The making of an international star

The Taliban may have the Pakistani state at their mercy at least that’s what it looks like on bad days – but one thing they had sought to control, or rather silence, is now their greatest nemesis, even more so than drone strikes. Malala Yousafzai. The name has only to come up and the Taliban get very angry, ending up saying things that make them look foolish.

We’ll kill Malala whenever we get the opportunity. So sayeth the ubiquitous Taliban spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid. We are against her because she has left Islam and is secular…whatever this means.

The bullet fired by a Taliban hit man was meant to kill Malala and would have killed her, but for the grace of God or the intervention of Providence. Or the moving finger going on to write a different script. Choose what you like.

Catholics talk of miracles. So do we. Could there be a greater miracle than her survival, or the survival of the two other girls with her? The Taliban just don’t know what to do about it because what was meant to put an end to her has made her into the international star we now see, the most recognisable Pakistani face, if not the most recognisable teen face, anywhere in the world.

The Taliban hadn’t bargained for this. If they knew what was good for them they wouldn’t mention the subject. At least Adnan Rasheed, the man behind the Kohat jailbreak, had the sense to say that the attack on her was wrong, although he went on to say that she should come back to Pakistan and join a female madressah, his idea probably of following the true path of Islam. But other Taliban, the ones who issue statements, can’t help themselves. They keep referring to Malala as an apostate worthy of being killed.

It’s quite funny in a way: the mighty Fortress of Islam, aka Pakistan, with all its tanks, missiles and nuke capability quivering before the Taliban and holding out to them not just an olive branch but the country’s entire olive production and Taliban leaders responding with impossible conditions, and no one in Pakistan with a clue to what’s really happening on this front. But a young girl, all of 16 years, leaving these holy warriors helpless, because she is out of their reach, and moving them to insensate fury.

And Malala sits with President Obama in the White House, Michelle Obama and one of their daughters also there and how completely at her ease she is…not overawed by her surroundings. Poise and confidence not just way beyond her years – the cliché doesn’t do her justice – but there in her to an extraordinary degree. I know what I would have felt sitting in that room – hot under the collar and ill at ease.

If Malala had been a frightened kind of a girl, cowering and slinking into the shadows, she might have been the object of universal pity but she wouldn’t have become the international celebrity she now is. It is the Taliban bullet, the miracle of her survival, and her poise and intelligence which have drawn worldwide attention.

Muslims believe in destiny. As claimants to being the most perfect Muslims of all, does it never cross the minds of the Taliban leadership that if Malala survived a bullet fired at the closest of all possible ranges, there must have been something from on high to bring this about? Divine will and all that. Yet they keep on muttering darkly about not sparing Malala because she had strayed from the faith.

By writing a BBC blog revealing how it was to live under the sway of the Taliban, Malala was already a bit of a sensation when Maulana Fazlullah and his zealots ruled the Swat Valley. After the army wrested control of Swat from the Taliban, Malala and her entire family could easily have obtained visas to any western country and left Swat for good. But they chose to stay there and Malala, we should not forget, used to ride to school every day on a minivan, her movements known to everyone. And the Taliban threatened her and this was on a Taliban website but she went on going to school.

That’s when the hit man came for her. The minivan on which she was travelling with two of her schoolmates, Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz, was stopped and the gunman looked into the van and asked who Malala was, and then started shooting. All the girls were hit, Malala grievously.

Defying the Taliban and getting known for that, and then choosing to stay in Swat…that was brave, on her part and her family’s. The attack on her and her companions was bound to make international headlines. How could it not? Maulana Fazlullah and his crew probably hadn’t figured this out, the negative harvest they would reap.

Even the outrage in Pakistan was overwhelming because no metaphysical arguments were needed to show how stupid and barbaric the attack was. And so even among many fence sitters – and there is a huge population of that out here – sentiment turned against the Taliban.

But Malala survived, because of a lot of medical attention both here and abroad. That was the miracle. And when she came out of intensive care and started to be seen and heard, and the poise and intelligence came through, becoming an international star was only a matter of time. Getting the European Union Sakharov Prize, the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize…all flowing from that bullet, and her brightness.

The Taliban could never have imagined this. Hence their great anger. (Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz are studying at the Atlantic School in Wales. They too are remarkably confident and beautiful girls.)

Here’s something for us to ponder. This young girl Malala took a stand for girls’ education and against the Swat Taliban and risked her life doing so. What about the rest of us, our various leaders, our political parties, caught between this and that, afraid of their own shadows, unable to speak clearly. By this dithering an entire nation left dazed and confused.

Malala says she wants to be prime minister one day. One thing is for sure: when she is of age and if the gods are kind, she’ll make a better prime minister than the stuffed lions and comic figures we are familiar with. Bhutto as prime minister gave an honour guard for Henry Kissinger when he visited Islamabad in 1976, an honour to which Kissinger, as secretary of state, was not entitled. Bhutto justified this on the grounds that the horses of the guard had to stand before so many dumb personages. They had the right to look upon someone intelligent for a change. Similarly, it wouldn’t hurt the prime minister’s office to have someone bright in it for a change.

Public disillusionment with government has never been so great. It was only a few months ago that the public was roundly cursing the PPP and holding it responsible for all its miseries. Punjab went all out for the PML-N, convinced it had the keys to the nation’s salvation. As the economic situation worsens, all that euphoria is gone. Now ask people what they think of the government and the answers are likely to be startling.

Our generation – and it’s the one now in charge – has burnt itself out. Or, what is perhaps nearer the truth, it had never much in its arsenal to begin with. That’s why Pakistan seems a bit lost, adrift on stormy seas and no able hand on the tiller. When brave voices like Malala’s rise up they point to things as they could be. But that’s a long way off and meanwhile we have just the stuffed animals and stables that require so much cleaning.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com