This article was written by Claire Xu of Richard Montgomery High School
“Malala Yousafzai”—a name that means something different to everyone, but is recognizable all the same. It is the name of a human rights activist, one of the most famous advocates for women and girls’ education, and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Born on July 12, 1997 to a Pashtun family in Pakistan, Yousafzai was exposed to activism at a young age. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, an activist who protested the opposition against the education rights of girls that the Taliban, an ultraconservative political and religious faction controlling the city they lived in, was enforcing. Malala would become inspired by his work and after she and other girls were kicked out of school, she began writing a blog under a pseudonym for BBC Urdu, expressing “her desire to remain in education and for girls to have the chance to be educated,” according to BBC News. The posts that she made resembled diary entries, in which she talked about her life under Taliban rule and her wishes to return to school. This was in 2008, when she was only 11.
Over the next few years, Malala and her father began advocating for girls’ education in the media. This made her somewhat famous, and in 2011, she won Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize and was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize. However, this also made her a target for those who opposed her cause. On Oct. 9, 2012, while on a bus ride home from school with her friends, two members of the Taliban boarded the bus and asked, “Who is Malala?” When Yousafzai was identified, they shot her in the left side of her head.
Days later, Yousafzai woke up in a hospital in England. Although she had no major brain damage, the left side of her face was paralyzed and she had to undergo numerous surgeries and rehabilitation. Yousafzai writes about this time on the story page of her and her father’s organization, Malala Fund: “It was then I knew I had a choice: I could live a quiet life or I could make the most of this new life I had been given. I determined to continue my fight until every girl could go to school.”
And so she did. In December of 2014, just over two years after the incident, Malala received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her charity, making her the youngest laureate at just 17 years old. At this point, she had also published an autobiography, I Am Malala, an incredible book detailing the true story of her family and her fight for her cause. Even today, Malala is still pushing for girls’ rights to education and is an inspiration to girls all around the world.
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