My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room. Many students argued that the book should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld. My father also saw the book as offensive to Islam but believes strongly in freedom of speech. ‘First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book,’ he suggested. He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, ‘Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it? Not my Islam!’
For the first few years after graduating from Jehanzeb my father worked as an English teacher in a well-known private college. But the salary was low, just 1,600 rupees a month (around £12), and my grandfather complained he was not contributing to the household. It was also not enough for him to save for the wedding he hoped for to his beloved Tor Pekai.
One of my father’s colleagues at the school was his friend Mohammad Naeem Khan. He and my father had studied for their bachelors and masters degrees in English together and were both passionate about education. They were also both frustrated as the school was very strict and unimaginative. Neither the students nor the teachers were supposed to have their own opinions, and the owners’ control was so tight they even frowned upon friendship between teachers. My father longed for the freedom that would come with running his own school. He wanted to encourage independent thought and hated the way the school he was at rewarded obedience above open-mindedness and creativity. So when Naeem lost his job after a dispute with the college administration, they decided to start their own school.
Their original plan was to open a school in my father’s village of Shahpur, where there was a desperate need: ‘Like a shop in a community where there are no shops,’ he said. But when they went there to look for a building, there were banners everywhere advertising a school opening – someone had beaten them to it. So they decided to set up an English-language school in Mingora, thinking that since Swat was a tourist destination there would be a demand for learning in English.
As my father was still teaching, Naeem wandered the streets looking for somewhere to rent. One day he called my father excitedly to say he’d found the ideal place. It was the ground floor of a two-storey building in a well-off area called Landikas with a walled courtyard where students could gather. The previous tenants had also run a school – the Ramada School. The owner had called it that because he had once been to Turkey and seen a Ramada Hotel! But the school had gone bankrupt, which perhaps should have made them think twice. Also the building was on the banks of a river where people threw their rubbish and it smelt foul in hot weather.
My father went to see the building after work. It was a perfect night with stars and a full moon just above the trees, which he took to be a sign. ‘I felt so happy,’ he recalls. ‘My dream was coming true.’
Naeem and my father invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees. They borrowed 30,000 rupees more to repaint the building, rented a shack across the road to live in and went from door to door trying to find students. Unfortunately the demand for English tuition turned out to be low, and there were unexpected drains on their income. My father’s involvement in political discussions continued after college. Every day his fellow activists came to the shack or the school for lunch. ‘We can’t afford all this entertaining!’ Naeem would complain. It was also becoming clear that while they were best friends, they found it hard to work as business partners.
On top of that, there was a stream of guests from Shangla now that my father had a place for them to stay. We Pashtuns cannot turn away relatives or friends, however inconvenient. We don’t respect privacy and there is no such thing as making an appointment to see someone. Visitors can turn up whenever they wish and can stay as long as they want. It was a nightmare for someone trying to start a business and it drove Naeem to distraction. He joked to my father that if either of them had relatives to stay, they should pay a fine. My father kept trying to persuade Naeem’s friends and family to stay so he could be fined too!
After three months Naeem had had enough. ‘We are supposed to be collecting money in enrolment fees. Instead the only people knocking on our doors are beggars! This is a Herculean task,’ he added. ‘I can’t take any more!’
By this time the two former friends were hardly speaking to each other and had to call in local elders to mediate. My father was desperate not to give up the school so agreed to pay Naeem a return on his share of the investment. He had no idea how. Fortunately another old college friend called Hidayatullah stepped in and agreed to put up the money and take Naeem’s place. The new partners again went from door to door, telling people they had started a new kind of school. My father is so charismatic that Hidayatullah says he is the kind of person who, if invited to your house, will make friends with your friends. But while people were happy to talk to him, they preferred to send their children to established schools.
They named it the Khushal School after one of my father’s great heroes, Khushal Khan Khattak, the warrior poet from Akora just south of Swat, who tried to unify all Pashtun tribes against the Moghuls in the seventeenth century. Near the entrance they painted a motto: WE ARE COMMITTED TO BUILD FOR YOU THE CALL OF THE NEW ERA. My father also designed a shield with a famous quote from Khattak in Pashto: ‘I girt my sword in the name of Afghan honour.’ My father wanted us to be inspired by our great hero, but in a manner fit for our times – with pens, not swords. Just as Khattak had wanted the Pashtuns to unite against a foreign enemy, so we needed to unite against ignorance.
Unfortunately not many people were convinced. When the school opened they had just three students. Even so my father insisted on starting the day in style by singing the national anthem. Then his nephew Aziz, who had come to help, raised the Pakistan flag.
With so few students, they had little money to equip the school and soon ran out of credit. Neither man could get any money from their families, and Hidayatullah was not pleased to discover that my father was still in debt to lots of people from college, so they were always receiving letters demanding money.
There was worse in store when my father went to register the school. After being made to wait for hours, he was finally ushered into the office of a superintendent of schools, who sat behind towering piles of files surrounded by hangers-on drinking tea. ‘What kind of school is this?’ asked the official, laughing at his application. ‘How many teachers do you have? Three! Your teachers are not trained. Everyone thinks they can open a school just like that!’
The other people in the office laughed along, ridiculing him. My father was angry. It was clear the superintendent wanted money. Pashtuns cannot stand anyone belittling them, nor was he about to pay a bribe for something he was entitled to. He and Hidayatullah hardly had money to pay for food, let alone bribes. The going rate for registration was about 13,000 rupees, more if they thought you were rich. And schools were expected to treat officials regularly to a good lunch of chicken or trout from the river. The education officer would call to arrange an inspection then give a detailed order for his lunch. My father used to grumble, ‘We’re a school not a poultry farm.’
So when the official angled for a bribe, my father turned on him with all the force of his years of debating. ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ he demanded. ‘Am I in an office or am I in a police station or a court? Am I a criminal?’ He decided to challenge the officials to protect other school owners from such bullying and corruption. He knew that to do this he needed some power of his own, so he joined an organisation called the Swat Association of Private Schools. It was small in those days, just fifteen members, and my father quickly became vice president.