When the year 2009 began, Swat conjured up the faceless image of a tourist destination with refreshingly clean waters and rugged natural beauty, fallen into the wrong hands. Everyone who had been to Swat, or had heard stories of its alluring charm, prayed for it but secretly thought it would never recover its lost glory. The oppressive blows that the Taliban dealt the valley seemed irreparable.
One such blow came on January 15, 2009, when the Taliban in Swat declared that all girls’ schools in the valley would close down. The whole world was appalled. Some two months later, a video captured on a mobile phone showed a 17-year-old girl being publicly flogged in the valley. The world was horrified.
But then, on February 1 the same year, a schoolgirl from Swat started blogging for BBC Urdu. She wrote about her typical days, after her school had been shut down. The details of entries in her blogs were ordinary for those living in the same area as she did and passing through the same circumstances as she was passing through but these were far from trivial. Her diaries became immensely popular. The unnamed schoolgirl beckoned the outside world to come to the support of all those girls who couldn’t go to a school in Swat. Exactly 11 months after her first blog appeared, the girl revealed her identity through her father. She was Malalai, now Malala Yousafzai.
Some would argue as to why she did not make her identity public while she was writing her blog. There is also debate about whether things would have unfolded differently had she disclosed her identity while writing her blogs. These arguments and debates, however, seem off the mark given the fact that she single-handedly gave Swat what it lacked: a public face that people around the world could recognise and identify with. With the growing reputation of her blog, every girls’ school in the valley began to form an identity.
Malala has never looked back since then or maybe she did not want to. Not surprisingly, there were quite a few things not worth looking back at. One of the world's most famous 16-year-olds, she has no memory of how someone all but took her life. However, she clearly remembers what prompted her on the path of challenging her tormentors – the wanton destruction of schools across her valley.
While doctors managed to save her life and retrieved her ability to see, hear, speak and write, hundreds of destroyed schools still remain a rubble, not just in Swat but in many other militant-ravaged areas. She has risen back to life to defend education as the most persuasive mechanism to fight the Taliban with. She serves as a source of inspiration for the state and the society, and hundreds of thousands of other girls like her to stand for the reconstruction and reopening of their schools.
The Taliban would have loved to see her disappear into death, as they would have liked that no school that they closed down or destroyed was reopened and reconstructed. But today, both Malala and the demolished, shut-down schools are slowly getting back into their stride.
The kind of reception that Malala is receiving in the West in general, and the Western media in particular has turned away some of her supporters in Pakistan. Some of them now accuse her of being a sellout to the West. Such detractors, however, seem to be wasting their time and energy over something that hardly matters, considering the fact that Malala today has become the international face for the cause of educating girls everywhere in the world. From being a local hero in 2009, she has transformed herself into a global icon in 2013.
Malala did not win the Nobel Peace Prize, and it instead went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for destroying Syria’s arsenal.
But it still is a great day for Malala who was not only nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but also won the Sakharov Award, Europe’s top human rights honour. It is also a memorable occasion for celebrating all those other lives, of schoolchildren and their teachers, that were lost while they were trying to keep the torch of education alight in the face of a dark doctrine. All of Malala’s fallen comrades havereturned from the dead to haunt their tormentors.
And she has learned to rise above the personal in order to stand up for the universal. Instead of seeking revenge and spreading hatred against the Taliban, who tried their best but could not take her life, she wants to talk to them to end the conflict and violence that they perpetrate.
She still remains the schoolgirl she was in 2009, championing the same cause that she championed then – education for girls. The only difference is that today she is no longer anonymous.
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