It’s impossible, I’m quite sure, to read anything about Pakistani schoolgirl and education campaigner Malala Yousafzai without wondering how anyone could grow to be as strong and brave and wise as she is at just 16 years of age. The more you read about her life, however, it is apparent there is a simple explanation: her father. Ziauddin Yousafazai.
In Pakistan sons are revered while daughters are shunned. Guns are fired to celebrate the birth of a male while females are hidden behind drawn curtains. Looking into Malala’s eyes after she was first born her father fell in love. The engrained indiscriminate favouring of boys over girls was quickly revealed to be just that. Indiscriminate. To Ziauddin, Malala was her brothers’ equal. A human being entitled to the same rights, treatment and opportunities as her brothers.
It seems obvious enough but in Pakistan that was – and remains – something of a quantum leap. His appreciation for the importance and liberation of his daughter and, indeed, all young women, led him to establish his own school which Malala attended from a very young age. The father and daughter proved to be a formidable force in publically advocating for the right for girls to be educated.
At 16 Malala’s efforts in raising the profile of this issue caused the Taliban to attempt to kill her. She survived a bullet that landed in her left eye-socket and a year on her resolve to promote her chosen cause is only stronger.
Her family remain in the United Kingdom, where Malala was flown in the aftermath of her attack, and where she will finish her schooling. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year and she has recently had meetings with US President Barack Obama, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Queen Elizabeth.
At 16 it is impossible to overstate the impact she has had in raising awareness for girls’ education. She has explained many, many times now that education is power and it’s power that all girls are entitled to. It is hard to imagine how much Malala will have achieved in another five, ten or fifteen years. Whichever way you cut it, she’s an extraordinary young woman. And she is the way she is because she had a father who believed in her. That is what separates her from the vast majority of her Pakistani peers; she wasn’t discarded by her family in any sense for being a girl. Instead she was embraced and treated as an equal.
If Malala is the proof of what one father can achieve, imagine how the world might look if it were filled with more fathers like Ziauddin Yousafzai? Fathers that don’t just love their daughters but advocate for them and demand for things to be different. Fathers who implicitly understand that their daughters and sons are equal.
In lots of ways I have very little in common with Malala Yousafzai. I was born into a country where my education was guaranteed, where democracy is peaceful, where the stakes of speaking out on any issue are lower. Truthfully, try as I might, I can’t comprehend the life Malala has led. As awed as I am of her passion and resolve in the face of legitimate terror, I also understand why, whenever she speaks, she is so quietly assured. Because I have this in common with her: a father who believes in me.
A father who treats my sister and I in exactly the same way he treats my brother not because he has to but because he genuinely wouldn’t consider any other option. Here in Australia that doesn’t make my Dad quite as powerful as Ziauddin Yousafazai is in Pakistan but it’s still powerful. I have written before that the power and capacity of men to advance the equality of women should not be ignored. Aside from everything else we can learn from Malala Yousafzai, and those lessons are long, we should remember this: the power to create change begins at home and in that regard fathers can be the most powerful champions of change.