Here's the Full Text of the Taliban Letter to Malala Yousafzai

Late last year we published an interview with Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani freelance reporter. Ashraf played a central role in the rise to prominence of Malala Yousafzai, the young advocate for girls education, gravely injured in an attempted assassination when a Taliban-linked gunman boarded her school bus and opened fire, hitting Yousafzai and three classmates. Since surviving the shooting, Yousafzai has risen to international fame, speaking this week at the United Nations, receiving thousands of votes to be Time magazine's famous "Person of the Year," and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Reporter Ashraf, who is now studying for a Ph.D. in Illinois, had published a column in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper questioning whether he and foreign media had gone too far in thrusting Yousafzai into the spotlight alone—a fame that may have led to her targeting. This week, following Yousafzai's U.N. speech, which received a standing ovation, a Taliban senior officer, Adnan Rasheed, sent a letter to Yousafzai, the full text of which is reproduced below. In it, he addressed several of the same points Ashraf had in our interview—if in drastically different ways. The letter deepens the story. The attack on Yousafzai, Rasheed argues, was not designed to deter girls from going to school, but was motivated by Yousafzai's own attacks on the Taliban. The motivation was to shut her up, or punish her for criticizing Taliban tactics, not her actions to promote her right to an education, Rasheed claims. It's a thin hair to split: Yousafzai's criticisms of Rasheed's Taliban faction were, precisely, about Taliban attacks on her school. But the argument recalls statements by Ashraf in our interview last year, in which he parsed the complex motivations behind the Taliban anti-education campaign. Though the Taliban had made clear their opposition to girls studying, Ashraf claimed the initial attacks on schools were intended as strikes against the Pakistani state, which was at war with Taliban forces. The goal was to hit state property, and complicate life for the government. Education for girls was one of several targets at the time, but the larger issue was political control of the region. Why does that distinction matter? In a practical sense, it probably doesn't—the end of girls' education was a particularly toxic item on the Taliban platform, and violence resulted. Yousafzai and three other girls were near-fatally attacked, the schools closed, and the world recoiled. But Rasheed's letter provides more of the deeply weird context around the events that would culminate in Yousafzai's shooting, and the broader Taliban war on girls. His letter quotes the educational goals of once-colonial power Britain, and references drone strikes, modern war crimes, and the Freemasons. It all adds up to a portrait of a belief system that makes it impossible for girls to study because, he seems to believe, studying suggests secularism and imperialism. The problem with Yousafzai learning geography or math, at least as far as Rasheed's letter goes, isn't that biblical law forbids it. It's that he doesn't like Yousafzai's particular curriculum. You say a teacher, a pen and a book can change the world, yes I agree with, but which teacher which pen and which book? It is to be specified, Prophet Muhammad Peace be upon him said I am sent as a teacher, and the book He sent to teach is Quran. So a noble and pious teacher with prophetic curriculum can change the world not with satanic or secular curriculum.Surprisingly few outlets have published the original text of the letter, below. It contains several spelling and grammatical mistakes, but is not difficult to read, and represents one of the few times an English-speaking audience has had access to a direct statement by a Taliban leader on the controversial case. Here it is.