Born: 1997 (Swat, Pakistan)
Biography:
Malala Yousafzai (Urdu: , Pashto: , pronunciation: [mlal jusf zj]; born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17. She is the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native homeland, 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 Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan’s most prominent citizen.
The daughter of education activist Ziauddin Yousafzai, she was born to a Yusufzai Pashtun family in Swat and was named after the Afghan folk heroine Malalai of Maiwand. Considering Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Barack Obama, and Benazir Bhutto as her role models, she was also inspired by her father’s thoughts and humanitarian work.[10]
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 New York 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 International Children’s Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.
On 9 October 2012, while on a bus in Swat District after taking an exam, Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt targeting her for her activism; the gunman fled the scene. She was struck in the head by a bullet and remained unconscious and in critical condition at the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology, but her condition later improved enough for her to be transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK.[11] The attempt on her life sparked an international outpouring of support. Deutsche Welle reported in January 2013 that she may have become the most famous teenager in the world.[12]
Weeks after the attempted murder, a group of 50 leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatw against those who tried to kill her.[13] The Pakistani Taliban were internationally denounced by governments, human rights organizations, and feminist groups. They responded to condemnation by further denouncing Yousafzai, indicating plans for a possible second assassination attempt which they felt was justified as a religious obligation. This sparked another international outcry.[14]
After her recovery, Yousafzai became a prominent activist for the right to education. Based in Birmingham, she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization, with Shiza Shahid.[15]