The authorities turned a blind eye. Our provincial government was still made up of mullah parties who wouldn’t criticise anyone who claimed to be fighting for Islam. At first we thought we were safe in Mingora, the biggest town in Swat. But Fazlullah’s headquarters were just a few miles away, and even though the Taliban were not near our house they were in the markets, in the streets and the hills. Danger began to creep closer.
During Eid we went to our family village as usual. I was in my cousin’s car, and as we drove through a river where the road had been washed away we had to stop at a Taliban checkpoint. I was in the back with my mother. My cousin quickly gave us his music cassettes to hide in our purses. The Taliban were dressed in black and carried Kalashnikovs. They told us, ‘Sisters, you are bringing shame. You must wear burqas.’
When we arrived back at school after Eid, we saw a letter taped to the gate. ‘Sir, the school you are running is Western and infidel,’ it said. ‘You teach girls and have a uniform that is un-Islamic. Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you.’ It was signed, ‘Fedayeen of Islam’.
My father decided to change the boys’ uniform from shirt and trousers to shalwar kamiz, baggy pyjama-like trousers and a long shirt. Ours remained a royal-blue shalwar kamiz with a white dupatta, or headscarf, and we were advised to keep our heads covered coming in and out of school.
His friend Hidayatullah told him to stand firm. ‘Ziauddin, you have charisma; you can speak up and organise against them,’ he said. ‘Life isn’t just about taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide. You can stay there accepting everything from the Taliban or you can make a stand against them.’
My father told us what Hidayatullah had said. He then wrote a letter to the Daily Azadi, our local newspaper. ‘To the Fedayeen of Islam [or Islamic sacrificers], this is not the right way to implement Islam,’ he wrote. ‘Please don’t harm my children because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren.’ When my father saw the newspaper he was very unhappy. The letter had been buried on an inside page and the editor had published his name and the address of the school, which my father had not expected him to do. But lots of people called to congratulate him. ‘You have put the first stone in standing water,’ they said. ‘Now we will have the courage to speak.’
10
Toffees, Tennis Balls and the Buddhas of Swat
FIRST THE TALIBAN took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history. One of our favourite things was going on school trips. We were lucky to live in a paradise like Swat with so many beautiful places to visit – waterfalls, lakes, the ski resort, the wali’s palace, the Buddha statues, the tomb of Akhund of Swat. All these places told our special story. We would talk about the trips for weeks beforehand, then, when the day finally came, we dressed up in our best clothes and piled into buses along with pots of chicken and rice for a picnic. Some of us had cameras and took photographs. At the end of the day my father would make us all take turns standing on a rock and tell stories about what we had seen. When Fazlullah came there were no more school trips. Girls were not supposed to be seen outside.
The Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and stupas where we played, which had been there for thousands of years and were a part of our history from the time of the Kushan kings. They believed any statue or painting was haram, sinful and therefore prohibited. One black day they even dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha, which was carved into a hillside just half an hour’s drive from Mingora and towered twenty-three feet into the sky. Archaeologists say it was almost as important as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Afghan Taliban blew up.