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September 9 - September 13, 2025
But I knew, even then, that I was the apple of my father’s eye. A rare thing for a Pakistani girl. When a boy is born in Pakistan, it’s cause for celebration. Guns are fired in the air. Gifts are placed in the baby’s cot. And the boy’s name is inscribed on the family tree. But when a girl is born, no one visits the parents, and women have only sympathy for the mother. My father paid no mind to these customs. I’ve seen my name—in bright blue ink—right there among the male names of our family tree. Mine was the first female name in three hundred years.
I pretended to be embarrassed, but my father’s words of praise have always been the most precious thing in the world to me.
In the afternoon the boys would go off fishing while we girls went down to a stream to play our favorite game: Wedding. We would choose a bride and then prepare her for the ceremony. We draped her in bangles and necklaces and painted her face with makeup and her hands with henna. Once she was ready to be given to the groom, she would pretend to cry, and we would stroke her hair and tell her not to worry. Sometimes we would fall down laughing.
Even my own mother, who’d grown up in the village, couldn’t read. It is not at all uncommon for women in my country to be illiterate, but to see my mother, a proud and intelligent woman, struggle to read the prices in the bazaar was an unspoken sadness for both of us, I think.
But my father told me not to worry. “I will protect your freedom, Malala,” he said. “Carry on with your dreams.”
As much as I wanted to help the children from the dump, my mother wanted to help everyone. She had started putting bread crusts in a bowl on the kitchen windowsill. Nearby was an extra pot of rice and chicken. The bread was for the birds; the food was for a poor family in our neighborhood.
They didn’t learn what the words actually meant, though, only how to say them.
He had done some investigating of the man behind the mysterious radio voice. “This ‘mullah’ is a high school dropout! He doesn’t even have religious credentials! This so-called mullah is spreading ignorance.” The voice on the radio belonged to Maulana Fazlullah, one of the leaders of the TNSM. His followers had helped so many people after the earthquake, but he was taking advantage of the trauma to instill fear in them, too.
Through his illegal radio broadcasts, he encouraged parents to refuse polio vaccinations for their children. He claimed that this medical aid was not meant to help; he said it was a ploy by Western countries to harm Muslim children.
Fazlullah made one of his strangest announcements: He declared war on the government and called for people to rise up in violence. The peace treaty he had signed became nothing more than a memory. But the government ignored him, like an annoying fly. And it ignored us, too, the people in Swat who were under his thumb. We were angry with our government and angry with these terrorists for trying to ruin our way of life, but my father said our family should do its best to ignore them as well.
“We must live a full life, if only in our hearts,” he said. And so, as usual, our family dinner conversations were about things of the mind: Einstein and Newton, the poets and the philosophers. And, as usual, my brothers and I fought over the remote, over who got the best grades, over anything and everything. Somehow I could ignore the Taliban, but I could not ignore these two annoying characters. Fighting with your brothers, I told my father, is also part of a full life!
One night I overheard my parents talking in hushed voices. “You must do it,” my mother said. “To be afraid is no solution.” “I will not go without your blessing,” my father said. “God will protect you,” she said. “Because you are speaking the truth.”
Most Pashtun women would cry and beg and cling to their husbands’ sleeves. But most Pashtun men would ignore their wives. Few would have even consulted with them in the first place. But my parents were not like other parents. My father is like a falcon, the one who dared to fly where others would not go. And my mother is the one with her feet firmly planted on the ground.
Here was a Talib with a machine gun just inches from my face. How was I bringing shame? I wanted to ask him. I was a child, a ten-year-old girl. A little girl who liked playing hide-and-seek and studying science. I was angry, but I knew it would do no good to try to reason with him. I knew I should have been afraid, but I only felt frustration.
My father replied to the Taliban the next day in a letter to the newspaper. Please don’t harm my schoolchildren, he wrote, because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life, but please don’t kill my schoolchildren. His letter appeared in the paper—along with his full name and the address of our school—even though my father had written only his name.
Besides, I was the daughter of Ziauddin Yousafzai, the man who had dared to talk back to the Taliban. I would hold my head high—even if my heart was quaking.
Despite the fear we all felt for her, we were not expecting them to attack a woman. The killing of women is prohibited by the Pashtunwali code. We were shocked.
My heart dropped. The school Fazlullah had destroyed was a primary school, not even a school that taught teenagers. He had bombed the school at night, when it was empty, but how cruel this man was, hurling firebombs at a place where little children wanted only to learn to read and write and add. Why? I wondered. Why was a school building such a threat to the Taliban?
Terrorism is different from war—where soldiers face one another in battle. Terrorism is fear all around you. It is going to sleep at night and not knowing what horrors the next day will bring. It is huddling with your family in the center-most room in your home because you’ve all decided it’s the safest place to be. It is walking down your own street and not knowing whom you can trust. Terrorism is the fear that when your father walks out the door in the morning, he won’t come back at night.
“At night our fear is strong, jani,” he said. “But in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again.”
Day or night, my father’s courage never seemed to waver, despite receiving threatening letters as well as warnings from concerned friends.
If she was afraid, I wouldn’t do it. Because if I didn’t have her support, it would be like speaking with only half my heart.
Many people in Swat saw danger everywhere they looked. But our family didn’t look at life that way. We saw possibility. And we felt a responsibility to stand up for our homeland. My father and I are the starry-eyed ones. “Things have to get better,” we always say. My mother is our rock. While our heads are in the sky, her feet are on the ground. But we all believed in hope. “Speaking up is the only way things will get better,” she said.
Meanwhile, even some of my friends asked why I let the world see my face. “Fazlullah’s men wear masks,” I said, “because they are criminals. But I have nothing to hide, and I have done nothing wrong. I’m proud to be a voice speaking out for girls’ education. And proud to show my identity.” A madman was about to kick more than fifty thousand girls out of school in a matter of days, and all people seemed to want to talk about was whether I should have worn a veil!
When I got to school that morning, I was more elated than ever to walk through the gate. Madam Maryam was waiting there for us, giving each girl a hug and telling us we were brave. She was brave, too, of course; she was taking a big risk being there. Girls like us might be reprimanded. A grown woman could be beaten. Or killed. “This secret school,” she said, “is our silent protest.”
At one point during the flogging, her burqa slipped up to reveal her trousers. The beating stopped for a moment so the men could cover her up again, then they went back to beating her. A crowd had gathered but did nothing. One of the girl’s relatives even volunteered to help hold her down. By the time it was over, she had been struck thirty-four times.
I felt so hopeful about the future of my valley that I planted a mango seed outside our house. I knew it would take a long time for the seed to bear fruit, like the reconciliation and rebuilding the government had promised, but it was my way of saying I was full of hope for a long and peaceful future in Mingora.
My dear friends, they were as generous as could be and only wanted to share in my success. I knew in my heart that any one of us could have achieved what I had; I was lucky that I had parents who encouraged me despite the fear we all felt.
I took another glance at the message on the screen. Then I closed the computer and never looked at those words again. The worst had happened. I had been targeted by the Taliban. Now I would get back to doing what I was meant to do.
My proud, fearless Pashtun father was shaken in a way I’d never seen. And I knew why. It was one thing for him to be a target of the Taliban. He had always said, “Let them kill me. I will die for what I believe in.” But he had never imagined the Taliban would turn their wrath on a child. On me. I looked at my father’s wretched face, and I knew that he would honor my wishes no matter what I decided. But there was no decision to make. This was my calling. Some powerful force had come to dwell inside me, something bigger and stronger than me, and it had made me fearless. Now it was up to me to
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My mother loved schoolwork even more than I did, if that was possible. My father said it was because she had been deprived of learning for so long. In the evenings, she and I would often do our homework together, sipping tea—two generations of Pashtun women happily huddled over their books.
This birthday felt like a turning point for me. I was already considered an adult—that happens at age fourteen in our society.
I glanced over at Dr. Fiona. She had positioned a box of tissues between us, and I realized then that she’d been expecting me to cry. Maybe the old Malala would have cried. But when you’ve nearly lost your life, a funny face in the mirror is simply proof that you are still here on this earth.
At first, I wondered how I could ever be friends with these girls. I have seen and experienced things they couldn’t even imagine. But as time went on, I realized they have had experiences I can’t imagine. What I’m finding is that we have much more in common than we have different, and every day we learn something new from one another. And every day I feel a little bit more like plain old Malala, just another girl in the class.
As for Atal, he doesn’t understand all the media fuss around me. “I don’t understand why Malala is famous,” he said to my father. “What has this girl done?” To the world, I may be Malala, the girl who fought for human rights. To my brothers, I’m the same old Malala they’ve been living with and fighting with all these years. I’m just the big sister.
She feeds the birds from leftovers she keeps on the windowsill, just as she used to do back home. I’m sure she is thinking of all the hungry children who used to eat breakfast at our house before school in the morning and wondering if anyone is feeding them now.
Sometimes my father cries, too. He cries when he recalls those first days after the attack, when I was somewhere between life and death. He cries at the memory of the attack itself. He cries with relief when he wakes up from an afternoon nap to hear his children’s voices in the yard and realizes that I am alive.
“Malala used to be known as my daughter,” he says. “But I am proud to say that now I am known as Malala’s father.”
My father, meanwhile, has taken on a new responsibility at home. Recently, I teased him that while he and I are busy speaking about women’s rights, my mother is still doing the cooking and cleaning. Now he cooks every morning. It’s the same thing every time: fried eggs. His cooking is full of love, but not so full of flavor. He has done some brave things in the past: starting a school without a coin in his pocket, standing up for women’s rights and girls’ education, and standing up to the Taliban. But now my brave, proud Pashtun father has taken on the pots and the pans!
The journalists also ask if I am afraid. I say no. And that is true. What I don’t say is that I am afraid of one thing: I wonder sometimes if I will be the same Malala in the future. Will I be deserving of all these honors I have been given?
Sometimes when the journalists see my brothers playing so freely, they ask if I am being robbed of a childhood by my campaign for children’s rights. I tell them to think of a girl who is married off at eleven. Or a little boy who has to pick through the rubbish heap to earn money for his family. Or the children who have been killed by bombs and bullets. They are the ones who have been robbed of a childhood.
But out of the violence and tragedy came opportunity.
So, yes, the Taliban have shot me. But they can only shoot a body. They cannot shoot my dreams, they cannot kill my beliefs, and they cannot stop my campaign to see every girl and every boy in school.
My mother had no education, and perhaps that was the reason she always encouraged us to go to school. “Don’t wake up like me and realize what you missed years later,” she says. She’s faced so many challenges in her daily life in England because, up until now, she’s had difficulty communicating when she’s gone shopping or to the doctor or the bank. Getting an education is helping her become more confident, so that she can speak up outside the home, not just inside it with us.
But when you are exiled from your homeland, where your father and forefathers were born and where you have centuries of history, it’s very painful. You can no longer touch the soil or hear the sweet sound of the rivers. Fancy hotels and meetings in palaces cannot replace the sense of your true home.
