginning, people gave lots
Page 178 and 179:
Making a speech to honour the peopl
Page 180 and 181:
Painting at school
Page 182 and 183:
In our garden in Mingora, building
Page 184 and 185:
At school reading a story: ‘All T
Page 186 and 187:
My father and the elders of Swat
Page 188 and 189:
The bus where I was shot
Page 190 and 191:
First days in the Birmingham hospit
Page 192 and 193:
Our headmistress, Madam Maryam (lef
Page 194 and 195:
Sir Amjad, head of the boys’ scho
Page 196 and 197:
Speaking at the UN on my sixteenth
Page 198 and 199:
Here we are outside our new home in
Page 200:
Copyright A Weidenfeld & Nicolson e
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