Petri: Malala is free as a bird - and a Nobel Peace Prize winner

"A talib fires three shots at point-blank range at three girls in a van and doesn't kill any of them. This seems an unlikely story," writes Malala Yousafzai in her memoir "I Am Malala." "When people talk about the way I was shot and what happened I think it's the story of Malala, 'a girl shot by the Taliban'; I don't feel it's a story about me at all."

But it is. Malala's story, the story of "a girl shot by the Taliban" has tremendous power because it is a story not of tragedy but of faith.

"While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five year-old boy! This was the tradition." Malala wrote elsewhere in her memoir. "I had decided very early I would not be like that. My father always said 'Malala will be free as a bird.' I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley." "Malala will be free as a bird." This was a powerful wish.

And now she's a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"Through hate-filled actions," Ban Ki Moon wrote, "extremists have shown what frightens them the most: a girl with a book." Seeing what Malala Yousafzai has already managed to accomplish at the age of 17, you can see what the Taliban was terrified of.

Malala is a story. Malala is a symbol. Malala is the thing that frightens the forces of oppression the most: a girl with a book.

She was a daughter in a country where daughters are occasion for commiseration instead of celebration. But she had a father who was just as proud to bring a girl into the world. He believed that she had every right to education.

All he had to do was not stop Malala from flying. "Trust your daughters," he told NPR, "they are faithful. Honor your daughters, they are honorable. And educate your daughters, they are amazing." "Tell me how can one live without daughters?" sobs Malala's father in a particularly poignant passage of her book, when he is frightened that Malala will not survive. He is commiserating with a father who had lost his own brilliant daughter - a computer programmer certified by Microsoft at the age of nine.

How indeed.

The world without daughters is an uglier place. When daughters are not given the same rights to education, when they are forced to cover their faces, treated as less worthy, discouraged and dismissed, everyone suffers - the girls who could be computer programmers and scientists and political leaders, never able to fulfill their potential - and the world that never got to see what they were capable of.

Malala's story is a powerful testimony to what we miss whenever we miss the chance to educate a girl.

Her father told NPR that when people ask him what he did to train his daughter, ""I usually tell people, 'You should not ask me what I have done. Rather you ask me, what I did not do. . . I did not clip her wings to fly. I did not stop her from flying." "Malala will be free as a bird." It sounds simple. It should not be revolutionary. But it is.

Look at Malala - penning a memoir, continuing her own education in England, poignantly addressing the U.N. on the power of pens and books, now, winning a Nobel Prize. This is what happens when you don't clip girls' wings.

Imagine if we'd never gotten to know who Malala was.

We nearly didn't.

"I didn't see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt," writes Malala. "I didn't get a chance to answer their question 'Who is Malala?' or I would have explained to them why they should let us girls go to school as well as their own sisters and daughters." Instead there was a bullet. Malala could have been just "a girl shot by the Taliban" - a sad, too-short story. But instead she survived, and she's using her voice.

"Today I looked at myself in a mirror," she writes near the conclusion of her memoir, "and thought for a second. Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself. . . By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given me great responsibilities."

She would be intimidating even under ordinary circumstances. She read "A Brief History of Time" to relax. "I distracted myself from the fear and terrorism by thinking about things like how the universe began and whether time travel is possible," she told The New York Times.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee wrote, "Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzay has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations. This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls' rights to education."

Thankfully, we never had to see what the world was missing.