We have just witnessed history in the making as sixteen year
old Malala Yousafzai addressed the United Nations. When she was in her village
in North Pakistan, relatively unknown, one voice, would we have believed that
today she could stand in front of the whole world and speak for the rights of
women and children everywhere to be educated; to speak for the peace and
brotherhood that will enable that education to happen; to speak for tolerance
and forgiveness when she has herself been through so much? ‘I am just one voice
but together we can change the world’, was part of her message. The
overthrowing of fear and prejudice was another. She called upon her sisters
everywhere to stand in their own strength and speak out for equality and their
human rights. One could almost feel the presence of the Brother/sisterhood in
spirit standing with her. The whole of the UN stood for her, but she said it
was not her day, but the day of all those who are oppressed. I truly feel she
was speaking for the light.
We are not all in the position to speak out physically as
Malala did today, but we all have the power of the light within us to bring
about changes within ourselves and for our world, through healing, through compassion,
through understanding, through forgiveness of which Malala spoke so eloquently,
through love.
My cousin Jeremy
wrote on Facebook: ‘God bless you Malala, and the tens of thousands of other
girls around the world with similar courage. Bless you for your truth to Islam.
Bless you for your truth to the human spirit!’
