At first they're effective, carried by Malala's incredible life story thus far, and especially moving when paralleling her father's victory over his stammer and fear of public speaking with Malala's own journey toward discovering her skills as a public speaker. But the animations are styled as if for a children's public programming special—a hint of what the movie could have been like had the producers stuck with their original plan for a feature film as opposed to a documentary. The title of the movie references the film's implication, that perhaps Malala's name, shared by the storied Malalai of Maiwand, inscribed a fate upon her from birth. Guggenheim should have saved such prophesying for the Disney reboot.Guggenheim replaces the events that shaped Malala, her father, and their home for a story of individual resilience, a single rising note held for poignancy. The war on terror is not a feel-good tale of triumph over adversity; yet He Named Me Malala is. How do we evaluate a movie whose central narrative is activated by a reality the film ignores?The war on terror is not a feel-good tale of triumph over adversity; yet He Named Me Malala is. How do we evaluate a movie whose central narrative is activated by a reality the film ignores?
"Paradise" is a word repeated in the film, and in just about everything ever written on Swat before 2007. The events that violated that paradise gain far less screen time, an omission increasingly painful the more Malala and her family reminisce about the idyllic past of their old home, and their desire to one day return to it, understanding how slim the chances of such an opportunity have become.Located roughly 80 kilometers from the Afghan border, Swat's history is intertwined with Afghanistan, and its people are spread across the hills between the two countries. These are areas with ties much older than modern maps would show—"We Pashtuns," Malala writes, "are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don't really recognize the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago."In 1979, Russia intervened in a civil war in Afghanistan that had broken out after socialist Nur Mohammad Taraki's coup began a regime that violently suppressed opposition. The Russians wanted to install a socialist of their own preference and found themselves mired for ten years. The last headscarved girl who captured America's imagination was fleeing Soviet airstrikes when Steve McCurry photographed her for the 1985 cover of National Geographic.We lived in the most beautiful place in all the world. My valley, the Swat valley, is a heavenly kingdom of mountains, gushing waterfalls, and crystal-clear lakes. Welcome to Paradise it says on a sign as you enter the valley.
For Pakistan it was a way to exert influence in an area out of the national government's range. For the US, it was a way to gain a regional ally after losing Iran in the Shah's overthrow in 1979, counter Soviet influence, and establish an access point to the natural gas-rich lands of then Soviet-controlled Central Asia. Ziauddin Yousafzai's memories betray the nature of the shared goals Reagan alluded to, in her memoir Malala recalls:We find ourselves even more frequently in agreement on our goals and objectives…. Your country has come to the forefront of the struggle to construct a framework for peace in your region, an undertaking which includes your strenuous efforts to bring peaceful resolution to the crisis in Afghanistan—a resolution which will enable the millions of refugees currently seeking shelter in Pakistan to go home in peace and honor.
My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had examples like, 'If out of 10 Russian infidels, 5 are killed by Muslims, 5 would be left' or '15 bullets - 10 bullets = 5 bullets.'
I am teaching about love, and social relationships and they would say, "Wait a minute, you just came from the US and are telling us about these things?" That is the reaction from the huge militancy around me there and that militancy is a result of the militarization from which the US and NATO forces have done… despite all of the positive things I can say about America, I will be less influential there as long as officials here do not engage in social interaction, but through metals and bombshells.
As wonderful as it is to see Malala show us the bookshelf in her new room in Birmingham, England, and watch her be teased by her brothers, safe and sound, I'm left disturbed. The documentary offers a comfort those of us in America and England have not earned. Reviews exclaim how inspiring the film is, but it isn't illuminating. What exactly will viewers be inspired to do? There's nothing to challenge the prevailing ignorance about the region's history, the land Malala came from and why she can no longer live there.Military interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been sold to the public as a rescue mission to save Muslim women from Muslim men. When shot at 15, Malala became one of those women. Despite her love of her homeland and proud identification as a devout Muslim, her story is shared with the assumptions about a region that remains clouded by shallow, manipulative representation.The chief convenience of a far-away tragedy is that the commiseration, a voluntary engagement, can feel like charity.
The oil crisis of 1973—in which Saudi Arabia embargoed the US and others in response to US military support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War—proved Saudi Arabia's power internationally. America realized its dependency on Saudi oil, and as such it became paramount to never again alienate the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia constitutes barely three percent of the world's Muslim population, but Wahhabism was born and bred in a country with the petrodollars to export it around the world.Wahhabism is patriarchal, uncompromisingly intolerant of anyone who isn't Wahhabist, and offers only absolutes in a world of uncertainties, replacing a sense of faith with a sense of mission. An estimated 95 billion euros has gone toward evangelizing this shuttered worldview, mostly through Wahhabist translations of the Quran and the funding of madrassas—religious schools devoted to a Wahhabist form of Islam. These schools, often the only option in the most rural and impoverished of communities, teach pupils the rigidity of Wahhabism and invite them to participate in what is presented as a global struggle against nonbelievers. In her memoir Malala describes how these schools mushroomed in Swat:If Malala's father is a good man, it's only because he's not like all the other men "over there." If Malala was shot on her way to school, it's simply because people "over there" can't stand girls in schools.
While its ascension outside of Saudi Arabia overlapped with Operation Cyclone, Wahhabism dates back to the late 1700s, when Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab agreed to support each other in their respective mission toward an Islamic state. Wahhab entered into this agreement with a view towards a "purified" Islam; Saud with a view towards increased land assets. Eventually, through a series of strategic, armed campaigns justified as an expansion of Wahhabist morality, the Saud family established the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1926. That alliance produced an ideological juggernaut, an autocratic monarchy dependent on an informal body of religious authorities and rich off international oil dependence.Islam has no ruling body, no Church, no Vatican, no priesthood. That hasn't stopped men from insisting on their religious authority through varying levels of scholarship. Besides, as the land of the final prophet and Islam's holiest sites, Saudi Arabia flexes an Arab-supremacist view of Islam.Quietly unchecked, Wahhabism could one day be viewed as among the most important determinants of the modern world as we know it. ISIS, which emerged out of post-Iraq War sectarian violence, may be anti-Saud, but only because they're the competition for the actualization of a Wahhabist state.During the Afghan jihad many madrassas had been built, most of them funded by Saudi money, and many young men had passed through them as it was free education. That was the start of what my father calls the 'Arabisation' of Pakistan.
The oil and weapons trade funds an economy devoted to the proliferation of an ideology masquerading as the one true expression of Islam. It's hardly recognizable to me, as a practicing Muslim, but it's the one that's increasingly taken to represent the faith I subscribe to. Muslims around the world insist Islam is a religion of peace every time a Wahhabist carries out a terror attack, and everyone else grows increasingly bigoted toward the Muslims around them despite our testimony. We perform a respectability politics of ideal, upwardly mobile patriotism, but it's unable to compete with the jihadis who shriek for death and chaos and politicians who channel public fears toward furthering the surveillance apparatus against Muslims.…the main source of funding for these groups is Saudi Arabia. In fact, this whole phenomenon that we are confronting, which Al Qaeda is a part of, is very closely associated with Saudi Arabia's financial and religious projects for the Muslim world as a whole… There is an undercurrent of terror and fanaticism that go hand in hand in the Afghanistan-Pakistan arc… For instance, in one madrassa in Pakistan, I interviewed 70 Malaysian and Thai students who are being educated side by side with students who went on to the Afghan war and the like. These people return to their countries, and then we see the results in a short while…. At best, they become hot-headed preachers in mosques that encourage fighting Christians in Nigeria or in Indonesia. And in a worst case, they actually recruit or participate in terror acts.
When the mujahideen took root, so did a vision that would be inherited by generations, thanks to a Saudi investment in its dissemination. Since Operation Cyclone, the mujahideen who didn't become Al-Qaeda became Taliban, and imams in madrassas around the world deliver made-in-Saud narratives of an infidel world and a martyrdom rewarded with virgins. As the memory of Soviet bombs cools, American invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone deaths in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, heat these sermons with a fresh urgency. There were many men with guns before one appeared between Malala and her life."It was a very enlightened society generations before," Guggenheim explained. "It was a very peaceful world. It was like a paradise. This Taliban thing was a very recent thing, and a lot of American's don't understand that." However Guggenheim's film does little to alleviate the misapprehension.Listening to Guggenheim explain his film to me felt a lot like watching the film, pleasant until you realize what you're being distracted from. By what right can Americans allow ourselves to feel good about our embrace of Malala? The casualties of an imperial war effort shouldn't be cordoned off into charity projects with marketing teams. This is not politicizing a tragedy—rather, this is remembering that the depoliticization occurred, and continues. Positioning Malala as the hero of the process veils that process.You don't love Malala because you're grateful she survived—you love her because she's not angry. Despite the starstruck media's insistence, the star of this story isn't an astoundingly gracious child—it's the resounding relief of politicians and officials whose violent foreign policies aren't indicted.