Malala Yousafzai is a world-famous youth icon. The daughter of an outspoken Pakistani women’s education activist, and herself a teenage blogger on the topic from 2009 onwards, she became the subject of intense hatred among members of the Taliban in the Swat Valley region of Pakistan’s Afghan border. In 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head by a young assassin acting on Taliban’s behalf. The attack was widely reported around the world, and – upon a speedy transferal to the UK for specialist medical treatment – she made an astonishing recovery, proceeding to use her newfound celebrity to continue her campaign for women’s educational rights, and becoming the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, at the age of 17.

Yousafzai’s first book, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2013, barely a year after her shooting (its US publisher is Little, Brown and Company). The book’s subtitle pitches it as a product of clashing values: human rights against religious fundamentalism, and education against repression. It is also, however, a product of intersecting interests: on Yousafzai’s part, the desire to share her story on a wide scale; on her publisher’s part, an opportunity for enormous sales by publishing while Yousafzai was still in the headlines. The fact that the book is co-written by an experienced Times (London) foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, adds an extra representational layer to the story that it tells, raising questions about Yousafzai’s narrative agency, as well as prompting questions about the position that both the text and Yousafzai herself occupy in Western culture.

Something is, in fact, revealed about the book’s cultural positioning simply by taking a glance at the contrasting ways in which it has been received within and outside of Pakistan. In the West, the reception was overwhelmingly positive, with the book consistently visible in bookshops and becoming an instant international bestseller (Sutton 2013). Interestingly, however, reviews in Western newspapers tended to focus more on the symbolic importance of its story than on genuine evaluative reflection, favouring platitudes about humanity and human rights over actual critique (perhaps understandable, given the circumstances). The Washington Post, for instance, said that Malala “stands for the universal possibility of a little girl” (Arana 2013), the Guardian that the memoir is full of “powerful reminders of the best in human nature” (Roberts 2013), and British Conservative MP Baroness Sayeeda Warsi used her Telegraph review to promote the UK Government’s policy on supporting education in Pakistan (Warsi 2013). Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, the book was immediately banned, and the Taliban renewed its call for Yousafzai’s death. As Shazia Sadaf explains, “Although the Pakistani media certainly contributed to Malala’s early celebrity status through television and local newspaper reporting, it was the universalization of her iconic status in the Western media, following her medical treatment and ‘adoption’ by the United Kingdom, that caused the first wave of animosity against her” (2017: 858). Compounded by a fear of Taliban reprisals, such has been the intensity of this suspicion towards Yousafzai in Pakistan that schools have actively resisted pressure to be named after her (864), while in 2015 the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation (APPSF) published a riposte to her memoir titled I Am Not Malala: I Am Muslim, I Am Pakistani (857).

What unites the Western and Pakistani responses, of course, is the fact that neither is really engaging with Malala Yousafzai as a rounded human being, but rather with the idea of her: “Malala”, the international human rights symbol. Both responses are reductive: one in its valorisation, the other in its censure. As sociologist Thomas Olesen has put it in a study of Yousafzai’s celebrity, she has achieved the status of “global injustice icon”: that is, someone whose image – like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela – constitutes a seemingly empirical “prism” of meaning and value processes (in this case those of human rights) at the level of global society (2016: 312). In this respect, the memoir is reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: a book that, as Hamid Dabashi recently reflected, in the wake of the “Rushdie Affair” in 1989, “stopped being a novel and became a manifesto” (2019: n. pg.). In a similar way, Malala the icon can be seen to have taken precedence over her book’s content in the minds of many on either side of the argument: what her story represents, ideologically, has become detached from the actual details of its narrative.

The memoir opens with a prologue that outlines, from Yousafzai’s point of view, the day that she was shot. In line with the idea that the text is a kind of manifesto, this section also sets the book up as a protest of sorts: “‘Who is Malala?’” Yousafzai recalls the young Talib shouting at the group of young girls around her, before writing, defiantly, “I am Malala. And this is my story” (Yousafzai, with Lamb, 2013: 6). The story that follows begins at her birth in 1997, but quickly moves into the 11-year period that takes up most of the narrative: from the 9/11 attacks in September 2001 to the shooting in November 2012. At the heart of the narrative is her father’s dangerous struggle to run a school for girls, increasingly under threat from religious hardliners as the so-called global “war on terror” progresses and, as a result, the Taliban begin moving into the area. Yousafzai narrates her story against a backdrop of paradigm-shifting events in Pakistan’s political landscape, such as the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, and the US killing of Osama Bin Laden on the country’s soil in 2011. She also relates her experience of writing as an anonymous activist blogger for BBC Urdu for three years. However, it is her father’s ongoing pro-education activism that eventually makes her a target.

Throughout the memoir, Yousafzai repeatedly ties education to Enlightenment-inspired humanism. She writes:

The Taliban is against education because they think that when a child reads a book or learns English or studies science he or she will become Westernised.
But I said, “Education is education. We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.” Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human. (2013: 136)

Passages such as this one emphasise a universality of human values that transcends cultural constructs such as “East” and “West”, Muslim or non-Muslim. In this respect, the book’s argument resembles the kind of values-based cosmopolitanism prominently advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah, most recently in his BBC Reith Lectures: “Values aren’t a birthright’” he argues, “you need to keep caring about them. Living in the west, however you define it, being western, provides no guarantee that you will care about western civilisation. The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European” (2016, n. pg.). However, there is, of course, a degree of simplification in Yousafzai’s point, as the concept of the human in itself is a construct that emerges out of Western Enlightenment tradition. Moreover, as many critics have pointed out, not least since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq during the so-called “war on terror”, the rhetoric of human rights can be mobilised for purposes that, in practice, undermine the very goals that they ostensibly set out to achieve. As Joseph Slaughter has put it in Human Rights, Inc., for many years “[we Westerners] knew that the Taliban were a violent and repressive regime, especially toward women, but we did not acknowledge that fact until we needed a humanitarian rationale for prosecuting the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan” (2007: 11–12). Meanwhile, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us that it is often true that “for better or for worse, the human rights aspect of postcoloniality has turned out to be the breaking of the new nations, in the name of their breaking-in into the international community of nations” (2003: 16).

 The frenzied celebration of Yousafzai in the West, especially in the immediate aftermath of her attack, has been commented upon extensively. Elsa Ashish Thomas and Rashid Narain Shukul have argued, for instance, that in the Western media, “the Malala narrative not only reinforces colonial power structures but also paints western gender values as the universal values for girls the world over” (2015: 236). Similarly, Max Fisher has posited that:

The young woman’s power as a symbol is undeniable. In the past months, though, the Western fawning over Malala has become less about her efforts to improve conditions for girls in Pakistan, or certainly about the struggles of millions of girls in Pakistan, and more about our own desire to make ourselves feel warm and fuzzy with a celebrity and an easy message. It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook, convincing ourselves that it’s a simple matter of good guys vs. bad guys, that we’re on the right side and that everything is okay. (2013, n. pg.)

In I Am Malala, Lamb and Yousafzai’s narrative does at times reinforce the kind of “good guys vs. bad guys” narrative that Fisher describes. A clear example of this is when Yousafzai says: “Our school was a haven from the horrors outside. All the other girls in my class wanted to be doctors, but I decided I wanted to be an inventor and make an anti-Taliban machine which would sniff them out and destroy their guns” [2013: 114]). Nonetheless, a careful reading of the memoir reveals to us that despite its occasional replication of the binaries that have characterised Yousafzai’s media reception, in other moments the book also displays at least some awareness of the dangers of such discourse. This is evident, for instance, when Yousafzai repeatedly deflects accusations of neo-imperialist co-option by distancing herself from US foreign policy: at one point she reminds her reader that in the 1980s, “jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA”, while elsewhere she mentions that “Children in … refugee camps were given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through [reference to] fighting” (Yousafzai, with Lamb, 2013: 26). This kind of awareness, while of course limited and itself sometimes reductive, is in line with Phyllis Mentzell Ryder’s findings in an analysis of Yousafzai’s UN testimonials (the content of which is often overlooked in superficial news reports). In Ryder’s words: “even as Malala relies on Western media to circulate her message, she persistently disrupts its dominant messages. The role of critics, then, should be to amplify these disruptions” (2015: 176). One such disruption that Ryder herself “amplifies” is that which took place in a meeting between Yousafzai and US President Barack Obama in 2013, in which Yousafzai expressed her concerns that drone strikes fuel terrorism in Pakistan. For Ryder, this is important evidence of Yousafzai actively “resist[ing] attempts to use her story to justify drones or wars. From her perspective, Western military intervention is the exact wrong response” (181). Just how successful Yousafzai’s “disruption” of Western media power can ultimately be is a question that certainly needs asking, but instances like this one remind us again that her iconicity has a life of its own, existing largely independent from her actions.

In I Am Malala, the ambivalence that Yousafzai (as represented by Lamb), shows toward the language of “good guys vs. bad guys” is particularly apparent in the way she describes the shooting itself. The attack is narrated three times throughout the book, each time constituting the dramatic conclusion to a chapter. The first occurrence is in the “Prologue”, when the event is narrated in a manner that simply reports the facts, and is largely made up of what has been related to her subsequently: “I later learned it was a Colt .45”; “My friends said he fired three shots” (2013: 6). The second occurrence is midway through the book, and in its much more figurative style attempts to emotionally place the reader in Yousafzai’s shoes: “The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing the heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one” (203). The third occurrence appears at the end of the final chapter, when the narration shifts to present tense to emphasise the connection between this deeply personal event and the global political context of which it is a part:

A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn’t kill any of them. This seems an unlikely story, and people say I have made a miraculous recovery. … I know God stopped me from going to the grave. It feels like this is a second life. People prayed to God to spare me, and I was spared for a reason – to use my life for helping people. (225)

Religious faith is emotively mobilised here as a way of countering both the extremism of the Taliban and stereotypes about Islam and violence in mainstream Western media discourse, and throughout the book Yousafzai repeatedly reminds her reader that the Taliban’s attack on her did not prompt her to rethink her faith, but strengthened it. The book ends, for instance, with her stating: “I love my God. I thank my Allah. I talk to him all day. He is the greatest. By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given me great responsibilities” (265). Through the gradual retelling of her trauma in increasingly emotive – and overtly Muslim – terms, as well as by ending the book on a religious note, the text’s authors clearly aim to challenge the notion that Islam and social liberalism, as well as education and women’s rights, are fundamentally incompatible.

It is this combination of values that Yousafzai sees personified in her father, Ziauddin, whom she idolises. In the first chapter, she tells the reader that:

For a while [in his youth], his Muslim identity seemed more important than anything else in his life. … He believes he might even have become a suicide bomber had there been such a thing in those days. But from an early age he had been a questioning kind of boy who rarely took anything at face value, even though our education at government schools meant learning by rote and pupils were not supposed to question teachers. (27)

Here, Yousafzai’s father – a longstanding activist for girls’ education – is presented as a challenge to all who subscribe to binary language surrounding Islam in the contemporary world, whether in the form of the Taliban or of Donald Trump. Of course, this is also another instance in which the success of Yousafzai’s attempt to “disrupt” such binaries remains open to question: there is a simplistically two-dimensional goodness to the way that Ziauddin is figured throughout the book, and the badness of the Taliban is likewise – on the whole – noticeably decoupled from any real sense of the organisation’s complex geopolitical context. Moreover, the centrality to Yousafzai’s narrative of the father-daughter relationship points toward another way in which the memoir inadvertently plays into an ideological framework set by Western Enlightenment norms: namely, through its structural reliance on the bildungsroman form.

The bildungsroman, or “coming of age” novel, is a literary genre that emerged out of a post-Enlightenment valorisation of the concept of the individual: it traditionally follows a young character – such as David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or Stephen Dedalus – through their formative years as they grow into adulthood, and it has often functioned as an effective tool for generating empathy with the disadvantaged. Critics such as M. Neelika Jaywardane, for instance, have argued that memoirs and personal narratives (such as Mayvish Khan’s My Guantanamo Diary [2008]) can offer important counter-narratives to dominant post-9/11 discourses on security and surveillance. Similarly, Carol Lazzaro-Weiss has pointed out that women’s Bildung narratives can work “to defend the right of feminist and women authors to describe their own reality” (1990: 21). And indeed, in I Am Malala, the bildungsroman structure does to some degree help convey feminist ideals, specifically by working to demonstrate a kind of transfer of power from Yousafzai’s father to herself. As she succinctly puts it, “I used to be known as his daughter; now he’s known as my father” (2013: 259). On the verge of adulthood, she has inherited the responsibility to show the world’s population, both Muslim and non-Muslim, that Islam, secularism and women’s rights are not mutually exclusive.

Nonetheless, the bildungsroman form also perpetuates the “good guys vs. bad guys” dimension of the book’s narrative, feeding into the media image of Yousafzai as a two-dimensional hero. To clarify: this is not to dispute the idea that Yousafzai is in many ways heroic, nor to say that her activism shouldn’t be applauded. Rather, it is to point out that the heroism depicted in this bildung narrative can, at times, work to reinforce an Orientalist conceptualisation of Malala as an unusually liberal-minded Muslim, to whom other Muslims should aspire. As Shenila S. Khoja-Moolji has put it:

Malala traverse[s] what I am terming the “chain of vulnerability-suffering-empowerment” established by and within contemporary human rights regimes, which transforms them from vulnerable and suffering to empowered women/girls. The metaphor of a chain is productive for me as it draws attention to the teleological and progressive linking of these subject positions in the dominant discourse of human rights—that is, a brown woman inevitably has to travel through this chain in order to achieve the kind of empowerment recognized by the liberal humanist discourse of rights. Such forms of legibility, as feminist postcolonial scholars have shown, are an effect of discourses about Islam and Muslim men that displace brown, Muslim bodies from dominant performances linked to being human. (2017: 383–4)

Of course, many Muslims and Pakistanis do see the heroism in Yousafzai’s story, but the point is that there is a neocolonial power dynamic at play when it is Western journalists and publishers who are the ones that place her on this pedestal, decontextualised and monolithic. Under exceptional circumstances, Yousafzai,  now based in Britain, has been given the equally exceptional opportunity to continue struggling, prominently, for what she believes to be “good”. In Pakistan itself, however, millions who share her ideals continue to exist in a world determined by complex and conflicting interests, and the division between “good guys” and “bad guys” can be much harder to define. Putting this in clearer terms later on in her article, Khoja-Moojli questions the “cartoonist representations around Malala in elite newspapers, featuring visual and textual rhetoric that portrays the undifferentiated mass of bearded men, Islam, and the Taliban in stark contrast to Malala, books, and education. Here, the latter stands in for the cherished ideals of civilized/progressive people, and the former signals its lack” (385). On the one hand, the book gives Yousafzai an opportunity to foreground Pakistani women’s collective struggles; on the other, its bildung form risks isolating her story from theirs, at times working to reinforce precisely the kind of “us and them” binary that it ostensibly seeks to challenge.

In conclusion, I Am Malala tells an important story about one young girl’s extraordinary experience in a violently schismatic twenty-first century world, but this story is not solely the product of Yousafzai’s remarkable voice: rather, it is also shaped by the economic and cultural paradigms underpinning contemporary global human rights discourse. As such, perhaps the most productive way to approach this text is to read it as a stepping-stone, leading Western readers towards the voices of other Muslim women writers. There is a growing body of work by such figures, including, for instance, Yasmin Hai and Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, who literary scholar Claire Chambers has argued are “writers [who] are challenging and subverting attempts to pigeonhole them” (2013: 1). The same can be said for US-based Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, whose 2016 memoir Muslim Girl similarly challenges stereotypes. Ultimately, though, whatever we make of “Malala” the icon, as careful readers and critics, we can do far worse than to take her memoir at its word when, through Lamb, she writes: “When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it’s the story of Malala, ‘a girl shot by the Taliban’; I don’t feel it’s a story about me at all” (2013: 225).

Works Cited

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Citation: O'Gorman, Daniel. "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 April 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35621, accessed 21 November 2024.]