The hidden Malala

Why do you know the woman on the left but not the woman on the right?On the left we have the youngest Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who as we all know, was horrifically shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in October 2012 for daring to campaign for girls’ education. Far from cowering down, she has since then persisted and emerged globally as one of the most prominent advocates for right to education.

On the right we have Malalai Joya, who in 2005 became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan Parliament and has been dubbed by many as ‘the bravest woman in Afghanistan’. In 2007, however, she was suspended after publicly denouncing the presence of ‘US backed’ warlords in the Afghan Parliament – who she said were as misogynistic as Taliban, and who assaulted and threatened her with rape in open Parliament. She has since then survived multiple assassination attempts and has had to wear an all encompassing burqa when out not because the Taliban forced her to, but because she has to hide her identity for her own safety.

A Google search for “Malalai Joya” renders 95,200 results, while one for “Malala Yousafzai” renders 6.5 million results. Why the disparity?

My intention is not to pit one brave woman against another: they are both brilliant and resilient in their own right. My intention is to show how, despite their similar name and mutual bravery – only one of their stories could be co-opted to romanticise imperialism, while the other’s story would directly expose its ills.

And for this reason, we only know about Malalas that war apparently is meant to save but not the Malalais who live to remind us war can never be the answer.

Frankly, it’s not even about Malala the individual (who has been vocally anti-war herself), it’s about Malala the idea – as constructed and told by the West: war is justifiable because girls like Malala need to be saved from barbarians like Taliban. Malala’s story was coopted, against her own will, by the US and its NATO allies to peddle the ‘we are here to save the women’ card to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan.

Malalai Joya’s story on the other hand, poses an existential threat to this Western narrative, not only because countless assassination attempts have been made on her life by the very war lords who the US/NATO invasion put in power – but because of her unflinching stance against the US/NATO occupation. She has repeatedly asserted that Afghan women do not need ‘saving’ and that the net effect of foreign military intervention only causes women more suffering – striking right at the heart of the lie that was used to justify the Afghan war in the first place. As she famously once said: ‘for years I have called for the withdrawal of the foreign occupation from our country, as I believe no nation can donate liberation to another nation.’

Let us understand why and how certain stories get told, and let us tell the stories that war mongers try to keep untold.