Can Malala overcome co-option?

I hope that she changes her mind again, and decides to stick to the cause of acquiring and promoting education

The announcement of the decision to award Malala Yousufzai the Nobel Peace Prize has unleashed a barrage of commentary ranging from adulation to suspicion.

Internationally viewed as a youthful symbol of resistance against myopic tyranny, Malala has received much praise. In addition to a range of other awards, since the time that she survived the horrific attack on her life, Malala was voted the most influential by Time’s 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014. Another Time Magazine article has even described her as a non-magical parallel version of the Harry Potter story, where the Taliban in trying to kill her, have created a much more powerful threat to their ideology.

At home, however, the reactions to Malala’s success have been mixed. On the one hand, she has been praised for championing the cause of education, for becoming a symbol of hope, and a source of pride for the whole country. But there are also those who remain more suspect about her, seeing her as a tool for Western hegemony. The All Pakistan Private Schools Management Association had banned Malala’s co-authored book (with Christina Lamb), criticising its soft stance towards the Ahmadi community.

Since she has been awarded the Nobel Prize, prominent politicians, including the prime minister, have been issuing congratulatory statements. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari wants to enlist Malala’s help in bringing education to Sindh. After the announcement of the award, talking to CNN from Birmingham, Malala claimed she was the “first Pakistani to be getting this award”. Did she mean the Peace Prize? It couldn’t be the Nobel Prize, because Abdus Salam was the other Pakistani to have won the Nobel Prize years ago. Was the Pakistani government’s lacklustre acknowledgment of Dr Salam at work behind Malala’s statement, or just oversight? On the other hand, Malala’s decision to join Kailash Satyarthi in inviting the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to be present at their award ceremony this December was astute.

Speaking with Laura Flander, Arundhati Roy aptly pointed out how a young girl like Malala is in danger of co-option within ‘the great game’, to justify imperialist aggression, which deploys the reductionist rhetoric of fighting against repressive ideologies and entrenched patriarchal cultural norms. Roy did, however, praise Malala for beginning to speak out against policies of the West, such as drone strikes, rather than just praising it for rescuing her and helping her champion the cause of universal education.

Enlisting Malala to the cause of global education, or recruiting her to speak out against the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls is one thing. However, to use her to project a simplistic view about conflict in Muslim countries is objectionable and needs to be countered.

Another columnist gave interesting advice in these op-ed pages last week, suggesting that we all work to petition Malala to help situate the politics of girls’ rights to education in Pakistan in a much more nuanced light than the Taliban’s opposition to it. While individual pleas to this effect may be overwhelming, educationists and education campaigners could certainly make targeted efforts to provide Malala with practical suggestions concerning what issues to champion, and how.

Malala said she had wanted to become a doctor, but now she seems to have changed her mind, and wants to become a politician instead. I, for one, do hope that she changes her mind again, and decides to stick to the cause of acquiring and promoting education, the sort which empowers individuals to do more for the betterment of humanity as a whole, rather than achieving success through the exploitation of others.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 18^th, 2014.

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