Malala’s voice is defiant — but how much can she change Pakistan? 

In 2012 a Taleban gunman, infuriated by Malala Yousafzai’s frequent television appearances insisting that girls had a right to education, shot her in the face. She survived and is now an inspirational symbol both of defiance and of the love of learning.

As you might hope in a memoir by a 16- year-old, full acknowledgment is given to parental influence and particularly to the role of her father. Ziauddin Yousafzai is himself a long-standing champion of girls’ education who, until the Taleban forced the family into exile in Birmingham, ran girls’ schools in the famously beautiful Swat valley in northern Pakistan.

And yet, as his daughter reveals, his life so nearly took a different path. In a passage that helps explain the dire state of Pakistan today Malala states that, as a teenager, her father dreamt of jihad and prayed for martyrdom before a family friend gradually talked him out of it. Many capable young Pakistanis have lacked that kind of friend.

But Ziauddin Yousafzai chose life over death, education over dogma and, with his blessing, his precocious daughter repeatedly and recklessly denounced Taleban rule in Swat. This was at a time when, every morning, the Taleban would leave piles of headless corpses on the streets of Swat’s main town, Mingora.

The Pakistani newspapers are full of her. Recent headlines on a single day included: ‘Malala Will be Back as a Politician’; ‘Malala Backs Talks with Taleban’; ‘Malala Being Used by Enemies of Islam’, (the view of a prominent pro-Taleban cleric) and ‘Taleban Vow to Attack Malala Again’. That story contained an extraordinarily ungenerous statement from the official Taleban spokesman: ‘She is not a brave girl ; she has no courage,’ he said.

As the headlines suggest, not all the coverage is positive. While millions of Pakistanis admire her, others are jealous that she and her family have moved from obscurity to asylum in the UK.