When the voice of truth rises from the minarets, The Buddha smiles, And the broken chain of history reconnects. The lines are from the poem, The Relics of Butkara , written by Malala’s father and quoted by her in her autobiography, I am Malala . I’m still reading the book and found this passage about Butkara, her birthplace, interesting. “Our Butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek,” she writes. They were relics from the days when Buddhism was practised by the people of the place. In other words, Malala’s forefathers must have been Buddhists. The people who are now Muslims have a Buddhist ancestry. It is that reconnection that Malala’s father speaks about in his poem. “Islam came to our valley (Swat) in the eleventh century when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni invaded from Afghanistan and became our ruler, but in ancient times Swat was a Buddhist kingdom,” writes Malala. “The Buddhists had arrived here in the second century and their kings ruled th
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