Malala pledges to return home to Pakistan after graduating from Oxford
By Mohammad Zubair Khan in Islamabad and Tony Diver
MALALA YOUSAFZAI, the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner, said yesterday that she plans to return permanently to Pakistan after finishing her studies in Britain.
Ms Yousafzai, who is known across the world simply as Malala, was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012, while campaigning for female education in Pakistan.
She said she plans to return in two years’ time, after finishing her course in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. It will be her first visit to the country since the attack. “My plan is to return to Pakistan as this is my country,” she said.
She described herself as “completely focusing on education” at Oxford, but said she wanted “to work for the education of children and make it possible for every girl in Pakistan to receive a highlevel education, to fulfil her dreams and become a part of society”. While in Pakistan, Malala, now 20, hopes to visit her home town in the Swat Valley, around 160 miles (250km) from the capital, Islamabad.
While many in Pakistan welcomed news of her return, others were more critical of her reforming stance and accused her of promoting her own, nonislamic, values. A group of private schools declared Friday to be “I Am Not Malala Day”, for what its spokesman described as her “anti-islam and antipakistan ideology”.
Responding to her critics, she said: “I am proud of my religion, and I am proud of my country. I just don’t know anything I’ve said that makes me antipakistan or anti-islam.”