I Am Malala: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

When Malala was ten years old, the Taliban came to the Swat valley. When she first saw the Taliban, Malala thought they resembled vampires, like the creatures she’d been reading about in the Twilight books. They wore black turbans and had long beards, even by Pakistani standards. The leader of the Taliban in the area was a man named Maulana Fazlullah. At first, Fazlullah claimed to be a “reformer” of the Quran. He encouraged people to give up drugs and cigarettes to improve their health. As time went on, however, he became more extreme in his rhetoric, calling the government officials of Pakistan “infidels” for their alliance with America. He also insisted that women should work all day at home, and he used his radio station to broadcast his beliefs. Fazlullah became enormously popular in Swat—people thought of him as a “Robin Hood” figure, restoring power and dignity to good, common Muslims. Malala and Ziauddin were disturbed by Fazlullah’s popularity.

As Malala grew up, Fazlullah continued to inspire the people in Swat. He called for increasingly severe changes in Swat society: closing down all beauty parlors, banning barbers, and forbidding women from walking outside in the evening. When American health workers arrived in Mingora offering polio vaccines, he encouraged Muslims to refuse their help, arguing that the vaccines were part of an American conspiracy to make Pakistanis infertile. Fazlullah also called for all women to wear their headscarves (burqas) at all times. At his schools, Ziauddin didn’t enforce this rule. His friends encouraged him to speak out against Taliban laws. Ziauddin wrote a letter to the newspapers, arguing that the Taliban were misinterpreting the Quran. He was then disappointed to see that the editor placed his letter in an unpopular section of the newspaper where few people would read it, and also included Ziauddin's name and address. Nevertheless, Ziauddin's friends congratulated him on speaking out against the Taliban.