Malala Yousafzai (Malalah Yusafzay) (b. July 12, 1997, Mingora, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan). A Pakistani education activist from the town of Mingora in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. She became known for her activism for rights to education and for women, especially in the Swat Valley, where the Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. In early 2009, at the age of 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls. The following summer, a New York Times documentary was filmed about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region, culminating in the Second Battle of Swat. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu.
On October 9, 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head and neck in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen while returning home on a school bus. In the days immediately following the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, for intensive rehabilitation. On October 12, 2012, a group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwa against those who tried to kill her, but the Taliban reiterated its intent to kill Yousafzai and her father.
The assassination attempt sparked a national and international outpouring of support for Yousafzai. The United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown launched a United Nations petition in Yousafzai's name, using the slogan "I am Malala" and demanding that all children worldwide be in school by the end of 2015 – a petition which helped lead to the ratification of Pakistan's first Right to Education Bill. In the April 29, 2013, issue of Time magazine, Yousafzai was featured on the magazine's front cover and as one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World". She was the winner of Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize and was nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize (which was awarded to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons). On July 12, 2013, Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations to call for worldwide access to education, and in September 2013 she officially opened the Library of Birmingham.
After her recovery from her wounds, Yousafzai became a more prominent activist for the right to education. Based in Birmingham, England, she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization, with Shiza Shahid. In 2013, she co-authored I Am Malala, an international best seller. In 2013, she received the Sakharov Prize, and in 2014, she was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi of India. Aged 17 at the time, she was the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.
In 2015, Yousafzai was the subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary He Named Me Malala. The 2013, 2014 and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured her as one of the most influential people globally. In 2017, she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada.
Yousafzai completed her secondary school education at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham in England from 2013 to 2017. From there she won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and undertook three years of study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), graduating in 2020. She returned in 2023 to become the youngest ever Honorary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.
Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, into a Sunni Muslim family of Pashtun ethnicity. She was given her first name Malala (meaning "grief stricken") after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan. Her last name, Yousafzai, is that of a large Pashtun tribal confederation that is predominant in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where she grew up. At her house in Mingora, she lived with her two younger brothers, her parents, and two pet chickens.
Yousafzai was educated in large part by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who was a poet, school owner, and an educational activist himself, running a chain of schools known as the Khushal Public School. She once stated to an interviewer that she would like to become a doctor, though later her father encouraged her to become a politician instead. Ziauddin referred to his daughter as something entirely special, permitting her to stay up at night and talk about politics after her two brothers had been sent to bed.
Yousafzai started speaking about education rights as early as September 2008, when her father took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club. "How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?" Yousafzai asked her audience in a speech covered by newspapers and television channels throughout the region.
Toward the end of 2008, the TTP (the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan; often called the Pakistani Taliban) announced that all girls’ schools in Swat would be shut down on January 15, 2009. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) approached Yousafzai’s father in search of someone who might blog for them about what it was like to live under TTP rule. Under the name Gul Makai, Yousafzai began writing regular entries for BBC Urdu about her daily life. She wrote from January through the beginning of March of that year 35 entries that were also translated into English. Meanwhile, the TTP shut down all girls’ schools in Swat and blew up more than 100 of them.
In February 2009 Yousafzai made her first television appearance, when she was interviewed by Pakistani journalist and talk show host Hamid Mir on the Pakistan current events show Capital Talk. In late February the TTP, responding to an increasing backlash throughout Pakistan, agreed to a cease-fire, lifted the restriction against girls, and allowed them to attend school on the condition that they wear burkas. However, violence resurged only a few months later, in May, and the Yousafzai family was forced to seek refuge outside of Swat until the Pakistani army was able to push the TTP out. In early 2009 The New York Times reporter Adam Ellick worked with Yousafzai to make a documentary, Class Dismissed, a 13-minute piece about the school shutdown. Ellick made a second film with her, titled A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey. The New York Times posted both films on its web site in 2009. That summer she met with the United States special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, and asked him to help with her effort to protect the education of girls in Pakistan.
With Yousafzai’s continuing television appearances and coverage in the local and international media, it had become apparent by December 2009 that she was the BBC’s young blogger. Once her identity was known, she began to receive widespread recognition for her activism. In October 2011, she was nominated by human rights activist Desmond Tutu for the International Children’s Peace Prize. In December of that year, she was awarded Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize (later renamed the National Malala Peace Prize).
On October 9, 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head by a TTP gunman while she was en route home from school. Fazlullah and the TTP took responsibility for the attempt on her life. She survived the attack and was flown from Peshawar to Birmingham, England, for surgery. The incident elicited protests, and her cause was taken up around the world, including by the United Nations special envoy for global education, Gordon Brown, who introduced a petition that called for all children around the world to be back in school by 2015. That petition led to the ratification of Pakistan's first Right to Education bill. In December 2012, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari announced the launch of a $10 million education fund in Yousafzai’s honour. About the same time, the Malala Fund was established by the Vital Voices Global Partnership to support education for all girls around the world.
Yousafzai recovered, staying with her family in Birmingham, where she returned to her studies and to activism. For the first time since being shot, she made a public appearance on July 12, 2013, her 16th birthday, and addressed an audience of 500 at the United Nations in New York City, Among her many awards, in 2013 Yousafzai won the United Nations Human Rights Prize, awarded every five years. She was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2013 and appeared on one of the seven covers that were printed for that issue. With Christina Lamb (foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times), Yousafzai coauthored a memoir, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013). She also wrote the picture book Malala’s Magic Pencil (2017), which was based on her childhood. In 2014, she became the youngest person to win the Liberty Medal, awarded by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to public figures striving for people’s freedom throughout the world. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 but passed over that year, Yousafzai in 2014 won the prize, becoming the youngest Nobel laureate. Yousafzai shared the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a children's rights activist from India. She became the second Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize after 1979 Physics Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.
Her life, before and after the attack she endured, was examined in the documentary He Named Me Malala (2015). The title referenced the fact that Yousafzai had been named for the Afghan heroine Malalai, or Malala, who purportedly led her people to victory against the British in the 1880 Battle of Maiwand.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Yousafzai continued to attend school in England—she graduated from the University of Oxford in 2020—while using her enhanced public profile to bring attention to human rights issues around the world. In July 2015, with support from the Malala Fund, she opened a girls’ school in Lebanon for refugees from the Syrian Civil War. She discussed her work with refugees as well as her own displacement in We Are Displaced (2019).
In 2015, the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation (APPSF) banned her autobiographical book, I Am Malala, at all Pakistani private schools, with the APPSF president Mirza Kashif Ali releasing his own book against her, I Am Not Malala. His book accused Yousafzai of attacking the Pakistan Armed Forces under the pretense of female education, described her father as a "double agent" and "traitor", and denounced the Malala Fund's promotion of secular education. However, Ali pointed out that the APPSF had gone on a national strike when Yousafzai was attacked by the Pakistani Taliban. Conspiracy theorists in newspapers and social media also alleged that Yousafzai had staged her assassination attempt, or that she was an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Many Pakistanis view Yousafzai as an "agent of the West", due to her Nobel prize, Oxford education and residence in England.
On March 29, 2018, Yousafzai returned to Pakistan for the first time since the 2012 shooting. Meeting Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Yousafzai gave a speech in which she said it had been her dream to return without any fear. Yousafzai then visited her hometown Mingora in the Swat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The APPSF, representing 173,000 private schools in Pakistan, organized an "I Am Not Malala Day" on March 30, 2018, in response to what the federation said were her "anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan" views. Yousafzai responded by saying "I am proud of my religion and country."
On November 9, 2021, Yousafzai married Asser Malik, a manager with the Pakistan Cricket Board, in Birmingham, England.
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