I Am Malala Full Book Introduction

I Am Malala

I Am Malala Full Book Introduction

When Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan, she was a normal girl, but she went on to resist terrorists and advocate for women’s right to education. As a result, she was shot in the head by armed militants at the age of 15, but she miraculously survived. Her story moved the world, and she won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize at only 17 years old. How did she have the superhuman courage to face death, and how did she maintain such strong convictions in her fight for equality? Let’s experience this brave and visionary tale together.

Author : Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

Malala Yousafzai, born in 1997 in Pakistan, became well-known when she published an article on the BBC website at age 11 that argued for children’s and women’s rights to education. When she won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, she was only 17 years old, making her the youngest person to ever win the prize. Christina Lamb is a well-known British war journalist who started covering Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1987. She has been named Britain’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times, and she has received Europe’s highest honor for war correspondents, the Prix Bayeux-Calvados.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the book, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.

In the beginning of the 21st century, most people living in peaceful countries enjoyed comfortable lives, and they saw the right to education as a given. They could hardly imagine that, under the same sky, many corners of this world were full of war. The dark places were overrun with fear. Citizens of those countries were being tossed between endless oppression and torment, and countless children were yearning for education and equal treatment, but they struggled in vain. They may have been impacted by poverty, illness, or war, but all of them wanted the world to hear their voices, and the author of this book, Malala Yousafzai, was one of them.

Malala was born to a normal family in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. When frequent terrorist activity broke out in Pakistan, and an anti-government organization, the Taliban, controlled their small village in the Swat Valley, she refused to be silent. Instead, she stood up to her oppressors and fought for the right to an education. She was regarded as the terrorist organization’s enemy, a label that put her life in jeopardy. She was shot by a terrorist at the age of 15. After miraculously surviving, she became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17.

I Am Malala, the autobiographical account of these experiences, was on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year. In the book, she reveals a terrorist organization’s evil deeds and darkest facets, giving an account of her extraordinary struggle to secure women’s right to education. Time magazine commented, “In trying to silence this Pakistani schoolgirl, the Taliban amplified her voice. She is now a symbol of the struggle for women’s rights all over the world.”

Malala mentions in her book that there are 57 million children in the world who have not been able to attend elementary school, and Pakistan is one of the countries where this problem is most serious. In 2014, the World Bank released a report that showed there were 7 million people in Pakistan who were deprived of education, and two thirds of those people were women. Most of the people who have lost out on schooling don’t have basic arithmetic, reading, or other language skills.

A UNESCO survey found that the main barriers that stand between children and education are gender, geography, poverty, and armed conflicts, those conflicts being one of the top reasons that students are unable to attend school. Among elementary-age children that are unable to attend school, over one third of them live in areas impacted by war or similar conflicts.

Maybe we have no way to imagine how people live in Pakistan, especially in the areas and times most heavily impacted by conflict and terrorism. When their lives are hanging in the balance, do they still have dreams? When facing hardships, do they choose to be resigned to their fate, or do they stand up and fight? Do the children learn from their life experiences instead of learning from teachers? All of these questions will be answered after we have finished listening to this bookey.  

In this bookey, we will see what we can truly gain from Malala Yousafzai in three parts:

Part One: A cry for freedom in the face of Taliban terrorists;

Part Two: A struggle for education under the oppression of the Taliban;

Part Three: A call for world peace after being attacked by the Taliban.