Malala on Time's most influential list but her father is also an inspiration

[snagglepuss]

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“The Taliban almost made Malala a martyr; they succeeded in making her a symbol,” wrote Chelsea Clinton in Time.

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But something else makes Malala extraordinary and sets her apart from millions of other Pakistani and Afghan schoolgirls who yearn for an education: Malala’s first champion in life was her father. In that context, she is a lucky girl. Mothers in Afghanistan and Pakistan often wish their girls could enjoy better opportunities in life than them, but it rarely happens unless the fathers agree.

The fathers almost always make the final decisions about their children’s future with one eye kept on the family's honour, which is always tied to a girl's personal reputation. It takes a big man to ignore social pressures of a rural Pashtun culture that values girls only as mothers and housewives and a society that considers girls who are educated beyond primary school as unsuitable brides. Those attitudes are prevalent in areas not under Taliban control. In places like the Swat Valley, where the Yousafzais lived, the family had the additional terror of Taliban death threats against those who sent their girls to school.

Ziauddin Yousafzai is an enlightened man. He ran a school named after a Pashtun poet warrior. He was an active supporter of girls’ education who wrote his daughter’s birth on the family register -- unheard of in a society that values only boys. He admitted to the New York Times once that his daughter was special, and that after his two younger sons went to bed, Malala was allowed to stay up and talk politics. On Malala’s first day of school in England it was Ziauddin who accompanied her.




http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/04/malala-on-times-most-influential-list-but-her-father-is-also-an-inspiration.html

[idwiyo]

1. K&R

[JI7]

2. in videos before she was shot she is talking about what she

wants to do when she grows up and you can see him so happy and proud.