B A PARKER, HOST:
Hey. B.A. Parker here. When this publishes, that’ll mark the first day in over 50 years that NPR and member stations operate without federal funding. It’s an historic moment and one that reminds me why I do this work. I’ll never forget reporting on a group of high school students in Curtis Bay in Baltimore, who were protesting against environmental racism.
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SHASHAWNDA CAMPBELL: We had open-air coal piles since I was in high school, right? But, like, we all just walked past it because it is, like, the best way to hide something is in plain sight, right?
PARKER: And I remember standing there with my microphone in hand, and I saw how much these young people needed their voices heard. And that’s what NPR is. It’s a place for every story and every perspective. We’re still here because of you, our listeners, and as long as you keep tuning in, those voices won’t be silenced or forgotten. On with this show.
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PARKER: Hey, everyone. You’re listening to CODE SWITCH. I’m B A Parker. OK, so sometimes I use this test on dates to suss out a guy. Like, I casually ask about a famous Black woman, whether it’s Beyonce or Serena Williams or Jada Pinkett Smith. And it tells me about someone’s politics or sensibilities, if I should run. ‘Cause women, particularly women of color in the public eye, tend to draw this, let’s call it, light-hearted dehumanizing. And I was chatting about this litmus test with a fellow journalist I want to introduce you to. She’s a freelance reporter who lives in Karachi, Pakistan, Mariya Karimjee.
Hey, Mariya.
MARIYA KARIMJEE: Hi, Parker.
PARKER: So I hear you’ve used your own version of this question in Pakistan.
KARIMJEE: Yes. Years ago, I rolled out the Malala test.
PARKER: Wait, Malala as in, like, universally famous and beloved Malala?
KARIMJEE: Yes, Malala Yousafzai. And, Parker, I am super curious. What is your impression of Malala?
PARKER: I mean, for me, like, Malala is an advocate for education. I’m sure for myself and a lot of the American public, we fully gained notice of her in 2012 when she was a teenager who had been shot by the Taliban and later won the Nobel Peace Prize. And since then, she’s grown more and more revered by the public. The first thing that pops into my head is I remember in the movie “Booksmart,” the protagonist used Malala’s name as a safe word.
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BEANIE FELDSTEIN: (As Molly Davidson) I’m calling Malala.
KAITLYN DEVER: (As Amy Antsler) Wow.
KARIMJEE: Oh, yeah. That is how you know her in the West. In Pakistan, it’s a bit more complicated. A lot of people in Pakistan do not love her.
PARKER: What?
KARIMJEE: Yeah. They see her as this kid who got shot and then leveraged that to become famous. And people have strong reactions to Malala. They think she’s a puppet of Western interests. Some people, like ministers in our cabinet, even think the shooting itself was staged.
PARKER: OK. Real talk. I thought the U.S. had a lock on this kind of thinking. Like, it’s very conspiracy theory, very InfoWars.
KARIMJEE: Yeah, you guys definitely do not have a monopoly on conspiracy theories over there.
PARKER: That’s very fair.
KARIMJEE: OK. So back to the Malala test. When someone tells me their opinion about Malala, they’re telling me stuff like how likely they are to believe conspiracy theories, how skeptical they are about the media, how they see women who speak up, how they see education itself. And those things, all of those things, they help me understand a whole lot about whether we’re going to get along.
PARKER: That’s interesting. I feel like in the West, people don’t really critique Malala. She’s kind of passively revered. Like, she can be a safe guest on “The Daily Show.”
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As self) You are one of those few human beings who walks the planet and is seen as a saint.
PARKER: She can take playful jabs from Hasan Minhaj.
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HASAN MINHAJ: (As self) Malala follows me on Instagram, and I don’t follow her back.
PARKER: She can cameo on a show like “We Are Lady Parts” and not even say anything in the show.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, singing) Cross your heart and hope to die. It’s Malala Yousafzai.
PARKER: But, like, it’s all kind of part of her charm.
KARIMJEE: OK. But do you remember how last year she produced a big new Broadway show about suffragettes?
PARKER: Oh, yeah, “Suffs.”
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, singing) I’m a great American b****.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) Yes, you are.
KARIMJEE: (Laughter) Yeah, “Suffs.” “Suffs” was kind of the last straw for me because it broke my test. Because the other famous producer on this project was none other than Hillary Clinton.
PARKER: Oh, I see. Go on.
KARIMJEE: You’re in Pakistan. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department is remembered for drone strikes. Those left the kind of scars that people do not forget. And it was just a little hard to digest Malala partnering with her. There was something about that collaboration that made me start hearing Malala’s haters differently. I started wondering if some of their critiques were, in fact, valid.
PARKER: OK. So let’s get into that journey of yours. On today’s episode of CODE SWITCH, we’re going to dive into the critiques of Malala Yousafzai from people in Pakistan and how the story we’ve built around her in the U.S. doesn’t really hold the whole picture. This image of Malala as, like, a girl boss deity makes a lot of people in Pakistan very angry.
So, Mariya, what got you thinking about Malala now?
KARIMJEE: OK, Parker, I teach journalism and writing classes to 20-somethings at Habib University. It’s a small liberal arts school in Karachi. And a little over a year ago, in a class about narratives and social change, I assigned a Malala speech so that we could discuss rhetorical techniques. She gave the speech at the U.N. General Assembly on her 16th birthday. You might know the speech. She’s wearing a light pink dupatta. She looks really sweet, like a little doll.
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MALALA YOUSAFZAI: One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.
PARKER: OK, I’m not going to lie. I did just get chills when I heard her say it. I don’t know, it’s – like, it’s a teenager using all of her, like, her mic to speak truth to power, and, like, maybe I’m a sucker, but I think that’s commendable.
KARIMJEE: I know. I love this speech. I, like, really love it. But instead of talking about the speech, my students started tearing Malala apart. Like, the conversation became about whether she even deserved her fame, and it became apparent quickly that maybe my students didn’t know that Malala was a young activist who was specifically targeted by the Taliban. Like, that her getting shot wasn’t a fluke.
ZAINAB MOHIUDDIN: I remember when you told us that she used to write for BBC, although before she got shot, that didn’t entirely come as a surprise because I knew that, but I feel like it got, like, it went to the back of my memory. It was always after her getting shot and her story after that.
KARIMJEE: That’s Zainab Mohiuddin, one of my students. I spoke with her and two other students that you’ll hear from, and both of them agreed in Pakisan the story of Malala starts from the moment she got shot. A young girl is attacked by the Taliban, moves to the U.K., then becomes famous.
PARKER: That’s a very different framing from a young activist speaks out against the Taliban, gets shot and becomes a global activist for children’s education.
KARIMJEE: Yeah. And my students’ version of the narrative – it haunted me. Like, I am not a stranger to how intensely people react to anything pertaining to Malala, but I really wasn’t expecting it from students at a bougie liberal arts school.
PARKER: So tell me more about what they thought of Malala.
KARIMJEE: OK, yeah. So here’s Soheba Shoaib.
SOHEBA SHOAIB: I think Malala’s presentation was more of a thing that we know from a very young age, and we have some sort of opinions or perspectives that we have been listening to and hearing on the media or even in our families. So I think we have – we all had a lot to say.
KARIMJEE: Malala’s name came with baggage that shows up in really specific personal ways. Zainab had this moment that, I think, says a lot about how people around her saw Malala.
MOHIUDDIN: OK, I have a little bit of a backstory to this. When I was in seventh grade, so when I was, like, 12, I bought the “I Am Malala” book. No reason. Just saw it at Liberty Books. I was, like, OK, I’ll just buy it. And I was buying “The Fault In Our Stars” at the same time. So it didn’t really make sense to buy “I Am Malala” with that, right? It’s still in my cupboard. I’ve never really read it. And I feel like part of the reason is that when I bought it and I brought it home, the response I got was, oh, why did you buy this book?
KARIMJEE: For some of them, the skepticism has started to shift into something more personal. They’re not just reiterating what they’d heard growing up, but what they’ve come to believe on their own.
SHOAIB: She does what she wants to, and it’s mostly not in the favor of the people. So even if she takes the standard education (non-English language spoken). I think one of the key points in her speech, as well, I don’t see it translated in my community, or, like, here in Pakistan, or at least I’m not aware of it much. It’s just that what we see Malala as is a very whitewashed person after she left Pakistan.
KARIMJEE: Like, they were thinking, you’ve left. You’re in the West, and our lives aren’t necessarily impacted by you being there.
PARKER: Like, is that true? Like, is that a fair critique?
KARIMJEE: It’s a commonly heard critique, but honestly, no, I don’t think it’s fair. According to a representative from the Malala Fund, in the last few years alone, she’s successfully worked with Pakistan’s government to shape their commitment to girls’ education, advocated for a law that ends corporal punishment in Punjab, argued for resilient education systems to counter the impact of national emergencies and work with the provincial government of her hometown to increase the education funding by 24%.
There’s this one big incident I think about. And I told my students about how, when Malala was 16, right after she was shot, before she even won the Nobel Prize, she was invited to the White House. And while she was there, sitting with the Obamas, she told President Obama to stop the drone strikes in Pakistan. Here’s Malala later on on CBS, speaking with Norah O’Donnell.
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YOUSAFZAI: I think the best way to fight against terrorism is to do it through peaceful way, not through wars, because I believe that a war can never be ended by a war.
NORAH O’DONNELL: And you said that to President Obama?
YOUSAFZAI: Yes, of course.
KARIMJEE: And even this moment, which personally, I think is pretty badass on Malala’s part – it’s not immune to skepticism from my students.
ABDUL WAJID USMAN: How are you going to tell Obama to, like, stop the drone attacks in your country but then do, like, a play with Hillary Clinton, who has also been associated and implicated in all these, like, war crimes? So, yeah. I think it’s just very telling of her agency, of her saying all these things before but now kind of not. It’s kind of like she’s lost agency, almost, in a way.
KARIMJEE: That’s Abdul Wajid Usman (ph), and I agreed with him. Here’s Malala on her interest in that play.
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YOUSAFZAI: Of course, I talk about serious things, but I also believe that sometimes it’s not a speech. Sometimes it’s not a protest that can make it all happen. So when I think about a musical, for me, it’s a tool. It’s a platform.
KARIMJEE: But like Wajid, I, too, was grappling specifically with the Clinton connection.
PARKER: Say more about that.
KARIMJEE: OK. So the way that I saw it, again similar to Wajid, is that Malala used to be someone who criticized Obama’s foreign policy under Clinton. No matter what someone would say about her online, I felt like she had real moral clarity. But even more than 10 years later, to see her teaming up with the same person – someone who supported drone strikes, who pushed wars that directly impacted our country – Parker, it made me mad. Like, during those drone strikes, civilians were dying, too, sometimes by the dozens. And while the United States might have framed it as necessary for national security, to many people here, it felt like a constant reminder of how little anyone really understands about the reality on the ground.
PARKER: But now you get a musical.
KARIMJEE: Now you get a musical. I did reach out to Malala’s press representatives for comment about the criticism of her teaming up with Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t respond to that issue directly. And it is worth noting that Malala’s been getting more into this type of work. She’s been a producer on a movie about South Korean women divers, a documentary with Jennifer Lawrence about Afghan women under the Taliban and a Pakistani movie called “Joyland.”
PARKER: Have you seen any of the movies she’s produced?
KARIMJEE: Yeah. I loved “Joyland.” I thought it was incredible. It almost got banned from being screened in Pakistan because the themes – gender, love, queerness – were so controversial. And Malala really supported this movie vocally and financially.
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KARIMJEE: In my conversations with my students, I realized that in the decade or so since Malala has been shot, there’s been this shift around what people expect of activists and how they represent themselves on social media.
PARKER: Oh, for sure. And maybe for these students in their 20s, virtue signaling on social media is a lot of how they see activism.
KARIMJEE: Exactly. It’s not about what you’ve done. It’s about making it clear, over and over again, where you stand. And I kind of wanted that from her, too. Like, one thing that came up a few times was Gaza.
MOHIUDDIN: The overarching thought at that time was that she hadn’t really spoken up properly about Palestine.
USMAN: And just, like, kind of refusing to speak up very explicitly on the Palestine and Israel conflict.
SHOAIB: They see her advocating for other things, but not Gaza.
KARIMJEE: So Malala has, in fact, spoken up on Gaza several times.
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YOUSAFZAI: I want to express my solidarity with Palestinian people. After decades of oppression against Palestinians, we cannot deny the asymmetry of power and the brutality, from Israeli airstrikes on women and children in Gaza to stun grenades targeting worshippers in Al-Aqsa.
KARIMJEE: That’s from four years ago. And in 2014, when Malala won the World’s Children’s Prize, she donated the entirety of the prize money, which was $50,000, to rebuilding schools in Gaza. Parker, do you want to read her statement here?
PARKER: Sure.
(Reading) Innocent Palestinian children have suffered terribly and for too long. We must all work to ensure Palestinian boys and girls and all children everywhere receive a quality education in a safe environment because, without education, there will never be peace.
KARIMJEE: When we reached out to the Malala Fund, they said that not only has Malala posted about Gaza more than 40 times on social media, she’s also made personal donations of more than $200,000 towards Gaza. And since October 2023, she’s directed $600,000 from the Malala Fund to organizations working with families in Gaza.
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KARIMJEE: Personally, I have a question about why Pakistanis want Malala to explicitly talk about Palestinians, but I don’t see them demand that she speaks on issues local to Pakistan, such as Indigenous rights movements and floods related to climate disaster.
PARKER: OK. Just to push back, like, is that her job?
KARIMJEE: Yeah, the more Zainab, Soheba, Wajid and I dug into it, the harder it was to untangle our feelings and experiences from what we wanted from her.
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KARIMJEE: When you were a kid, and you would think about, like, this young girl getting shot by terrorists – right? – terrorists are almost, like, kind of normalized in your lives.
MOHIUDDIN: I was discussing this with my friend recently. We were like, that’s so traumatic that…
USMAN: Yeah.
MOHIUDDIN: …We were thinking that way when we were so young that, oh, I hope we get an off from school tomorrow because XYZ thing happens. That is not good.
KARIMJEE: So did you not think it was that big of a deal?
MOHIUDDIN: It for sure was a big deal. Her getting shot was a big deal also.
KARIMJEE: Like, to you personally?
MOHIUDDIN: Yeah, yeah, personally, as well, because I was like – I mean, it’s something as simple as her going to school and getting shot, right? That is a big deal.
KARIMJEE: Why do you think that at that point, people had such strong negative opinions about her?
MOHIUDDIN: I think it’s – I don’t have an answer to that, but the fact that I never questioned this before, that why do we have such a negative opinion of her? Like, I understand. I – to an extent. But as someone – like, I was – what? – I was 12 in 2014 when she got the Nobel Peace Prize. It was like, actually, like, she’s making us look so bad.
SHOAIB: Yeah.
MOHIUDDIN: And she went there and is making a life for herself, but she’s making us look bad. That is, I think, was what the primary reason for the negative opinions around her.
USMAN: The second – one of our people is associated with someone or something from the West. It’s almost automatically associated with being a sellout.
PARKER: OK. What does Wajid mean by sellout?
KARIMJEE: Yeah, that’s a good question. So people in Pakistan, especially young people, I think they feel very frustrated that the only stories that the world is hearing about us are about really horrible things, like, you know, a girl getting shot for just trying to go to school.
SHOAIB: You know, when someone talks about Pakistan, (speaking non-English language) Pakistan, very few people know abroad. But if they know, they’ll associate terrorism with it. So I think this incident really reinforces that.
PARKER: When we come back, we’re going to untangle more of Malala’s burden of representation.
SANAM MAHER: It’s such a spaghetti with, like, you know, how we think about women, how we think about anyone coming in from the West, how we think about, quote-unquote. like, “Western values,” which she is seen to represent. So what is enough in this situation?
PARKER: That’s coming up. Stay with us.
Parker.
KARIMJEE: Mariya.
PARKER: CODE SWITCH.
I’ve been talking with reporter Mariya Karimjee about Pakistan’s contentious relationship with celebrity activist Malala Yousafzai. Mariya was getting into what exactly it is that people want from Malala in Pakistan. But before we dive into that, I think we need to know a bit more about where Malala comes from.
KARIMJEE: Yeah. I think it’s important to remember that before she won the Nobel Peace Prize, before she was making these global speeches, Malala was just a young girl who wanted to go to school. Can I read out some of the diary entries she wrote for the BBC?
PARKER: Yes, please.
KARIMJEE: OK. This is from January of 2009. She was 12 years old.
(Reading) I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I’ve had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat.
By February, she’d written, (reading) I felt hurt on opening my wardrobe and seeing my uniform, school bag and geometry box. Boys’ schools are opening tomorrow, but the Taliban have banned girls’ education.
PARKER: You can totally feel her innocence and frustration over this thing that, to her, feels so simple.
KARIMJEE: Yeah. And then in October of 2009, The New York Times published a documentary about Malala living through a military operation in Swat, the valley in Pakistan where she grew up.
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YOUSAFZAI: Suddenly, there was a huge firing and missiles. So we quickly get our clothes, and we put it in our bags. And I was weeping that why we have to leave Swat? What is our – we are innocent. What is our sin?
KARIMJEE: By 2010, most people outside of Swat associated the valley entirely with terrorism and the Taliban, a place that was actually under Sharia law, with limited rights for women and girls. But Swat wasn’t always like this.
FAZAL KHALIQ: Swat was like a haven. It was thronged by tourists not only from Pakistan, but also from abroad, from around the world.
KARIMJEE: That’s Fazal Khaliq, Malala’s high school English teacher, talking to me from Swat. He grew up there and works as a journalist in the valley. The Swat he described to me, I’d never heard of it described in that way.
KHALIQ: The people of Swat were very educated here. In 1960s, we had missionary school where co-education was there. But before 2007, you know, in the area where Pashtun people live, here, it was a missionary school, and still we have the university and we have co-education. So in Swat before 2007, before the militancy, everything was good. There were so many educated women working in the offices, teaching in the health field, even in the NGOs.
KARIMJEE: Before the Taliban entered Swat, women’s literacy rates were higher there than in parts of Karachi. The largest city in the country had worse education for women than a remote valley in Pakistan’s mountainous north. Fazal wasn’t in Swat when Malala got shot. And when he found out, his first reaction wasn’t shock, it wasn’t disbelief. He had been kind of expecting it.
KHALIQ: In the mouth of everyone, it was one thing that Malala was shot. It had to be done because when – she was so much vocal. Whenever a reporter or a journalist, local, national or from abroad, if they would need some comments on women education, it was only her. She talked. So because of her activism, because of the activism of her father, they received different threats, and it was in the minds of people that one day it will happen.
KARIMJEE: And that brings us back full circle, Parker. You know the rest of the story from here. Malala becomes a globally famous and revered activist. But back home, not everyone saw her as a hero.
KHALIQ: So I think that if it was some other country, there would be a celebration. There would be celebrations everywhere. It would be like Jashn. But in Pakistan, this is our bad luck.
KARIMJEE: From basically day one, instead of celebrating this young woman, the country reacted by tearing her down. Not only were we not throwing parties, people were doubting her story. Others were questioning her intentions. Conspiracy theories were growing legs on social media and on the news.
PARKER: Wait. What kind of theories?
KARIMJEE: Some people believed the attack never happened, that it was all orchestrated to make Pakistan look weak or to drum up support for the U.S.’ war in Afghanistan. Others thought Malala was being rewarded not for bravery, but for criticizing the country on the world stage.
PARKER: Hold on. Hold on. So, like, she’s criticizing Pakistan by getting shot for trying to go to school?
KARIMJEE: Somehow, yes. Parker, like, before Malala even won the Nobel Peace Prize, she wrote her memoir “I Am Malala,” the one that Zainab talked about. And people claimed that it criticized Islam and was too heavily aligned with Western values. The University of Peshawar had to cancel her book launch because they got so much opposition from local politicians. Then, less than a month after she won the prize, the president of the All Pakistan Private Schools’ Federation, which claimed to represent 200,000 schools, decided to declare a holiday called I Am Not Malala Day.
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MIRZA KASHIF ALI: (Non-English language spoken). I am Muslim. I am Pakistani. (Non-English language spoken).
PARKER: Who has that much time to be a hater?
KARIMJEE: That guy, Parker, because then he went and banned her memoir at all of those schools across Pakistan.
PARKER: That’s just so much time and effort.
KARIMJEE: Yeah.
PARKER: For what?
KARIMJEE: For what? And as Malala got more involved in global activism – like, founded the Malala Fund, started meeting world leaders – the criticism against her only grew. She wore skinny jeans when she was studying at Oxford, and it made headline news in Pakistan. People were hand-wringing about how she was too Western.
PARKER: She was in the U.K.
KARIMJEE: And she also still wore her dupatta. And then later, in a British Vogue interview, she offhandedly mentioned that she wasn’t sure why folks had to get married. And she got absolutely lambasted on Twitter by Pakistani randos.
PARKER: Oh, she really just could not win.
KARIMJEE: As recently as 2021, police raided bookstores to seize copies of an elementary school textbook that had a picture of her in it.
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KARIMJEE: Fazal still teaches in Swat.
Do you tell your students that – about Malala?
KHALIQ: Of course, I do. I do a lot.
KARIMJEE: And how do they react?
KHALIQ: Oh, some – many of them react against her. I don’t know.
KARIMJEE: His students these days are similar to mine. They question whether Malala is good. Mostly, they call her a spy, an agent. To be clear, there’s no actual evidence behind that allegation.
When you say they’re against her, what do they say?
KHALIQ: That’s what. That’s the same thing that they say, that she was – she is agent. But they don’t know what is agent and what activity of agent she is doing or she did.
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KARIMJEE: They aren’t really thinking about what makes her a spy. It’s a bit of a reflex, part of growing up in a country with a long history of foreign interference.
MAHER: I think that we’ve always been suspicious of foreign interests in Pakistan.
KARIMJEE: That’s my friend Sanam Maher. She’s a journalist and author in Pakistan. Full disclosure – she’s also written for Malala’s newsletter. And the kind of distress to foreign interests Sanam mentions is shaped by real incidents, mostly lately around the United States.
PARKER: OK. I’ma be honest. As an American, I think I need a refresher on what we did.
MAHER: Raymond Davis.
KARIMJEE: So Raymond Davis was a CIA contractor. In 2011, he was in Lahore and shot and killed two men on a busy street in broad daylight. He said it was because they approached him with guns drawn. But then the U.S. intervened and got him out of Pakistan through a backroom deal. People were furious. It felt like proof that Pakistani lives didn’t matter in these power struggles.
MAHER: I remember I was in Lahore when that happened – it was terrible – and the way that he was allowed to leave the country.
PARKER: Yeah, got it. OK.
KARIMJEE: OK. And then just a few months after that, that story got overshadowed by a bigger story out of Pakistan.
MAHER: And then, of course, we think of the fake vaccination campaign to catch Osama bin Laden. That’s a big one.
PARKER: Wait. Fake vaccination? Well, what’s that?
KARIMJEE: Yeah. When the U.S. was trying to track Osama bin Laden down, they ran a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad. They went door to door under the guise of vaccinating against hepatitis B. But really, they were collecting DNA to confirm if bin Laden’s family was there.
PARKER: Mariya, no.
KARIMJEE: Yeah. Parker, it’s really bad. Like, Pakistan was close to eradicating polio. And when this news broke, it harmed already super precarious trust in vaccines. People stopped getting their kids vaccinated because of it. Polio workers were under, like, militant attacks after this campaign.
PARKER: All right. Now I really get it. OK.
KARIMJEE: Yeah. And, like, just to add on here, even the actual killing of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. did it all without telling Pakistan – just flew in, killed him and left. And even though the U.S. later came out and said they intentionally left Pakistan in the dark about this, what does that say about how the U.S. sees Pakistan’s sovereignty? It was humiliating.
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KARIMJEE: So, Parker, can you see why my view of Malala shifted so dramatically when she teamed up with Hillary Clinton to produce a Broadway play? Like, it felt to me like she was co-signing something that she should have questioned. And this was the first time that I wondered if the people saying that she didn’t stand for anything anymore had a point.
PARKER: It kind of sounds like you lost faith in Malala.
KARIMJEE: Kind of, yeah. I had spent so long defending her. And then all of a sudden, I was thinking maybe I’m the one who’s been naive, but I couldn’t land on what I wanted from her. What would have been enough?
MAHER: What is enough, though? What does enough look like?
KARIMJEE: I don’t know.
MAHER: I think that’s the tricky bit. Like, what would be good enough? What is our measure that we’re using for her? Is it fair? Do we consider her context in it? It’s such a spaghetti with, like, you know, how we think about women, how we think about anyone coming in from the West, how we think about, quote-unquote, like, “Western values,” which she is seen to represent. So what is enough in this situation? I don’t have an answer for that. I just – that’s what confuses me. What would be good enough?
KARIMJEE: There’s also the added factor of gender. Sanam has spent a lot of time thinking about how women in Pakistan are treated and the system that surrounds women in the public eye.
MAHER: When women have suffered violence here and they choose to stay quiet, we appreciate that. We can give them sympathy then. If you try to turn it into a cause, we’re very suspicious of that.
KARIMJEE: Sanam had a lot of examples, some of whom I hadn’t even thought of in this context.
MAHER: Mukhtar Mai – that was 2002, I believe. So this is a woman who, on the orders of a, quote-unquote, “tribal council” or a jirga, is subjected to rape. And it was a gang rape. She decided to take the perpetrators to court. She didn’t back down. It became quite a big case, not just within Pakistan but internationally. And I remember – I’m sure you remember this as well, but Pervez Musharraf.
KARIMJEE: Oh, yeah.
MAHER: He (laughter)…
KARIMJEE: By the way, we’re talking about the man who was president of Pakistan at that time.
MAHER: I mean, it’s awful that we’re laughing about this, but I distinctly remember she was trying to go for some ceremony. It was either Canada or the U.S. She was trying to get a visa for that, and he gave an interview in The Washington Post. And I’m paraphrasing, but the gist of it was, if you want a visa, if you want to become a millionaire, get yourself raped. Those were his words – get yourself raped. So, I mean, Malala is just one of, like, so many women.
KARIMJEE: I really have to emphasize, when I’ve been working on this story, I’ve heard so much Malala hate from people around me – people earnestly asking me if I thought she was really shot, others asking me why education hasn’t improved in Pakistan after her Nobel Prize. So it was really refreshing to hear this.
MAHER: I actually really like her. Like, I just – let me make that clear. I deeply respect, like, whatever she’s gone through and where she’s at and what she’s trying to do and the kind of life that she’s trying to have. I’m fascinated by the discourse around her, just as I am with any other woman and the way that we are angered by them, frustrated by them, the ways in which we want our women to behave. Like, that’s my interest. But Malala can honestly do whatever she wants to do. If at 14 you had to go through such a horrific, traumatic thing, and you’re figuring your way out right now through big questions in life – where you want to live, what you want to do – like, give her some grace. She’s still just, like – what? – 20-something?
KARIMJEE: And it’s not like Sanam doesn’t have critiques. For instance, when Malala is in Pakistan, she’s under incredibly tight security all the time.
MAHER: I would love if she didn’t exist in such a controlled space, if she was able to just do interviews with good people, local people here, if she could do a podcast, if she could actually – like, this is the criticism that comes a lot where we’re suspicious of her because we see her being, quote-unquote “managed.”
KARIMJEE: And it’s not just about who’s asking the questions. It’s also about what she’s willing to answer. And maybe that’s where some of the tension is.
MAHER: I wonder if she doesn’t speak out about these things because of the associations that we have with her. Like, consider the audience, right? Like, let’s say Malala turned around and, like, fully put her support behind one of these groups. Does it harm the cause?
KARIMJEE: I think it’s the thing one of my students said really early on. Like, Parker, how many globally famous Pakistanis do we know? Malala is going to Wimbledon. She’s dressing cute and going to the Oscars. She’s still relevant. She’s in the public eye, and I want her to use that fame to talk about the things that matter to me.
PARKER: What kind of things do you want her to talk about? Like, what kind of things matter to you?
KARIMJEE: Human rights violations in Pakistan. For example, enforced disappearances in Balochistan, violence against minority religious groups, like Hindus, Christians the Ahmadi community. I could go on. But then I think about the ongoing criticism now about the way she’s spoken up about Gaza, that it didn’t come quickly enough, that it isn’t in exactly the right way.
MAHER: When people were criticizing her for not saying enough or doing enough when it came to Gaza, perhaps she approached it from the position of, well, of course, I am against this. How could you have imagined that I am not? I am now having to verbalize this on Instagram and make my position clear. But perhaps what she’s not able to see or hear is the very legitimate questions that are coming from some of the critiquing audience. Perhaps she’s in an incredibly tricky position and is unable to verbalize some stuff the way that I might want her to, which just led me to interrogate. Well, why do I need someone like her? I then question my need for that, rather than put it on her.
KARIMJEE: That conversation with Sanam gave me pause. Why did I specifically want Malala to talk about these things? Clearly, my students cared because they saw her as someone with power with a platform.
PARKER: Do you see her the same way?
KARIMJEE: I’m not sure, Parker. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Maybe I was looking for reassurance that Malala was still connected to people like us. And I think about how easily I deploy her name during the Malala test bumble days. I used it – right? – to get a very quick gut check of someone’s politics, their ego, their instincts, right? Just one name and their response, and I believed I knew a whole thing about them. But maybe that’s not fair to anyone. When you use someone as a test and project all kinds of needs onto them, maybe you stop seeing them as a person.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
PARKER: And that’s our show. You can follow us on Instagram – @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is [email protected]. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter. And just a reminder that signing up to CODE SWITCH+ is a great way to support our show and public media, and you’ll get to listen to every episode sponsor-free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/codeswitch.
This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Dalia Mortada and Leah Donnella. Our engineer was Robert Rodriguez.
KARIMJEE: Special thanks to my students for making me think so hard about Malala and to the Habib University film studio for letting me use their podcast room and Marya Darukhanawalla for helping with setup.
PARKER: And a big shout-out to the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive – Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Courtney Stein, Veralyn Williams and Gene Demby. I’m B.A. Parker.
KARIMJEE: I’m Mariya Karimjee.
PARKER: Hydrate.
KARIMJEE: Don’t use ChatGPT.
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