Page 62 - Great Elizabethans

Resisting attempts to scare her and keep her quiet, including an attack that nearly killed her, the activist Malala Yousafzai has fought fiercely for every girl's right to an education since she was 11 years old.
DEFYING THE TALIBAN
In July 1997, in the city of Mingora in the beautiful, mountainous Swat District of
Pakistan, a baby girl was born, the eldest child of Ziauddin and Toor Pekai Yousafzai.
Girls in Pakistan were not always valued as highly as boys, but the baby’s father, a poet and teacher, believed passionately in education for everyone. He wanted to give his daughter exactly the same opportunities that he would later give his sons.
Young Malala loved school and was a gifted, hard-working student. She shared her father’s passion for education, and his belief that it was for everyone.
Ten years after Malala was born, an extremist political group called the Taliban took control of the Swat District. The Taliban believed that girls should not be educated, and that everyone should obey strict
religious rules about how they dress and behave. They banned TV, music, make- up, and even flying kites, and harshly punished people who disobeyed. They
also began stopping girls from going to school. In 2008, Malala started speaking out against the invaders who had taken away her right to be educated. As the Taliban closed school
after school, she wrote down her sad, fearful, angry thoughts, and shared them on a BBC blog. Speaking out in this way was dangerous, but Malala felt that she should tell the world what the Taliban was taking away from the girls of the Swat Valley.
In October 2012, the Taliban tried to silence Malala forever. When she was on her way home from school, an armed man got onto her bus, terrifying the girls, and asked
them: “Who is Malala?” He shot her in the head with his gun – but Malala did not die. Ten days later, she woke up in a hospital in Birmingham, UK. Her injuries were very
serious, and doctors and nurses had worked desperately to save her life. Offers to help the brave 15-year-old activist had come from hospitals around the world. Malala took a long time
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to recover, but when she was better, she and her family made a new home in Britain.