Seventeen-year-old Malala Yousafzai at Girl Summit 2014. Photo by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development.
Seventeen-year-old Malala Yousafzai at Girl Summit 2014. Photo by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development.

“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”

~ Malala Yousafzai 2013

Pakistani Educator Ziauddin Yousafzai speaks to a TED Talk audience about his daughter Malala, who was shot at point-blank range in September 2012 by a Taliban gunman. She survived.

Malala Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner ever.

From a very early age, Malala has been an activist for education and other rights for girls in a culture in which it can be deadly to speak out against the prevailing order, no matter how malefic or abusive that culture might be.

Mr. Yousafzai said that when people ask him about his mentorship of his daughter, that resulted in such confidence and poise, he answered, “Ask me instead what I didn’t do.” What he did do included encouraging her to “unlearn the lesson of obedience.”

Watch the very inspiring TED Talk for more on that … and what he taught his male students.

See a longer interview by Christiane Amanpour with Malala and her father Yousafzai, and watch Malala’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

“My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.” ~ Audre Lorde, American Poet, Writer, and Activist

Here’s to the power of finding courage, to unlearning the lessons of destructive obedience, and to speaking and standing for Truth.

Big Love,
Jamie