
Life | Work is a series focused on the personal side of Harvard research and teaching.
On a June evening in 2009, militants detonated a car bomb packed with more than 1,000 pounds of explosives near the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 17 and injuring nearly 50. The terrorist operation came in response to a government offensive against an offshoot of the Taliban and added to the spiral of political violence that has engulfed the region since the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
The bombing also changed the life path of Mashail Malik, assistant professor in the Department of Government, whose father was nearly killed in the blast. Malik was back home in Islamabad, after her freshman year at Beloit College. Her father was badly injured, but to keep everybody calm, he recited poetry through the three-hour ride from Peshawar to a hospital in Islamabad.
Growing up, Malik was enthralled by literature and philosophy, but after the attack felt a need to learn more about terrorism and the forces behind people’s willingness to kill or be killed for political beliefs. Her interest set her on the path toward political science.
“My first love was fiction; my second was philosophy. But both of those things are in some ways divorced from the real world,” Malik said on a recent afternoon at her office in the Center for Government and International Studies building on Cambridge Street.
“As a child, I was always made fun of as the person who always had her nose in a book and was disconnected from reality in some ways. The attack forced me to engage with ‘the real world.’ Political science allows me to do that and helps me focus on ethical issues in ways that are fascinating.”