When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, one girl fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday 9 October 2012, she almost paid the ultimate price when she was shot in the head at point-blank range.
Malala Yousafzai’s extraordinary journey has taken her from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations. At seventeen she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and is the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.
Malala’s name is familiar to millions – if not billions – around the world. I Am Malala was published just two years after she was shot by a Taliban jihadist on her way home from school. Her crime? Campaigning for girls to be allowed to go to school.
Malala had grown up in an unusual household where she and her father had always viewed her as an equal to her brothers and considered that girls were equally as entitled to education as boys were. The Taliban, on the other hand, believed that it was ‘un-Islamic’ and ‘western’ for girls to receive an education and they made it very dangerous for girls to go to school and for anybody who enabled this, including Malala’s father.
The story of Malala’s attack is well-known and she describes this briefly at the beginning of the book. What is less well-known, however, is that 15-year-old Malala was not a newcomer to her campaign for girls’ education. Aged 11 she had blogged under a pseudonym for BBC Urdu, documenting life as a girl under the Taliban; she had given television interviews and been featured in a documentary; and she had received Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize earlier in 2012. She was therefore well-known in Pakistan by October 2012 and her notoriety meant that the Taliban’s attack inadvertently attracted worldwide attention to her campaign.
Malala describes her recovery in hospitals in Pakistan and the UK and then her start at a school in Birmingham, from which she later went to Oxford University to study philosophy, politics and economics. This would be a great success for anyone but, having now read about the monumental hurdles she overcame to reach that point, including months of recovery after her brush with death, I realise quite how extraordinary her achievements are, both in terms of the standard of her education and the spread of her voice and her success around the world.
Her shocking attack did not deter her from campaigning for what she believed in. In fact, it drew attention to her work and spurred her on to achieve more than she had ever dreamed of.
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