“I KNOW THE POWER THAT A YOUNG GIRL CARRIES IN HER HEART.”
“Malala is truly extraordinary,” Michelle Obama tells me. “Right away it was clear she belonged in a room with the President of the United States.”
Even the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history is not immune to the occasional life freak-out. “This is a question I have for myself every night,” Malala Yousafzai says with a groan when I ask her where she sees herself in 10 years’ time. “Lying awake in bed for hours thinking about what I’m going to do next.”
Yousafzai—fresh from the previous day’s Vogue shoot and still only 23 years old—goes on: “Where do I live next? Should I continue to live in the UK, or should I move to Pakistan or another country? The second question is, who should I be living with? Should I live on my own? Should I live with my parents? I’m currently with my parents, and my parents love me, and Asian parents especially, they want their kids to be with them forever.”
We sit in a quiet corner of a central London hotel. Yousafzai’s hair is loose and uncovered. Her headscarf rests in the nape of her neck. “I wear it more when I’m outside and in public,” she says, seated at a table, her discreet security detail sitting nearby. “At home, it’s fine. If I’m with friends, it’s fine.” The headscarf, she explains, is about more than her Muslim faith. “It’s a cultural symbol for us Pashtuns, so it represents where I come from. And Muslim girls or Pashtun girls or Pakistani girls, when we follow our traditional dress, we’re considered to be oppressed, or voiceless, or living under patriarchy. I want to tell everyone that you can have your own voice within your culture, and you can have equality in your culture.”
For almost 13 years, ever since she began campaigning for girls’ rights in Pakistan as an 11-year-old, this has been Yousafzai’s message to the world. Under Taliban rule in the city of Mingora
