When Malala Yousafzai woke from the coma the Taliban put her in, she was aware of only a few things.
“Yes, Malala, you were shot,” she told herself.
She thought back to her dreams – of lying on a stretcher, being in some distant place far from home and school – and realized that they weren’t dreams, but recollections.
“The nurses and doctors, everyone was speaking in English,” she recalls. “I realized that now I am not in Pakistan.”
All Malala Yousafzai wanted was to go to school.
But she lived in an area of Pakistan, the Swat Valley, where the Taliban had effectively taken over governance, and imposed its harsh ideology – of no music, no visible women, and certainly no girls in school.
For defying their will, and refusing to stay silent, the Taliban tried to murder Malala, then a 15-year-old girl.
Miraculously, she survived, and has continued speaking truth to power about education, extremism, and equality.
Almost a year to the day after the attempt on her life, Malala, and her father Ziauddin, spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in front of a live town hall audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
The Taliban, she told Amanpour, “say that we are going to fight for Islam. … So I think we also must think about them.”
“And that's why I want to tell Taliban [to] be peaceful,” she said, “and the real jihad is to fight through pens and to fight through your words. Do that jihad. And that's the jihad that I am doing. I am fighting for my rights, for the rights of every girl.”
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