Nevertheless, They Persist: The Iconicity and Radical Politics of Malala Yousafzai

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Syed Irfan Ashraf, Jyotsna Kapur, and Mejgan Massoumi for many thoughtful and challenging conversations; and to Miranda Green-Barteet, Amanda Allen, Camille Meder, and Usha Iyer for their indispensable notes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Swat is a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, which is situated at the border zone between Afghanistan and Azad Kashmir (Pakistan-occupied Kashmir). The valley is populated primarily by Pashtuns.

² The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, sometimes also called the Pakistani Taliban, consists of several militant groups based along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

³ As Lila Abu-Lughod has argued, liberal feminist calls for “Muslim women’s rights” have often served to justify Euro-American imperialist intervention in places such as the Middle East and South Asia. For Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Malala traverses a “‘chain of vulnerability-suffering-empowerment’”; as she explains, “a brown woman inevitably has to travel through this chain in order to achieve the kind of empowerment recognized by the liberal humanist discourse of rights” (383). Ofra Koffman and Rosalind Gill, meanwhile, analyze Malala’s central role in “The Girl Effect,” a network of policy discourses, corporate investments, and marketing campaigns through which “girls in affluent societies, particularly the US, are hailed variously as the allies and saviours of their Southern ‘sisters’, using discourses of girl power and popular feminism” (84).

⁴ Wendy Hesford notes that when Malala invokes Gandhi’s “suffering without retaliation” in her UN speech on July 12, 2013, she makes the “self-sacrificing move…that we have come to associate with historical figures who espoused the philosophy of nonviolence, such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa” (“The Malala Effect” 149). It is significant that two of these figures – King and Mandela – were also socialists whose politics have been repressed in liberal lore.

⁵ Ashraf and I met in Carbondale, IL in 2012, while he was completing his PhD at Southern Illinois University. His recent book, The Dark Side of News Fixing, offers further discussion of his experiences working alongside parachute journalists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After his graduate studies, Ashraf returned to his home in Peshawar, Pakistan, only 40 kilometers from the border with Afghanistan. In August 2021, the United States ended its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, and the Taliban have since taken control of Kabul. The Ashraf family is living under conditions of war.

⁶ In April 2017, Malala received honorary Canadian citizenship. According to Al Jazeera, this citizenship is “entirely symbolic” and “does not come with any rights or privileges, such as a Canadian passport or the right to vote in national elections” (Kestler-D’Amours).

⁷ The “Great Game” was a political contest spanning most of the 19^th century, between the British and Russian Empires over territories in Central and South Asia.

⁸ Thank you to Mejgan Massoumi for pointing out that many in Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora have been deeply disappointed by Malala’s underwhelming reaction to the events of August 2021.

⁹ “Class Dismissed” also stages Ellick’s encounter with Malala as a serendipitous discovery, a fiction that has too long been taken for fact. Ana Belén Martínez García, for example, writes: “Almost by accident, Malala featured in a documentary on education in Pakistan. She was not the intended interviewee, but she caught the eye of one of the directors who was struck by her innocent looks, beauty and heartful emotion when asked about the prospects of getting an education in her country,” citing the documentary as her source (203). This version of events is particularly damaging in its implication that all of Swat’s girls – and extrapolated to all “Third World Muslim girls” – are innocent, beautiful, heartfelt, and oppressed, and that all they want is an education.

¹⁰ In an interview with NBC’s Alexa Liautaud, Yousafzai describes his relationship with Malala as transcending that of father and daughter, stating they are “comrades” (“Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala’s Father, Talks Parenting and Gender Equality”).

¹¹ The Malala Fund is a nonprofit organization that “supports the work of educators and advocates and helps bolster girls’ secondary school education around the world” (https://malala.org/).