Ban on Malala’s book – Pakistan Freedom of Expression Monitor

Pakistani schools network observes anti-Malala day

Web Desk — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 07:44:52 +0000

ISLAMABAD: An association of Pakistani schools held an “I am not Malala” day on Monday, condemning young Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai for what it called her support for controversial novelist Salman Rushdie.

Education campaigner Malala was shot in the head by the Taliban in October 2012 but recovered and went on to win this year’s Nobel peace prize.

The 17-year-old has been hailed around the world for standing up for girls’ rights to education, but the response to her in Pakistan has not been universally positive, with some seeing her as a “Western agent” on a mission to shame her country.

The All Pakistan Private Schools Federation last year barred its members from buying Malala’s memoir “I am Malala” because of what the group said was its “anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam content.“

Read more: Pakistani private schools ban Malala’s book

It said the book, written with British journalist Christina Lamb, was too sympathetic to British novelist Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie in 1989 became the target of an Iranian fatwa, or religious edict, calling for his murder for allegedly blaspheming Islam and the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) in his book The Satanic Verses.

Mirza Kashif Ali, the president of the schools’ federation, said in a statement it was “clear that Malala has nexus with Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin, and also has alignment with Salman Rushdie’s ideological club”.

“We severely condemned the chapter of the book in which Salman Rushdie’s book has been mentioned as freedom of expression by Malala while referring to father’s views,” Ali said.

He said walks, seminars and press conferences were held to highlight the “I am not Malala” day.

Bangladeshi author Nasrin was forced to flee her homeland in 1994 after radical Muslims accused her of blasphemy over her novel “Lajja” (Shame), in which a Hindu family is persecuted by Muslims.

Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Pakistan also, where it can carry the death penalty.

Malala’s book describes her life under the Taliban’s brutal rule in northwest Pakistan’s Swat valley in the mid-2000s, hints at her ambition to enter Pakistani politics and even describes her father’s brief flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism as a youngster.

The book describes public floggings by the Taliban, their ban on television, dancing and music, and the family’s decision to flee Swat along with nearly one million others in 2009 amid heavy fighting between the militants and Pakistani troops.

Malala, who lives in Britain where she went for treatment after being shot, was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October alongside India’s 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi for their championing of children’s rights.

DAWN

Malala book still not get allow to launch in KP

Web Desk — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 12:55:51 +0000

PESHAWAR: The Taliban militants’ fear continues to hinder the launch of girls education campaigner Malala book in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The government had stopped the launch of ‘I am Malala’ the Malala book<.b> in Peshawar two and half months ago in the wake of the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan’s threat of attacks against bookshops selling the book.

“We’d reached the relevant people in Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government for permission to launch the book, but to no avail. PTI chairman Imran Khan had tweeted he was at a loss to understand why the book’s launch had been stopped in Peshawar. However, the PTI government in the province isn’t ready to allow us to launch the book,” Khadim Hussain, director at the Bacha Khan Education Foundation, told Dawn on Tuesday.

The Malala book was slated to be launched at the Area Study Centre of the University of Peshawar in January but stopped.

“We have been in contact with University of Peshawar, Abdul Wali Khan University and private universities to hold the launching ceremony on their premises. However, their response is painfully slow,” he said.

According to him, Malala is unfearing.

“We need to arrange the launch and benefit from Malala’s worldwide recognition as an education and human rights campaigner. The people are getting Malala scholarships, so why our girls and boys should not get their right,” he said.

Malala shot by the Taliban in her hometown, Swat, in October 2012 had challenged militants and therefore, became a symbol of courage for young generation.

Mr Hussain said Malala needed respect and acknowledgement at home but the provincial government was opposed to her Malala book launch fearing the Taliban’s attacks.

“We are asking the government and universities to allow us to launch the book on their campuses,” he said.

Sources at University of Peshawar say the government is not allowing the event to take place.

They quoted a senior leader of the provincial government as saying first glorifying Malala was not allowed in universities, which were a place of learning, and second, Malala was not ‘our heroine’ after all.

The Area Study Centre of the university was slated to host the event.

Since then, the organisers’ efforts to hold the event on campus have failed.

The sources said nobody was responding to the requests to hold the function as both bureaucrats and varsities’ vice chancellors didn’t want to anger the provincial government by doing so.

Mr Hussain said he was awaiting government’s response to several requests for hosting the launch.

“We will hold the launching ceremony at all costs,” he said.

A provincial minister, who wished not to be named, said the government couldn’t put the universities at risk by allowing the launch of Malala book.

“Militants can target universities if we continue to showcase their enemy, Malala, as a champion. Therefore, we don’t want to create such a situation,” he said.

The minister said the event should take place in places other than universities.

He said the launch of Malala book was ‘purely a political issue’ and should be tackled as such.

“We know the Taliban are not happy with her (Malala’s) popularity, so they could target her supporters,” he said.

The minister said it had been conveyed to the organisers that a university wasn’t a proper place for such events and that they should hold events, which could benefit students.

“The organisers shouldn’t draw political gains at the cost of education,” he said.

Dawn

Malala’s book launch

PPF Editor — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:23:40 +0000

WHAT a shame that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has stopped the ceremony to launch Malala Yousufzai’s book, I am Malala, at the Peshawar University.

Pity the nation that keeps on harping on the supremacy of the constitution but cannot provide security to even a premier university of the country. What signals do we send to the world when we invite international teams to come and play in Pakistan, on the one hand, and stop a book launch for fear of security, on the other hand?

Farooq Dawood
Karachi

DAWN

Burn notice

PPF Editor — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 12:09:54 +0000

By: NADEEM F. PARACHA

On Jan 28 this year, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government that is being headed by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) and its ally, the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), disallowed a launch of Malala Yusufzai’s book at the Peshawar University.

The ceremony to launch the book was being organised by the the Bacha Khan Education Foundation (BKEF), a welfare outfit associated with the left-liberal Awami National Party (ANP).

Khan’s PTI, which managed to dislodge the ANP during the May 2013 election, has increasingly shifted its policy-related moorings to the ‘rightest’ sides of the conventional ideological divide.

Consequently, with the kind of disconcerting rise witnessed in the country in violent hate crimes against military personnel and civilians by extremist and sectarian outfits, the PTI has come under some severe criticism.

As a consensus seems to be rapidly developing against these crimes, the PTI has been accused of playing the role of an apologist party for the extremists.

The criticism in this respect has not only come from the left and liberal sections of the society that are largely represented by parties such as the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the Awami National Party (ANP), and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). The centre-right, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) — that has a ruling majority in the National and Punjab assemblies — has also blamed the PTI for trying to arrest the changing national narrative against extremism by sticking to the old (and rapidly thinning) plot that sees extremist violence as a reaction to US drone attacks and War on Terror.

But whereas PTI’s charismatic chief, Imran Khan, seems to be coming around to (albeit grudgingly) accept the fact that indeed the old narrative has lost its convincing power in the wake of the unprecedented rise in extremist violence in the last eight months or so, many of his party personnel can still be seen on TV talk shows angrily using the same arguments that have ended up giving the PTI its unsavoury apologist label.

Though Khan exercises almost dictatorial powers in the party, one is not sure how much of him is there in certain controversial and reactive decisions taken by the PTI regime in the KPK.

When young Malala Yusufzai was shot and injured by the extremists in Swat last year, Khan promptly visited her at the hospital. But he did not mention her at all during PTI’s election campaign in Swat.

Moreover, even as his official Twitter account called the attack a cowardly act, the bulk of anti-Malala content, conspiracy theories and propaganda in social media clearly emerged from PTI and JI supporters on Twitter and Facebook.

Last week, when those bothered by the KP government’s move regarding the book launch Tweeted about it, they were at once (and right on cue), attacked by a barrage of PTI supporters for promoting ‘Western agenda’ and ‘undermining faith.’

However, on the same day, Khan’s Twitter handle asked why would anyone ban the launch of a book written by Malala?

One thus wonders exactly what sort of communication really flows between the chief of the PTI and his more rabid followers, or for that matter between him and his party’s government in KP.

Many political observers have explained a large section of PTI’s members to be made up of young men and women who were born at a time when a reactionary mind-set designed by the country’s former right-wing military dictator, Gen Zia (1977-88), had begun to take root in the country’s media, schools and urban middle-class polity.

These observers suggest that political inexperience and the tendency to understand history and politics through the skewed and myopic perceptions weaved and propagated by the state under Zia, have often left PTI members sounding like apologists and reactionaries ( but believing themselves to be revolutionaries).

Malala’s book, I am Malala, is openly available in book stores in the Sindh and the Punjab provinces, even though initially some private schools decided not to make it a part of their libraries, fearing violence from the extremists.

In the KP however, the book has been treated like a live grenade by the province’s government. Though there are hardly any good book stores left in cities like Peshawar, the KP government is hell-bent on keeping the book out.

Scientist, author and liberal commentator, Dr Parvez Hoodbhoy, is of the view that Malala and her book are seen as a threat by those who want to continue doing politics on the old, right-wing narrative that is now wearing thin.

Hoodbhoy recently saw himself trapped by a TV anchor who (without telling him), surrounded the scientist with two intransigent men (one a civil servant masquerading as a ‘scholar’, and the other an ‘investigative journalist’ who seems to spend more time pretending to be an expert on social morality on TV channels).

Hoodboy was hounded by the two men for praising Malala’s book and afterwards he accused the two men of propagating hatred against a Pakistani school girl who was half their age.

Of course, the two men and hundreds of PTI and JI supporters (on social media), who were so fervent in their criticism against Malala (calling her a Western agent and anti-Islam), and against her book, have no complaints about the volatile hate literature against certain Muslim sects, sub-sects and the country’s minorities, that is still freely available in many parts of the country. In the 1980s, when the Zia dictatorship put a complete ban on two books he thought were against the ever-elusive ‘Ideology of Pakistan,’ his regime was churning out sectarian and extremist hate literature in the name of serving faith.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s If I Am Assassinated (written by the former PM when he was in jail and awaiting death by a sham trial), and Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan, were completely banned by the Zia regime.

Both the books became openly available after Zia’s demise in August 1988.

It wasn’t the books that triggered the moral, social and political decay that began to creep into the ways of Pakistan from the 1980s onwards. It was the reactive and self-righteous mind-set and consequent policies of those who banned these books.

DAWN

Malala Yousafzai book launch censored in Peshawar

PPF Editor — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 11:59:26 +0000

Reporters Without Borders regrets that the launch of 16-year-old blogger Malala Yousafzai’s memoir “I am Malala” at Peshawar University’s Area Study Centre in northwestern Pakistan on 28 January was cancelled as a result of pressure from local officials, who cited security reasons.

“We deplore this politically-motivated manoeuvre, which violated freedom of information,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of the Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific Desk.

“Claiming an inability to protect the book launch in order to prevent it taking place was totally specious. The provincial government’s opinion of this book should be of no consequence and should certainly not result in any form of censorship. We hope the rescheduled event goes ahead without interference on 5 February.”

The organizers were forced to cancel the book launch after the police told them that they were unable to provide security for the event.

Khadim Hussain, one of the organizers, said two members of the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (of which Peshawar is the capital) – information minister Shah Farman and local government minister Inayatur Rehman ¬– intervened personally to prevent it going ahead.

On the day scheduled for the Malala book launch, the government said it did not oppose the event but rather the university’s use by the organizers “for political ends.”

The book’s complete title is: “I am Malala: the story of the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban.” Its author, who has written a blog on the BBC Urdu website since 2009, has lived in Britain with her family since the October 2012 shooting.

Still threatened by the Taliban in Pakistan, Yousafzai had not been due to attend the launch, which was organized by the Bacha Khan Education Trust, an NGO called Strengthening Participatory Organization and the university’s Area Study Centre.

Pakistan is ranked 159th out of 179 countries in the 2013 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

Reporters Without Border

Malala’s book launch issue triggers heated debate

PPF Editor — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 10:29:07 +0000

PESHAWAR: Though the decision of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to stop the launch of Malala Yousafzai’s book shocked Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan, yet a minister defended the move.

After scathing criticism against PTI-led provincial government in the press and social media, Imran Khan had to intervene to do damage control. “I am at a loss to understand why Malala’s book launch stopped in Peshawar. PTI believes in freedom of speech/debate, not censorship of ideas,” the tweet said.

The two tweets were widely re-tweeted in approval and replied to by Twitter users, appreciating Imran Khan for expressing displeasure over the action of his party-led provincial government. The book launching ceremony of “I am Malala” was scheduled to be held on Tuesday at the Area Study Centre, University of Peshawar. The ceremony was jointly organised by the Area Study Centre, Bacha Khan Education Foundation and Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO). The provincial government pressurised the university administration and the director of Area Study Centre not to hold the event.

After the director’s resistance, the campus police refused to provide security to the gathering, which resulted in the cancellation of the book launch.

However, the official handout issued by the provincial Minister for Information Shah Farman defended the decision instead of repenting it. He justified cancelling the book launch by saying it had no relevance to the university.

“Unveiling the book at the Area Study Centre University of Peshawar was not allowed because the same book had no relevance with curricular and co-curricular activities of the students,” the minister said in the statement.

Some expressed surprise that how a book could be irrelevant to a university. “It is an interesting argument. If books have no relevance with curricular activities, then I wonder what else? asked Nauman Khan, a college teacher in the city.

The minister argued the government had not stopped the event from taking place instead the venue was not “suitable.” The government has not stopped the unveiling of the book, “I am Malala”. The real issue was of a suitable place and security for holding the ceremony,” it explained. However, the handout did not say the government had suggested an alternate venue.

He said the book was a biography of Malala Yousafzai, which has no connection with Area Study Centre and other educational institutions.

The minister added the PTI government believed in the freedom of expression, therefore, some other suitable venue should have been selected for unveiling the book, as Area Study Centre being an educational institution was not a ‘proper venue’.

The government has a focused approach to make educational institutions and other centres of excellence apolitical and therefore no one would be allowed to make political scoring in educational institutes, he concluded.

Director of Area Study Center Dr Sarfaraz challenged the assertions made by the minister. “Anything which is relevant to Afghanistan, Pakistan, war on terror, regional war is the mandate of the centre given by the Parliament,” he stated.

He said their job was to disseminate knowledge. Dr Sarfaraz wondered at the minister’s argument that the book was irrelevant to the centre and said it had organised hundreds of books launching ceremonies in the past.

Besides a number of foreign dignitaries including ambassadors, foreign ministers and even heads of state from US, UK, Hungary and other countries had addressed the students at the centre.

He denied making political point-scoring by hosting the book-launching ceremony. “We are dealing with politics in academic way,” he said and added “Tomorrow one will demand to close down the department of political science as it teaches politics,” he said.

When contacted, Khadim Hussain, a scholar and the Managing Director of the Bacha Khan Education Foundation, criticised the provincial government for not allowing the book launching.

He termed the decision a violation of all norms of decency and academic freedom. “Those having difference of opinion should come and speak as well, but this is not the way to suppress the voices with which the government doesn’t agree,” he stated.

He said Malala Yousafzai is an indigenous voice of struggle against the forces of retrogression and people have the right to know about her.

I am Malala was launched on October 9, 2013 the world over. The 276-page book carries details of Malala Yousafzai’s life in Swat valley and describes her struggle for girls’ education and her ordeal after she was critically shot in the head by Taliban in October 2012. Taliban have threatened action against the bookshops selling her book.

The News

KP govt stops Malala book launch

PPF Editor — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 07:38:05 +0000

PESHAWAR: A ceremony to launch Malala Yousufzai’s book ‘I am Malala’ scheduled at the University of Peshawar on Tuesday was stopped by the university after intervention by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government.

The Bacha Khan Education Foundation (BKEF), Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) and Area Study Centre had planned the ceremony.

“It is against the spirit of freedom of expression and promotion of education because holding a ceremony in honour of Malala Yousufzai means to scale up awareness about child rights,” Dr Khadim Hussain, director of the BKEF, told Dawn.

He said they had been informed by police late on Monday that they could not provide security for the programme.

“I was stopped by many people, including ministers, the vice-chancellor, registrar and police, from holding the programme,” Area Study Centre’s director Sarfraz Khan said.

Sources in the centre said the director was first contacted by provincial Local Government Minister Inayatullah Khan, who belongs to Jamaat-i-Islami, and then by Information Minister Shah Farman of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), asking him to stop the book launch. But the director made it clear to them that the ASC was an autonomous centre which did not come under the jurisdiction of the provincial government. After that he was approached by the vice-chancellor and registrar and both of them called for stopping the ceremony.

Finally, the head of the Campus Peace Corps, which comes under the provincial police chief, categorically told the director that they were not in a position to provide security, the sources said. When contacted, LG Minister Inayatullah Khan said: “I never spoke to anyone regarding the book launching programme.” Shah Farman was not available for comments.

DAWN