I am Malala

say, ‘Mr So-and-so was smoking chars but has stopped because it’s sinful,’ or, ‘Mr X has kept his beard and I congratulate him,’ or, ‘Mr Y voluntarily closed down his CD shop.’ He told them they would have their reward in the hereafter. People liked to hear their names on the radio; they also liked to hear which of their neighbours were sinful so they could gossip: ‘Have you heard about So-and-so?’
    Mullah FM made jokes about the army. Fazlullah denounced Pakistani government officials as ‘infidels’ and said they were opposed to bringing in sharia law. He said that if they did not implement it, his men would ‘enforce it and tear them to pieces’. One of his favourite subjects was the injustice of the feudal system of the khans. Poor people were happy to see the khans getting their comeuppance. They saw Fazlullah as a kind of Robin Hood and believed that when Fazlullah took over he would give the khans’ land to the poor. Some of the khans fled. My father was against ‘khanism’ but he said the Taliban were worse.
    My father’s friend Hidayatullah had become a government official in Peshawar and warned us, ‘This is how these militants work. They want to win the hearts and minds of the people so they first see what the local problems are and target those responsible, and that way they get the support of the silent majority. That’s what they did in Waziristan when they went after kidnappers and bandits. After, when they get power, they behave like the criminals they once hunted down.’
    Fazlullah’s broadcasts were often aimed at women. He must have known that many of our men were away from home, working in coal mines in the south or on building sites in the Gulf. Sometimes he would say, ‘Men, go outside now. I am talking to the women.’ Then he’d say, ‘Women are meant to fulfil their responsibilities in the home. Only in emergencies can they go outside, but then they must wear the veil.’ Sometimes his men would display the fancy clothes that they said they had taken from ‘decadent women’ to shame them.
    My friends at school said their mothers listened to the Radio Mullah although our headmistress Madam Maryam told us not to. At home we only had my grandfather’s old radio, which was broken, but my mother’s friends all listened and told her what they heard. They praised Fazlullah and talked of his long hair, the way he rode a horse and behaved like the Prophet. Women would tell him their dreams and he would pray for them. My mother enjoyed these stories, but my father was horrified.
    I was confused by Fazlullah’s words. In the Holy Quran it is not written that men should go outside and women should work all day in the home. In our Islamic studies class at school we used to write essays entitled ‘How the Prophet Lived’. We learned that the first wife of the Prophet was a businesswoman called Khadijah. She was forty, fifteen years older than him, and she had been married before, yet he still married her. I also knew from watching my own mother that Pashtun women are very powerful and strong. Her mother, my grandmother, had looked after all eight children alone after my grandfather had an accident and broke his pelvis and could not leave his bed for eight years.
    A man goes out to work, he earns a wage, he comes back home, he eats, he sleeps. That’s what he does. Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children. In our house my mother managed everything because my father was so busy. It was my mother who would wake up early in the morning, iron our school clothes, make our breakfast and teach us how to behave. It was my mother who would go to the market, shop for us and cook. All those things she did.
    In the first year of the Taliban I had two operations, one to take out my appendix and the other to remove my tonsils. Khushal had his appendix out too. It was my mother who took us to hospital; my father just visited us and brought ice cream. Yet my mother still believed it was written in the Quran that women should not go out and women should not talk to men other than relatives they cannot marry. My father would say to her, ‘Pekai, purdah is not only in the veil, purdah is in the heart.’
    Lots of women were so moved by what Fazlullah said that they gave him gold and money, particularly in poor villages or