I am Malala

fight the communist Red Army. General Zia was invited to meet President Ronald Reagan at the White House and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. They lavished praise on him.
    Prime Minister Zulfikar Bhutto had appointed Zia as his army chief because he thought he was not very intelligent and would not be a threat. He called him his ‘monkey’. But Zia turned out to be a very wily man. He made Afghanistan a rallying point not only for the West, which wanted to stop the spread of communism from the Soviet Union, but also for Muslims from Sudan to Tajikistan, who saw it as a fellow Islamic country under attack from infidels. Money poured in from all over the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia, which matched whatever the US sent, and volunteer fighters too, including a Saudi millionaire called Osama bin Laden.

    We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don’t really recognise the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago. So our blood boiled over the Soviet invasion for both religious and nationalist reasons. The clerics of the mosques would often talk about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in their sermons, condemning the Russians as infidels and urging people to join the jihad, saying it was their duty as good Muslims. It was as if under Zia jihad had become the sixth pillar of our religion on top of the five we grow up to learn – the belief in one God, namaz or prayers five times a day, giving zakat or alms, roza – fasting from dawn till sunset during the month of Ramadan – and haj , the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every able-bodied Muslim should do once in their lifetime. My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like, ‘If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by one Muslim, 5 would be left’ or ‘15 bullets – 10 bullets = 5 bullets’.
    Some boys from my father’s district went off to fight in Afghanistan. My father remembers that one day a maulana called Sufi Mohammad came to the village and asked young men to join him to fight the Russians in the name of Islam. Many did, and they set off, armed with old rifles or just axes and bazookas. Little did we know that years later the same maulana’ s organisation would become the Swat Taliban. At that time my father was only twelve years old and too young to fight. But the Russians ended up stuck in Afghanistan for ten years, through most of the 1980s, and when he became a teenager my father decided he too wanted to be a jihadi. Though later he became less regular in his prayers, in those days he used to leave home at dawn every morning to walk to a mosque in another village, where he studied the Quran with a senior talib . At that time talib simply meant ‘religious student’. Together they studied all the thirty chapters of the Quran, not just recitation but also interpretation, something few boys do.

    The talib talked of jihad in such glorious terms that my father was captivated. He would endlessly point out to my father that life on earth was short and that there were few opportunities for young men in the village. Our family owned little land, and my father did not want to end up going south to work in the coal mines like many of his classmates. That was tough and dangerous work, and the coffins of those killed in accidents would come back several times a year. The best that most village boys could hope for was to go to Saudi Arabia or Dubai and work in construction. So heaven with its seventy-two virgins sounded attractive. Every night my father would pray to God, ‘O Allah, please make war between Muslims and infidels so I can die in your service and be a martyr.’
    For a while his Muslim identity seemed more important than anything else in his life. He began to sign himself ‘Ziauddin Panchpiri’ (the Panchpiri are a religious sect) and sprouted the first signs of a beard. It was, he says, a kind of brainwashing. He believes he might even have thought of becoming 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.
    It was around the time he