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To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op’: Malala Yousafzai on growing up, getting cynical – and how getting high nearly broke her
Sirin Kale
The global icon of women’s education is ready to tell the full story of her turbulent recent life, from arguing with her parents to being ghosted by the statesmen who were once desperate to be seen with her
Iam at the shed where Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai smoked her first bong. No, there’s no punchline – it’s not that kind of anecdote. “My life has changed for ever,” Yousafzai says sadly, as we gaze at the semi-derelict structure. “Everything changed for ever, after that [night].”
The shed is tucked away at the back of Lady Margaret Hall, away from the prying eyes of Oxford’s college life. You have to know how to find it. Yousafzai leads me through quadrangles and out into a hidden garden. Inside are dusty pint glasses and spiderwebs, and board games with the pieces missing.
We are meeting on a bright summer afternoon, ahead of the release of her memoir, Finding My Way, a sequel to her 2013 bestseller I Am Malala. Dressed in a blue shirt, jeans and a headscarf, Yousafzai is accompanied, at a discreet distance, by two close-protection officers. The college is quiet – it’s the summer holidays – and Yousafzai attracts no attention from the few students who remain as she tramps across the grass.
This is not our first interview. Our last conversation sparked days of negative headlines for Yousafzai, back home in her native Pakistan. As we gaze at the bong-shed, I fear that round two may lead to more of the same.
In 2021, I profiled a then-23-year-old Yousafzai for the cover of British Vogue. The world’s youngest Nobel laureate – she received the award at 17, for her activism for girls’ education – had recently graduated from university and was about to launch her adult life.
Yousafzai began campaigning at the age of 11. Her father, Ziauddin, is an education activist and she followed in his footsteps, writing a blog for BBC Urdu about her life as the Taliban shut down girls’ schools across Pakistan’s Swat valley where she lived. When a Taliban gunman shot her in the head on her school bus when she was just 15 years old, Yousafzai was airlifted to the UK and made a remarkable recovery, resettling with her family in Birmingham, where she attended secondary school, all the while campaigning for the rights of girls around the world to receive an education.
Yousafzai recovering at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham 10 days after the attack. Photograph: PG P / Shutterstock
When I met Yousafzai in April 2021, she had just got a 2.1 from Oxford in politics, philosophy and economics, and signed a deal with Apple TV+ to develop and produce her own slate of TV and films. (The deal has now ended.) We did an interview at a hotel in London before walking around a Covid-era St James’s Park. When I asked her if she had a romantic partner, she blanched. “I would say that I have come across people who have been great, and I hope that I do find someone,” she stuttered, visibly embarrassed.
Later, she mused on marriage. “I still don’t understand why people have to get married,” she told me. “If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why can’t it just be a partnership?”
Her comments seemed unexceptional. I was more concerned that the fact she’d told me that she frequented pubs could create controversy, given that Yousafzai is Muslim, and so when I wrote up the interview I was careful to specify that she did not drink alcohol.
The article came out. Yousafzai shared it, and sent me a message of thanks. The following day, logging on to Twitter (now X), I saw that #shameonMalala was trending in Pakistan. Her comments had been widely misinterpreted to mean that she was denouncing nikah, the Islamic institution of marriage, and implicitly to suggest that she condoned premarital sex.
She led Pakistan’s national news for days. Online commentators accused Yousafzai of betraying her religion as a result of western indoctrination. An influential cleric tagged her father on Twitter, asking him to explain his daughter’s un-Islamic remarks. (He responded, saying they had been taken out of context.) Parliamentarians in an assembly in north-west Pakistan even debated her comments.
Yousafzai maintained a dignified silence. And then, in November 2021, she announced her surprise wedding to Pakistani cricket manager Asser Malik. Many, including myself, struggled to make sense of it.
Shirt: Stella McCartney. Skirt: Kent & Curwen. Headscarf and shoes: Gucci
“Malala, what happened?!” I ask now as she walks, alone, into an empty conference room and greets me with a hug.
She smiles sheepishly. “When you asked that question [about meeting someone],” she says, “I felt like I was caught. It was like, wait a second, does she know anything? I was like, no, no, no, you know, I just don’t want to get married.”
In Finding My Way, Yousafzai reveals that, by the time of the Vogue interview, she and Malik were already dating. In other words, Yousafzai over-corrected to throw me off the scent.
But she was sincere in having her doubts about marriage. Growing up in Pakistan, she says, it represented “a future without any opportunity, where your husband determines your life”.
After the furore, her parents, but particularly her mother, were distraught. “She was so mad at me,” Yousafzai says. Family and friends kept texting articles. An imam from her village called to lecture her parents on the phone. “I was facing a lot of pressure,” she says, “from my dad, especially, and my mum, to issue a statement to clarify what my thoughts were on marriage, and I found this absurd.”
And then there was Malik. Yousafzai’s parents had met him, but she hadn’t felt ready to make the relationship public. She felt guilty for disavowing him publicly, but Malik didn’t blame her, and instead stepped in to help mediate with her parents. Over the following months, Yousafzai began to interrogate her views on marriage. She asked Malik about his thoughts on women and equality, and liked what she heard. “I’m supposed to be an advocate for girls and women, and even I was limiting my own self in how I perceived marriage,” Yousafzai says.
But there were other pressures, familiar to any immigrant child who has butted up against their parents’ cultural expectations. When Malik and Yousafzai left the house together, her mother would urge them to “maintain, like, a 10-foot distance”, she says.
It seems from reading Finding My Way that she would not have married so young were it not for her parents. She nods. “I felt like I was sort of giving up,” she says. Refusing to marry would have led to not only interfamilial, but international, conflict. “Am I willing to fight my mum and my dad? Am I willing to start a new debate on people living together without these ceremonies and traditions?” Yousafzai realised that she couldn’t live with Malik “without getting married in the traditional way, in the religious way”.
She could dig her heels in, but it would cause immense pain to her parents. And, besides, she was in love. “He’s so charming, he’s so smart, and I just could not stop thinking about him.” So she relented. On 9 November 2021, at her parents’ house in Birmingham, in an Islamic ceremony, Yousafzai married.
After marriage, Yousafzai realised that “things feel sort of the same. They’re not that different.” She lives with Malik in a riverside apartment in London. They split the chores; neither cooks, instead eating out or using a meal delivery service. (Yousafzai’s mother thinks this is “a disaster. She says, ‘Your house is the only house where there’s a fridge with no vegetables!’”)
It has been only four years since we met, but Yousafzai is much changed. The woman I met before appeared girlish, even a little gauche. She was visibly mortified when we spoke about relationships. Now, she is grounded and at ease. She also looks subtly different, having undergone surgery to improve the facial paralysis she suffered after the attack.
At university, Yousafzai experienced the sweetness of independent adult life for the first time. When we met in 2021, she described a whirl of college balls, societies and essay crises. Now she’s more willing to share the unvarnished reality of her university experience.
I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me
In Finding My Way, Yousafzai writes of the pressures of having to travel internationally, maintaining the relationships critical to the Malala Fund, which supports girls’ education projects around the world, in addition to paid speaking gigs. She is the breadwinner not only for her parents and two brothers, but also for her extended family back home in Pakistan, and even family friends. (At one point, she was paying for two family friends to attend college, in the US and Canada.)
Did she feel resentful of these financial obligations? “It was difficult to manage,” Yousafzai says. She “hated the experience of thinking about our expenses for the next year and [thinking], OK, I have to do this event, because otherwise we won’t be able to cover these costs.”
Yousafzai displays her medal during the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony in Norway, 2014. Photograph: Cornelius Poppe/AFP/Getty Images
Her studies suffered. Yousafzai got a 2.2 in her first-year exams and had to seek additional support from specialist tutors, a humbling experience for the most famous education activist in the world. “I felt like an impostor,” she laughs. “I felt ashamed.” She asked her tutor to write a letter to her parents explaining that she was forbidden from working during term time because she was failing her degree. Why didn’t she tell her parents herself? “I had talked to my family many times about the pressure,” she says, “and how difficult it was to manage.”
She writes of how, at home in Birmingham, “my dad treated our house like an art museum, and me like the signature piece in the collection”. She would be summoned downstairs to meet visitors keen to gawp at a Nobel laureate up close. “My dad is a very generous person,” she says, “a giving person, and he always understood what other people wanted … in his heart, he knew that they wanted to meet me.”
Have there been times, I ask, where he’s pushed you too much?
“Oh,” she laughs, “he has physically pushed me.” When meeting well-wishers or guests at family events, Ziauddin has given her the odd shove. “You know when you have a little kid, and you sort of push the kid [to] say hello to this person? I’m, like, it’s fine when they’re little kids, you know.” But even when she’s grouching, it’s clear Yousafzai has tremendous love and respect for the man who, however inadvertently, propelled her on to the world stage. “My dad has always been supportive,” she says. “Whenever I explain something to him, he completely understands it. He is one of those cool dads, who never disagrees with me.”
But I fear even the world’s most down-to-earth father may have concerns about what Yousafzai – whose new book is likely to be a bestseller (her first memoir sold nearly 2m copies) – is about to put in the public domain.
And so to the bong incident. What happened that night: Yousafzai tried to walk back to her room, but she blacked out en route. A girlfriend carried her back instead. She couldn’t sleep. Her brain endlessly replayed a loop of the day the Taliban attempted to murder her. The gun. The bloodspray. Her body being carried through crowds to an ambulance.
She had always thought she couldn’t remember being shot. But the bong unlocked long-submerged memories, of the attack and also of a childhood growing up under the spectre of Taliban violence. “I had never felt so close to the attack as then, in that moment,” she tells me. “I felt like I was reliving all of it, and there was a time when I just thought I was in the afterlife.” She felt she was dying, or already dead. “It’s easier to laugh about it now,” she says, with a small, tight smile.
Listening to her speak, I feel deep compassion for all she went through as a young child. “I was nine or 10 when the Taliban took over control in our valley,” she says, “and they would bomb schools, they would kill or slaughter people and hang their bodies upside down.”
After the bong, Yousafzai developed anxiety. “I felt numb … I couldn’t recognise myself in the mirror,” she says. The sweetness of college life fell away. She told her parents in general terms about the incident, but “they were a bit dismissive”, she says. She struggled to tell them how much it had affected her mental health. “I just could not explain to them that things are not the same any more.”
Optimism is the only way you can keep going, because there’s no other option
Friends were worried about her. (Maria, her personal assistant, who lives in London, was so concerned she drove up to be with her immediately after the incident.) Yousafzai lied and told them things were fine. “I’m the girl who was shot … I’m supposed to be a brave girl,” she says. Until she couldn’t pretend any longer. “I’d be sweating and shaking and I could hear my heart beat. Then I started getting panic attacks.” She saw a therapist, and realised that her childhood, the attempted murder and exam stress were overwhelming her mental health. In the book, Yousafzai writes a list of her symptoms at the time: a racing heart, finding it hard to breathe, struggles sleeping, brain fog and a constant fear of someone she loved dying. “Normal people don’t have lists like this,” she writes, adding, “Something is wrong with me.”
“I survived an attack,” she says, “and nothing happened to me, and I laughed it off. I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. My heart was so strong. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me. But, you know, in this journey I realised what it means to be actually brave. When you can not only fight the real threats out there, but fight within.”
Has becoming famous so young also had an impact? “Yes,” Yousafzai says, nodding emphatically. She talks about how young she was when she started winning awards, and what it was like to go to ceremonies and see activists there who had spent decades fighting for a cause. It made her feel as if she needed to “spend the rest of my life campaigning for girls’ education” to show she was worthy.
But no matter how many leaders she lobbied, or projects she helped to fund – Yousafzai glows when she talks about the girls’ school she opened back home – she felt it was not enough. There was “always this feeling … could I do more?” Her youthful idealism began to flake and peel off in patches, and then rub clean away. “As I was getting older,” she says, “I was realising that things are not as straightforward. Things are more complex.”
As a teen, Yousafzai had seen the world as a biddable place. She would reason with world leaders! Show them girls’ education was important! As she got older, she began to see the world as it really is.
You became cynical? I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, “for sure.” She gives a bitter, clipped laugh. “100%.”
In April 2021, the US announced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan in August of that year. Within days of them leaving, the Taliban took over the country. “We had calls with the Afghan activists who the Malala Fund were supporting,” she says, “and it was just unbelievable. Some of them knew the worst was coming. Some of them still had faith.”
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls cannot go to secondary school or higher education, with the only option available being madrasas that promote an extreme interpretation of Islam. The Malala Fund continues to do what it can. “We are providing funding for alternative education right now,” she says. “There are underground schools, there are radio and television education programmes.”
Yousafzai is heartbroken at what has come to pass. “I feel the world has forgotten about the women in Afghanistan,” she says. What stings is that “people were willing to trust the Taliban more than Afghan women”. Which people, I ask? “World leaders,” she says, “decision makers.”
Yousafzai writes of emailing politicians, begging for their assistance in evacuating her Afghan partners to safety before the Taliban took over. “For years, I’d smiled in pictures with these leaders, shaken their hands and stood next to them at podiums – but not one of them picked up the phone, or replied to my messages. To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op.”
Who didn’t take her calls? She mentions Biden. Johnson. Macron. Trudeau. She notes, pointedly, that female politicians did. Erna Solberg, the then Norwegian prime minister, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Lolwah Al-Khater, assistant foreign minister of Qatar at the time, stepped in to help evacuate her Afghan partners to safe countries, in some instances without passports.
The global icon of women’s education is ready to tell the full story of her turbulent recent life, from arguing with her parents to being ghosted by the statesmen who were once desperate to be seen with her
www.theguardian.com
