INSPIRATION LIKE YOUSAFZAI

“Yousafzai”, the international movement most commonly refers to Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. The name also refers to the Yusufzai, one of the largest Pashtun 2 tribes, who are native to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan. Today I speak to the activism and bravery of Malala Yousafzai. 

She was born 12 July 1997, is a Pakistani female education activist. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, receiving the prize in 2014 at age 17. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native district, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former prime minister Shahid Khagan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan’s “most prominent citizen.”

Malala came by her activism honestly as she is the daughter of education activist Ziauddin Yousafzai. In early 2009, when she was 11, she wrote a blog under her pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC Urdu to detail her life during the Taliban’s occupation of Swat. The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a NY Times documentary about her life as the Pakistan Armed Forces launched Operation Rah-e-Rast against the militants in Swat. She rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and was nominated for the Intemational Children’s Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu. On October 9, 2012, while riding a bus in Pakistan’s Swat District, Malala Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt targeting her for her outspoken activism. Malala was struck in the head and remained unconscious and in critical condition at the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology. Her health gradually improved, allowing her to be transferred to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The attack sparked a global wave of support and solidarity. By January 2013, Deutsche Welle, a German broadcaster based in Bonn, reported that Yousafzai may have become the most famous teenager in the world. Weeks after the attempted murder, a group of 50 leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her. A fatwa is a legal ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a qualified Islamic Jurist in response to a question posed by a private individual, judge or government. Govermments, human rights organizations and feminist groups subsequently condemned the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. 

After her recovery, Yousafzai became a more prominent activist for the right to education. Malala Yousafzai has gone on to become an acclaimed author, producer of film and televi sion, and the recipient of many awards and recognitions to include the Nobel Peace Prize. Let us all take note of her many accomplishments and gamer inspiration for our own lives.