Malala Yousafzai has received international recognition that most of us will never know at the age of 16. She wasn’t in a film or a popular music video. Malala took a bullet to the face when she fought against the Taliban and its oppression of women and girls in Pakistan.

Her survival alone is phenomenal. But the fact that she was able to recover her ability to talk, walk, speak and write makes her story even more captivating. Most important is the fact that she refuses to be silenced despite the Taliban’s continued death threats.

Malala fights for the women in western Asia who face men that insist on keeping “their” women caged in homes. These women live in an environment with a cultural tradition that keeps them in a social position only slightly higher than that of farm animals.

Before 2001, the Taliban ruled over Afghanistan and didn’t allow anyone to fight back. Girls weren’t allowed in schools. Women weren’t allowed to work or walk the streets alone. They were even whipped if they showed any skin in public, including a bare hand.

Young teenage girls were traded into marriages with adult men. A woman whose husband died was given off to the husband’s closest male relative to do anything he wished with her.

This suppression should have caused outrage, but most of the world didn’t know these abuses were occurring. Malala began speaking up at age 11, supported by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who is a schoolteacher.

When the threats couldn’t silence her, a man boarded her school bus in October of 2012, demanding to know which one of them was Malala. He then proceeded to fire three bullets into her face and neck. I Am Malala is the name of the book she wrote as she recovered in Britain.

For a teenage girl in the corner of the globe to spark a movement and promote women’s liberation-despite all the odds against her- is unbelievable. The world cannot let Malala’s message die because we are all Malala.