Malala
Yousafzai S.St (born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani activist
for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known
mainly for human rights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat
Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the
local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai's
advocacy has since grown into an international movement.
Her family runs a chain of schools in the region. In
early 2009, when she was 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for
the BBC Urdu detailing her life under Taliban occupation, their attempts to
take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls in
the Swat Valley. The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New
York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in
the region. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on
television, and she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize
by South African activist Desmond Tutu.
On the afternoon of 9 October 2012, Yousafzai boarded her
school bus in the northwest Pakistani district of Swat. A gunman asked for her
by name, then pointed a pistol at her and fired three shots. One bullet hit the
left side of Yousafzai's forehead, travelled under her skin through the length
of her face, and then went into her shoulder. In the days immediately following
the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her
condition improved enough for her to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in
Birmingham, England, for intensive rehabilitation. On 12 October, a group of 50
Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her,
but the Taliban reiterated their intent to kill Yousafzai and her father,
Ziauddin Yousafzai. The assassination attempt sparked a national and
international outpouring of support for Yousafzai. Deutsche Welle wrote in
January 2013 that Yousafzai may have become "the most famous teenager in
the world." United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown
launched a UN petition in Yousafzai's name, demanding that all children
worldwide be in school by the end of 2015; it helped lead to the ratification
of Pakistan's first Right to Education Bill.
The 2013, 2014 and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured
Yousafzai as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World".
She was the winner of Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize, and the
recipient of the 2013 Sakharov Prize. In July that year, she spoke at the
headquarters of the United Nations to call for worldwide access to education,
and in October the Government of Canada announced its intention that its
parliament confers Honorary Canadian citizenship upon Yousafzai. In February
2014, she was nominated for the World Children's Prize in Sweden. Even though
she was fighting for women's rights as well as children's rights, she did not
describe herself as feminist when asked on Forbes Under 30 Summit in 2014. In
2015, however, Yousafzai told Emma Watson she decided to call herself a
feminist after hearing Watson's speech at the UN launching the HeForShe
campaign. In May 2014, Yousafzai was granted an honorary doctorate by the
University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Later in 2014, Yousafzai
was announced as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, along with
Kailash Satyarthi, for her struggle against the suppression of children and
young people and for the right of all children to education. Aged 17 at the
time, Yousafzai became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She was the
subject of Oscar-shortlisted 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala.
Since March 2013, she has been a pupil at the all-girls'
Edgbaston High School in Birmingham. On 20 August 2015, she achieved a string
of A's and A*s in her GCSE exams.
Yousafzai was born on 12 July 1997 in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, into a Sunni Muslim family of Pashtun ethnicity. She was given her first name Malala (meaning "grief-stricken") after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pushtu
poetess and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. Her last name, Yousafzai, is that of a
large Pashtun tribal confederation that is predominant in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where she grew up. At her
house in Mingora, she lived with
her two younger brothers, Khushal and Atal, her parents, Ziauddin and Tor
Pekai, and two pet chickens.
Fluent in Pashto,
English, and Urdu, Yousafzai was
educated in large by her father, Ziauddin
Yousafzai, who is a poet, school owner, and
an educational activist himself, running a chain of private
schools known as the Khushal Public School. She
once stated to an interviewer that she would like to become a doctor, though
later her father encouraged her to become a politician instead. Ziauddin referred to his daughter as
something entirely special, permitting her to stay up at night and talk about
politics after her two brothers had been sent to bed.
Yousafzai started speaking about education
rights as early as September 2008, when her father took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club. "How dare the Taliban
take away my basic right to education?" Yousafzai asked her audience in a
speech covered by newspapers and television channels throughout the region.
In 2009, Yousafzai began as a trainee and
then a peer educator in the Institute
for War and Peace Reporting's Open Minds Pakistan youth programme, which worked
in schools in the region to help young people engage in constructive discussion
on social issues through the tools of journalism, public debate and dialogue.
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