This is another one of those times when I doubt I can write anything that hasn’t been written about this topic already but I feel compelled to do it anyway.
You’ve probably heard about Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani activist who was shot in the head and neck by the Taliban while waiting for the school bus the other day because she’s “pro-West.” The winner of her country’s first National Peace Prize is stable and unconscious as she recovers from emergency surgery. (Conflicting reports have one or two other girls also injured in the attack.)
The Pakistani Taliban, which claimed responsibility for the crime, said in an official statement: "The Pakistani Taliban successfully targeted Malala Yousafzai in Mingora. Although she was young and a girl and Taliban does not believe in attacking women but whomsoever leads any campaign against Islam and Shariah is ordered to be killed by Shariah. It is not merely allowed to kill such a person but it is obligatory in Islam."Wow. I wasn’t aware that Malala’s insistence that girls be allowed to attend school in Taliban-controlled areas of Pakistan represented an assault on Islam. I also didn’t know that the Taliban “does not believe in attacking women.” I guess those grainy cell phone videos on the internet of women and girls in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia being stoned and decapitated were anomalies then. The reports of the systematic flogging, rape and murder of thousands of women in Afghanistan must have been exaggerated. The world community must have been mistaken when it condemned the Taliban for “brutal repression of women” a decade or so ago.
I’m not sure what to write. It’s too easy to condemn misogynistic terrorist groups, to trash Islam and religion, to vilify the country that harbored Osama bin Laden and can’t protect someone from being attacked for the despicable crime of demanding equal rights. Most people already find it dreadful that we live in a world where little girls are shot outside their schools (if they’re even allowed to attend). Men persecute, degrade and abuse women and girls all over the world, not just in South Asia. And for every tragic situation and distressing circumstance that captures the media’s interest, there are hundreds of others that never make the front page or the nightly news.
But still. Malala was just waiting for a school bus.
One Al Jazeera reader commented, “Malala is no different than riders of a bus in London, or a train in Spain, or those cuing up at the American embassy in Nigeria, or on a plane that flew into the World Trade towers, or attend a funeral or wedding or a hotel in India. The Taliban did not commit the majority of these crimes but those who believe in Islam did, and are proud. Something is terribly wrong with Islam that so many Imans command their followers to commit these atrocities. Like all previous ‘outrages,’ nothing much will come from this.”
I suppose the Taliban seeks to squelch dissent and control Pakistanis through fear but it’s likely to backfire in this case. People tend to band together when their children are shot at bus stops. It’s possible that Malala will be too afraid to continue to speak out against injustice and unfairness once she heals (and I join the millions of others around the globe who are hoping for a complete and speedy recovery). But the opposite could happen: her suffering could serve to galvanize others to join her in condemning the unacceptable and working for change.
I hope this is what results from this horrendous attack. I hope Malala’s assailants are caught and punished. And I hope I never have to explain to my children why men are so awful.
Sources: Washington Post, New York Times, Detroit Free Press, International Herald Tribune, Al Jazeera.
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