1. Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist, film and television producer, and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17.
66 Facts About Malala Yousafzai
1. 2.
Malala Yousafzai is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize.
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Malala Yousafzai 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.
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Malala Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.
5.
Malala Yousafzai 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.
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Malala Yousafzai completed her secondary school education at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham in England from 2013 to 2017.
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Malala Yousafzai returned in 2023 to become the youngest ever Honorary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.
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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.
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Malala Yousafzai is the daughter of Ziauddin Yousafzai and Toor Pekai Yousafzai.
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Malala Yousafzai's family is Sunni Muslim of Pashtun ethnicity, belonging to the Yusufzai tribe.
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The family did not have enough money for a hospital birth and Malala Yousafzai was born at home with the help of neighbours.
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Malala Yousafzai was given her first name Malala after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.
13.
Fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English, Malala Yousafzai was educated mostly by her father, Ziauddin Malala Yousafzai, a poet, school owner, and an educational activist himself, running a chain of private schools known as the Khushal Public School.
14.
The only alternative was Malala Yousafzai, who was four years younger and in seventh grade at the time.
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Malala Yousafzai's blog was published under the byline "Gul Makai", a name taken from a character in a Pashtun folktale.
16.
Malala Yousafzai hand-wrote notes and passed them to a reporter who scanned and e-mailed them.
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Malala Yousafzai wrote that only 70 pupils attended out of the 700 who were enrolled.
18.
Mingora was evacuated and Malala Yousafzai's family was displaced and separated.
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Malala Yousafzai's father went to Peshawar to protest and lobby for support, while she was sent into the countryside to live with relatives.
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That month, after criticising militants at a press conference, Malala Yousafzai's father received a death threat over the radio by a Pakistani Taliban commander.
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Malala Yousafzai was deeply inspired in her activism by her father.
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Malala Yousafzai's family reunited, and on 24 July 2009 they headed home.
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Malala Yousafzai made a second appearance on Capital Talk on 19 August 2009.
24.
Malala Yousafzai began appearing on television to publicly advocate for female education.
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In 2011, Malala Yousafzai trained with local girls' empowerment organisation, Aware Girls, run by Gulalai Ismail, whose training included advice on women's rights and empowerment to peacefully oppose radicalisation through education.
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Malala Yousafzai was the first Pakistani girl to be nominated for the award.
27.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that Malala Yousafzai would be moved to Germany, where she could receive the best medical treatment, as soon as she was stable enough to travel.
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Malala Yousafzai's plane landed in Birmingham, England, where she was treated at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, one of the specialties of this hospital being the treatment of military personnel injured in conflict.
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Malala Yousafzai had come out of her coma by 17 October 2012, was responding well to treatment, and was said to have a good chance of fully recovering without any brain damage.
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On 3 January 2013, Malala Yousafzai was discharged from the hospital to continue her rehabilitation at her family's temporary home in the West Midlands, where she had weekly physiotherapy.
31.
Ehsanullah Ehsan, chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that Malala Yousafzai "is the symbol of the infidels and obscenity", adding that if she survived, the group would target her again.
32.
The day after the shooting, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik stated that the Taliban gunman who shot Malala Yousafzai had been identified.
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In November 2012, US sources confirmed that Mullah Fazlullah, the cleric who ordered the attack on Malala Yousafzai, was hiding in eastern Afghanistan.
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Malala Yousafzai was killed by a US-Afghan air strike in June 2018.
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From March 2013 to July 2017, Malala Yousafzai was a pupil at the all-girls Edgbaston High School in Birmingham.
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On 19 June 2020, Malala Yousafzai said after passing her final examinations that she had completed her PPE degree at Oxford; she graduated with honours.
37.
Malala Yousafzai addressed the United Nations in July 2013, and had an audience with Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace.
38.
In July 2014, Malala Yousafzai spoke at the Girl Summit in London.
39.
In 2015, Malala Yousafzai told Emma Watson she decided to call herself a feminist after hearing Watson's speech at the UN launching the HeForShe campaign.
40.
On 12 July 2015, her 18th birthday, Malala Yousafzai opened a school in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, near the Syrian border, for Syrian refugees.
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The school, funded by the not-for-profit Malala Yousafzai Fund, offers education and training to girls aged 14 to 18 years.
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Malala Yousafzai called on world leaders to invest in "books, not bullets".
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Malala Yousafzai wore one of Benazir Bhutto's shawls to the UN.
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Malala Yousafzai presented the chamber with "The Education We Want", a Youth Resolution of education demands written by Youth for Youth, in a process co-ordinated by the UN Global Education First Youth Advocacy Group, telling her audience:.
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Malala Yousafzai was there as a guest to promote her book, I Am Malala.
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Malala Yousafzai left Jon Stewart speechless when she described her thoughts after learning the Pakistani Taliban wanted her dead, saying:.
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On 10 October 2014, Malala Yousafzai was announced as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.
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Malala Yousafzai shared the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a children's rights activist from India.
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Malala Yousafzai is the second Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize after 1979 Physics laureate Abdus Salam.
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Malala Yousafzai later sympathised, and acknowledged that problems are faced by young people all over the world, saying "there are problems in Mexico, there are problems even in America, even here in Norway, and it is really important that children raise their voices".
51.
In March 2018, Malala Yousafzai was the subject of an interview with David Letterman for his Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
52.
In July 2021, amid a major offensive by the Taliban insurgents, Malala Yousafzai urged the international community to press for an immediate ceasefire in Afghanistan and provide humanitarian aid to Afghan civilians.
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Malala Yousafzai had said that she did not understand why people had to marry.
54.
On 9 November 2021, Malala Yousafzai married Asser Malik, a manager with the Pakistan Cricket Board, in Birmingham.
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Malala Yousafzai's statements conflicted with the view that militancy in Pakistan was a result of Western interference, and conservatives and Islamic fundamentalists described her ideology as "anti-Pakistan".
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Many Pakistanis view her as an "agent of the West", due to her Nobel prize, Oxford education and residence in England; however, Malala Yousafzai is seen as courageous by some Pakistanis.
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Farman Nawaz argued in Daily Outlook Afghanistan that Malala Yousafzai would have gained more fame in Pakistan if she belonged to the province of Punjab.
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Malala Yousafzai's book accused Yousafzai of attacking the Pakistan Armed Forces under the pretence of female education, described her father as a "double agent" and "traitor", and denounced the Malala Fund's promotion of secular education.
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However, Ali pointed out that the APPSF had gone on a national strike when Malala Yousafzai was attacked by the Pakistani Taliban.
60.
Conspiracy theorists in newspapers and social media alleged that Malala Yousafzai had staged her assassination attempt, or that she was an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency.
61.
On 29 March 2018, Malala Yousafzai returned to Pakistan for the first time since the shooting.
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Malala Yousafzai then visited her hometown Mingora in Swat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
63.
On 7 August 2019, following the Indian revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, Malala Yousafzai urged the UN to help Kashmiri children go safely back to school in response to the Indian Government's lockdown and communications blackout in the Kashmir valley and expressed her concern about the situation, and appealed to the international community to ensure peace in Jammu and Kashmir.
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Malala Yousafzai was condemned by Pakistani authors Nida Kirmani and Mehr Tarar over a Broadway musical she co-produced with former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had rejected calls for ceasefire in Gaza.
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Malala Yousafzai visited Australia and criticized its asylum policies and compared immigration policies of the US and Europe unfavourably to those of poor countries and Pakistan.
66.
In 2015, during the media tour for a documentary film about her life, Malala Yousafzai performed magic tricks with playing cards on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.