Beginning with Malala, an inspiration to many - by Peter Leyland
Beginning with Malala, an Inspiration to Many
Recently, I came across a newspaper article about Malala Yousafzaia which started off a train of thought and which led me to write it all down for this month's blog post.
I first encountered Malala when I was teaching a Workers' Educational Association (WEA) course on The Poetry of War in 2008. I was using a book 1914 Poetry Remembers created and edited by Carol Anne Duffy who at the time was Poet Laureate. Her idea was that a selection of known poems from WW1 such as Ivor Gurney with "First Time In" would be matched appropriately with newly created works by modern poets.
Duffy had asked fellow poets to create their own poem in response to a poem from WW1. "Avalon", for instance, was the poem that Simon Armitage created in response to Ivor Gurney's poem. I was teaching another matched poem from the book by Imtiaz Dharker, a Pakistani poet who had been brought up in Glasgow. It was called “A century later” and it was matched with Wilfred Owen’s "Anthem for Doomed Youth" about the death of young men in WW1. Imtiaz Dharker’s poem was about the attempted murder of 15 year old Malala Yousafzai in October 2012 by the Pakistan Taliban in their war against women’s education.
A century later
by Imtiaz Dharker
The school-bell is a call to battle,
every step to class, a step into the firing-line.
Here is the target, fine skin at the temple,
cheek still rounded from being fifteen.
Surrendered, surrounded, she
takes the bullet in the head
and walks on. The missile cuts
a pathway in her mind, to an orchard
in full bloom, a field humming under the sun,
its lap open and full of poppies.
This girl has won
the right to be ordinary,
wear bangles to a wedding, paint her fingernails,
go to school. Bullet, she says, you are stupid.
You have failed. You cannot kill a book
or the buzzing in it.
A murmur, a swarm. Behind her, one by one,
the schoolgirls are standing up
to take their places on the front line.
While teaching the matched poems from 1914 Poetry Remembers I did some research about Malala’s story which you may know. After the shooting, and she was severely wounded in the head, Malala was flown to Birmingham in the UK where thanks to her doctors she made an almost complete recovery from her injuries. Imtiaz Dharker’s poem tells the first part, the impact of a bullet on a young person and how the ideas in her head and her passion for an education could not be killed, ‘just as you cannot kill a book and the buzzing in it’, says the poet.
Malala wrote a book, I Am Malala, about her early life in the Swat Valley where she was involved in her father’s activism to promote female education which had provoked the Taliban’s murderous attack on her. It was also a symbolic attack upon the rights of women in all communities to receive an education and the desperate attempts of patriarchal elements in those communities to stop this happening. As if to give the lie to this intransigent attitude, after her recovery and now living in the UK, Malala was admitted to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University where she completed a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. She later met and married Malik, a cricket manager.
As I was thinking about Malala’s passion for education, I recalled another WEA course that I began teaching in 2008, which was specifically about Adult Learning. After taking early retirement from teaching children in that year, I had become a part-time adult education tutor. This was a reluctant decision because I loved the work with children, but I had lost so much of my hearing ability in the high registers that it made increasing sense. At the time I was staying in Cambodia with my sister and brother-in-law, where I had gone to take stock of my future. They were in Cambodia as missionaries to help heal the wounds of those who had suffered from the genocide led by Pol Pot against his own people in the 1970s. when nearly 25% of Cambodia’s population, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge
While I was there, I became a fan of Andy Sipovitch in NYPD Blue, which was very popular in Phnom Penh where they lived, and it was the family’s (two teenagers) programme of choice. I also read The Sea, a Booker Prize winner by John Banville which later featured in another course I taught. It may have been just a fortunate co-incidence but when I returned from this recovering country (where I was recovering myself), two more uplifting things happened. The first, was that as I waited to collect my baggage at the airport I watched on the overhead screens the news that Barrack Obama had just been elected president of the USA. It was 4th November 2008. A new era seemed to be beginning.
The second, was that the following day I received a phone call from the WEA Co-ordinator for the South East. She offered me part time work on a course called Helping in Schools, designed to help parents of primary age children to volunteer as helpers and learn how their children were being taught. I immediately accepted and shortly afterwards began running 60-hour courses about what happened in primary schools, the theory and practice. The courses were run in places such as Reading, and Slough where there were large Pakistani communities who wanted access to education. I taught this course to several different groups at centres there for the next four years. The students were mainly women with primary age children who were working in their local schools as voluntary helpers.
Their starting points varied: some had degrees while others were at pre-GCSE level. They were all, however, interested in learning about what happens in the schools their children attended, and the educational reasons behind it. As the students were from diverse backgrounds, questions like, why schools should have an Equal Opportunities Policy, were of real interest. Using my many years of acquired teaching expertise I was able to show them what they could achieve. One of them, whom I will call Razia, I remember completed a 2,500 word study of autism for her end of course project. She wanted to be able to help her autistic son.
I think the success of the courses owed itself to the WEA style of teaching and learning, which encouraged student participation in all the sessions. The students really responded to learning in groups. These comments from an evaluation that I carried out were typical:
‘The most useful part of the course was the discussions and the feedback from everyone. Also putting into practice in our placement what we learned during class sessions. We could verify the theory. And the brainstorming got us to reflect on various issues.’
The students also spoke about friendships made on the course, their appreciation of an opportunity to return to learning and the confidence gained from this. Many wanted to become teaching assistants. I was often asked to write references to accompany their applications for these posts and by the end of their courses many had obtained employment. Some of them became school governors. As a new WEA tutor for the Southern Region, I found it a really rewarding course to teach.
So, my connection with Malala Yousafzai occupies a space in time. In an interview in The Guardian of November this year, which I mention at the beginning, she tells interviewer Sirin Kale how her experiences while at Oxford university caused everything to change for her forever. The experiences, Sirin Kale says, ‘unlocked long submerged memories of the attack and also of a childhood growing up under the spectre of Taliban violence.’ Malala struggled to tell her parents about how these experiences had affected her mental health, which they could not understand. In another book, Finding My Way, Malala talks about how she found life had become more complex, that becoming famous at such a young age had made her feel she must spend the rest of her life campaigning for female education. She tells Sirin Kale that later she became more cynical. There is more, much more, but I will use some of the interviewer’s words to summarise:
'It strikes me as I walk away from our interview that she [Malala] never chose any of this. To be shot as a child, to be airlifted to the UK, to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Yousafzai seems to be someone who consistently puts others before herself, whether it’s accommodating her parents’ cultural expectations around marriage, supporting her family back home, or dedicating her life to girls’ education…'
"Anthem for Doomed Youth" speaks of the desolation that war can bring to young people. With Malala it seems to have had the opposite effect. A century after Wilfred Owen's poem was written, she has done all the things mentioned in Sirin Kale’s closing words quoted above. It might be worthwhile that you have a look at the complete interview, referenced below, to find out more.
References
Interview with Malala Yousafzai by Sirin Kale, in The Guardian Saturday 11th October, 2025. The article was accompanied by a photograph of her with Barrack Obama, his wife and daughter, but I was unable to reproduce this.
Dharker, I. Over the Moon p.146 (2014)
Duffy, C.A. 1914 Poetry Remembers (2013)
Leyland, P. WEA Branch Newsletter: Helping in Schools (2009)
Owen, W. "Anthem for Doomed Youth", published posthumously in 1920
Yousafzai, M. and Lamb, C. I Am Malala: the Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (2013)
Yousafzai, M. Finding My Way (2025)
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