Malala Yousafzai Biography

Malala Yousafzai rose to fame and became a household name when she was shot by a Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan gunman in an assassination attempt in retaliation for her activism along with two other girls. Malala has two identities - she is a Pakistani activist for female education and also the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. She is native to Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan and is well known there for human rights advocacy. She works especially for the education of women and children. The local Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan had banned girls from attending school there. Her advocacy gradually grew into an international movement. 

Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai is an educational activist. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Benazir Bhutto are Malala’s role models. She is also inspired by her father's humanitarian work and thoughts. She wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC Urdu detailing her life during the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan's occupation of Swat when she was just 11 years old in the year 2009. The following summer a New York Times documentary was made by journalist Adam B. Ellick about her life.

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Malala Yousafzai Profile

Malala Story: Early Life of Malala

Malala was born on 12th July 1997 to Ziauddin Yousafzai and Tor Pekai Yousafzai in a middle-class family. She belongs to a Sunni Muslim family of Pashtun ethnicity, belonging to the Yusufzai tribe. She was named Malala after Malalai of Maiwand, who was a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. Malala means “grief-stricken”. She has two younger brothers - 14 years old Khushal and 9 years old Atal. 

Malala is fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English. Her father Ziauddin Yousafzai is a poet, school owner, and an educational activist and she got her education mostly from her father. He is also known for running a chain of private schools known as the Khushal Public School. Malala is inspired by the founder of Pakistan - Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Her father took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club in September 2008 and this is when she started speaking about education rights.

In late 2008, Aamer Ahmed Khan from the BBC Urdu website wanted to cover the Pakistani Taliban's growing influence in Swat. They had planned that a schoolgirl will blog anonymously about her life there. Their correspondent in Peshawar, Abdul Hai Kakar, was in touch with Malal’s father as he was a teacher there, but could not find anyone as everyone feared risking their lives. Finally, 11-year-old Malala took the responsibility. Her first entry was published in the BBC Urdu blog on 3 January 2009.

The Pakistani Taliban had set a decree that no girls could attend school after 15 January 2009 in Mingora. Following the same, they destroyed more than 100 girls' schools over there. When the boys’ school reopened, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan lifted restrictions from the co-education schools while restrictions were still there on girls-only schools. Malala wrote in her blog that out of 700 enrolled students, only 70 showed up. 

After the end of the BBC diary, Malala and her father were approached by Adam B. Ellick, a reporter of the New York Times. He wanted to film a documentary. The same year in May, the Pakistani Army moved to regain control and the second battle of Swat happened. Mingora was evacuated and it affected Malala’s life too. They were displaced from their home and were separated too. Malala had to stay in the countryside with her relatives while her father went to Peshawar to protest and lobby for support.  

Malala’s father criticised the militants in a press conference. As a result of this, he received a death threat over the radio by a Pakistani Taliban commander. But, he didn’t stop and this inspired Malala a lot. This is when she decided to become a politician leaving her dream of becoming a doctor. In early July, the Prime Minister of Pakistan announced that it was safe to return to the Swat valley. The Yousafzai family reunited and reached their home on 24 July 2009. After the documentary, national Pashto-language station AVT Khyber, the Urdu-language Daily Aaj, and Canada's Toronto Star interviewed Malala. On 19th August 2009, Malala appeared again on Capital Talk. In 2009, December, her blogging identity was also revealed. She did many more things to empower girls' education.

Malala Story: Attempt to Murder

As Malala became famous, she started receiving death threats in various ways. She used to receive death threats on Facebook, notes slipped from under her door and even it was getting published in the newspaper. On 9th October 2012, a Tehrik-i-Taliban gunman shot 15-year-old Malala on her way home. She was on a bus coming back home after taking an exam. The bullet travelled 18 inches from the side of her left eye passing through her head and neck and landing in her shoulder. The other two girls, Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan were also wounded in this accident.

Malala Story: Treatment

After the traumatic event, Malala was shifted to the military hospital in Peshawar by air. The doctors had to operate soon as her brain started swelling because of the bullet that passed through her head. The doctors had to struggle for 5 hours to take the bullet out of her shoulder which was lodged near the spinal cord. The doctors even had to perform Decompressive craniectomy, a neurosurgical procedure where a part of the skull is removed to allow swelling in the brain to expand without getting squeezed. On 11th October 2012, a panel of doctors decided to move her to the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology in Rawalpindi. The government and doctors from all over the world offered to treat Malala and she went to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in the United Kingdom for further treatment. 

In the same year, on 17th October, Malala came out of the coma but she was still battling an infection. On the 11th of November, she had to undergo surgery for 8 and ½ hours to repair her facial nerve. On the 3rd of January, 2013 she was discharged but she had to continue her physiotherapy. On 2nd February, she again had to undergo another 5-hour operation to reconstruct her skull and restore her hearing with a cochlear implant. 

Malala Story: Reaction of the World

This shameful event was covered by the media of the whole world and was badly criticised by everyone. Many protests started happening all over Pakistan and around 2 million Pakistanis signed the petition for the Right to Education. It was because of this petition that the first Right to Education Bill was approved in Pakistan. Not only this, the Pakistani government announced a reward of US$105,000 to the person giving information about the attackers of Malala. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the shooting of Malala as “a heinous and cowardly act”. Barack Obama, the President of the United States, found this as a “reprehensible, disgusting and tragic” event. 

The Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Yousafzai had been very brave in standing up for the rights of girls and that the attackers had been threatened by that kind of empowerment”. The Foreign Secretary of British, William Hague, addressed the event as “barbaric” and also stated that the event had “shocked Pakistan and the world”. Many other great personalities gave reactions against this shameful incident and stood by Malala. 

Malala Yousafzai Information: UN Petition

Gordon Brown, the UN Special Envoy for Global Education and the former British Prime Minister launched a petition in Malala’s name on 15th October 2012. The petition used the slogan “I am Malala” and contains the following three demands:

• It wanted Pakistan to agree to a plan to deliver education for every child.

• The petition wanted all countries to outlaw discrimination against girls.

• It also wanted international organisations to ensure the world's 61 million out-of-school children are in education by the end of 2015.

Malala Yousafzai Profile: Education

After Mingora, Malala continued her studies in Edgbaston High School in Birmingham from March 2013 to July 2017. At the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) level, she scored 6 A* and 4 A. At the A level, she studied the following subjects: History, Geography, Mathematics and Religious Studies. She completed her studies on 19 June 2020. 

Malala Day

On the 16th birthday of Malala, 12th July 2013, she spoke to the United Nations to call for worldwide access to education. The United Nations declared the event “Malala Day”. It was Malala’s first public speech after the shameful event of the gun shoot. She received several standing ovations and Ban Ki-moon called her “Our Hero”. 

The Nobel Peace Prize

Malala Yousafzai was announced as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi on 10th October 2014. She got the prize for her struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education. Malala was just 17 years old when she got the Nobel Peace Prize. She is the youngest Nobel laureate and also the 2nd Pakistani to receive the Nobel Prize. The first Pakistani to receive a Nobel was the Physics laureate Abdus Salam in the year 1979. 

Malala’s Works

Malala wrote her autobiography named “I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” with a co-writer Christina Lamb, a British Journalist. It was published in the US by Little, Brown and Company in October 2013 and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. A children’s edition of the book was published in 2014 and was named “I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World”. According to Publishers Weekly, the book had sold almost 2 million copies in 2017 and almost 750,000 copies of the children's edition were in print. 

Malala Yousafzai is known for her works for the education of women and children in Pakistan. She was once shot in the head by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. The Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi once said that she was the “most prominent citizen" of the country.