Malala Yousafzai, Girl Shot by Taliban, Was Drawn to Politics by Dad
Malala Yousafzai, Girl Shot by Taliban, Was Drawn to Politics by Dad
Malala Yousafzai is only 14 years old, but she has always come off as preternaturally mature, able — even at 11 — to talk about serious issues like education and terrorism and her native Pakistan’s troubled relations with India. The attempt on her life and the ensuing medical emergency have made her a hero to a greater audience. But in the patriarchal and conservative Muslim world she grew up in, a pioneer like Malala would not have been possible without another hero: her father.
The saga “is a story about a father and a daughter, more than a story about a girl,” says Adam Ellick, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who covered the 2009 shutdown of the schools in the Swat Valley because of Taliban threats that led to the displacement of the Yousafzai family and thousands of others. Ziauddin Yousafzai founded the Khushal School and College that his daughter attends in the city of Mingora. Says Ellick: ” Her father has a sort of revolutionary commitment to his cause. He is an incredibly unique and complex person.” Mustafa Qadri is a Pakistan researcher at Amnesty International who knows Malala’s father well. Describing him as a “folk hero in Swat,” Qadri says, “He’s a deeply religious man, in the best sense of the term. I remember him constantly talking about his Islam and that it tells him to get his daughter educated and to make sure that women get the same rights as men.” Ziauddin, he says, “is very brave, very eloquent, as is Malala.”
“I can’t imagine being his child and not fully taking on everything he says,” says Ellick. “He has an evangelical way about him. I can’t imagine having breakfast every morning of my life … and not having what he believes in become what I am going to believe in.”