Proud parents and relieved schoolchildren across Britain took to social media in August to celebrate as the results of the country’s GCSE exams were released.
Few parents, however, had as much cause for pride as Ziauddin Yousafzai, who tweeted his daughter’s results: A* passes — the highest possible — in six subjects and straight As in four more.
Such a haul is more than most pupils born and bred in the UK would dare to hope for.
But Malala Yousafzai’s triumph was the greater because it came less than three years after she survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban in Pakistan and overcame all the difficulties of moving to a strange country to start her life afresh.
It was the ultimate retaliation against the fundamentalists who tried to take her life because she had campaigned against their ban on education for girls.
This week Malala, now 18, was in Abu Dhabi for the premiere of a documentary about her life. It was an appropriate location for the first screening of He Named Me Malala, and not only because the film was co-produced by Abu Dhabi's Image Nation.
In October 2012, Emiratis shared the revulsion felt around the world when Malala was critically injured by a Taliban bullet while on her way home from school.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, condemned the “attack on … every girl’s right to a future unlimited by prejudice and oppression”, and it was the UAE that sent the air ambulance that flew Malala to Britain for the expert medical attention she so badly needed.
Born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, a town in the Swat district of north-west Pakistan, the girl whose campaign for education for all children of the world has made her an example to so many was named after an earlier Pashtun folk heroine.
Folklore has it that an 18-year-old called Malala rallied faltering Afghan troops at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, seizing the fallen flag and urging them to victory against the British. She died in the act.
At the outset, her modern namesake’s existence seemed destined to be less remarkable.
"When I was born," Malala recalled in her 2014 autobiography, I Am Malala, "people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father."
Born in poverty – “we knew what it was to be hungry” – she was “a girl in a land where … daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children”.
And that, for a poor girl from Swat, should have been that. But Malala found a different future beckoning in the simple school that her father had founded opposite the humble family home.
As a toddler, Malala had “the run of the school as my playground” and by the age of 3 was sitting in classes for much older children.
Though poor, the family was happy. But when Malala was 4 the peace of what was once “the most beautiful place in the world” was shattered by events half a world away.
A month after the September 11 attacks, the United States invaded neighbouring Afghanistan to root out Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The repercussions rippled through Swat.
Extremists began attacking cinemas screening “inappropriate” films, tearing down billboards that portrayed women and even destroying female shop mannequins. “It was,” Malala wrote later, “as though they wanted to remove all traces of womankind from public life.”
Malala was 10 when the Taliban finally came to her valley. Malala and a friend had been reading the Twilight books, "and … it seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the night just like vampires … armed with knives and Kalashnikovs".
Public beatings became common, women were banned from going to shops and the Taliban stopped polio vaccinations, claiming they were an American plot to make Muslim women infertile. Kidnappings and murders escalated.
In 2008 the Taliban began blowing up schools, and by the end of that year hundreds had been destroyed.
Malala’s father, an outspoken community activist, became increasingly vocal, speaking out against the terror at meetings and on local and foreign media.
By the time she was 11, Malala and other girls from her school, encouraged by her father, were also giving interviews. The more she gave, she later wrote, “the stronger I felt … In my heart was the belief that God would protect me. If I am speaking for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong.”
At the end of 2008, Malala’s father had a call from a friend working for the BBC in Peshawar. He was looking for a schoolgirl to write a blog about life under the Taliban and Ziauddin volunteered his daughter. The die was cast.
Under the pseudonym Gul Makai — another Pashtun folklore heroine — Malala’s first entry, headlined “I am afraid”, appeared on January 3, 2009. She was still only 11 years old.
The blog quickly attracted global media attention and before long Malala's identity had been exposed, in a documentary posted online by The New York Times.
It’s a telling film. At one point, Malala sits silently, listening to her father talking about his determination not to be driven out of Swat, facing death if need be. His daughter’s safety is not discussed.
Her dream, she tells the reporter, is to become a doctor, “but my father told me: ‘You have to become a politician’. But I don’t like politics.”
As the Pakistan government’s battle with the Taliban for control of Swat ebbed and flowed around her, Malala and her campaign for girls’ education became increasingly well known, at home and abroad.
After she won Pakistan’s first National Peace Prize, Malala’s mother, Toor Pekai, became increasingly anxious that her daughter would become a target. She was right. In January 2012 a school was named after Malala in Karachi and the Taliban finally issued a death threat against her.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, 15-year-old Malala sat the first of her end-of-year exams. It was physics, a subject she loved because “it is about truth, a world determined by principles and laws”.
As she travelled home, the school bus was stopped by two masked men. One called her out by name and shot her in the head. Two of her friends were also wounded, though less critically.
As her brain swelled dangerously, her life was saved by an operation carried out by a Pakistani military neurosurgeon.
Messages of sympathy and outrage, along with offers of medical help, poured in from around the world. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the “heinous and cowardly act”, which US President Barack Obama labelled “reprehensible and disgusting”.
Six days after the shooting, Malala was flown to England, via Abu Dhabi, to be treated at a hospital in Birmingham that specialised in military injuries.
Among the endless flowers, teddy bears and other gifts that arrived was one Malala treasured above all others. The children of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistan prime minister who was assassinated in 2007, sent her two of their mother’s shawls.
Malala wore one of them when she addressed the United Nations in New York on her 16th birthday in 2013, telling the delegates: “Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.”
Malala, by now “the most famous teenager in the world”, according to one European newspaper, finally left hospital in January 2013. She had survived, but the shooting had changed her life utterly.
She dreams of returning to Pakistan, where her old school friends keep a chair in class for her. Today, she has swapped her dream for her father’s, hoping to “serve the people [as] an influential politician”.
But for now the family lives in Birmingham, which although it has a large Muslim population, is very different to Malala’s beloved Swat valley.
At the start, the family was shocked by many things, including the sight of men and women mixing freely and women wearing skimpy clothes. At first, Malala recalled, her mother was so horrified she begged her father, “Please take me to Dubai – I can’t live here!” Now, her uneducated mother is learning to read, write and speak English.
Her daughter, the simple schoolgirl from the Swat valley, has adapted remarkably well to life in the global limelight. Malala has met and mixed easily with presidents, queens, sheikhs and celebrities, and many honours have come her way. Yet she has retained her sense of perspective and humour.
In 2014, she became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Some call me a Nobel laureate now,” she said in her moving acceptance lecture in Oslo on December 10. “However, my brothers still call me that annoying bossy sister.”
She is grateful for all the awards, but she does not want to be remembered as “‘The girl who was shot by the Taliban’, but ‘The girl who fought for education’.” This, she says, “is the cause to which I want to devote my life” – and for which she very nearly gave it.
weekend@thenational.ae
Read The National’s exclusive interview with Malala Yousafzai in Arts&Life on Sunday.
