I Am Malala: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Malala begins the chapter by noting that the Taliban “took our music, then our Buddhas, then our history.” She elaborates that the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues and monuments where Malala used to play as a child. In 2007, they obliterated a Buddhist statue that had been standing in the Swat valley since the 7th century. The Taliban also banned various childish games that it considered to be against the Quran. To Ziauddin’s amazement, almost no one spoke out against these injustices, and people were willing to submit to the Taliban’s rules. Ziauddin, by contrast, continued to write articles and op-eds for the newspapers, and use his popularity and charisma to speak out against the Taliban.

Malala notes that all of Pakistan seemed to be going mad in the early 2000s. The Taliban ordered all women to wear their burqas at all times. Groups of women covered with burqas would break into Western restaurants and music stores and destroy everything there. As Musharraf became more vocal in his support for the United States, the country became more extreme in its political and religious views, and there was even a plot to blow up Musharraf’s convoy.

By 2007, when Malala was ten years old, the situation in Pakistan had escalated to the point where it was feared that Taliban soldiers would take over the capital city of Islamabad. On July 12—Malala’s birthday—a large group of Taliban supporters, including many women, marched through Islamabad, declaring war on Pakistan’s government. There were suicide bombers throughout the country, many of whom were women. These women claimed that Fazlullah had taught them that it was noble to martyr themselves. In response to the constantly escalating violence in the country, Musharraf decided to step down as president. Surprisingly, the United States arranged for his replacement to be Benazir Bhutto, Musharraf’s old political rival. The plan was for Bhutto and Musharraf to cooperate with one another and help the US. Ziauddin was certain that this deal would fail, since Musharraf and Bhutto despised one another.

On October 18, 2007, Benazir Bhutto returned from a long period of exile. Malala and millions of other Pakistanis watched television footage of her arrival. Suddenly, to everyone’s shock, there was an enormous explosion in Bhutto’s bus. 150 people were killed, but amazingly Bhutto wasn’t one of them, since she’d left the bus only moments before. Militant Islamists, Malala explains, had engineered the bombing.

Shortly after the failed attempt on Benazir Bhutto’s life, the Pakistani national army arrived in Swat. Musharraf—still a powerful force in the government—sent 3,000 troops to Swat to protect the people from the influence of the Taliban. Every night, Malala heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions. Within only a few weeks, much of the Pakistani army had defected to the Taliban’s side. Musharraf responded by sending more soldiers to the area—this was somewhat successful, though Ziauddin warned that the Taliban would “return with a vengeance.”

On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto held a rally in which she claimed that she would fight the forces of extremism and militancy in Pakistan, especially the Taliban. As Bhutto's car drove through the crowd, a suicide bomber suddenly blew himself up by the car, and a sniper simultaneously shot at Bhutto. Either because of the gunshot, the bomb, or both, Bhutto had been murdered. Malala was heartbroken when she learned of the assassination, as she had thought of Bhutto as a defender of women’s rights. Afterwards, Musharraf blamed the Taliban for the shooting, something which—very unusually—the Taliban denied. To Malala’s horror, many of the mullahs in her community took the position that Bhutto’s death was a good thing: she’d been profaning the Quran. Ziauddin told Malala that she would have to learn to interpret the Quran herself.