What event caused Malala to take action in support of education for girls?

A) The president of Pakistan criticized the Taliban's actions.

B) The Taliban banned education for girls and bombed schools.

C) Taliban gunmen shot Malala in the head on her way to school.

D) A book publisher asked Malala to write about her fight for girls' education.

Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban in October, resumed her education in March, as a student at a new school in England.

Malala made herself an enemy of the Taliban by campaigning for education rights for Pakistani girls. Gunmen opened fire on her, but she was quickly airlifted to a hospital. Five months later, she is fully healed. Now she is attending Edgbaston, a girls school in Birmingham, England, with the world at her back.

Bulletproof Determination
Malala made a quick recovery from surgery. The surgery involved fitting a titanium plate to her skull and installing a cochlear implant to help her regain her hearing. After five months in the hospital, she is defying the Taliban by showing it will take more than a bullet to the head to keep her from getting an education.

"I am excited that today I have achieved my dream of going back to school," Malala said in a statement to Time magazine. "I want all girls in the world to have this basic opportunity. I miss my classmates from Pakistan very much, but I am looking forward to meeting my teachers and making new friends here in Birmingham."

Malala thanked her supporters in a video released on the Guardian website. She was proudly wearing a pink backpack over her school uniform -- a green sweater with the Edgbaston insignia and a blue skirt -- along with a headscarf. She called her first day back at school her "happiest moment."

Learning How To Change The World
"I will hold my books, my bag, and I will learn. I will talk to my friends, and I will talk to my teacher. I think there's no more important day than this day," Malala said. "I want to learn about politics, and about social rights, about the law. I want to learn how to bring change into this world."

The teenage Malala already has a head start. She became famous in Pakistan and beyond while she was only 12. She wrote a popular blog on the BBC's Urdu-language website. She chronicled her experiences as a schoolgirl in the Swat Valley, a region of Pakistan then coming under Taliban control. The Taliban had banned education for girls, and began bombing girls schools.

Writing under the name Gul Makai (which means "corn flower" in Urdu), Malala showed the violence of daily life in Swat. She stood up to the Taliban's intimidation of ordinary people and added a human face to the political and military news that had been the only stories from the valley at the time.

Targeting A Schoolgirl
After the Pakistani army won back control of the region, Malala put her international fame to work, campaigning for the right to an education for all girls. Unable to strike back against the army, the remaining Taliban fighters picked Malala as a target. On Oct. 9, gunmen stopped the school bus Malala was riding. They asked the other children to point her out, and fired a bullet into her skull, wounding two other girls.

A Nation Rallies In Support
After sending Malala to specialists in Birmingham, the Pakistani government denounced the attack. Politician Altaf Hussain called the gunmen "beasts" and said "Malala Yousafzai is a beacon of knowledge. She is the daughter of the nation." Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said it was "an attack on all girls in Pakistan, an attack on education, and on all civilized people." He vowed "the work that she led was higher before God than what terrorists do in the name of religion. We will continue her shining cause."

The backlash rattled the Taliban, and it took the unusual step of trying to justify its attempted murder of a child. "She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her ideal leader," Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman, said in a statement. Millions of Pakistanis disagreed, rallying and marching in major cities throughout the country to support Malala and pray for her recovery.

The Taliban's attempt to keep Malala from getting an education has now backfired. Not only is Malala alive and bravely continuing to campaign for her beliefs, but Nov. 10 was named Malala Day to urge people to support the almost 32 million girls worldwide who are denied schooling. She is now the youngest Nobel Peace Prize nominee ever. She recently got a deal to publish a book about her life and the struggle for girls' education. She will have to write it in between homework assignments.