I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

Education for ALL.   

Malala’s resilience and resolve in the face of radical abominations is undeniably inspirational!  Malala was fifteen years old when she was shot for her vocal passion for education for ALL—including girls.  This memoir is a fascinating first-hand account of her life in Pakistan and under the tyrannical rules of the Taliban who took control of the Swat Valley where she lived. 

In this Taliban-controlled world women had to wear burqas and had to hide behind curtains in their homes or go into another room if men were present. They could not laugh out loud, wear white shoes, were locked up and beaten for wearing fingernail polish, and were not allowed to go to school.

Malala outlines the corruption and oppression in Pakistan made extreme by the Taliban, where women were second-class citizens with no control or rights. 

Jaw-dropping. I'm still in culture shock!

“In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers, or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word does not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.”  pg 219

If you liked this book, you may also want to read:

Beneath the Tamarind Tree by Isha Sesay (Mass abduction of 276 girls from a Nigerian school)

Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza (Rwanda Holocaust)

Slave: My True Story by Mende Nazar and Damien Lewis (12-year-old girl kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1993)

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (A boy is forced to be a soldier in the Sierra Leone Civil War)

Annette