If Malala decides to continue her crusade, hers will be a platform backed with financial means and wired with well-connected allies. “She’d be great as both a fundraiser and a public speaker,” says former First Lady Laura Bush, who’s spent years campaigning for women’s rights in Taliban-controlled areas. Several funds and initiatives have been founded, including at least one that Malala and her father will directly influence once she has recovered. However, a return to Pakistan, where Malala would likely be most effective, would be fraught with danger. The Taliban have on several occasions sworn to target her again.
Long before she was an activist, Malala Yousafzai was a model student. By the time she was 21⁄2, she was sitting in class with 10-year-olds, according to a close family friend and teacher at the school founded by Malala’s father. The little girl with the huge hazel eyes didn’t say much, but “she could follow, and she never got bored,” says the teacher, who asked to remain anonymous for fear that she too might become a Taliban target. Malala loved the school, a rundown concrete-block building with a large rooftop terrace open to views of the snowcapped mountains that surround the Swat Valley. As she grew older, she was always first in her class. “She was an ordinary girl with extraordinary abilities,” says the teacher, “but she never had a feeling of being special.”
Malala spent most of her pocket money on books, says the teacher. She carried a Harry Potter schoolbag and read a biography of Benazir Bhutto as well as one of Barack Obama’s books. One of her favorite books was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, and she often quoted the well-known line about how the universe conspires to help when you want something.
Family friends attribute Malala’s precociousness to her father, a social activist who believes that the education of girls is vital to Pakistan’s future. Ziauddin Yousafzai opened Khushal School and College 17 years ago with the aim of building a new generation of female leaders. Samar Minallah Khan, a documentary filmmaker who got to know the Yousafzais in 2010 when she made a film about the school, was astounded by the ambition and character of the girls she met. “Each and every girl in that school is a Malala,” says Khan, “and the credit goes to her father and the teachers and the principal.”
In September 2008, as the Pakistani Taliban gained a significant foothold in Swat and started enforcing their strict interpretations of Islamic law, Yousafzai took Malala to the provincial capital of Peshawar for an event at the city’s press club. There, in front of the national press, the 11-year-old gave a speech titled “How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to Education?” The speech was well received, but many worried that confronting the Taliban so brazenly might put Malala in danger. “People said to me, ‘How can you let her do this?’” Yousafzai told a reporter at the time. “We needed to stand up,” he reasoned.
Some believe that Malala was simply not old enough to make what were essentially life-or-death decisions. “I think Zia was imposing his own thoughts about girls’ education on her,” says Dr. Mohammad Ayub, a psychiatrist from Swat who manages the hospital where Malala was taken immediately after the shooting. Malala, he says, “was like a suicide bomber, brainwashed into putting herself in danger. Child prostitutes, child soldiers, child laborers and child heroes — they are all exploited children, in my opinion, and it shouldn’t be allowed.” People who know Malala personally, however, insist that she knew what she was doing. “No one on this earth can dictate to Malala,” says Khan.
2-4
