Endangered Blogger: Malala Yousafzai

Warning: when I read this story in the Daily News, over the weekend, I was literally, physically sick. Here's the original Reuters report that appeared in my local paper:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-pakistan-girl-family-idUSBRE8990T720121010

Lots of updates in the sidebar. Here's the BBC link that contains translations from the death-defying blog:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19899540

This web site has called for decent Muslims to share their opinions on the abominations being committed in their name. The attempted murder of a fourteen-year-old blogger has apparently brought out some displays of decency. However, Imran O Khazmi's Facebook page reports that he's being harassed for a display of decency even as mild as this:

http://noisyroom.net/blog/2012/10/14/not-your-typical-14-year-old-malala-yousafzai/

Imran O Khazmi's article recalls something a student from the India side of the Khyber Pass shared with me twenty-five years ago.

"All of my brothers went to school, because we are a good family. Medical school, if we were smart enough to get in. I was not so good in school. My stepmother wanted me out of the way for her own children, so she used to give me opium. To protect me my father sent me to school two years before I should have been old enough to start school. So I was never at the top of my class and only got into an accounting course." (He had earned decent grades at a prestigious U.S. college.) "There was not a school for girls. My sisters had an old lady come in to teach them a few prayers and how to sew and knit. They can write their names. If they learned more than that, they learned from my brothers, or maybe their husbands by now. There was no question of their going to school with us. The big boys would have killed them. When a little boy with smooth cheeks started school, some of the big boys would always rape him. You could hear them scream but nobody did anything. I was like the rest. First I screamed, then I got used to it, then I grew a mustache and they didn't want me any more. That's why I always wear a mustache."

Apparently things are a little better now...and some unspeakable things out there want to make them worse.

There seems to be a perception among Taliban types that education equals Americanization. BOSH. I can say this much. This Indian accounting student was the one who wanted schools in northern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He wanted to network with American funders, but admitted that an American-born teacher would be at best a necessary evil. In order to be acceptable to his family any American-born teacher who wanted to make day schools more accessible to young children in this region would need to become a student of the local languages and literature. He said that this region has its own literature and culture, which are very rich and almost entirely untranslated into English, and that anyone who succeeded in translating the poems of northern India into English would probably make a fortune.

I did not learn Urdu. I recognize about as many Arabic words as I do German words, when they're spoken; I don't read even Arabic. This whole field of culture and literature is too big and too alien for me. It is for somebody like Malala Yousafzai, or Yousufzai, or Yusufzay (everybody who's posted in English about this girl seems to spell her name a different way) to share with the English-speaking world, not for English-speaking people to try to "copyright" away from her. This is an ancient, in many ways honorable, in many ways beautiful cultural tradition that belongs to intelligent people who can and should share what they have with the world as they see fit.

All I can say is, the sooner the better. It's for people like me to wait to read what people like Malala Yousafzai have to write for us.

Make them Americans? Balderdash. More Americans should only be as brave, as intelligent, and as public-spirited as this child has been.