Malala and Religion

Frank S. Robinson
4 min readSep 2, 2024

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September 2, 2024

Malala Yousafzai, 15, was shot in the head in 2012, on a school bus, by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan, targeted because she’d become an icon for girls’ education. She survived. I’ve read her book, I Am Malala.

What a story — and not just the shooting. Her ethnically Pashtun family lived in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, not exactly a cosmopolitan realm of modernity. They were poor. And that didn’t mean food stamps. Americans have no idea.

On the first page, she relates the culture shock of landing up in England — mentioning cooking ovens “that don’t need anyone to go and fetch gas cylinders from the bazaar.” I laughed, thinking of how much technology is actually behind those cylinders, themselves a vast advancement!

Malala’s father, despite poverty, through sheer grit managed to get a college education. Indeed, so fixated on education that his dream was to start a school. And he did it, though it was touch-and-go, and chronically losing money. Then everything was wiped out by a flood. He started again.

Malala is Muslim (at least as of the book’s 2013 publication). She was shot because local Muslim fanatics opposed girls’ education. A key recurring element of the book was the whole Muslim take on the female “problem.” The very existence of another gender seems to mess up those men’s heads. Unable to relate to women in a healthy way as fellow human beings.

It’s really all about sex. All the burqa stuff, keeping girls from schooling, separating them in every way. “Purdah” is the word, equivalent to locking women away from the world so only their husbands can have access. Like a woman is some precious, fragile object that must be kept in a climate controlled bell jar. Nice in a way to be treated so reverently. But they’re not objects, they’re people, and most would rather live as such. Especially given the freedoms enjoyed by males in their society.

And they’d rather not suffer “honor killings,” by family members, to uphold their Islamic purity when daughters or sisters are accused of straying from Purdah. Nor endure female genital mutilation, to prevent sexual pleasure and thus discourage adultery. (Quick research failed to clarify how common these may be in Pakistan. FGM is mostly in Africa.)

A phrase appearing in the book is “taken a wife.” Think about that. It says everything.

Nature made sex a powerful force for obvious reasons. Yet we are not slaves of nature, not required to bend our whole existence to sexual imperatives. Even the most lubricious can’t spend more than a small fraction of their hours in sex.

Am I being too rational? No. Not when I compare the rich rewards of my own bond with my wife against the arid neuroticism their culture imposes on too many Muslim marriages.

Religion more broadly pervades this book, the lives of the people in it, and the whole functioning of their society. All grounded in a childish fairy tale laughably divorced from reality. Much of America isn’t so different. You’d think in the age of science, technology, computers, space exploration, artificial intelligence, we’d have grown up. The dissonance between what human reason has achieved, and the atavistic persistence of religion, is jarring.

In 2012 (just before Malala’s shooting), I wrote a blog post titled “Pakistan: The F**ked-up Country.”* It has not improved since.

Back in Swat, in 2005, a young radio preacher named Fazlullah started gaining attention and support, with at first reasonable-sounding messages. But soon the militancy ramps up, and Fazlullah becomes a kind of local warlord, deploying an army of Taliban fanatics to violently enforce an extremist version of Islamic puritanism. Including stopping girls’ education. The bloodied bodies piling up in the public square.

“It felt as though the whole country were going mad,” Malala writes. She’s eloquent about what amounted to the clash between efforts to live humanly and the religion at odds with that. We often hear the words “sick society.” This one is sick at its Muslim core. Many actually believing that anyone not totally with the program — anyone — deserves death. Should be killed. And practicing this insane ethic in full.

If you think it can’t happen here, think again. No God protects us. Religion is the curse of humanity.

*https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/pakistan-the-fked-up-country/

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