Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai is a prominent Pakistani education activist and the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize, recognized for her unwavering advocacy for girls' education, especially in regions facing significant challenges. Born on July 12, 1997, in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, she grew up in a family that valued education, with her father being an educational activist himself. Malala began her public advocacy at a young age and gained international attention after writing a blog for the BBC about the Taliban's oppressive regime, which banned girls from attending school.
Her activism led to a life-threatening attack in 2012 when she was shot by a Taliban gunman while returning from school. Surviving the attack, she continued her education in the UK and became a global voice for education rights, speaking at the United Nations and authoring the memoir "I Am Malala." In 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Kailash Satyarthi for their efforts to combat child education deprivation.
Throughout her career, Malala has remained committed to empowering young women through education, establishing the Malala Fund, and supporting initiatives globally, including founding a school in Lebanon. She continues to highlight the challenges faced by women and girls, particularly in Afghanistan, and engages in various collaborative projects to promote women's stories and rights.
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Malala Yousafzai
Activist
- Born: July 12, 1997
- Place of Birth: Mingora, Pakistan
Significance: Malala Yousafzai is an activist in education and is the youngest person to have been awarded the Nobel Prize. She is known mostly for her advocacy work for the education and support of women, particularly in disadvantaged countries.
Background
Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, to a Sunni family in the Swat Valley in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. She was named after Malalai of Maiwand, a female poet and warrior, while her last name, Yousafzai, is the name of the tribal confederation in the Swat Valley. She lived in a small house in Mingora with her parents, Ziauddin and Tor Pekai, and her two brothers. Yousafzai shares her love of education with her father, who owned a school, was a poet and educational activist, and was largely responsible for his daughter’s education. She became fluent in three languages: Pashto, Urdu, and English. When she was young, she expressed interest in becoming a doctor.
Yousafzai began speaking about education from an early age after her father brought her to speak at a press club. Her speech was covered by local news throughout the area. In 2009, Yousafzai became an educator at the Open Minds Pakistan youth program, part of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
Life’s Work
The BBC Urdu website was interested in covering the increased influence of the Taliban within Swat, and journalist Aamer Ahmed Khan wanted to come up with a new way to cover this phenomenon. One of the correspondents, Abdul Hai Kakar, had been in contact with several schools, including Yousafzai’s father’s school. Many students were not willing to write about their schools because of the danger they might face doing so, but Ziauddin Yousafzai recommended his own daughter, Malala, who was eleven years old at the time. The Taliban had swept through the area and had banned women from shopping and being educated, and prohibited television for everyone.
Yousafzai’s first blog post was published in 2009 on the BBC blog. She would work with a reporter and give handwritten notes that would be scanned. After January 15, 2009, the Taliban had declared that girls could no longer attend school. They had already destroyed hundreds of schools for girls. Yousafzai continued to study for her upcoming exams. The boys’ school was also closed in order to show solidarity with the schools for girls.
Yousafzai and her family heard gun shots on February 15, 2009, signaling a peace deal. The girls’ schools were opened again and students were allowed to take their exams, but the young women were required to wear burqas. After the end of the BBC diary, Yousafzai and her family were featured in a documentary. Mingora was evacuated during the Second Battle of Swat, and Yousafzai’s father sent her to live in the countryside while he went to Peshawar. During this time, Yousafzai decided on a career as a politician.
After the filming of the documentary and being revealed as the BBC blogger, Yousafzai began making headlines and appearing on television talking about female education. She was nominated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu for the International Children’s Peace Prize. Later that year, she was given the National Youth Peace Prize. Her newfound recognition had negative effects as well. Yousafzai received death threats both online and in the newspapers. In the summer of 2012, the leaders of the Taliban decided that she should be killed. On October 9, 2012, a masked gunman shot Yousafzai on a school bus as she was coming home from an exam. The bullet went through her head, her neck, and her shoulder. Two of Yousafzai’s classmates were also shot, but the girls did not sustain life-threatening injuries.
Yousafzai was taken to a hospital in Peshawar. Doctors immediately began surgery to stop the swelling in her brain, and part of her skull was removed. On October 11, 2012, Yousafzai was moved to the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology in Rawalpindi. She was given a 70-percent chance of surviving. She was flown alone to Queen Elizabeth Medical Center in Birmingham, United Kingdom, for additional surgery and rehabilitative care. She woke up on October 16 in Birmingham and her family joined her several days later. She later had additional operations to restore her hearing and reconstruct her skull.
After the news of her attempted assassination, the world took notice of Yousafzai. Several Pakistani cities held marches in protest. Many were afraid that Yousafzai would be targeted again. The UN Special Envoy for Global Education and former British prime minister Gordon Brown started a petition in her name for education and to give others a chance to attend schools.
Yousafzai and her family remained in Birmingham following her recovery and release from the hospital. In 2013, she started attending the Edgbaston School for Girls in Birmingham. She graduated from the school in 2015, finishing with top marks in her final GCSE exams. Yousafzai’s mother, who left school early and remained uneducated in Pakistan, followed her daughter’s example and went back to school in Birmingham.
Only a day after the shooting, the gunman was identified as Atta Ullah Khan. (The men behind her attack were arrested in Pakistan in 2014.) Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations in 2013, and she also was able to meet President Barack Obama and discussed her criticisms of US drone strikes in Pakistan. She released a memoir, I Am Malala, in 2013; it was later rewritten in a children’s edition. In October 2014, the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize were announced. Yousafzai was given the prize along with Kailash Satyathi. At the age of seventeen, she became the youngest recipient of the prize.
Yousafzai took a year off of school to run her charity and decide on a university. In 2018 she enrolled at Oxford University's Lady Margaret Hall to study philosophy, politics, and economics. She graduated from the school in 2020. Her book We Are Displaced: True Stories of Refugee Lives was published in 2019, with all proceeds going to Yousafzai's charity, the Malala Fund. After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, Yousafzai was vocal in her fears for Afghan girls and women and the need for citizens around the world to help protect them and their rights to an education. She made her concerns for the plight of Afghan women the focus of her speech for the 2023 Nelson Mandela Lecture in South Africa, calling on groups such as the United Nations to address what she had deemed a "gender apartheid." Meanwhile, a documentary she produced alongside actor Jennifer Lawrence to draw further attention to the issue, titled Bread & Roses, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that same year. Stranger at the Gate, a 2022 short documentary she had helped produce about an Islamophobic former US Marine who becomes part of the community of a local mosque, had been nominated for a 2023 Academy Award.
In 2024, as well as condemning Israel's war in Gaza and related humanitarian crises in the area, Yousafzai continued collaborating on different projects meant to highlight women's stories. To that end, she served as part of the production team behind the new Broadway musical Suffs, which chronicles the women's suffrage movement in the United States. The original, off-Broadway staging had experienced critical and audience success after its opening in 2022.
Impact
Yousafzai started a school on her eighteenth birthday in Lebanon. It was founded by her own not-for-profit fund, the Malala Fund, and offers schooling for young girls from the age of fourteen to eighteen. She was mentioned in Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Though she did not originally identify as a feminist, Yousafzai said she had changed her mind after listening to the speech given by actor and activist Emma Watson on the subject. Yousafzai was given an honorary degree by such institutions as University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Bibliography
Bahr, Sarah. "Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai Toast Their New Broadway Show." The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/style/suffs-broadway-hillary-clinton-malala-yousafzai.html. Accessed 22 July 2024.
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"Malala Yousafzai Becomes Youngest-Ever Nobel Prize Winner." The Express Tribune, 10 Oct. 2014, tribune.com.pk/story/773258/malala-yousafzai-shares-nobel-peace-prize-with-indian-activist. Accessed 12 June 2016.
Meikle, James. "Malala Yousafzai Gives $50,000 to Reconstruction of Gaza Schools." The Guardian, 29 Oct. 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/29/malala-yousafzai-reconstruction-gaza-schools. Accessed 12 June 2016.
Rioumine, Maria. "Malala Yousafzai’s Toughest Battle?" HuffPost, 12 Dec. 2013, www.huffpost.com/entry/malala-yousafzais-toughes‗b‗4435517. Accessed 12 June 2016.
Schifrin, Nick. "The 72 Hours That Saved Malala: Doctors Reveal for the First Time How Close She Came to Death." ABC News, 7 Oct. 2013, abcnews.go.com/International/72-hours-saved-malala-doctors-reveal-time-close/story?id=20485460. Accessed 12 June 2016.
Shamsie, Kamila. "Malala Yousafzai: ‘It’s Hard to Kill. Maybe That’s Why His Hand Was Shaking.’" The Guardian, 7 Oct. 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/07/malala-yousafzai-hard-to-kill-taliban. Accessed 14 July 2016.
Shoard, Catherine. "'Why the Silence? Why the Inaction? It Breaks My Heart': Malala and Jennifer Lawrence Take on the Taliban." The Guardian, 19 Apr. 2024, www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/19/why-the-silence-why-the-inaction-it-breaks-my-heart-malala-and-jennifer-lawrence-take-on-the-taliban. Accessed 22 July 2024.
"Will Continue to Condemn Israeli Government: Malala Clarifies Her 'Support for the People of Gaza.'" The Express Tribune, 25 Apr. 2024, tribune.com.pk/story/2463886/will-continue-to-condemn-israeli-government-malala-clarifies-her-support-for-the-people-of-gaza. Accessed 22 July 2024.
Yousafzai, Malala. "Malala: I Survived the Taliban. I Fear for My Afghan Sisters." The New York Times, 17 Aug. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/opinion/malala-afghanistan-taliban-women.html. Accessed 3 Sept. 2021.
Yousafzai, Malala. "Malala Yousafzai: ‘The Day I Woke Up in the Hospital.’" Time, 17 Oct. 2013, time.com/3490769/malala-yousafzai-the-day-i-woke-up-in-the-hospital/. Accessed 14 July 2016.
Yousafzai, Malala, and Christina Lamb. I Am Malala. Brown, 2013.
Yousafzai, Malala, and Joshua Seftel. "'Stranger at the Gate' Explores How a Potential Tragedy Became a Powerful Act of Kindness." Interview by Amna Nawaz. PBS News, 8 Mar. 2023, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/stranger-at-the-gate-explores-how-a-potential-tragedy-became-a-powerful-act-of-kindness. Accessed 22 July 2024.