Love, decency and humanity: a higher standard for politics

Photo by Jordhan Madec on Unsplash

I’ve just finished reading the brilliant and inspiring book ‘Let Her Fly’, the personal memoir of Ziauddin Yousafzai, the father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala.

It is by all accounts an extraordinary story of one man’s profound belief in the equality of women, despite growing up in a country and culture that kept, and continues to keep, women subservient in nearly all aspects of social, political and family life. But what is especially extraordinary is what informs those beliefs and how little Ziauddin knew about ‘feminism’ as a concept for the early part of his life. He quotes:

“What was this thing I yearned for long before Malala was born? And then wanted for her, and for my own wife, and then for my girl students, and then for all girls and all women on God’s beautiful earth? I did not articulate it, initially, as feminism. This is a valuable label that I would later learn in the West, but I was unaware of feminism then. For more than forty years, I had no idea what it meant. When it was explained to me, I said, “Oh, I have been a feminist for most of my life, almost from the beginning!” While living in Pakistan, I saw my own shifting ideas to be based more on love, decency, and humanity. I simply wanted, and continue to want, for girls everywhere to live in a world that treats them with love and meets them with…