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Rachel Holmes points out, this racially biased view is also held by “the
right-wing military of the world’s superpower,” namely the United
States, which “is going around the world saying we are bringing
feminism to liberate you” (2013). As local feminists and political
activists, Zarina and her sister-in-law, Diwa, are both dubbed “Malala
of Maiwand” in the novel on different occasions (Shamsie, 2014c: 269,
353). Before the massacre breaks out in the Street of Storytellers,
Zarina “took a dagger in her hand and walked out bare-faced, the dye
of the Khudai Khidmatgar staining her skin” (355). Diwa is fearless,
too, when she “stepped out from the lines of the Peshawari men,
walked through the ranks of sepoys who stepped aside as if she were a
djinn whose touch might burn them, and stopped in front of an
armoured car” (257). Even though Diwa dies of a gun shot in the end,
she is mourned by Peshawaris as “[t]he angel on the Street of
Storytellers” (Shamsie, 2014c: 322). Being dubbed “Malala of
Maiwand,” both Zarina and Diwa remind the reader of the Pakistani
feminist, Malala Yousafzai, who, being a Pashtun, is also named after
Malala of Maiwand, a national folk hero of Afghanistan who rallied
local fighters against the British troops at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand.
Even though she was shot in the head by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai
has never stopped speaking out against the Taliban and insists on
women’s rights to education, for which she was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2014. By creating two Pashtun activist female characters,
who recall Malala of Maiwand and remind the reader of Malala
Yousafzai, and juxtaposing them with the non-violent male characters,
Shamsie’s novel shows that “[i]t is, and has always been, possible to be
a Muslim Pashtun and to embrace nonviolence and a prominent role
for women in public affairs” (Dalrymple, 2013). In short, concerning
critical cosmopolitanism, the novel underscores not only the
complexity of Muslim culture but also the long history of Muslims’
local resistance against the globally widespread violence of extremism
and patriarchy while fighting against Western imperialism.