By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – The world’s youngest Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, has often been compared to Anne Frank. Both kept diaries in times when rulers subjugated those whom they believed to be racially or religiously inferior. Both Anne and Malala suffered through warfare, their lives constantly threatened, respectively by the Nazis and the Taliban. And both expressed a refreshing optimism and belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity.
It was not a coincidence that Malala kept an Anne Frank-like record of the deprivations suffered by her family and other residents of the Swat Valley during the time of Taliban oppression.
The diary that she began at age 12 under a pseudonym in fact was premised on journalist Hai Kakar’s idea, inspired by Anne Frank, that the thoughts of an innocent girl might impact the thinking of people in Pakistan and beyond.
Malala told her thoughts about living under Taliban threat to Kakar, who wrote up her feelings in Urdu for a weekly report on Pakistan’s BBC. Malala was given the pen-name Gul Makai.
Before the enterprise began, the journalist “told me about Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis with her family in Amsterdam during the war,” Malala wrote in her memoir, I Am Malala. “He told me she kept a diary about their lives all cramped together, about how they spent their days and about her own feelings. It was very sad, as in the end the family was betrayed and arrested and Anne died in a concentration camp when she was only fifteen. Later her diary was published and is a very powerful record.”
In 2014, when Malala was 17 and still recuperating from a Taliban gunshot to her head, she received an award from the Anne Frank Trust, at which her father Ziauddin Yousafzai, related that Anne’s diary had been “a kind of motivation for my daughter.”
“The Nazis controlled media and banned Jewish children from schools. The Taliban are trying to control media, bullying journalists and have closed hundreds of schools,” said her father, who served as headmaster of the school that Malala attended in defiance of the Taliban’s ban on girls becoming students.
Later in 2014, Malala shared the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming at age 17, the youngest laureate in the history of the prize.
It’s nice to imagine that Malala, a Muslim, and Anne, a Jew, could meet sometime in the hereafter and compare notes while forging an enduring friendship.
It would be interesting to hear them discuss such topics as the differences and similarities between Islam and Judaism.
For example, in writing about her early life, Malala told of going to Shangla, the village of her family, for the Eid ul-Azha holiday which “commemorates the Prophet Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, Ismael, to God.”
Jews refer to the story as the Akedah, but as Jews tell it, it is Isaac, not Ishmael, whom Abraham was called upon to sacrifice.
Another difference that Anne and Malala, in a spirit of good will, might enjoy discussing is how the story of Jonah might be of comfort to those in distress.
After Malala was nearly assassinated, Pakistani officials wanted her father to accompany them at midnight to their station.
“My father was so worried that for the whole time he repeated a verse of the Holy Quran over and over,” Malala wrote. “It was from the story of Yunus who is swallowed by a whale like the story of Jonah in the Bible. This verse was recited by the prophet Yunus when he was in the tummy of the whale. It reassures us that there is a way out of even the worst trouble and danger if we keep faith.”
When I think of Malala, I think of a teenager who wrote: “I used to say the Ayat al-Kursi, the verse of the Throne from the second surah of the Quran, the Chapter of the Cow. This is a very special verse and we believe that if you say it three times at night your home will be safe from shayatin or devils. When you say it five times your street will be safe, and seven times will protect the whole area. So I’d say it seven times or even more. Then I’d pray to God, “Bless us. First our father and family, then our street, then our whole mohalla, then all Swat.” Then I’d say, “No, all Muslims.” Then, “No, not just Muslims, bless all human beings.”
And when I think of Anne, I remember what was perhaps her most famous quotation: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)