Malala Yousafzai, the 17 year old girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012, has gained global stardom for her advocacy and activism for girls’ education. This year, she was the joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, while 12th July 2013, her 16th birthday, was declared “Malala Day” by the UN. Giving a speech at that event, she said: “Malala day is not my day. Today is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights.”
While she has been lauded all over the world for her tireless campaigning, she is not so popular at home. Ever since news of the Taliban attack on Malala spread across the world, there has been a contingent of vociferous critics in her home country, Pakistan. A section of the population have criticised her as an agent of the west, while others have said she is being used as a political pawn to make Pakistan and Islam look bad.
Now, an association of privately run Pakistani schools has staged what it called an “I am not Malala” day to protest against the Nobel Laureate. The All Pakistan Private Schools Federation claims to have 152,000 member institutions. The head of the federation, Mirza Kashif Ali, told journalists that Malala was “playing into the hands of the west”. In a statement to the media, he singled out a reference to Salman Rushdie in Malala’s book. Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is banned in Pakistan as blasphemous. In the book, Malala wrote that her father favoured a more rational approach than the street protests that followed the book’s publication. Ali said that this showed she " has nexus” with Rushdie.
The All Pakistani Private Schools Federation has already made its feelings about Malala clear; last year, it announced that the book would be banned in all its member institutions, saying that it disrespected Islam and could have a “negative” influence.
The federation’s stance is extreme, and its tactics deliberately attention-grabbing, but this does point to a broader thread of public opinion. The Pakistani journalist Huma Yusuf summed up the Malala backlash in a 2013 piece for the New York Times: "Her fame highlights Pakistan’s most negative aspect (rampant militancy); her education campaign echoes Western agendas; and the West's admiration of her is hypocritical because it overlooks the plight of other innocent victims, like the casualties of US drone strikes.”
