PESHAWAR: A senior Pakistani Taliban commander has written to Malala Yousafzai, accusing her of “smearing” them and urging her to return home and join a madrassa.
Last October, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan gunmen shot Malala, now 16, in the head in her home town in Swat where she campaigned for the right of girls to go to school.
Malala made a powerful speech at the UN on Friday in her first public appearance since the attack, vowing to continue her struggle for education and not to be silenced by the militants.
In the letter, Adnan Rasheed, a former air force member-turned-TTP cadre, said he wished the attack had not happened, but accused her of running a “smearing campaign” against the militants. “It is amazing that you are shouting for education, you and the UN is pretending that you were shot due to education, although this is not the reason... not the education but your propaganda was the issue. What you are doing now, you are using your tongue on the behest of the others,” he wrote. It is understood Malala has not received the letter.
Rashid also accused Malala of seeking to promote an education system begun by the British colonialists to produce “Asians in blood but English in taste” and said students should study Islam and not what it called the “satanic or secular curriculum”.
“I advise you to come back home, adopt the Islamic and Pashtun culture, join any female Islamic madrassa near your home town, study and learn the book of Allah, use your pen for Islam and plight of Muslim ummah (community),” Rasheed said.
He said he had wanted to write to Malala to warn her against criticising the Taliban when she rose to prominence with a blog for the BBC Urdu service chronicling life under the Taliban rule in Swat in 2007-09. The Taliban have destroyed hundreds of schools saying government forces used them as hideouts and bases. Rasheed was sentenced to death over a 2003 attack on then military ruler General Pervez Musharraf but escaped from custody in April last year. AFP
