Let Her Fly

by Ziauddin Yousafzai

  And then his results came in. It was amazing, really amazing. I was so happy for him.

  I was full of regret, too, at my own behavior. My son got fantastic grades and he’d had this potential all along. Dr. Fiona was right.

  These days, I am a hugging father for Khushal. Every day he comes and he kisses me on one side of the cheek and then the other. He is the only person in the family who does. Malala and Toor Pekai do not like hugging much. And the kiss from Khushal is a genuine one. It is like the kiss that my father used to give me. It is the same because it is full of love, even though the relationship the boys and I have is entirely different.

  We talk about how we used to be, which seems a world away. Khushal has said to me, “You kept on giving me chances. Even if I made a mistake, you gave me a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance. And I think I began to realize myself that you might have had a point.” I have asked him what he thinks a father should be, and he has told me, “A father should build his son’s character rather than build his son’s mind for him.” I think these are wise words and I am glad I understand what they mean now.

  I don’t see myself as authoritarian, but I hope that I am a figure of respect.

  When Atal was about to go out recently, I said, “Atal Khan, should I not know the names of the friends you will be with?” And he responded cheekily, “Aba, I don’t ask you for a list of your friends’ names, do I?” I laughed so hard. How could I argue?

  There is not a tradition of the “sleepover” in Pakistan. When Atal first asked us to invite his friends to stay, Toor Pekai and I were confused. I said to him “What does that mean, sleepover? Why would these boys sleep in our home when they have beds of their own?” But Atal explained to us, “Look, my friends will come over and they will sleep at our house.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because it is a tradition here.”

  And we said, “Oh, okay.” And they came, about eight boys of different colors and religions, and they were up all night, maybe until 3 a.m., and they were just talking and playing in Atal’s room, but I was so happy.

  If these friends make Atal happy, then there are one hundred extra blessings of love filling my house.

  Loving my sons unconditionally has meant that they came to respect me naturally. I learned that real authority is not found in fear but in this respect. We no longer call Dr. Fiona “Aunty” but say “Godmother” instead, a tribute to the guidance she continues to give the boys. It is Malala who is Khushal’s newest mentor. Where once they fought over the television remote control, now they talk about his life, his plans to follow her to Oxford—“If you come, I’ll leave!” she tells him in jest—and affairs of Khushal’s heart. They text each other every day. Aged fourteen, Atal, that small disobedient boy, is almost as tall as Malala. “My sister is brilliant,” he says. “I should not be scared to be in her shadow. I should learn from her and how she does this special thing. I should learn not to be afraid like she is not afraid. Not to be shy and how to get my words across. People might say I am in her shadow, but I think rather that I am in her class. I am in the class of Malala, and I am learning from her.”

  My grandfather and my father would never have thought that it would be a girl in the family who would be mentoring her brothers in this way.

  I thank God for these beautiful changes.

  Wife and Best Friend

  The Quiet Activist

  SOMETIMES I ASK MYSELF what would have happened in my life had Toor Pekai not been my wife. I think I would have struggled to bring up children who believed deeply in gender equality like ours do, because how could I have instilled those ideas and values in them if their mother was not part of our family’s journey? How would equality have come to mean anything to Malala, Khushal, and Atal if they had seen their mother live in my shadow? There would have been no bridge between us, husband and wife, and no bridge between Pekai and her children. In countries where there is a strong patriarchy, change has to come from women, too. So many women all over the world are told from birth that men are more important. There comes a time when they have to actively stop believing this and claim what they are entitled to. This is why I call Toor Pekai my co-traveler.

  Toor Pekai was—is—so important in the role of mother because she refused to chain Malala with all the lessons she herself had been taught about being a girl. In Toor Pekai’s childhood, girls were judged only by the honor they brought to the male members of the family—their father, their brothers, and their sons—and their determination never to bring upon the family any kind of shame. “Shame” is not only acting in a bad way. It can be acting in an independent way. If a girl falls in love with a boy not chosen by her parents and meets him unchaperoned, this is considered shameful. Looking into the eyes of a man who is not your husband is a “shame.” There is a Pashtun saying that the most honorable girl in the village—in other words the “best” girl—will always keep her eyes to the floor, even when her village is on fire. As a teenager, Pekai asked her mother, “What kind of girl would not look up to help when all around her people and homes are burning?” When faced with this logic, her mother replied, “Oh, Pekai, what can I say?”

  It was Pekai, as a woman, who was also courageous in the way she unlearned old ideas about the difference between boys and girls.

  Early in our marriage, first in Barkana and then shortly afterwards in Mingora, where we really began our own joint journey towards freedom, I was struggling in life to become a teacher and then to set up my own school. Pekai was so supportive. Even on our honeymoon, which we spent at my father’s house, she did not complain when I went off every day to volunteer as a teacher in the high school where once I was a student. Looking back now, I see this is characteristic of her. She is a rock, steady and self-assured, with a heart dedicated to the needs of others.

  We never seemed to have any money, and it saddened me so much when Pekai had to sell her wedding bangles. Where could I find a job, a good opportunity, so that I could earn a living and provide for a future family, while still enjoying a sense of pride from contributing to my community? It seemed hopeless. Neither Pekai nor I wanted to stay in Karshat or Barkana.

  Pekai called me “Khaista” from the beginning of our marriage. It means “beautiful one.” My nephews called me this, too. I am not beautiful, but it is a lovely pet name that I still like hearing Pekai use. “Khaista,” she would say, “if you do these good things for others, God will ensure that we are okay.”

  After a period of teaching English in a well-known private college in Mingora, I set up my own school with an old college friend called Muhammad Naeem. He was later replaced by another friend, Hidayatullah. It was a mixed primary school, a dream come true for a lower-class man like me who believed so much in education. We had just three pupils. There was nowhere in the school for Pekai and me to live as a married couple, but she joined us and we lived in two dirty rooms I rented near the school. It was in this shack that she gave birth to our first child, a girl. The child was stillborn. Pekai still remembers her, with her pale skin and refined nose. I have always blamed our rooms’ lack of hygiene. But Toor Pekai did not complain too much about our conditions. The school was her dream, too. She held the lantern while I whitewashed the school’s walls late into the night.

  We named the school the Khushal School, after the poet Khushal Khan Khattak, and we painted a motto by the door: “We are committed to build you for the call of the new era.” But the new era for us, in reality, meant poverty. I was in a lot of debt from college, and our three students were hardly enough for us to survive.

  But being married to Pekai brought me such happiness. As a child, Toor Pekai, had valued her independence. She was a strong character who had loved running around Karshat, the neighboring village to mine, but adolescence and purdah had meant that her movements became restricted and her face was veiled. Marriage and a home in Mingora, however humble, meant she could experience once again the freedoms she had enjoyed as a child. In Mingora, life was differ
ent from that in Barkana in that the women seemed more relaxed in their movement from place to place. I was adamant that Pekai enjoy the kind of freedom that would have been impossible for a woman living in either of our villages. She walked around without me, and inside our home we behaved as equals. If a man ever criticized us to my face, I took no notice.

  What I discovered was that in feeling Pekai’s freedom with me, I, too, felt free. She enriched my life by being herself. Pekai was not a wife who brought the patriarchal burden of needing to be “protected,” that is, monitored. The kind of patriarchy we lived with—the kind that does not allow women to have economic independence—forces women to become a burden on their husbands, and then as widows on their brothers. It forces them to live in fear, too, constantly thinking about their honor. But I trusted Toor Pekai, and I was mostly free of the old patriarchal ideas.

  There were still the taught old rules of my childhood, however, and sometimes I caught myself behaving like an old-fashioned Pashtun. It was again a case of the old Ziauddin in battle with the new Ziauddin. So I had to defeat the old Ziauddin and accept the new Ziauddin, but it took time to accept my new self. I did not always get it right.

  Whenever the old Ziauddin popped up in our marriage, it was Toor Pekai who pushed him down. For example, during the first month after the wedding, while we were still in Shangla, I told her my male friend was coming to visit. As a traditional Pashtun, you are not supposed to allow your friends to meet your wife. It rarely happened. I was happy that Toor Pekai would meet my friend. Pekai knew him because he was in the community, but she had not met him as my wife. When I told her of his visit, she said she would like to make herself presentable with makeup. Instinctively I said, “Why should you be making yourself up for him?” It was the Pashtun in me.

  But she challenged me. She said, “It is my right to use makeup. This is my house, too. If you are not comfortable with this, then why bring your friend here?” I felt ashamed. “I am sorry,” I told her. “You are right.”

  On another occasion, a bit later in our marriage, somebody followed us home to where we lived in Mingora. We had visited the home of a new teacher, traveling there and back by rickshaw. Even with my new ideas of equality, I felt self-conscious walking beside Pekai in the street. Women did not walk the streets with their husbands. They went with their brothers and fathers. I quickened my pace, so that Pekai fell behind me, even though we had the same destination. A man followed us and then reported me to the person from whom I rented the school building. There was a knock at our door. When I answered it, the man said to me, “There has been a report that you have brought a woman back here. Can you explain this to me, please?” I said, “That woman is my wife! I rent this building! Do not meddle in my business.” I was furious, but in my discomfort at being seen in public with my wife—an endorsement of her freedom—I had acted in a guilty-looking way. Pekai was angry with the man who had followed us, suspecting some abuse of her honor, or that she was some sort of shameful woman. But it was I who had let her down. I should have walked the streets of Mingora with Pekai by my side with pride.

  There was one aspect of Pekai’s life in which she remained traditional. This was her view of the scarf, which she wore in public in a way that obscured almost all of her face. Until we left Pakistan in 2012 following Malala’s attack, she could never bring herself to relax the way she covered her face. I would say to her, “Pekai, purdah is not only in the veil. It is in the heart.” When Malala and I began appearing in the media in our campaign against the Taliban, Pekai would never allow herself to be filmed or photographed. The first time she agreed to have her picture taken was in 2013, when Malala gave her speech to the UN in New York on her sixteenth birthday.

  Pekai’s view of the scarf was connected to her religious devotion and also to the opinions of everybody living around us. Her whole life she had been taught to believe that being a good Muslim means covering yourself from the eyes of men who are not your husband.

  Misinterpretations of the Holy Quran that suppress women are how the Taliban attracted female followers at first, because they played on women’s desire to always want to be better Muslims.

  When the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah used an illegal radio station to appeal directly to illiterate devout women like Pekai, he knew he could successfully convince them to give up basic human rights by making them think that if they questioned him, they were not being devout. Pekai, like many women in Mingora, was a fan of Fazlullah at first. But why would God be displeased by girls’ education? And then allow his name to be used by the Taliban to bomb more than four hundred schools? Pekai quickly rejected the broadcast sermons of Fazlullah, but many women around her did not.

  When it came to the scarf, Pekai feared the judgment of other women, and she was right to. Women in the community did judge because they saw the men who controlled them judge. It is how social conditioning works.

  Pekai stayed veiled, but in her own way, I still consider her to have been the bravest woman in Mingora. Without Pekai, I would not have taken one step forward in my life. Because she was always beside me, encouraging me and encouraging Malala, we felt like we were not alone in our campaign for girls’ education. “Malala’s activism is my heart’s voice,” Pekai said. It was two-way. Without me—a husband prepared to see his wife as his equal—as a woman living in a patriarchal society, Pekai, too, could not have begun to feel free.

  It is true that Toor Pekai needed my support and my backing, just as so many girls like Malala and women in patriarchal societies need the support of their fathers or husbands for their lives to be different. It is the cultural context of their countries. I think there is nothing wrong with boys and men understanding they have a responsibility to contribute to equality. When men and boys are aware of what women face, when they take measures to make the lives of women and girls easier, it is not patronizing to these women and girls, but rather it is offering much-needed support, based on values of decency and humanity.

  In those early days of marriage, our new way of living attracted criticism. And then when Malala was born in July 1997, two years after our stillborn child, and I added her name to the family tree, the first girl for three hundred years, that attracted criticism, too. Some of my distant and closer relatives would not celebrate Malala, or look into her cradle for the fact that she was a girl. This interest—or lack of it—in Malala became a benchmark for me. If Pekai told me somebody had come to visit, I would ask immediately, “Did they want to see Malala?” If they did not, that person was gone for me.

  While I did not want to spark a revolution or create a feud, sometimes you have to draw a line between what is acceptable to you and what is unacceptable. Treating Malala with indifference due to her gender? This I could not tolerate.

  But God was with us. It was my friend Hidayatullah who noticed that once Malala was born, our fortune with the school changed. It was like she brought with her a rush of good luck. As for me, now with two beautiful females in my life, I was happier than ever before.

  It mattered to Pekai as much as it did to me that girls in Mingora whose parents could not afford an education would be given one by the Khushal School. She bitterly regretted her own lack of education, and she did not want to see this repeated in the next generation. Our school was a fee-paying school, but we tried to take in as many girls as possible from families who could not afford it. It was a delicate balance and not always smooth.

  By the time Malala and the boys were receiving an education, the Khushal School was just breaking even. I was no longer forced to be the school janitor as well as the school accountant as well as the head teacher. It had grown to eight hundred pupils in three buildings, the original primary school, plus a high school for girls and another high school for boys. I had originally opened one high school, in 2003, but the patriarchal climate of preventing teenage girls from meeting boys made it too difficult for boys and girls to be taught together. I got many complaints from fathers about this and eventually
, with regret, I had to separate boys and girls. Hidayatullah and I had also gone our separate ways by then, so I was the overall principal, helped later by Madam Maryam, principal of the girls’ school.

  Pekai’s mission was to get as many girls into the school as possible. This made her a powerful local activist.

  Many mothers who saw value in sending their girls to school—even if it was only for a few years—came to Pekai first when they had financial needs, either requesting that Pekai help get their girls into the school for free, or, if they were already there, making the case to her that they could no longer afford the fees. Pekai was a great advocate for these women. Her success was built on the fact that everybody knew I listened to her and often did as she asked. This was very unusual between a husband and wife in our community. Usually, it was the wife who did what the husband asked. Malala later joined Pekai in this lobbying for free places.

  Fathers visited me at the school, but their wives knew better. Pekai was visited by women in our home quarters, a collection of small rooms above the school. A scenario might go like this: A mother with children already at the school would say. “Oh, bhabi, we cannot pay this fee. It is too much. Please, I beg that you help in reducing it.” And Pekai would say, “Okay, I will talk to him.” I would come home from teaching and she would say, “Here are the fee cards of the children of this family. Khaista, please bring the bill down for them.” And I would say, “Okay, it says here two hundred rupees. So we’ll bring it down to one fifty,” and then Pekai would haggle. “Too much! It must be a much lower amount!”

  The New Year would bring a rush of women to our home because this was the time that extras were added to the fee cards. I was not interested in making money, but I did have to pay the bills and the salaries, and I had to keep Madam Maryam calm, as she was responsible for balancing her own books. Sometimes Madam Maryam would visit me and say, “Sir, Toor Pekai has been admitting new girls again,” or “She has been promising that the school will fund their books. My school seems to run half by the ‘Toor Pekai Trust.’”