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Malala tells Muslim leaders not to ‘legitimise’ Taliban

AFP
Monday, Jan 13, 2025

By News Desk

ISLAMABAD: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders on Sunday not to legitimise the Afghan Taliban government and to “show true leadership” over their assault on women’s rights.

“Do not legitimise them,” she said at a summit focused on girls’ education in Islamic nations held in Islamabad.

“As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voices, use your power. You can show true leadership. You can show true Islam,” said 27-year-old Yousafzai.

The two-day conference brought together ministers and education officials from dozens of Muslim-majority countries, backed by the Muslim World League (MWL).

Yousafzai called on the international community to tackle the global crisis of girls’ education, emphasising the vital role educated women play in building a thriving society.

“We should begin by recognising what we are up against, a crisis that holds our economy back by hundreds of billions in lost growth, a crisis harming the health, safety and security of our people,” she said.

“If we don’t tackle this crisis, our society will not thrive as it should,” she said, adding:. “We will fail to live up to Islam’s fundamental values of seeking knowledge.”

This conference, she said, was an encouraging first step. “But we can only have an honest and serious conversation about girls’ educations, if

we call out the worst violations of it.”

“In Afghanistan, an entire generation of girls is robbed of their future. This conference will not be serving its purpose if we don’t talk about the education of Afghan girls,” she said, adding, “The Taliban-ruled country is the only one in the world where girls are completely barred from education.”Delegates from Afghanistan’s Taliban government did not attend the event despite being invited, Pakistan Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP on Saturday.

“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings,” Yousafzai told the conference. “They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification.” Muhammad al-Issa, a Saudi cleric and MWL secretary general, on Saturday told the summit that “those who say that girls’ education is un-Islamic are wrong”. Yousafzai also highlighted the impact of wars in Yemen, Sudan and Gaza on schooling.

“In Gaza, Israel has decimated the entire education system,” she said. “I will continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.” She further said girls in a number of Muslim countries, including Yemen and Sudan, were living under dire circumstances, facing poverty, violence and forced marriages. Yousafzai was shot in the face by the proscribed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2012 when she was a schoolgirl, amid her campaigning for female education rights.

She was evacuated to the United Kingdom after her attack and went on to become a global advocate for girls’ education and, at the age of 17, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner.