To celebrate International Women’s Day, I
suggest reading this article about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the
Taliban on 9 October 2012 and snatched from death miraculously.
Malala, who is the outspoken daughter of a devoted schoolmaster who
encouraged her love of learning, defied the Taliban’s obscurantist
resolve to keep girls in the dark and raised her voice in defence of their
education in a country where the illiteracy rate for women is 60 %.
When she was only 11, she started giving inspiring public speeches; she also began writing a blog for the
BBC under a pseudonym, in which she wrote about maltreatment and restrictions
imposed by the Taliban and the horrible limitations of life under their reign of terror.
