Tainted by the Nobel
BY GABRIEL RUBIN
When Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he quipped, “I was not aware at the time that the Nobel Prize is awarded without consulting the opinion of the recipient.” Few besides Sartre have ever dreamed of turning down a Nobel, widely recognized, in the West at least, as the crown jewel of prizes for writers, doctors, scientists, economists, and statesmen. This year the Peace Prize, the most overtly political Nobel, was awarded to Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani teenager whose eloquence and tireless advocacy for girls’ education has made her one of the world’s most recognizable human rights leaders. By accepting the prize, Yousafzai’s profile will only grow and her work will undoubtedly receive more attention than it would have otherwise. But in accepting the Nobel, she has permanently labeled herself as a representative of Western values—a precarious role to assume if she hopes to achieve real change for women and girls in Islamic countries.
In the extremist paranoia of the Pakistani Taliban, Malala Yousafzai became an American agent when she started campaigning for girls’ education. Like the health workers leading polio vaccination programs and the murderous drones hovering overhead, Malala represented yet another insidious and unwanted incursion of Western interests into the conservative Swat Valley and Pakistan as a whole. Taliban gunmen attempted to assassinate her and just narrowly failed: after taking a bullet to the head in October 2012, Yousafzai and her family fled to Britain to escape the Taliban and receive intensive medical care. She instantly became a celebrity in the West, beyond the niche community of human rights activists who had known about her education work. She appeared on the cover of Time magazine, chatted with President Obama in the Oval Office, and was the subject of numerous star-studded tributes by Laura Bush, Angelina Jolie, and Hillary Clinton, to name only a few. Jon Stewart, in what was perhaps the most fawning interview in the history of The Daily Show, asked if her father would be mad if he adopted her.
Yousafzai has found that being adopted by Western liberals has its financial benefits. Besides the Nobel’s hefty award, her autobiography I Am Malala spent 22 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. If she chose to make the rounds on the rubber chicken circuit she could easily demand a speaking honorarium in the high five figures.
Though she has received the lion’s share of attention, Yousafzai is actually one of two winners of the 2014 Peace Prize. The other recipient, Kailish Satyarthi, has spent decades toiling in near anonymity in north-central India to put an end to child labor. Despite threats to his life and intense opposition from some in Indian society, Satyarthi has built up his “Save the Childhood” movement and helped an estimated 83,000 children around the world avoid forced labor.
Yousafzai’s commitment to her cause cannot be questioned, but her future efficacy can be. Unlike Satyarthi, she has not spent years building a movement. Her charisma and cult of personality can help win her admirers and Western donors, but they make it more likely that she will be seen as a foreign interloper in Pakistan, where Angelina Jolie and Laura Bush are less popular.
At least for now, it is far too dangerous for Malala to return to Pakistan. She herself concedes that living in Britain and associating with mostly Westerners has limited her contact with people in the Swat Valley. As nearly every Peace Prize laureate has mentioned in their Nobel lectures, social and political progress cannot be achieved by one person—the best an individual can do is inspire the people around her to create change. While she has been celebrated by some in Pakistan, including in Swat, it will take decades of difficult work to improve girls’ education there.
To some degree, Malala seems to have begun to understand that she must be wary of the West’s embrace if she hopes to actually have any impact on girls’ access to education in Muslim-majority countries. She has publicly criticized President Obama for the American drone-strike campaign that continues to wreak havoc on the Swat Valley and the rest of Northwest Pakistan. She donated the $50,000 award money from the International Children’s Peace Prize (like the Nobel, a Western creation) to rebuilding schools in Gaza that were destroyed in last summer’s war between Hamas and Israel. While both of those gestures show Yousafzai’s willingness to separate herself from an entirely Western agenda, she will have to do much more in order to establish herself as a reformer from within rather than an outside agitator. By no means will she ever ingratiate herself to the Taliban (nor should she), but she will need local allies and unexpected bedfellows if her cause is to succeed. If Malala isn’t careful, the West’s love will condemn her to ineffectual irrelevance.