It’s a Good Day to be a Girl

I don't even have to write an article, I could just give you Malala quotes.

Today, the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced its youngest winner ever, Pakistani education advocate and world-famous terrorism survivor Malala Yousafzai. Her co-recipient Kailash Satyarthi,is an equally impressive child labor activist, who goes beyond rhetoric to leading actual raids of factories employing children, even standing down armed guards. Together, they are excellent representatives of the people who actively fight every day against fundamentalism, extremism, and violence.

Ms. Yousafzai’s activism on behalf of women and girls’ education everywhere has earned her nearly universal praise from the West, including this latest honor, yet she still cannot return home to Pakistan due to fears for her and her family’s life. While she is widely known and celebrated abroad, feted by heads of state, and has even met Queen Elizabeth II, Malala is often called a Western pawn or CIA agent in the Pakistani media, with some even doubting the veracity of the Taliban’s attempt on her life in 2012.

Malala Yousafzai and the Fight for Female Education

The girl enters the studio stage left, and the crowd goes wild. She is dressed in traditional Pakistani garb, poised, smiling, and impossibly mature. The next 16 minutes make you alternately want to cry, scream, cheer, and laugh. In an interview destined to go viral, Malala Yousafzai left host Jon Stewart speechless with her beyond-her-years wisdom and eloquence. In the past few weeks, Malala’s name – and her cause – have been inescapable, especially after she became the youngest person ever on the short list for a Nobel Peace Prize. She has met the Queen of England, taken tea with Angelina Jolie, had a biography published about her life (at 16, no less), and put a face on the struggle to educate girls, especially in the developing world.

It is striking that at only 16, Malala has achieved global celebrity not even Hollywood starlets could dream of, and all without a stint in rehab. In a documentary about the Taliban in Swat Valley, the viewer is offered a glimpse of Malala just a few years ago: markedly shier, she hides her face behind her hands as she cries on camera. The reason for her tears: the next day, a Taliban ban on girls in school will take effect, and her schooldays would come to a (brief) end. Her father smiles and pats her back, telling the cameraman that he simply could not risk his daughter’s life because he “fell in love with her” the moment she was born. Four years later, Malala says of the moment, “We don’t learn the importance of anything until it’s snatched from our hands… Education is power for women, and that is why the terrorists are scared of education.”