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Malala Yousafzai's address at the United Nations on Friday, her sixteenth birthday, was remarkable, not least because she was speaking less than a year after being shot in the head by a Pakistani Talib - her punishment for daring to advocate education for girls. Yet she spoke to the hundreds of delegates in the hall, and the audience of millions beyond, without bitterness, and with compassion, grace and confidence.
She also spoke with authority. That authority was the result of two factors, one readily understood – her extraordinary bravery - and one scarcely noticed by the British media – her religion.
If you listen to Malala's speech in full you realise that it was a very pious address. This is not surprising. She is a devout young Muslim. But the explicitly religious parts of what she said were mainly absent from the extracts I heard on television and radio. This did us a double disservice. We didn't get to hear about a different form of Islam from one that so often dominates the media, and, we lost much of the force of what she said.
She began by invoking God in the Islamic manner, as the most Beneficent, the most Merciful, and gave delegates the Muslim greeting, A-salaam aleykum. And she was very clear that her cause – the right of all children, female as well as male, to have an education – derived from the Qu'ran itself. These religious references, omitted in the west, are crucial if the cause of female education is to make serious headway beyond Europe where most cultures are religious. This is especially true in Pakistan where she comes from. It was the religious nature of the address that would make it persuasive there.
And the speech does something else. It forces us to think again about where power lies.
When Malala spoke she was in a place – the United Nations – where the world's leaders gather, some of whom were there. People with power. Or are they?...