The teenage survivor refusing to submit to the Taliban

By Isabel Berwick

The Swat valley schoolgirl is now a leading education campaigner

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When I saw her for the first time, a very newborn child, and I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love with her, believe me.” These are the words of a proud father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, speaking about his daughter, Malala, in Class Dismissed . The extraordinary 2009 New York Times documentary follows Mr Yousafzai’s courageous efforts to keep his school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley open after Taliban leaders ordered an end to girls’ education. In the film, Malala, then an articulate 11-year-old with a Harry Potter backpack, says she dreams of becoming a doctor. She seems today to be following a different path.

Still 16, she has become a global campaigner for girls’ education. She is one of the world’s most recognised people – famous enough to be known only by her first name – and a remarkable survivor.

On October 9 last year, fighters from the Taliban forces in the Swat Valley district in the Northwest Frontier Province boarded her school bus. They shot her in the head and wounded two friends. Ms Yousafzai was flown to the UK, where she received emergency treatment in Birmingham. She recovered – she has a titanium plate in her skull – and her campaigning goes on. She was well enough to speak in front of 1,000 youth delegates at the UN on her birthday in July, telling them nothing had changed in her life since the attack, except that “weakness, fear and hopelessness died”.

Ms Yousafzai now lives with her family (she has two younger brothers) in Birmingham and attends school there – although her timetable fits around her campaigning. This week she opened the city’s new £189m public library, the largest in Europe. As she told the watching crowd of “fellow Brummies(people of Birmingham)” in her adopted home: “Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism. I truly believe the only way we can create global peace is through educating not only our minds but our hearts and our souls.”

Her campaign for girls’ right to go to school started before the attack. She had already won Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize. Yesterday she collected the International Children’s Peace Prize in The Hague, and she has been nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, to be awarded next month.

It is barely credible that someone so young could be such an effective campaigner on the world stage. Yet Ms Yousafzai has single-handedly turned the issue of the right of girls – and all children – to be educated into headline news. And she is a figure worth hearing, according to Jude Kelly, artistic director of London arts hub the Southbank Centre, which will host Ms Yousafzai’s (sold-out) first official appearance in London next month. Ms Kelly says: “We are about to lose [Nelson] Mandela and then, in another area, Malala steps on to the world stage. She is no token signifier – she is a woman with real substance. Her clarity, her determination, her simple clear sense of mission is undeniable.”

Her resilience and courage is clear but it would not have been possible for her to become educated – or a campaigner – were it not for her father’s support. (Her mother is also reportedly supportive but does not appear in public.) Adam Ellick, who made Class Dismissed, first met Mr Yousafzai through the latter’s work as an activist in Swat. The plan was for him to help Mr Ellick find a family to document as they lived through Taliban occupation in 2009. Instead “he showed up with Malala, and we eventually decided to make the documentary about their family”.

Mr Ellick lived with the family, on and off, for six months, and stayed close to them. He said: “I really admired how far the father, who hailed from a small village, became a leader in Swat.” When Mr Ellick met her, Ms Yousafzai was, “like most Pakistani girls, quite deferential to her father. She spoke mainly when spoken to.” But she was already developing her public voice – albeit secretly. Early in 2009 she began writing, using a pen name, about life for a young girl under the Taliban for the BBC’s Urdu service.

Shiza Shahid, a Pakistani education campaigner, first met Ms Yousafzai when she was 10, and has been working with her ever since. While still in hospital, the teenager set up The Malala Fund, with a vision to put every girl in the world through school. The first grants for the US-based charity now run by Ms Shahid – announced by actor Angelina Jolie – have been used to educate 40 girls in Swat. Ms Yousafzai regularly speaks to the girls to see how they are getting on.

Her campaign to get girls into school is a welcome awareness boost in an area with much work still to be done. Unesco figures show 57m primary-age children worldwide do not attend school, of whom 31m are girls. A further 34m adolescent girls are not being educated, mostly in Nigeria and Pakistan. Established groups setting up schools and libraries in the developing world include Room to Read, whose founder, John Wood, acknowledges Ms Yousafzai’s influence but reinforces the scale of the problem. “It’s great to have awareness raised on this issue,” he says, “but to turn that potential energy into kinetic, we need the social sector to think like a business, to build plans and teams that allow for massive scale so that we can reach millions of children like Malala who deserve to gain the life-long gift of education.”

The next milestone in Ms Yousafzai’s global celebrity comes with next month’s publication of her autobiography, I am Malala. Like all hot literary properties, it is under strict embargo. The publicity schedule includes Ms Yousafzai’s first big television interviews – with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in the US and the BBC’s Panorama.

No teenager, perhaps with the exception of Justin Bieber, has achieved such fame and faces such constant public pressure. But Ms Shahid says her friend is unaffected: “She’s a very intelligent girl yet humble and grounded, very much still the authentic Malala.”

The writer is associate editor of FT Life & Arts