The heir to the throne of the Qinda tribe based on the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Qais chose a life of travel, drinking, fighting-and poetry.

His masterpiece is the Muallaka, an ode so revered that it is written in gold on sheets of paper that are then hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s most revered shrine (its title translates to “hanging ode”).

Other poets may have their own famous works, but many consider Al-Qais to be superior because of his amazing metaphors and beautiful verses that reflect his desire to be a worthy lover, wise man, warrior, and master. The kind of work he perfected greatly influenced the writing of those who followed.

Al-Hansa (575-645)

Tamadir bint Amr, better known as al-Hansa, is one of the famous poets of the Arab world who converted to Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad.

Her masterpiece is her eulogy to her brother Sahr, a tribal leader who was seriously wounded and later died after an attack on the rival Bani Asad tribe.

Her poems are full of beautiful metaphors about loss, life, love, and departure. However, although four of her children were killed during the Muslim battles against the Romans and Persians, al-Hansa refused to write eulogies for them, saying that Islam taught her not to mourn for the dead.

Abu Nuwas (756-814)

Abu Nuwas’s reputation in the Arab world is based on his adoration of wine and as a poet of merry love.

Born in Ahwaz, in what is now Iran, he moved to Iraq at a young age, the ruling center of the then powerful Abbasid caliphate.

About 1500 of his poems survive, including several masterpieces that reflect his experience of cosmopolitan life in Baghdad, where people gathered in taverns, libraries, bazaars, mosques, and baths.

His works are abrupt, spontaneous and full of sharp turns as he loudly glorified pleasure, lovers, wine, music and good company while despising war and the clash of swords.

Al-Mutanabbi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabbi’s life is perhaps best described as an epic journey to fame, money, and power.

Through his nearly 300 poems, he mastered Arabic verse like no other and treated poetry as a craft to be studied and taught, through a work that spoke of wisdom, pride, courage, fighting the Romans, and worshiping his ego.

Many of his poems are used today as proverbs to reflect on life’s experiences of friendship, love, departure, war, and death.

Born in Kufa, Iraq, as Ahmed bin al-Hussein al-Qindi, his nickname translates to “the one who will be a prophet.”

He never rested in one place, traveling to Baghdad, Damascus, Tiberias, Antioch, Aleppo, and Cairo, among others, receiving income from emirs for his poetic praise of them.

Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri (973-1057)

When he was four years old, al-Ma’arri became blind due to smallpox. He remained housebound for most of his life: unlike his hero al-Mutannabi, al-Ma’arri did not leave his home for almost four decades, preferring solitude to socializing with people.

His poetry contains philosophy, contemplation, and pessimism: for many of his followers who flocked to his home, he was considered the poet of philosophers and the philosopher of poets.

Al-Ma’arri’s masterpiece is the Luzumiyat and Resalat al-Gufran (The Message of Forgiveness), which focuses on the poets’ experiences in hell and heaven more than 200 years before Dante’s Divine Comedy.

But opponents condemned al-Ma’arri for heresy because he ridiculed followers of all religions. Attacks occurred not only during his lifetime, but also long after his death: in February 2013, a thousand years after his active work, Syrian militants beheaded a statue of the poet-philosopher in his hometown of Maarrat al-Numan in Syria.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Considered a leading light of his generation, Darwish has been translated into English more than any other contemporary Arab poet.

He was born in the Palestinian village of Al-Birwa under the British mandate, but fled when Israeli authorities took control and expelled thousands of Arabs.

In most of his work, he mixed modern poetry with Arabic rhythmic meters: themes included the Palestinian Revolution of 1965-1993 and the 1948 mass exodus known as the Catastrophe or Nakba.

Darwish has received several prestigious international awards, including the Prince Claus Foundation in 2004.

Iman Mersal (1966 – present)

Mersal is an Egyptian poet who is currently a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Alberta, Canada.

She writes free prose, a style of poetry that is not measured by Arabic rhythm: These Are Not Oranges, My Love, a selection of her work was published in 2008.

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Although Europeans of the Middle Ages used Islamic treatises on medicine, geography, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, they were not familiar with the original literary works of the Muslim world. Even today, the rich heritage of Islamic literature is almost unknown in the West, with the exception of a few examples, such as the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam; the Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights; Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat; _ and the 20th century works of Khalil Jebran. This unfamiliarity is due in part to the fact that almost all of this literature was written in languages that were often quite difficult to translate, in part because they used the Semitic alphabet.

Difficulties of translation were especially true of Islamic poetry, which for centuries used traditional, rigid, and distinctive forms in a highly stylized way. Prose, in the Western sense of novels, short stories, and dramas, was not known in the Islamic world until the modern period. Prose also used specific forms, and often, like verse, it was rhymed. This emphasis on form and style dominated Islamic literature until the early 19th century, often to the detriment of content.

Classical Arabic poetry was built on the principle of monorhyme, and one rhyme was used throughout the poem, regardless of whether it was long or short. There were 16 basic sizes in the rhyme scheme in five groups, but the poet was not allowed to change the size during the poem.

The main literary types, all poetic forms developed in accordance with traditional rules, were qasidah, gazelle, qita, masnawi, and robai. In prose, the main genre was the maqama.

Poetry
Developed by pre-Islamic Arabs, the qasidah has survived in the history of Arabic literature to the present day. It consists of an elaborately structured ode of 20 to 100 verses and retains a single final rhyme throughout the work. The poem begins with a short prelude, usually a love poem, to attract the reader’s attention. This is followed by a narrative of the poet’s journey, describing his horse or camel, scenes and events in the desert. The main theme, in the end, is a tribute to the poet’s patron, his tribe, or even himself. After the advent of Islam, the qasidah served as an instrument of praise to God, eulogies of Muhammad, and songs of praise or lamentation for the saints. It was a type of poem that lent itself to demonstrating the poet’s own knowledge.

A love lyric of five to 12 verses, the ghazal probably originated as a development of the opening section of a qasidah. The content was religious, secular, or a combination of both.

QITAH
The qitah is a literary form used for less serious matters of daily life. Its main function was satire, jokes, word games, and codes.

MASNAVI
Masnavi originated in Persia, a country with its own ancient literary tradition. The term means “doubled” or rhymed verse. Masnavi became very popular because it allowed a poet to tell a long story by stringing together thousands of verses. It was the closest approach to an epic poem that developed in Islamic literature. The Arabs rejected the epic as a form of fiction that they considered to be akin to a lie.

ROBAʿI
Like the masnavi, the robai also has its roots in the pre-Islamic Persian poetic tradition. Its form is a qatrain (four-line poem) in which the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The most famous example of robai is Omar Khayyam’s Rubayat.

MAKAMA
The most typical expression of the Arab spirit in rhyming prose was the maqama. It was used to tell mostly simple and interesting stories in an extremely complex style. Because the maqama was often used to demonstrate the wit, education, and eloquence of the author, it often became entangled in intricate terminology and grammar that made it quite difficult to understand and thus almost impossible to translate. It was only in the late 19th century, under the influence of translations from European languages, that his style became commonplace, making it less artificial.

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The religious zeal of the early Muslims did inspire the beginning of two significant works, collections that were not completed until the following centuries. The most important was the hadith, a record of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. The sudden death of the spiritual and political leader took the Islamic community by surprise, and for several decades it was deemed necessary to preserve all of Muhammad’s words and actions, as they were believed to be inspired. By the 9th century, the hadith had been reduced to a material to which no new traditions were added. Today, the hadith are revered as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the Qur’an.

Another collection, which was started at the same time, consists of the sayings of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the fourth caliph, whose followers later founded the main division in Islam, the Shiites. The collection, finally completed in the 10th century, is called The Way of Eloquence. It is a masterpiece of Arabic prose that has inspired numerous commentaries and imitations in other languages.

THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE
Islamic civil wars and growing sectarian rivalries fostered the emergence of poetry, which became a favorite means of expressing different points of view. Three of the greatest poets of the Umayyad period were polemicists who used their poems to support political factions.

Al-Akhtal, although a Christian, was a staunch supporter of the policies of the first Umayyad, Mu’awiyah I. Jarir and Tammam ibn Ghalib Abu Firas (al-Farazdak) were active in the courts of the Umayyad caliphs and their governors and were ardent supporters of the regime. However, the two were enemies and amused their warring tribesmen with their caustic satires of each other. The work of these two poets has provided historians with rich material on the social and political climate of Islam in the early eighth century. They used the traditional form of the qasidah to great effect, employing a rich vocabulary and imagination.

A remarkable poet from Mecca, Umar ibn Abi Rabia, contributed to the development of the ghazal as a love poem. His poems celebrate love affairs with ladies who have come to Mecca on pilgrimage. Using the same literary form, one of the last Umayyads, al-Walid ibn Yazid, gained a greater reputation as a poet than as a warrior. His poetry was characterized by lighthearted love poems and odes to the virtues of wine.

In Medina, very idealized love poetry was in vogue, similar to the chivalric romances of medieval Europe. Supposedly invented by Jamil, this genre celebrates lovers who become martyrs, dying completely surrendered to the power of true love.

THE ABBASID CALIPHATE
In contrast to the short 90-year period of Umayyad rule, the Abbasid caliphate lasted for more than five centuries. It was during the Abbasid rule, with its capital in Baghdad, that the golden age of Islamic literature began. In Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia), all the cultural currents of the ancient Middle East converged, and members of the Muslim community, concentrated in the court of the caliphs, began to adapt and process elements from all previous cultures.

The main poets of the Abbasid period were Abu Nuwās, Ibn al-Muʿtaz, Ibn Daud, al-Mutanabbi, and al-Maʿarri. The greatest of them was Abu Nuwas, who had an incomparable command of language and imagery. However, his witty, cynical poems and wonderful table songs caused a scandal among orthodox Muslims. One of his phrases, which is said to have been his motto, was: “Accumulate as many sins as possible”.

Al-Mu’tazz, in his Book of the Novel and the Strange, established literary rules governing the use of metaphors, similes, and verbal puns (see Figures of speech). His conception of poetry included the richest decoration of poems with all kinds of figures of speech and rhetorical devices. Later, thanks to his advice, poetry appeared, the content of which prevailed over style and phrases.

The theme of a lover who would rather die than achieve union with his beloved became central to ghazal poetry in the 10th century. The first exponent was Ibn Daud, a theologian, in his anthology The Book of Flowers. Although initially used in a completely secular way, the theme later became a core concept of religious mystical poetry. Soon it also became common in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry. Its influence was felt even in Spain, where another theologian, Ibn Hazm, drew on personal experience to create his Ring of the Dove, a prose work about pure love interspersed with poetry.

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Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Essa Khattak, unconditionally. But she still feels uncomfortable with Hattack’s stingy secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton’s death. Drayton’s apparently accidental fall off a cliff doesn’t seem to warrant a police investigation, especially not by Rachel and Hattack’s team of sensitive minority cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tiptoeing into the case. It soon becomes clear that Drayton may have been a war criminal connected to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

If true, any number of people could have helped Drayton die, and the murder investigation could have sent far-reaching ripples through society. But as Rachel and Khattak delve deeper into the life and death of Christopher Drayton, it seems that every question only leads to more questions, with no easy answers. In the end, did the ghosts of Srebrenica come back to haunt Drayton, or did he keep secrets of a completely different nature? Or, in the end, did the man simply fall to his death from the Bluffs?

In her gripping debut, Ausma Zehanat Khan has written a complex and provocative story of loss, redemption, and the price of justice that will stay in readers’ minds long after they turn the last page.

The main characters are

Esa Khattak
The protagonist of the novel, Esa, is the lead detective in the investigation of Christopher Drayton’s death. As a second-generation Canadian Muslim, his boss, Tom Paley, believes that he is well suited to investigate the crime. Eza has a complicated relationship with his longtime friend Nate and Mink Norman, who works at the museum, but his professionalism and strong relationship with Getty allow him to investigate thoroughly.

Rachel Getty
Determined and inquisitive detective Rachel is Ezra’s partner and works with him in the investigation of Christopher Drayton’s death. Despite their honest relationship, Getty struggles with Hattack’s evasiveness about his personal relationships with Nathan Clare and Mink Norman. Rachel’s father is the infamous former police chief Don Getty, with whom she has a tense and complicated relationship.

Nathan Clare
The famous writer Nathan (Nate) is an estranged college friend of Ezra’s and lives in the same neighborhood as Christopher Drayton. His connection to Ringsong allows Hattack and Getty to infiltrate the community to learn the truth about Drayton’s death.

Christopher Drayton
The investigation into the death of Christopher Drayton, the alias of war criminal Dražen Krstić, forms the basis of the novel. Hattack and Getty discover that Drayton was a war criminal linked to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, a crime that remains painful for the Bosnian community.

Melanie Blessant
Melanie Blessant is the fiancée of Christopher Drayton and the mother of two daughters, Hadley and Cassidy. She is an eccentric and passionate woman who, according to the detectives, has an ulterior motive for wanting to marry Drayton. She is the source of many problems in the investigation because of her demand for Drayton’s will and her poor care of her two daughters.

Mink Norman
Mink is a librarian at Ringsong who also lives on the grounds and dedicates her life to studying Andalusian culture and history. She gains the respect and adoration of Inspector Hattack, which causes tension between the detectives and within the investigation. Towards the end of the novel, we learn that Mink is also part of the Bosnian community and is connected to other people who suffered from the Srebrenica massacre.

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Amina is a young Pakistani-American girl who grew up outside of Milwaukee with her loving mother, father, and older brother Mustafa. She has a beautiful singing voice and is a gifted pianist. However, Amina is afraid of public speaking and hates being the center of attention. Only her closest family and friends know how talented she is.

Amina’s best friend is Sujin, a Korean-American woman. Sujin is excited about her upcoming citizenship ceremony. She tells Amina that she is going to change her name to something more “American.” Amina worries that by giving up her name, Sujin will be giving up an important part of herself. She also wonders if this means that Sujin is changing and therefore their friendship. To make matters worse, Sujin befriends Emily, a girl who, along with other classmates, teases Amina and Sujin about their different foods and cultures. Amina is sure she will never be able to forgive Emily and befriend her, but Sujin keeps inviting her to join them.

Amina’s brother, Mustafa, has trouble avoiding trouble, and their parents put a lot of pressure on him to do well in school. Their mosque will be holding a Quran recitation contest with a scholarship awarded to the winner, and Amina’s parents expect the children to participate, which scares her. To top it off, their very conservative uncle, Taya Jaan, is coming for a visit from Pakistan. Her parents ask him to help the children prepare for the competition. One day, Amina hears Taya Jaan complaining to her father that she is playing too much music, saying it is “haram” or forbidden. The issue is debated in Islam and Amina’s parents disagree, but she doesn’t hear her father say anything to challenge her older brother. Amina remains confused and anxious.

The confusion leads Emily to believe that Amina has betrayed her trust. Sujin is horrified that her best friend might do something hurtful. Amina feels terrible and realizes that Emily was just trying to be friends after all. Feeling upset and embarrassed, Amina confesses to her mother what she heard Taya Jaan say. Her mother is adamant that her musical talents are a gift and she should continue to play and sing. She also tells Amina that her misunderstanding with Emily can be resolved through sympathetic communication. The conversations Amina has with her mother help her see things more clearly and find peace.

Unfortunately, this peace is interrupted when Amina’s mosque is horribly vandalized in a hate crime. The building is burned down and everything beautiful and sacred inside is torn and destroyed. Her family and the Muslim community are devastated by this loss. In a beautiful show of support, all members of the community come together, including the school, churches and synagogues, to support them and help rebuild. It is a powerful demonstration of solidarity.

To cheer themselves up, the parents encourage Amina to play the piano for those gathered in their home. This brings everyone great comfort in their grief, and Amina is pleasantly surprised to see that even Taya Jaan appreciates it and seems to have changed her mind. After reconciling with Sujin and Emily, Amina is surprised again when Emily’s father offers to donate his contract skills to help with the rebuilding. Sujin’s church holds a fundraiser for the mosque and also takes part in a Quran recitation contest, which, to everyone’s surprise, Mustafa wins!

With renewed confidence after her success at the Quran recitation competition, Amina decides to perform a solo at the school concert, which she had previously turned down. Her music teacher is thrilled, and when Amina takes the stage, she stuns the audience with a heartfelt and moving rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come”, “believing the lyrics with all her might”.

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In the Military Empire, disobedience is met with death. Those who do not pledge their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk having their loved ones executed and everything they hold dear destroyed.

It is in this cruel world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laya lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family lives in the poor streets of the Empire. They do not challenge the Empire. They have seen what happens to those who do.

But when Laya’s brother is arrested for treason, Laya is forced to make a decision. In exchange for the help of the rebels who promise to save her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from the Empire’s largest military academy.

There, Laya meets Elias, the best soldier in the school-and secretly the most reluctant. Elias only wants to be free from the tyranny he is trained to enforce. Soon he and Laya realize that their fates are intertwined-and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

The first book in this bestselling series (which includes Torch Against the Night, Reaper at the Gate, and The Sky Beyond the Storm) follows rebel Laya as she secretly becomes a slave at a renowned military academy to rescue her captive older brother, only to join forces with Elias, a reluctant elite soldier who wants to escape a life of violence.

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He was born on July 23, 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan. From the age of three to nine, he lived in the United States, where his father, a university professor, was pursuing his PhD at Stanford University. After that, the family returned to Lahore, where Hamid studied at the Lahore American School.

At the age of eighteen, Hamid moved to the United States to pursue higher education. In 1993, he graduated “with the highest honors” from Princeton University, where his writing teachers were Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid began work on his first novel during a seminar taught by Morrison. When he returned to Pakistan, he continued working on the book.

In 1997, Hamid attended Harvard Law School. He found corporate law uninteresting, so for several years he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company to pay off his student debts. He took three months of vacation a year to finish his debut novel, Smoky Moth (2000). Since then, four more novels have been published: “The Forced Fundamentalist” (2007), “How to Get Damn Rich in Rising Asia” (2013), “Discontent and Civilization: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (2014), and Escape to the West (2017).

In 2001, Hamid moved to London, planning to stay there for one year. Although he often traveled to Pakistan, he lived in London for eight years and became a British citizen in 2006. In 2004, he joined the consulting firm Wolff Olins, where he worked three days a week to have time for his writing career. He was later promoted to general manager of Wolff Olins’ London office, and in 2015 became the chief executive responsible for narrative writing.

Hamid has written on politics, art, literature, travel, including an Op-Ed piece on Pakistan’s internal divisions and extremism for the New York Times. His journalism, essays and short stories have appeared in the following publications: “TIME, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Paris Review, etc. In 2013, he was included in the list of “One Hundred Leading Thinkers of the World” according to the magazine “Forbes”.

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In 1621 she married Simon, the son of Mamia II Gurieli. After Simon murdered his father, Mariam’s brother took his sister and took her to Migrelia, in Zugdidi. In 1634, with the permission of the Persian Shah, Mariam married King Rostom of Carthage. The marriage was directed against Teimuraz I and King George III of Imereti. After Rostom’s death in 1658, Mariam married King Vahtang V (Shahnavaz I) of Kartli.

Mariam restored the churches and monasteries destroyed by the conquerors, in particular, she rebuilt the Bolnisi Church, renovated the Ruissa Church, and others. Mariam collected and restored Georgian manuscripts, and used her own money to buy valuable parchments. In 1633-1646, with the help of Mariam, the rewritten collection Kartlis Tskhovreba was restored.

Mariam was the daughter of the powerful prince of Odisha (Migrelia) Manuchar I Dadiani, who ruled in 1590-1611. His first wife was Nestan Darejan Bagrationi, the daughter of King Alexander II of Kakheti. It is known that Shah Abbas I wanted to marry Nestan Darejan, but Alexander was categorically against this marriage and immediately married his daughter to Manuchar, the ruler of Odisha (Migrelia).

According to the Russian ambassadors Kuzma Sovin and Andrei Polukhanov, Manuchar married Nestan Darejan in 1596. Based on this date, as well as on the information of Arcangelo Lamberti, the historian Ilya Antelava accurately calculated the date of birth of Levan, the firstborn son of Manuchar and Nestan Darejan, in 1597, which was also the year of Nestan Darejan’s death (Vakhushti Bagrationi wrote that “Nestan Darejan died in childbirth”).

After mourning for Nestan Darejan, according to Vakhushti, Manuchar married Vakhtang’s widow Gurieli and the daughter of the atabagh. Bari Egnatashvili also writes that Mariam was the daughter of the atabagh’s daughter. According to an anonymous Georgian chronicler, Mariam’s mother’s name was Tamar. Based on this information, it is believed that Mariam’s mother was Tamar Dzhakeli, whose son from her first marriage was Kaihosro I Gurieli, a politician of western Georgia who ruled Guria in 1639-1658. Manuchar and Tamara Dzhakeli had four children: Erekle, Iese, Mariam, and another daughter whose name has not been preserved (the materials of the Russian embassy of 1652 mention Levan’s second sister Dadiani, who was sent to the Shah of Iran). It is not known which of the children-Jese, Erekle, Mariam, or an unnamed sister-was older. If we assume that Mariam was older, then her year of birth could not have been earlier than 1599. It is known that Mariam married Simon Gurieli in 1621, and in Georgia at that time it was forbidden to marry under the age of 12. Taking this law into account, Mariam could not have been born later than 1609, so she was most likely born between 1599 and 1609.

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After school, Khaled Hosseini was a student at Santa Clara University and upon graduation in 1988 received a bachelor’s degree in biology. Khaled continued his education at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and graduated with an M.D. in 1993.

From 1996 to 2004, Khaled Hosseini worked as a physician at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and graduated with an MD in 1993. Khaled Hosseini worked as an internist at the Los Angeles Medical Center. In parallel with his main activity in 2001 he began work on his first novel “Running after the Wind”, which was published in 2003 and brought the author fame around the world. The next work of Khaled Hosseini “A Thousand Shining Suns” was no less successful and kept in the bestseller list for a whole year. In 2013, the third novel “And the echo flies on the mountains” was published, and the writer continues to work on new bestsellers.

In 2006, Khaled Hosseini was appointed an envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency and later founded his own foundation, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan.

Khaled Hosseini currently resides in Northern California with his wife and two children.

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Even the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner is not immune to constant self-deprecation and life upheavals. “I ask myself this question every night when I’m trying to sleep for hours,” Malala Yousufzai replies when I ask her how she sees herself in ten years.

Malala, who is only 23 years old, continues: “Where will I live next? Should I continue to live in the UK or should I move to Pakistan or another country? Who should I live with? Should I live alone or with my parents as I am now? They love me very much, and like any Asian parent, they want their children to be with them forever.”

We are sitting in a quiet corner of a hotel in central London. Malala’s hair is loose and uncovered, and she wears a scarf around her neck. “I wear it mostly on the street or in public places,” she says. Her cautious security detail is nearby. “When I’m at home or with friends, I don’t have to.” She explains that the headscarf is about more than just observing Muslim traditions. “For us Pashtuns, it is a cultural symbol that shows where I come from. Often Muslim girls wearing traditional clothing are considered oppressed, voiceless, or living in a patriarchy. I want to say to everyone that each of us can have our own voice within our own culture, and you can have equality in your own culture.”

Malala Yousufzai launched the campaign for girls’ rights to education almost thirteen years ago, when she was just 11. All these years, this has been Malala’s main message to the world. During the Taliban rule in Mingora, a town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, all girls were banned from attending school. Her desire to learn led to an attack on her life at the age of 15. Taliban militants shot at her and two other classmates while they were traveling home from school on a bus. It was in October 2012. She and her family were taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. After the move, Malala’s activism only grew stronger.

Her autobiography, I, Malala, published just a year after the assassination attempt, became an international bestseller. At the age of 15, she founded the Malala Fund, with which she organized campaigns aimed at freeing schoolgirls held captive by the Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram. She has met with presidents and prime ministers, addressed the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday, and at 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize while preparing for language exams in her new hometown of Birmingham. In 2017, she entered Oxford University to study politics, philosophy, and economics and graduated with honors. All of this shows that there are hopeful people, and then there is Malala.

Despite all these merits, I am sitting in front of a 23-year-old graduate who, like all of us, has had many trips interrupted by the pandemic, lives with her parents, often plays video games while locked in her room, and tries to work. So what does the most famous Oxford graduate want at the moment?

First, a little existential panic. “It was two o’clock in the morning,” Malala recalls, “I’m sitting in bed, looking at my personal Instagram and thinking: “What am I even doing?” After returning home from university last March to get her degree and wait out the pandemic, she became a member of the Covid class of 2020: unemployed, aimless, bored. In her childhood bedroom, she assessed her options. Naturally, her work with Malala Fund will continue, but at the same time, she is now at a major crossroads in her life.

Should she look for a job? Should she apply for a master’s degree? Travel the world? In the meantime, she slept, enjoyed her homemade lamb curry, and read (Malala has set herself the task of reading 84 books this year). “I had a secret Twitter account for about a year,” she says, “before I officially joined the network, I had about 4,000 followers.” (Yusufzai now has about 1.8 million followers and counting.)

The inspiration came unexpectedly from her favorite television. She had always known the power of storytelling – when she was 11, Malala started a BBC blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai, describing what it was like to live under Taliban rule. Like the Sussexes and Obamas, who turned to broadcasting to communicate with the public on issues that mattered to them, Malala began thinking about creating her own programs and attracting talent from around the world.

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