Let Her Fly

by Ziauddin Yousafzai

  When I looked at Malala asleep in her bed, I did not think, “Yes, she is Malala and I love her, but Ziauddin, be realistic, we don’t have much money and she is a lower-class girl.”

  Never. Never. I believed in anything and everything for her. Instead of writing her off, or limiting her with established prejudices, I thought instead, “She will change the world! She will move mountains! If she is given the chance, this girl can go up and she can move the world for everyone. She is meant for the stars.”

  I say the same thing to all fathers, brothers, men, and boys today: The world will not come to you, inside your home, and introduce your daughter or your sister to you, when she is still a child, as the next great woman, the next great scientist or politician, the next Malala. It is up to you as a father or a brother, and a mother, to be the first to accept and encourage potential in the girl you love. It is up to you to recognize her and to believe in her, to believe that, yes, this small child in her crib can grow up to be these things. If you do not say that your children are the best or that they can work towards their dreams, then who will? And our children need it, believe me, they need it.

  It is well known that I named Malala after Malalai of Maiwand, the female Pashtun fighter who died on the battlefield for her cause. Of course, I did not name her Malala for the warfare or the battle or the martyred death. I named her this because she was the first woman in our culture who had her own identity, her own name. I remember the first time I properly contemplated what the story meant, before Malala was born. I had been sitting in my friend’s house in Mingora, long before I was married. My friend Usman Olasyar would often feed me to help my plight. I was engaged to Pekai, who was back in Shangla, waiting for me to earn enough so that we could get married. I was sitting on his daybed drinking chai and looking at a framed poster of a girl on a horse, a girl who was drawn in all her grandeur and glory. Around her were the famous words “Thousands of men might have reached to the zenith of their success, but they are no match for what Malalai of Maiwand did with a single call.” I was so moved. One call of this girl Malalai of Maiwand is far more excellent than thousands of men of excellence. I found it so romantic. And I found it so just that I thought, “If I am lucky enough to have a daughter, I will name her Malala.”

  When Malala was very small and she talked of wanting to be the prime minister, I would see people smirk. Their look said it: “You? The prime minister of Pakistan?” From the beginning, I thought, “Well, this shining morning star, she might just be smarter than the one already at the top.”

  So when people laughed at her dreams, it brought out the same anger in me that I had felt when male members of my family had shown no interest as she lay in her cradle, just because she was a girl.

  Still, in order for this hope I had for Malala to blossom, to thrive and grow instead of dying like a neglected, thirsty plant, there had to be an extra ingredient: education. I am a romantic and an idealist, but in this I saw an urgent, practical need. Just as education had taken me from Shangla, my daughter’s only way out of the confines of our society would be through gaining a degree and a job.

  Even the rich girls needed an education. The rich boys, sons of feudal lords, might rise up through money and family power, but education for any girl in Pakistan, and so many countries, is the only way out of patriarchy and early marriage.

  Malala’s Scarf

  Malala was admitted to the nursery school class of my school when she was five years old. She loved everything about being there. The desks, the books, the uniform. As she grew older, she used to linger there with the other girls, unwilling to leave. Because we lived in two rooms above the classrooms, she had been coming in and out from the moment she could walk, but the moment she became a student herself was of huge significance.

  We had three terms a year, and from the beginning, I bought her a folder and she used to keep her answer sheets clipped there in order, along with each test, the checked papers, and certificates. We have some of them even now. It was as if she knew that this life in the classroom was precious. She wanted to treasure every bit of it, respect every bit of it, give it the small honor of neatness and order. It was an intense kind of treasuring, a kind of mad love, a desperate love. Really, it was an obsession with school.

  The girls wore a uniform, which was a white shalwar and a dark blue kamiz, with a white scarf in summer and a black scarf in winter. Their shoes and socks were black. Malala carried a bright pink rucksack with a darker pink trim.

  Sometimes I would come home from teaching and find Malala crouched down by the open tap in a small concrete antechamber off of our living quarters. It was our only source of water and it was where the dishes and clothes were washed, not every day for the clothes, but three or four times a week. Malala was often beside the tap, barely taller than where it came out from the wall, and in her hand would be her school scarf. She would have the scarf in a bucket resting on the table below the tap and be pushing and pulling and squeezing it, rinsing away the dust and grime collected through her daily carefree life in Mingora.

  Malala took such care in this. She washed her school socks, too. She was such a helpful girl to Pekai. Everywhere in Mingora dust hung in the air, from the traffic and the heat. Malala did not like dirt, but I like to think of this scarf washing as an example of her pride in being a schoolgirl. She scrubbed it until the water was murky brown, and then she wrung it out and clipped it on our washing line on the roof. The sun dried it almost instantly, and the next day it was on her head, clean and fresh, ready for another day at her school desk.

  Was Malala’s passion for school due to nature or nurture? I think both. You can say that Malala was a perfect seed in the perfect soil, a magical seed in the most conducive soil for its nourishment. Our home was devoted to learning and she was devoted to learning. But she was also the luckiest girl as well, compared with some of her friends, because she had us supporting her, too. Education is not just about learning facts and sitting exams. The best schools are where all students’ potentials are unlocked, where all girls are given the wings to fly, and where they have this confidence built up in them to live a successful life of their own making.

  When I started the high school in 2003, I knew that giving girls power inside themselves was equally as important as teaching them English and Urdu. I would walk around the classrooms, and sometimes the girls would talk to me about how they wanted to learn but were getting no support at home from their parents. I would often mediate with these parents, but it was hard changing the old, ingrained view that a girl’s education beyond a certain point was a waste of time. In Mingora, going to school at a young age was not unusual. It was when the girls became teenagers that they disappeared from the classroom, as most often their families prepared them for marriage.

  In the beginning, before even Malala and the boys were in school, we were not a privileged family. We did not have lots of money or a big bungalow. But we did have one another. Our family was a very close and loving family, and it gave us strength. It was not like at that stage I had physically taken this gun and was saying to all men, “Okay! I will fight with anyone who opposes Malala. I will oppose anyone who gets in my daughter’s way.” That kind of defiance came when the Taliban invaded. Before that, it was a kind of spiritual strength; people felt our adoration and affection for her.

  Pekai wanted so much for Malala to have the education she had not had. The only area where they differed was how much Malala should cover herself in public. Many women walked around our bazaars in burkas, triangles of thick cloth that fitted their heads tightly like caps and then flowed right down to the floor, covering every inch of the body to protect their honor. It takes skill to wear a garment like this because walking requires managing the burka flapping around your feet. But once mastered, the burka provides a window through which its wearer can view the world without being seen by eyes other than those of her husband. Pekai did not wear a burka but as I have said, she covered her face with a scarf. Malala wo
re a scarf but exposed her face. Malala refused to comply when Pekai asked her to cover more of her face. She did not want to view the world from behind a veil. She wanted to see it with an open face, just like the men did. I agreed with her, to be honest. I saw no shame in this. Not only would Malala not cover her face, but she would stare straight back at any man who looked at her. Sometimes, while out with Pekai, she would pass men and would look back at them and catch them staring at other veiled women, walking with their eyes fixed to the floor. “Malala, please,” Pekai would say. “Malala! What are you doing? Look away. Do not look at these men.” But Malala would reply, “Well, if they can stare at me, why can’t I stare back?”

  Malala thought of it as a sort of “staring problem,” but she was fearless and curious about these public boundaries that felt wrong to her. She was, even then, claiming a right she saw as her own.

  When the Taliban Stole Our Koh-i-noor

  Whatever Malala is, whatever Malala has, it is because of her education. If Malala had not been a fifth, sixth, or seventh grader, if she herself had not had this love of learning, if she had not been inquiring and bold and confident inside the home and out, she would never have become a powerful voice for girls all over the world. “Malala,” the girl who became a role model, without her education would have remained her whole life unsung, unheard. Her astounding voice, which is heard all over the world, would have been silent.

  I knew and she knew that an education was the only way out for her, the only chance she had to make a future for herself, to be financially independent, to make everything for her life that she alone decided.

  For Malala, education was the Koh-i-noor in her life. The Koh-i-noor is a diamond that has had a long and dramatic journey from India to Britain, where it is now part of the crown jewels. Qualifications were Malala’s Koh-i-noor. There was not a Plan B. None. If not an education and then a career, for a girl like Malala there would have been a husband by the time she was twenty—sixteen if she was unlucky. On a different path with no education, Malala would be the mother of two children by now, not an Oxford-educated Nobel laureate.

  Whenever anybody has asked me how Malala became who she is, I have often used the response “Ask me not what I did but what I did not do. I did not clip her wings.” In Pakistan I occasionally came across families who kept a bird, perhaps a dove, in their courtyard, and this bird was no longer able to fly. It would waddle around the dusty floor, lifting its head and moving it from one side to the other, but the vital ingredient in its life was gone. Somebody, no doubt a father or a brother, had taken some scissors to its primary feathers and clipped them so short that flight was no longer possible. It was a kind of act of ownership over that poor defenseless creature, for entertainment or the desire to have an obedient pet, forced to live against its primal instinct of flight. It always struck me as cruel.

  When I say of Malala “I did not clip her wings,” what I mean is that when she was small, I broke the scissors used by society to clip girls’ wings. I did not let those scissors near Malala. I wanted to let her fly high in the sky, not scratch around in a dusty courtyard, grounded by social norms, and I would stand by her, protecting her, until she had the confidence and strength to fly high herself, no longer in need of protection.

  How do you build a child, girl or boy, to be fearless and confident? I think you do it by praise. What I did every day, for the boys, too, but for Malala especially, if she did a small or big thing as a child, if she had some good grades or she came to me with a nice piece of homework or she expressed a new beautiful, innocent idea, I praised her. I loved her creativity. I endeavored to make her feel like she was the wisest human being ever to come to this earth, like she was the most beautiful human being to have ever existed. And this, I think, is the responsibility of every parent with their daughters and with their sons. All parents can nurture their children in this way. I see around me so many children who are brought up in ways that are not focused on the child at all. In the East and West, we teach our children that they must believe in God, the prophets, saints, and the holy books.

  We tell them to believe in angels that they cannot see and, in the East, jin, the creature that came before us. But our children are here in front of us, with all their whole physical bodies, full of passions and emotions, with their sentiments and their wisdom and their brains. They exist with everything they have, but we rarely tell them to believe in themselves.

  As Malala got older, her confidence in public speaking grew. She would stand up on a stage in debating and speaking competitions and display the same charisma and confidence that the world has seen in her since. She used to take part in all of the regular competitions, and she did so well in them. Before the Taliban came, she became the first ever Speaker of the Child Assembly in Swat, a position she won through an election. Both girls and boys together made up this assembly, and there were many schools from all over Swat taking part.

  Malala’s class was a unique and clever class. Every girl in it was competitive, but in a good way. There was no jealousy among them; it was more that they were all united in this journey to be educated. They were all smart, but some of them met with resistance from the men in their families.

  Once, when I decided to hold a joint debating competition between the boys’ and the girls’ divisions of my school, in the boys’ building, a girl’s brother came to find me. “Sir, my sister will not go to the boys’ school and she will not speak in front of the boys. Why have you suggested that the girls will be speaking before them with an uncovered face?”

  These were the so-called taboos that I often had to deal with. If their parents had allowed them, I believe at least ten girls in that class could have grown up to have the influence Malala has. In peacetime, everything about our lives was proactive, about working towards a better life. Malala was always speaking in competitions, and she was making a name for herself on the school circuit. But she was a young girl and it was really just a hobby she was good at, a source of trophies and medals and another way in which she could feel listened to and appreciated and valued. It is ironic to think that just as Pekai and I were encouraging these things that built up her self-esteem, Malala was about to lose the most fundamental part of her life.

  My activism had always been proactive. I wanted improvement in our community. I wanted more democracy, more planting of trees, cleaner water, more schools. I wanted better living conditions for everybody in Mingora. As a head teacher, every day I came up against patriarchal fathers who did not want to educate their daughters, but I never once thought that educating a girl would be banned.

  When militant Talibanization started in the Swat Valley in 2007, I was like a man who had had the earth dragged away from under his feet. Where is a man left when this happens to him? He is nowhere. By banning girls’ education, the Taliban was taking away Malala’s future. The Koh-i-noor had been snatched from us. All those dreams and hopes of a better life that I had had for Malala since her birth, and for the girls in the Khushal School and the 50,000 schoolgirls in the Swat Valley, were disappearing.

  The Taliban marched through Mingora regularly with flags in their hands and guns strapped to their backs. There were Taliban everywhere. Men who had once been normal people in our community were now part of this violent army. Often they came through the streets in jeeps, the wheels skidding and kicking up dust. Their hair was long and dirty under their turbans, and their trousers were tucked into their socks. They wore trainers on their feet. They swarmed around the women’s markets, their eyes darting around looking for women who they felt were not subservient enough. Every morning and every night, there would be stories on the news and in the newspapers that another three schools had been bombed, four schools bombed. More than four hundred schools were destroyed in all, and it became routine that every day a school would be blown apart. And then came the ban on girls’ education, on January 15, 2009.

  I had broken into pieces the scissors that would have clipped Malala’s wings. I ha
d raised her to believe that she could fly as high as she wanted, but the Taliban came armed not with scissors to ground her but with bombs and guns. After the sermons on the illegal radio station, the violence became inhumane. People I knew who opposed the Taliban were taken away in the night and found in the morning, beheaded in the square or thrown in the sewer.

  The idea of not standing up to them, of keeping quiet, was not an option for me. It was instinctive. I had no choice because I believe that human life does not mean breathing out carbon dioxide and taking in oxygen. I believe that human life means humanity, with all its dignity, with all the basic human rights we are entitled to. I will not live for one day, not one day, without fighting for these principles. If I could live for just one day according to my own choices versus hundreds of years in subjugation to bigots and murderers, I would choose one day of freedom.

  Of course I felt fear, but fear also gives you courage. I feared I would be killed, because many people were being murdered, but my bigger fear was that Malala and all the girls of the land would be without education, that girls born in our part of Pakistan would have a dark future. I was acting upon an unshakable conviction about a girl’s right to be educated, but it was also a panic, a terror of what might become of Malala’s future and the future of Pakistan.

  Over time, there were very few people prepared to speak out. They would say, “We cannot speak on it because our lives are very dear to us. We will not speak because we are frightened.” And if somebody did speak? Sometimes they would say what the Talibs wanted to hear: “We demand that Islam and Sharia be implemented in Swat, then there will be peace!”

  And I would stand up and oppose them: “This is not about Islam!” I would tell whoever wanted to listen. “We do not have any un-Islamic things in Swat. We are already an Islamic society. This is about power! This is about greedy people. It is about thugs who want to come in and control our lives. This is unacceptable! Indeed, this hatred and violence is un-Islamic!”