Malala Yousafzai, once a teenage girl among many struggling to get an education in Pakistan is now a celebrated international rights campaigner, Nobel laureate, and student at Oxford University. The 20-year-old girls’ education icon, who arrived in Pakistan on an unannounced visit Thursday for the first time since the desperate dash to a British hospital to save her life in 2012, is no ordinary young woman. Few can lay claim to a Nobel Prize, or say they spent their 17th birthday lobbying Nigeria’s president to do more to free hundreds of girls kidnapped by Islamist militants, or confronted US President Barack Obama in the White House over the drone war in Pakistan. She had already been in the public eye for years when a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus on October 9, 2012, asked “Who is Malala?”, and shot her in the head. Her father Ziauddin, a school principal, helped propel the precociously talented girl from the Swat valley in northwest Pakistan into the limelight. At his encouragement, Malala started writing a blog for the BBC’s Urdu service under a pseudonym in 2009, aged just 11, about life under the Taliban in Swat, which the Islamist militants had taken over in 2007. Opponents were murdered, people were publicly flogged for supposed breaches of sharia law, women were banned from going to market, and girls were stopped from going to school. Her blog, written anonymously with the clarity and frankness of a child, opened a window on the miseries being perpetrated in Pakistan. But it was only after the shooting in 2012, and Malala’s subsequent near-miraculous recovery in Britain, that she became a truly global figure — a formidable and instantly recognisable force for human rights.