Malala's courage is her father's story, too

Before Malala Yousafzai was an international icon, before the heroic Pakistani teen was heaped with accolades for her courageous advocacy of girls' education, she was nurtured by a strong family.

In particular she was influenced by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who instilled the radical - and in their society, hazardous - belief that a daughter is every bit as valuable as a son.

At the heart of young Yousafzai's unstoppable drive to learn - the passion and bravery for which she was named a corecipient of the Nobel Peace Prize this month and for which she will receive the 2014 Liberty Medal in Philadelphia on Tuesday - is a stirring story of father-daughter love.

"I was the apple of my father's eye," Yousafzai, 17, writes in her autobiography, I Am Malala. "A rare thing for a Pakistani girl."

Rare and revolutionary in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, where the birth of a boy brings gifts and celebratory gunfire and a girl's birth is met with sad empathy for the parents.

"My father paid no mind to these customs," writes Yousafzai. "I've seen my name - in bright blue ink - right there among the male names of our family tree. Mine was the first female name in three hundred years."

Bucking centuries of tradition is part of the makeup of Ziauddin Yousafzai, 45, a teacher, accountant, and principal, who three years before his daughter was born started the Khushal School, which she would later attend in their hometown of Mingora.

By the time his daughter was 8, Ziauddin Yousafzai was in charge of 800 students and three campuses - an elementary division and two high schools, one for boys and one for girls.

A stellar student who regularly was first in her class, Yousafzai lived to attend school, even in 2005 as Taliban mullahs began using radio programs to issue edicts banning girls' education.

Men and women who disobeyed the edicts were publicly flogged at kangaroo courts. Hundreds of schools were bombed. Some policemen were killed.

At great risk, Ziauddin Yousafzai pushed back against the elders who thought his girls' high school was a blasphemy. He traveled to the capital, Islamabad, to take the government to task for not protecting its citizens. The activism wasn't lost on his daughter, whose namesake, Malalai of Maiwand, was a Pashtun heroine who rallied her countrymen against British troops in 1880.

"Inside the Khushal School we flew on wings of knowledge," Yousafzai observed. "In a country where women aren't allowed out in public without a man, we girls traveled far and wide inside the pages of our books. In a land where many women can't read the prices in the markets, we did multiplication. In a place where, as soon as we were teenagers, we'd have to cover our heads and hide ourselves from the boys who'd been our childhood playmates, we ran free as the wind."

In 2009, at the invitation of the BBC's Urdu service, which wanted to document the growing educational crisis in Swat, young Yousafzai began writing a blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai. It didn't take long for her identity to be revealed.

Then the New York Times produced a short documentary featuring Yousafzai, her father, and their struggle to sustain girls' education under oppressive conditions.

Irked by such defiance, Taliban gunmen in October 2012 boarded a school bus and demanded, "Who is Malala?"

Her friends didn't say a word, but some looked in her direction. The gunmen fired three shots, hitting Yousafzai in the head and neck and wounding two other students.

The bullets that shattered Yousafzai's skull seem only to have intensified her resolve. She was airlifted to Birmingham, England, for expert medical attention. From her hospital bed, she said she would continue speaking out and announced the creation of the Malala Fund to continue her advocacy.

"The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions," she said in a July 2013 address to the United Nations. "But nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear, and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage was born."

As the world took notice of the diminutive activist, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a crusader in his own right, began to be billed as Malala's dad. He doesn't mind.

"Why is my daughter so strong?" the deep-voiced Yousafzai said in a March TED Talk. "Because I didn't clip her wings."

The National Constitution Center's Liberty Medal ceremony, which begins Tuesday at 7 p.m., will recognize Malala Yousafzai for "courage and resilience in the face of adversity."

The event's lineup of speakers includes Minnijean Brown Trickey of the Little Rock Nine, the group of African American students who fought for the right to attend the racially segregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

Five girls from Philadelphia and suburban schools, including Mo'ne Davis, the Little League pitching sensation from Philadelphia, will read selections from Yousafzai's BBC blog posts.

The Pennsylvania Girlchoir will perform its rendition of Sara Bareilles' "Brave." The song's chorus: "Say what you want to say."

ABC News' chief global affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz, will host the event.

The Liberty Medal, established in 1988, commemorates the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Given annually, the medal honors "men and women of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe."

Yousafzai is the seventh Liberty Medal recipient to also receive a Nobel Prize.

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