| Who would shoot such a beautiful girl? |
| Malala Yousfazal |
Some years ago, over dinner at a restaurant in Amsterdam, human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounted a moment of her childhood when her world began to change: Human beings, a teacher told her class, had come “from monkeys” – not from God. Little Ayaan rushed home to present this extraordinary information to her mother, who responded with a mixture of fury and disbelief. “They come from monkeys!” she said. “We come from Allah.”
It was an expression as much racist as it was religious: “They” were the Kenyans, the dark-skinned blacks of Nairobi, where Ayaan’s family then lived; by “we,” her mother meant lighter-skinned Somalis, like herself.
Days later, a confused and shaken Ayaan hid her face in her arms as she filled in the answers on her final exam. “Allah, forgive me,” she whispered to herself as she responded to questions on evolution and the origin of man; and she answered in favor of science, not religion.
I’ve thought about this story often since the shooting of Malala Yousafzai by Pakistani Taliban members for having had the audacity, as a 14-year-old-girl, to go to school – and worse, to encourage other young girls to do the same. Knowledge, after all, is power, and power in the hands of women threatens the very existence of the Taliban, and of the premises that serve as its foundation.
The Taliban shot Malala, but most of these attacks are perpetrated by radical Muslims who are not part of the Taliban, and likely never will be. Certainly the Taliban have no monopoly on the oppression of women, not even in Islamic countries (think of Saudi Arabia, for one, where, in addition to the laws forbidding women to be seen alone in public and to drive, even Swedish furniture giant Ikea was recently caught airbrushing women from its catalogue.
This fact is why the real victim in the shooting of Malala Yousafzai is not only Malala; it is women – specifically, the women and young girls who live under the dominating dictatorial fist of radical Islam, wherever its strike may land. Malala herself is, thankfully, expected to recover from her wounds; but a similar future is less certain for thousands of Pakistani women – and other Muslim girls not just in Pakistan, but around the world.
There is nothing new, of course, about keeping education from the reach of the downtrodden. It is the reason, for instance, that Americans were forbidden to teach their slaves to read. And in the 21st century, knowledge and literacy pose even greater dangers to oppressors, as the uprisings in Iran in 2009 demonstrated, let alone the pulses that ignited the so-called Arab Spring.
And Hirsi Ali’s discovery as a schoolgirl that everything her mother and her religion had presented to her as truth may not be true at all opened the Pandora’s box of her natural inquisitiveness and, ultimately, paved the way not only to her secularization, but to her liberation from radical Islam and the rule of man – including her Somali husband. (It was en route to join him in his adopted home of Canada following their forced wedding in 1992 that she made her escape, arriving in the Netherlands as a refugee; ten years later she was a member of the Dutch Parliament fighting for the rights of Muslim women in the West, a cause she continues to this day.)
But Malala isn’t seeking to throw the yoke of Islam from her shoulders. She wants only the rights she knows are available to other women throughout the world – a knowledge the Taliban aims to shield from other Muslims (as if this were even possible), and to omit from the culture they hope, eventually, to rule. The burqa-clad women of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan embodied this ideal: Kept in the dark (both literally and figuratively), with no contact with the outside world, faceless and so, inhuman, these women were the ultimate sex objects, their purpose on earth solely that of appeasing the sexual appetites of men, forbidden to think, to reason, their emotions irrelevant and unacknowledged , their longings denied, their personhood negated.
But what too many forget – or maybe do not see – is that even outside the burqa, far too many Muslim women live lives not unlike theirs; and even beyond the reach of the Taliban, in Pakistani and Turkish and Moroccan and Afghan and Iraqi families in England, in Germany, in Canada and in the USA, there are thousands of Malala Yousafzais. They are the girls who, especially in Western countries, witness the freedom other women have and long to claim it for themselves, who dream, as Malala does, of becoming doctors, professors, even astronauts. They are the girls who imagine one day marrying for love, and not indentured servitude, sold by their own fathers to pay a debt or resolve tensions between members of a clan.
One thousand of them die every year in Pakistan alone – three every day – murdered by brothers, fathers, husbands, even mothers, for the “dishonor” these longings, this wish to be barely human, brings upon their families. In Germany, in the Netherlands and in Great Britain, an estimated 12 such girls and women become the victims of such honor killings every year -- one a month in each country -- though most experts believe the real number is much higher. And why? Ultimately, it’s because they know too much.
Which is why the real fight against radical Islam is the fight for knowledge, for education, and so, the fight for civilized society. And it is why, to win this war – not just the war on terror, but the war for human rights -- we will need far more than drones and bombs and armies. We will need, more than anything, to ensure that for every Muslim man who seeks to rule by sword, there will be, too, a Muslim woman with a pen – and the skills she needs to use it.
Abigail R. Esman, an award-winning writer based in New York and the Netherlands, is the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the We
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