Hasan Altaf: Floating over I Am Malala, and at one point explicitly acknowledged, is the ghost of Anne Frank. The comparison has been made before, and while Yousafzai is clearly the more fortunate, there is an important difference. Anne Frank was forced to hide in an attic; the diary she kept there—the narrative she created, for herself and by herself—was entirely her own. In exile, Malala Yousafzai has been granted one form of freedom, but been denied the other for a while. Even the diary she famously kept for the BBC was from the beginning intended for public consumption and shaped by that need; as Yousafzai writes, in one of the uncomfortably metatextual moments in which it becomes all too clear what we are complicit in, “…after a while I got to know the kind of things [the BBC correspondent] wanted me to talk about and became more confident. He liked personal feelings and what he called my ‘pungent sentences’ and also the mix of everyday family life with the terror of the Taliban.”
The nearest comparison, then, isn’t Anne Frank. What we’ve done is turn Malala Yousafzai into our Harry Potter. She is the Girl Who Lived—which is a way of saying that she is Pakistan’s hope, Pakistan’s absolution. Of that, there seems to be no shortage these days. Consider another teenager, fifteen-year-old Aitzaz Hasan: Running late one January morning, he tackled a suicide bomber and saved his schoolmates at the cost of his own life. He was quickly named a hero, christened the “male Malala” and subjected to the same instantaneous process of canonization or, since there isn’t that much difference, fetishization. As Malala Yousafzai became “the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban,” Aitzaz Hasan became #BraveheartAitzaz, a life compressed into an inane hashtag.
From a distance, perhaps, that’s fine: Martyrdom is simple, ordained, and, in its way, beautiful. But when you get closer—when you become one of those in whose stead these young people are offered up—it’s an out. Making martyrs is easy business; no explanations, no logic, no hypotheticals are required or even desired. In this case, it means that no one needs to tell the story of how history came to ask this of Aitzaz Hasan; more importantly, it means that no one needs to attempt to answer the questions that his life—a life of, most likely, unemployment, poverty, sickness—would have posed, had he been allowed to live it. More here.