Nevertheless, They Persist: The Iconicity and Radical Politics of Malala Yousafzai

Abstract

A young girl dressed in a prettily embroidered kameez with a white dupatta draped over her head stands at a pulpit in Swat Valley, Pakistan. A poster with images of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin hangs from the front of the podium; the International Marxist Tendency’s logo marks the poster’s upper right corner. A line from Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France runs along the bottom: “The Political instrument (state) of their (workers) enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation” (Marx). The photo (“Malala Yousufzai [sic] speaking at the Marxist school in SWAT”) was taken between July 13 and 15, 2012 (Woods). Three months later, on October 9, the girl in the photo was shot by a Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) gunman. Two years later, when she became the youngest person to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, Tariq Ali wrote to Al Jazeera: “The first Trot sympathizer to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Did they know?” (Waraich). Malala Yousafzai, though largely celebrated in the United States and her current home of the United Kingdom, remains a controversial figure. She and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, have been condemned by progressives and conservatives alike as Western puppets. Scholars of gender and the Middle East have also relegated Malala to a symbol, analyzing her rise to global fame as emblematic of the neoliberal-imperial impulse among Western nations to ‘save’ Muslim women by waging war in their home countries. Put simply: Malala’s construction as a neoliberal darling by and for the ‘the West’ has been firmly established. But as Rosie Walters correctly points out, depicting Malala “as a young woman whose story has been