Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani female education activist and a producer of film and television. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history. She received the Peace Prize in 2014 at age 17. She is the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai speaks up for human rights, especially the education of women and children in her home district, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from going to school. Her work has grown into an international movement. According to former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen".

She is the daughter of the education activist Ziauddin Yousafzai. She was born into a Yousafzai Pashtun family in Swat and was named after the Afghan folk heroine Malalai of Maiwand. She looked up to Bacha Khan, Barack Obama, and Benazir Bhutto as role models, and she was inspired by her father's thoughts and humanitarian work. In early 2009, when she was 11, she wrote a blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai for BBC Urdu. In it, she described her life during the Taliban's occupation of Swat. The following summer, the journalist Adam B. Ellick made a documentary about her life for the New York Times, at a time when the Pakistan Armed Forces launched Operation Rah-e-Rast against the militants in Swat. In 2011, she received Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize. She interned for the Swat Relief Initiative, a foundation founded by Zebunisa Jilani, a princess of the Royal House of Swat, which supports schools and clinics. As her fame grew, she gave interviews in print and on television. She was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.

On 9 October 2012, while she was on a bus in Swat District after taking an exam, Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman in an attempt to kill her because of her activism. She was hit in the head and was taken to the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology in critical condition. Her condition later improved enough for her to be moved to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK. The attack led to an international outpouring of support. In January 2013, Deutsche Welle reported that she may have become "the most famous teenager in the world". Weeks later, a group of 50 leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who had tried to kill her. Governments, human rights organizations, and feminist groups condemned the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

After her recovery, Yousafzai became a more prominent activist for the right to education. Based in Birmingham, she co-founded the non-profit organisation Malala Fund with Shiza Shahid. In 2013, she co-wrote I Am Malala, an international best seller, and she received the Sakharov Prize. In 2014, she shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi of India. At 17, she was the youngest Nobel Prize laureate ever. In 2015, she was the subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary He Named Me Malala. In 2017, she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada. She finished her secondary school education at Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, England, and then won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. There she studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 2020. In 2023, she returned to become the youngest ever Honorary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.

Early life

See also: First Battle of Swat

Malala Yousafzai was born on 12 July 1997 in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, into a lower-middle-class family. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, was a poet, a school owner, and an educational activist, and he taught her much of her early education. Her family is Sunni Muslim, of Pashtun ethnicity, and belongs to the Yusufzai tribe. She was named after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. She grew up in Mingora and spoke Pashto, Urdu, and English. Inspired by Benazir Bhutto, who was twice elected Prime Minister and was later assassinated, she began speaking about education rights in September 2008, when her father took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club. In 2009 she joined the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's Open Minds Pakistan youth programme. In late 2008, BBC Urdu asked a schoolgirl to blog anonymously about life under the Pakistani Taliban, who were led by Maulana Fazlullah and were taking over the Swat Valley. Their correspondent, Abdul Hai Kakar, was in touch with Ziauddin, and his 11-year-old daughter agreed to write. Her blog was published under the name "Gul Makai" ("cornflower" in Pashto). Her first entry was posted on 3 January 2009, and she recorded her thoughts during the First Battle of Swat.

See also: Second Battle of Swat

The Taliban banned girls from attending school, and many schools were closed. Yousafzai wrote about fewer pupils coming to class and about her own school shutting down. Later the Taliban lifted restrictions on girls' primary education, where there was co-education, but girls-only schools stayed closed for a time. Yousafzai spoke out against the Taliban on the national show Capital Talk. When the peace deal was announced on the Taliban's FM Radio studio, fighting broke out again. Their leader, Maulana Fazlullah of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, later said girls could attend school until exams if they wore burqas. In May 2009, the Pakistani Army moved into the region during the Second Battle of Swat, and Yousafzai's family was separated. The New York Times reporter Adam B. Ellick filmed a documentary about her. In July 2009 the family went home, after first meeting other grassroots activists with Richard Holbrooke, the special representative of President Barack Obama. From 2009 to 2010, she chaired the District Child Assembly of the Khpal Kor Foundation. In 2011 she trained with Aware Girls, run by Gulalai Ismail. That year, Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children's Peace Prize of the KidsRights Foundation, which was won by Michaela Mycroft. In December 2011, Yousaf Raza Gillani gave her Pakistan's National Peace Award for Youth. In 2012 she attended the International Marxist Tendency National Marxist Summer School and named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Pashtun leader of the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar resistance movement against the British Raj, as an inspiration.

Assassination attempt

As Yousafzai became better known, the dangers she faced grew. Death threats were printed in newspapers and slipped under her door, and she began to receive threats on Facebook, where she was an active user. In the summer of 2012, Taliban leaders agreed to kill her. On 9 October 2012, a Taliban gunman shot her, at age 15, as she rode home on a bus after an exam in Pakistan's Swat Valley. Two other girls were also wounded. She was airlifted to a military hospital in Peshawar, where doctors performed a decompressive craniectomy to make room for swelling in her brain. On 11 October, a panel of doctors moved her to the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology in Rawalpindi. Interior Minister Rehman Malik said she would move to Germany once she was stable enough to travel. On 15 October she travelled to England and was treated in Birmingham at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. She had surgery to repair her facial nerve, and on 3 January 2013 she was discharged to continue her recovery in the West Midlands. In February 2013 she had an operation to rebuild her skull and restore her hearing with a cochlear implant.

The attack brought worldwide sympathy and anger. Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari called it an attack on "civilized people", UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a "heinous and cowardly act", and US President Barack Obama found it "reprehensible, disgusting and tragic". Hillary Clinton and British Foreign Secretary William Hague also spoke out. Madonna dedicated her song "Human Nature" to Yousafzai, and Angelina Jolie later donated $200,000 to the Malala Fund. Former First Lady of the United States Laura Bush compared Yousafzai to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank in The Washington Post. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility, calling her a "symbol of the infidels", and cited the Quran and Sharia to justify the attack. Islamic clerics issued a fatwā against the gunmen, and scholars from the Sunni Ittehad Council denounced the Taliban's religious claims. Some groups spread conspiracy theories that the Central Intelligence Agency staged the shooting to justify continuing drone attacks, but the attack was widely condemned. Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister, launched a petition in her name and planned to give it to President Zardari in Islamabad. Police named a 23-year-old graduate student as the gunman, but he remained at large. Mullah Fazlullah, the cleric who ordered the attack, was hiding in Afghanistan. In September 2014, ISPR Director, Major General Asim Bajwa, said the attackers belonged to a militant group, and that its members were arrested. In April 2015, ten men were sentenced to life in prison, but in June it was revealed that eight of them had been acquitted after a secret in-camera trial. The London Daily Mirror reported on the releases, and the Pakistan High Commission said there was not enough evidence to connect them to the attack.

Education

From March 2013 to July 2017, Yousafzai attended Edgbaston High School, an all-girls school in Birmingham. In August 2015, she earned six A* grades and four A grades at GCSE level. For her A-Level subjects, she studied Geography, History, Mathematics and Religious Studies. She applied to Durham University, the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics (LSE). In December 2016, she was interviewed at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and received a conditional offer that required three A grades in her A-Levels. In August 2017, she was accepted to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).

In February 2020, climate change activist Greta Thunberg traveled to Oxford University to meet Yousafzai. On 19 June 2020, after passing her final exams, Yousafzai said that she had completed her PPE degree at Oxford and that she had graduated with honours.

Continuing activism

In 2013, Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations and had an audience with Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace. That September she spoke at Harvard University, and in October she met US President Barack Obama and his family, where she questioned him about his use of drone strikes in Pakistan. In December she addressed the Oxford Union. In 2014 she spoke at the Girl Summit in London and donated $50,000 to UNRWA to help rebuild schools in the Gaza Strip. At a Forbes Under 30 Summit in 2014, she did not describe herself as a feminist. In 2015 she told Emma Watson that she had decided to call herself one after hearing Watson's speech launching the HeForShe campaign. On her 18th birthday in 2015, she opened a school in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon for Syrian refugees. The school is funded by the not-for-profit Malala Fund, and she called on world leaders to invest in "books, not bullets." She has repeatedly condemned the Rohingya persecution in Myanmar and asked Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to speak out on Twitter. Suu Kyi has avoided condemning the violence, which has led to widespread criticism. In 2014 Yousafzai said she might run for prime minister, inspired by Benazir Bhutto, but by 2018 she said there were other ways to bring change. Asked in a 2018 interview with David Letterman for My Next Guest Needs No Introduction whether she would want a political position, she replied: "Me? No."

On 10 October 2014, Yousafzai was announced as co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a children's rights activist from India. At 17, she is the youngest Nobel laureate. She is the second Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize after Abdus Salam, a Physics laureate in 1979. Some people disagreed with the decision, including Fredrik Heffermehl. Earlier, on 12 July 2013, her 16th birthday, she spoke at the UN to call for access to education for every child, and the UN called the event "Malala Day." In 2013 she also appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote her book I Am Malala, and she spoke about human rights and women's education after learning that the Pakistani Taliban wanted her dead. In 2018 she said she forgave her attackers and criticised the first presidency of Donald Trump on issues including the treatment of women, the ban on Muslims, and racism. After the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, she worried about women's rights and women in Afghanistan losing gains made under the previous Afghan government. She also condemned the Taliban's ban on girls going beyond primary school. Yousafzai married in 2021, and in 2022 she said every woman should be free to choose what she wears, from a burqa to a bikini. She also spoke against forced conversions of under-aged minority girls in Pakistan.

Personal life

On 9 November 2021, Yousafzai married Asser Malik, a manager with the Pakistan Cricket Board, in Birmingham. She is a supporter of Birmingham City of the Premier League and the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League.

Yousafzai is a practising Sunni Muslim. In an interview with Muslim Girl, she said that her faith has always been a big part of her life and still is today. She has also defended her practice of wearing a shayla.

Reception

Some people in Pakistan disliked Yousafzai's opposition to Talibanization, especially Taliban sympathisers. Some writers said she was blamed by the "failing state government," and others said she was disliked by "overzealous patriots" who wanted to deny the oppression of women in Pakistan. Many Pakistanis saw her as an "agent of the West" because of her Nobel Prize, her Oxford education, and her home in England, although some Pakistanis saw her as courageous. In 2015, the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation banned her book I Am Malala at private schools, and its president wrote a book against her called I Am Not Malala. Some conspiracy theorists claimed she had staged her shooting or worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2018, Yousafzai returned to Pakistan for the first time since the shooting. She met Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and visited her hometown, Mingora, in Swat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In 2019, after the Indian revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, she urged the UN to help Kashmiri children return to school safely. She expressed her concern about the Indian Government's lockdown in the region. People in India criticised her for supporting the "Pakistani agenda" in the Kashmir conflict. After the Gaza–Israel conflict began in October 2023, she was criticised for being silent about Israel's genocide in Gaza. She also faced criticism for a Broadway musical she co-produced with Hillary Clinton. After strong criticism, she said again that she supported the people of Gaza and called for a ceasefire.

Works

Yousafzai's memoir I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, written with British journalist Christina Lamb, was published in October 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the US and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. Reviewers praised the book. Fatima Bhutto wrote in The Guardian that it was "fearless." Marie Arana wrote in The Washington Post that it was "riveting." A children's edition came out in 2014, and by 2017, the book had sold almost 2 million copies, according to Publishers Weekly. Yousafzai was also the subject of the 2015 documentary He Named Me Malala, which was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 2020, an Indian Hindi-language film, Gul Makai, was released, with Reem Sameer Shaikh playing her.

In 2017, Yousafzai wrote a picture book, Malala's Magic Pencil, illustrated by Kerascoët. In March 2018, it was announced that her next book, We Are Displaced: True Stories of Refugee Lives, would be published. It tells stories about refugees, including some from Yousafzai's own life. She said that "people become refugees when they have no other option. This is never your first choice." The profits went to her charity, Malala Fund. In March 2021, a multiyear partnership between Yousafzai and Apple was announced. She will work on programming for Apple's streaming service, Apple TV+. In October 2025, her second memoir, Finding My Way, was published.

Awards and honours

Further information: List of things named after Malala Yousafzai

Malala has received many awards and honours since 2011. In 2011 she was a nominee for the International Children's Peace Prize. In 2012 she received Sitara-e-Shujaat, Pakistan's second-highest civilian bravery award. In 2013 she was named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World" and received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European Parliament. She also received the Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International that year.

Her biggest honour came in 2014, when she shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi. That same year she received the Philadelphia Liberty Medal and the Asia Game Changer Award, and she was given Honorary Canadian citizenship. In 2015 an asteroid, 316201 Malala, was named in her honour, and the audio version of her book I Am Malala won a Grammy Award. In 2017 she became the youngest ever United Nations Messenger of Peace.

In popular culture

In 2015, during the media tour for a documentary film about her life, Malala performed magic tricks with playing cards on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In the 2016 action comedy film Zoolander 2, Malala Yousafzai is shown dating or marrying the "next hot model," Derek Zoolander Jr. (played by Cyrus Arnold), who had earlier admired and read her autobiographies. Joe Lycett performed Live At The Apollo, and his sketch showed Malala as the classmate you can never compete with, especially during Show and Tell.

In the 2019 coming-of-age comedy film Booksmart, two main characters, Amy and Molly (played by Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), use the code word "Malala" to mean they need the other to do something without asking questions. Yousafzai loved the film and approves of the reference. In the 2023 animated superhero film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Sofia Barclay voices Malala Windsor / Spider-UK (Earth-835), a character described as a mix of Malala Yousafzai and the House of Windsor. The second season of the Channel 4 British sitcom We Are Lady Parts, released in May 2024, included an episode titled "Malala Made Me Do It," which was inspired by Yousafzai and featured her in her debut acting role.