Let Her Fly

by Ziauddin Yousafzai

  She took the phone from me and studied it. And then she put it down. “Well,” she said, “I do not believe in such categorization of human beings.”

  I learn from her every day.

  Benazir Bhutto’s Scarf

  For us, as Malala’s parents, after October 2012 nothing mattered as long as Malala was on this planet. We were just happy that God had given her this second life, that she existed in our lives.

  Our house was divided about what might come next. Malala saw her life now with renewed purpose. Pekai, though, was very anxious. As Malala settled into school life in Birmingham, we began the process of writing her book, I Am Malala, with Christina Lamb, which after publication required more travel and recounting Malala’s story.

  I was neutral about whether or not Malala should carry on as a campaigner, but it is hard now to think that she might not have done so. Still, Pekai phoned her eldest brother in Pakistan, the same one who was my teacher and inspiration.

  “Tell me,” he said to her. “Answer this one question. Have you saved her life or has God saved her life?” Pekai answered, “God has saved her life. I did not.” And he said, “If God has saved her, then he has saved her for a reason. You cannot stop her. Don’t waste your time, please. You just support her. Let God complete his purpose. You cannot protect her. Do not intervene in God’s plan. Just support it and respect it.”

  It made so much sense. We felt the world needed Malala’s voice, so free of blame or hate or jealousy. Love is the most powerful thing human beings can have. Peace and passion can overcome violence. Malala is not aggressive, she is not violent, she is not angry. If ever she is angry, still she is not cruel. She chooses words that fall hard and deep on ears but without ever hurting the listener or the oppressor. This kind of approach is beautiful. It is so powerful. You challenge, but you do not hurt. You just knock on the door, but you do not break it with stones. You knock on it once, and if there is nothing, then again and again and again. And still you do not break it down with tools. Weapons may bring immediate power, or immediate change, but it is not the long-lasting kind. The long-lasting change is what you stand for, believe in.

  Malala began her second life with resilience, patience, and love. Her aim has always been that the people who block her path will join with her in the end. They will be part of her journey because of the peaceful way in which it is traveled.

  One day, before the attack, I was asked by an army brigadier, “Would you tell me what Malala has done to make her so popular in Pakistan that everybody is praising her? Tell me why there are newspapers and media all around her.”

  And I told him the story of the Prophet Abraham (AS). King Namrood wanted him dead and intended to burn him alive. He made a very big fire and put Abraham in the middle. There was a bird in the sky who took water in its beak, and dropped a small drop down on the flames. It did not help, but the bird continued, one drop after another. No drop of water from a small bird’s beak would ever be enough, but that bird has become very famous in our stories. It did not give up.

  And so I told the army brigadier, “Whether your efforts are small or big, if you have purity of intention and those intentions are in tune with history, then you reach the hearts of people.”

  I want to tell another story of a man in my own family who has made a change during Malala’s life. One of my older cousins was so shocked to see me write Malala’s name on the family tree that he made a sort of grimace with his face. It was an undeniable expression of disapproval that a girl should be acknowledged. But after seeing Malala’s pure activism, he changed his mind. His daughters now go to medical school. So my cousin who was once critical of Malala’s gender is now her biggest supporter. The pictures of her in the media he once resented? He now shares those pictures himself proudly.

  Nine months after the attack, Malala was invited by former UK prime minister Gordon Brown to celebrate her sixteenth birthday by giving an address to the United Nations in New York. This was a deep honor, but we were worried in the beginning. It was a huge pressure and she had been through so much physically. It had not yet been a year since the attack. We thought, “What will happen with this girl? The whole world is looking at her and they have such big expectations. She is just sixteen years old—can she be up to this overwhelming standard?” But then I looked at her strength, and I realized that I could not advise her. I thought, “Zia, God knows that those tiny shoulders can carry the weight.”

  We did not talk much about it in the run-up. She was so focused on her schoolwork and her homework. But it was getting so close to the date that, in the end, I felt compelled to say, “Jani, there are only ten days remaining.” She was so composed, so poised. If it had been me, I would have had my hair standing on end. I’d have been a man in a panic. But Malala never panics. She is calm.

  One afternoon, after school, she came to me with a piece of paper covered in writing in pencil. She had drafted her speech during a free period at school. When I read it, I saw the lines “Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage were born. I am the same Malala.”

  I called out, “Pekai! Pekai! We have our same Malala.” Our daughter was more resilient. More powerful. More determined. The power she had was growing greater, not diminishing.

  The speech also included these lines: “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.…Education is the only solution. Education first.”

  This greater power, this global mission, Pekai and I thought, we take as gifts from God that come with our daughter’s life. Malala’s status and her responsibility to millions of girls around the world come with her life, celebrated like a child’s life with a birthday card.

  Everything that was sent to Malala when she was unwell meant so much to us all because it showed the world was with her. One thing, however, was especially important to Jani. Benazir Bhutto has always been Malala’s role model. She was a strong woman who received an education and became the first female prime minister of our country, twice. She was also exiled from our country, and ultimately killed for her beliefs. Malala viewed her as a talent lost, a woman smart and strong who was killed for what she believed in. Among the gifts that were sent to Malala were a card and some presents from Benazir Bhutto’s children. But also in the package were two of Benazir Bhutto’s scarves. When they arrived, Malala lifted the scarves to her face and took in the smell. She was astounded that she was holding them. She was so happy to have them.

  It made perfect sense that when she delivered her UN speech she should wear one of these scarves. She chose the white one, and wrapped it around her shoulders, over her dark pink scarf. As Jani walked onto the stage of the UN wearing Bhutto’s scarf around her shoulders, I thought of her crouched down by the tap, a small girl scrubbing her own school scarf clean. It had seemed impossible then that she could value any scarf as much as the one she wore as part of her school uniform. But because of her devotion to the cause of education, Malala now had another precious scarf, one she could value just as much.

  Don’t Know Me As the Girl Who Was Shot

  In the run-up to Malala’s speech to the UN, there was a small reception for us, hosted by Tina Brown, the British-born, New York–based editor and commentator. Malala was standing in the corner. Somebody gave her a microphone and she started talking. It was a small gathering and I don’t think she had intended to speak to the room, especially as the big speech was to come the following day.

  “I don’t want to be known as the girl who was shot,” she said. “I want to be known as the girl who fought.”

  Once again, I thought, “Oh, Malala, what are you saying?” My tears came. “She is right. She is right.” For so long, she had been hearing and reading in the media of “the girl who was shot. The girl who was shot.” She was so tired of being that. And so she said, “Don’t know me as this thing. Know me as the girl who fought.”

  A Surprise in Chemistry Class

  Malala’s favorite subject had always been physics b
ut it was in the midst of a chemistry lesson that she found out she’d won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014.

  Since the UN speech in 2013, combined with the publication of I Am Malala, her profile had become global. As cofounders of the Malala Fund, we traveled everywhere together, just as we did when we were in Pakistan.

  There had been a lot of speculation in 2013 that she would win the Nobel prize. The media in Pakistan seemed to be waiting for this announcement. Malala and I were in America together, campaigning, and I was getting many telephone calls asking, “Have you had the call yet? Usually they call in advance.”

  A year later, on October 10—one day after the second anniversary of her attack—it did not cross Malala’s mind that she would win this honor. A colleague from the Malala Fund was coming to our house to watch the ceremony announcing the winner with me. “Please,” Malala said as she left the house for school in her dark green uniform. “It’s like 0.0000001 percent that it might be me. Nothing is going to happen. I am going to school!”

  We settled on the sofa. I was very excited that, in thirty minutes perhaps, I would receive a call on my phone. No call.

  “Well, let’s watch it anyway,” said my colleague. We put the iPad on the table in front of us and sat there. A door opened on the screen and Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee, entered the assembly and stood behind the podium. The winners were announced: Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai.

  I jumped! I jumped high off the sofa and I hugged my colleague. Toor Pekai joined us. It was an unforgettable moment. It was such recognition at such a young age. For me, being the father of a seventeen-year-old girl who was going to be a Nobel laureate, this was incredible. It doesn’t happen in dreams. It is beyond dreams. Beyond any dreams I had when I wanted to break to pieces the scissors of our society that would have cut her wings.

  When the deputy head of the school knocked on the door of the chemistry class and said she’d like to take Malala to see the headmistress, Malala instinctively thought, “Oh, dear, what’s the problem?” It was the headmistress who broke the good news to her.

  Later, Malala gave a speech to the whole of Edgbaston High School for Girls. It was the only time in her school career that she allowed herself to be “Malala” the activist rather than just an ordinary schoolgirl. The teachers were crying. The students were crying. But Malala did not cry, not with them and not with us later on.

  She did not come home after the announcement. Of course not! She finished her school day, and when she arrived back home, we hugged. And Toor Pekai and I cried.

  For me as a father, I had a few feelings about this prize. This prize changed Malala into “the teenager who won the Nobel.”

  A few months after that day, I went to Winnipeg to make a speech and I met a small child, the son of my cousin. I crouched beside him and said, “So you know Malala?”

  “Yes, I know her,” the boy said. “She is the girl who got the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  “Yes, that is right,” I said. And the child must surely have thought, “Who is this strange man, crying at my simple answer?”

  It was such a wonderful thing to happen for her campaign. As Malala herself said, “I was walking, and now the Nobel is a bike to my destiny.”

  Malala was not interested in any personal glory. “This award is for the issue, Aba,” she said. “It will help us raise the issue globally and bring more attention to our campaign for girls’ education.” And she is right. It has had a great impact on Malala’s success as a campaigner and fund-raiser for the Malala Fund. More and more people are talking about the importance of education for all girls and especially those children who are growing up in parts of the world where there is conflict.

  Sometimes I imagine what her life would have been like without the Talibanization of our home, if we had all been able to stay in Pakistan. I really believe that she would have been the same amazing girl, playing a central role in public life, not globally yet but definitely in Pakistan. She was flourishing in peacetime. In another life, at the age of twenty, Malala would perhaps be studying now at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She would not have achieved the Nobel Peace Prize in this alternative life. She probably would not have had anywhere near half the accolades and prizes that fill our home, but she would still have been Malala.

  Conkers in Edgbaston

  For six years now, we have lived in Edgbaston, a leafy area of Birmingham where the streets are full of the kinds of trees that Pekai and I had only ever seen at the very top of the mountains in Shangla and Swat. In the flat fields where we grew up, we were used to playing in the orchards, the branches of the various trees hanging with every kind of fruit. We had trees thick with apples and peaches and pears, oranges and persimmons, the last a delicious fruit from a tree that is quite common in Japan. It was normal for us to live among these fruits. But other trees, such as chestnuts and oaks, conifers and pines, were only ever seen on treks to the top of the mountain, such as the time I climbed up the mountain with my mother to see the saint for my stammering.

  From the very beginning of our new life in the UK, I would marvel at being able to walk to the shops passing by the trunks of the chestnut trees and the oaks. Seeing their branches and their leaves made me feel like I was back home. For Pekai, these trees were her friends. Sometimes, she would talk to them in Pashto: “Oh, dear tree, you were there with us in Shangla and in Swat. Who has brought you over here with us?”

  In winter, there is always a sea of shiny brown conkers (horse chestnuts) just like there was on the mountaintops in Shangla. We call the trees jawaz. In Pakistan, we do not attach conkers to strings the way children do in the UK, but we use them as natural marbles. In my childhood, I remember my sisters creating toy houses, a shiny conker representing a buffalo or a cow in the pasture. For Pekai, she remembers how these conkers were used by her mother’s friends, their seeds extracted to create a kind of medicine for bone or joint pain.

  In Edgbaston, October is the prime time for conkers. We never tired of seeing them lying on the ground.

  This year, their fall coincided with us taking Malala to Oxford to begin her degree. I knew I would miss her, but I allowed my tears to fall only once, the night she left, when I handed her a bag of dried fruit as I used to do when she was studying for her A levels.

  I have learned that I must not be possessive, that as my children grow older I must let go. The more Malala is independent, the more she is living on her own, the more she grows into a fully fledged human being, the more rewarding my love for her is. Because seeing her live a life based on her decisions alone is all I have ever wanted. This is a reward for me.

  These days, it is rare that Malala is in Edgbaston. She lives almost all of the time in Oxford. She has made so many friends there. We have visited her four or five times so far and each time I meet her friends I feel so happy that my daughter is surrounded by people who love her. For these new friends, Malala is not a Nobel laureate but just a young woman, a fellow undergraduate who is a member of international societies, debating societies, and even the cricket club.

  It has been much easier for her than it was when she started in Edgbaston High School because of the simple fact that she joined Lady Margaret Hall at the same time as everybody else. She is an ordinary student like everybody else.

  When Jani got to Oxford, everything went so well apart from one thing: there were spiders in her room. She telephoned me and said, “Aba, I do not like them there.” Atal is absolutely terrified of spiders. Malala does not have this phobia, but still, she is not comfortable with them in her room. I wanted to help. When I shared my dilemma with our local pharmacist, she said to me, “I advise you to send her some fresh conkers to place in the corners of the room. Spiders do not like them.”

  The jawaz of Edgbaston! That afternoon, I put on my long coat and I walked around the sidewalks that had once felt so strange. The conkers were all around my feet and I filled my pockets with them until they bulged out of each s
ide. The following day, I went to the post office and I filled an envelope with the conkers and a note telling Malala to put them in the corners of the room. The next time Malala rang, she said, “Aba, I think the spiders might have gone!”

  Your children might not need you in obvious ways, but as a parent it is nice to know you still have your uses.

  Familiar Advice

  I like telephoning Malala for advice. Should I tweet this particular political thought? What should I do if I am having difficulty in expressing an idea? How do I get my iPhone to do this or that particular function? And she guides me. “Aba, do this, do that, do this.” She has always guided me. As a seven-year-old girl, she would say to me when I asked her opinion about the progress of the Khushal School, “Aba, I think it is sort of crawling along like an ant.”

  Now she often says to me about my own capabilities, “Aba, you can learn these things yourself, but you don’t believe in yourself. You think you can’t learn. But if you pay a bit more attention to these things, then you will learn how to do them. Please don’t automatically think that these things are not for you.”

  Malala often travels without me now, accompanied by people from the Malala Fund instead. We have traveled all over the world together as part of our campaign for girls’ education, but she no longer needs me by her side. The way she puts it is that you do not wake up one morning and think, “I no longer want this…” or “I’m ready for that now…” but that it is a gradual process where you feel your way towards something new. I suppose this is called growing up.

  When baby birds are born, they do not know how to fly. They have an instinct for it, but no practice, so they watch the mother bird, who leaves the nest often, flying backwards and forwards dropping food into their beaks. The baby bird begins to feel a bit bolder, and seeing this, the parent bird moves farther away so that the chick is encouraged to come out onto the branch seeking its food. The baby bird often falls to the ground with a thump when it tries to lift its wings, but the mother bird does not panic. The mother flies again and again, and gradually its baby learns to copy. Even when the little bird does this once or twice, it is not easy or instant. No. The chick has to train the muscles in its wings so that it can flap with more strength. And all the time, the mother bird is watching, reinforcing the message of this wing flapping by her own flight. And then, one day, the baby bird raises itself up off the branch, and it flaps its wings so hard that it is effortlessly carried high into the air. This is the moment it realizes that it no longer needs its mother or any other bird to bring it food or to offer it protection. It is the moment when it realizes that it can fly away to wherever it wants. The mother bird never stops this from happening. She would be a very poor mother bird if she did.