I think it’s time that people update themselves, educate themselves, and inform themselves.
If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so. God wants to see how we behave in such situations. There is a saying in the Quran, “The falsehood has to go and the truth will prevail.” If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it? I wondered. I prayed to God every night to give me strength.
For us girls that doorway was like a magical entrance to our own special world. As we skipped through, we cast off our headscarves like winds puffing away clouds to make way for the sun then ran helter-skelter up the steps. At the top of the steps was an open courtyard with doors to all the classrooms.
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.
I might have been calm, but my dear father was near tears. ‘Are you all right, jani?’ he said. ‘Aba,’ I said, trying to reassure him. ‘Everybody knows they will die someday. No one can stop death. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a Talib or from cancer.
When he went to France to collect an award for me, he told the audience, “In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter.
Does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself.
But God has also given us the power to forget, so that when the tragedy is over we carry on as normal.
Its as if you planted a tree and nurtured it – you have the right to sit in its shade.
Someone said I had smiled. But to my father, it was not a smile, just a small beautiful moment because he had not lost me forever.
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 homemade like theirs.
My father was almost bursting with pride at how I came across on the documentary. “Look at her,” he told Adam Ellick. “Don’t you think she is meant for the skies?” Fathers can be very embarrassing.
My father’s voice is so loud my mother often jokes that he doesn’t need to make phone calls, he can just shout.
We are told that Swat is being sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan, but no one and nothing should be sacrificed for the state. A state is like a mother, and a mother never deserts or cheats her children.
A small boy was brought to sit on their laps to encourage the birth of a son.
Someone gave me a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, a fable about a shepherd boy who travels to the Pyramids in search of treasure when all the time it’s at home. I loved that book and read it over and over again.
It’s a kind of Romeo and Juliet story in which Gul Makai and Musa Khan meet at school and fall in love. But they are from different tribes, so their love causes a war. However, unlike Shakespeare’s play their story doesn’t end in tragedy. Gul Makai uses the Holy Quran to teach her elders that war is bad and they eventually stop fighting and allow the lovers to unite.
So, yes, the Taliban have shot me. But they can only shoot a body. They cannot shoot my dreams, they cannot kill my beliefs and they cannot stop my campaign to see every girl and every boy in school.
I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free.
If you hit a Talib with your shoe, there is no difference between him and you. You must not treat others with cruelty. You must fight them with peace and dialogue.