Seven-year-old Shireena is playing in a stream with some other children at a somewhat unusual pre-noon time on a busy working day. Normally, she stays in her classroom at this hour except during weekends, but today she is not. She is among more than 2,000 unfortunate girls of the area whose parents have decided to take them out of the schools after cleric Maulana Fazlullah issued an edict declaring girls’ education ‘un-Islamic’.According to some locals, a majority of the girls stopped by their parents from attending schools, were the first in their families to have had the opportunity of getting formal education and Shireena was one of them.
The female education ratio in Imam Deri and the nearby Koza Banda, Bara Banda, Kabal and Char Bagh villages is very low. And things are likely to remain the same with little chances for many families to send their girls to schools after the edict. Perhaps it was because of the very low literacy rate and vulnerability of the locals to religious propaganda that Maulana Fazlullah chose Imam Deri to build his first markaz — where he wanted to establish his first religious school, his FM radio station and all the facilities to gather people for sermons.