I am Malala The Girl who stood for Education and was shot by the Taliban 

Dia lahir di Pakistan di daerah bernama Swat dengan lembahnya yang indah. Pada umur 15 dia tertembak di kepala di Bus sekolah yang ditumpanginya, dia juga adalah penerima “Nobel Peace Prize” termuda di usia 17 tahun.  Pada usia 16 dia juga mendirikan sebuah Organisasi Non-Profit atas namanya Malala Fund yang bertujuan untuk memperjuangkan pendidikan khususnya untuk anak perempuan.  Dia juga masuk dalam daftar 100 orang berpengaruh dunia versi majalah Time. Semua itu dia raih dari keterbatasan kondisinya demi untuk pendidikan yang lebih baik.

Buku ini menceritakan kehidupan Malala seorang anak perempuan yang sangat peduli dengan pendidikan dan berjuang agar setiap anak perempuan juga diberikan hak yang sama untuk pendidikan. Malala juga didukung oleh ayahnya yang juga sangat peduli dengan pendidikan bukan hanya buat anak laki-laki tetapi juga untuk anak perempuan, yang juga mendirikan sekolah di daerahnya. Dalam perjalanannya Radio BBC mencari guru perempuan atau anak sekolah yang mau menceritakan bagaimana kisah hidupnya ditengah-tengah kekuasaan Taliban. Malala dengan dukungan dari ayahnya akhirnya mengambil peran ini.  Kisahnya ini akhirnya lama kelamaan membuat Taliban gerah dan akhirnya mencarinya dan menembaknya. Keajaiban membuatnya sembuh dan membawa kisahnya dari desa yang kecil sampai ke berbicara di forum United Nation di New York. Pada usia 16 tahun dia menjadi simbol global perdamaian.

Nice quote :

We lived in the most beautiful place in all the world. My valley, the Swat Valley, is a heavenly kingdom of mountains, gushing waterfalls and crystal-clear lakes. WELCOME TO PARADISE , it says on a sign as you enter the valley

Kalau kita cari di internet maka akan kita dapati Swat Valley ini memang memiliki panorama yang sangat indah, layak masuk check list daftar tempat liburan, terlepas dari sarana dan fasilitas di sana seperti apa. Di daerah sinilah Malala tinggal.

The man was wearing a peaked cap and had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as if he had flu. He looked like a college student. Then he swung himself onto the tailboard at the back and leaned in right over us.

‘Who is Malala?’ he demanded.

No one said anything, but several of the girls looked at me. I was the only girl with my face not covered. That’s when he lifted up a black pistol. I later learned it was a Colt 45. Some of the girls screamed. Moniba tells me I squeezed her hand. My friends say he fired three shots, one after another. The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit the girls next to me. One bullet went into Shazia’s left hand. The third went through her left shoulder and into the upper right arm of Kainat Riaz. My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired. By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba’s lap were full of blood. 

Everything changed when my father was ten. Just after Christmas 1979 the Russians invaded our neighbour Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans fled across the border and General Zia gave them refuge. Vast camps of white tents sprang up mostly around Peshawar, some of which are still there today. Our biggest intelligence service belongs to the military and is called the ISI. It started a massive programme to train Afghan refugees recruited from the camps as resistance fighters or mujahideen. Though Afghans are renowned fighters, Colonel Imam, the officer heading the programme, complained that trying to organise them was ‘like weighing frogs’. 

The Russian invasion transformed Zia from an international pariah to the great defender of freedom in the Cold War. The Americans became friends with us once again, as in those days Russia was their main enemy. Next door to us the Shah of Iran had been overthrown in a revolution a few months earlier so the CIA had lost their main base in the region. Pakistan took its place. Billions of dollars flowed into our exchequer from the United States and other Western countries, as well as weapons to help the ISI train the Afghans to 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’.

One of their most heated debates in that first year was over a novel. The book was called The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, and it was a parody of the Prophet’s life set in Bombay. Muslims widely considered it blasphemous and it provoked so much outrage that it seemed people were talking of little else. The odd thing was no one had even noticed the publication of the book to start with – it wasn’t actually on sale in Pakistan – but then a series of articles appeared in Urdu newspapers by a mullah close to our intelligence service, berating the book as offensive to the Prophet and saying it was the duty of good Muslims to protest. Soon mullahs all over Pakistan were denouncing the book, calling for it to be banned, and angry demonstrations were held. The most violent took place in Islamabad on 12 February 1989, when American flags were set alight in front of the American Centre – even though Rushdie and his publishers were British. Police fired into the crowd, and five people were killed. The anger wasn’t just in Pakistan. Two days later Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination.

Some of our religious people saw Osama bin Laden as a hero. In the bazaar you could buy posters of him on a white horse and boxes of sweets with his picture on them. These clerics said 9/11 was revenge on the Americans for what they had been doing to other people round the world, but they ignored the fact that the people in the World Trade Center were innocent and had nothing to do with American policy and that the Holy Quran clearly says it is wrong to kill. Our people see conspiracies behind everything, and many argued that the attack was actually carried out by Jews as an excuse for America to launch a war on the Muslim world. Some of our newspapers printed stories that no Jews went to work at the World Trade Center that day. My father said this was rubbish. 

It was during one of those dark days that my father received a call from his friend Abdul Hai Kakar, a BBC radio correspondent based in Peshawar. He was looking for a female teacher or a schoolgirl to write a diary about life under the Taliban. He wanted to show the human side of the catastrophe in Swat. Initially Madam Maryam’s younger sister Ayesha agreed, but her father found out and refused his permission saying it was too risky.

Islamabad was totally different to Swat. It was as different for us as Islamabad is to New York. Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions. We saw women in the streets without purdah, their heads completely uncovered. I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl. Later I realized that simply having your head uncovered isn’t what makes you modern. 

Catatan saya mengenai buku ini adalah Malala adalah gadis biasa yang hanya ingin bersekolah dan menempuh pendidikan. Malala mempunyai ayah yang sangat peduli dengan pendidikan anaknya dan sang ayah pula yang mempunyai peran besar dalam kehidupan Malala sampai akhirnya dia tertembak. Malala sama seperti anak lainnya yang suka membaca , menonton TV, mendengarkan musik , mengganti potongan rambut dan yang lainnya. Malala adalah anak yang sholeha yang suka membaca Alquran , tapi ada juga pada suatu paragraf di buku ini Malala melakukan sesuatu yang di larang oleh Al Quran yaitu melepaskan kerudungnya pada saat pergi ke kota di mana banyak perempuan di jalan tidak memakai penutup kepala sama sekali dan dia melepas kerudungnya karena mengikuti lingkungannya. Dia merasa telah menjadi wanita modern yang pada akhirnya dia menyadari bahwa menjadi modern bukan artinya melepas kerudung. Malala yang di atas harus berhadapan dengan Taliban yang radikal, yang melarang mendengarkan musik, anak perempuan bersekolah.

Malala adalah salah satu korban radikalisme yang dilakukan Taliban. Pada masa itu di madrasah-madrasah berkembang pesat ajaran radikalisme yang sebenarnya tidak sesuai dengan nilai-nilai Islam. Perlu juga diingat saat itu adalah saat dimana terjadi perebutan kekuasaan untuk memperebutkan Afganishtan dan Pakistan, dan sebenarnya Amerika sendirilah yang menyuburkan radikalisme tersebut dengan membiayai dan mengembangkan pejuang-pejuang yang bisa digunakan Amerika untuk melawan musuhnya, Taliban juga adalah produk Amerika.

Terlepas dari semua hal di atas, melakukan kekerasan penembakan terhadap anak adalah kejahatan yang besar yang dilakukan oleh Taliban, hal ini adalah sesuatu yang jelas salah dalam hal kemanusiaan dan juga agama. Wallahu A’lam

Baca Juga :

[Resensi Buku] Prisoners of Geography – Tim Marshall

[Resensi Buku] – Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky