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IN Arabic, `revolution` is a feminine noun. This is fitting, as without women revolutions are sterile. They have no movement, no life, no sound. Urdu, a distorter of tongues, pilfering as it does from Persian and Hindi, but largely Arabic, uses the masculine word for coup d`etat ingilab for revolution, rather than the accurate feminine: thawra. Perhaps that`s why the Taliban were confused. Perhaps that`s why they imagined that shooting a 15-yearold girl would somehow enhance their revolution. `I Am Malala`, Malala Yousufzai`s fearless memoir, cowritten with journalist Christina Lamb, begins on Malala`s drive home from school on the day she was shot in the head. `Who is Malala?` the young gunman who stopped the Khushal School van asked. None of the girls answered. But everyone in the valley knew who Malala was. Ten years old when the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan came to the beautiful Swat Valley, once the home of ancient Buddhist kings,11years old by the time she had established herself...

By: Ayesha Nasir Have you heard of  Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi ? Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi was a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who lived in a house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the town of  Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq . She lived a middle-class life with her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhsin, 45-year-old father Qasim Hamza Raheem, two brothers and younger sister, six-year-old Hadeel Qasim Hamza. Though not much is known about  Abeer , one can imagine her childhood; playing with rag dolls, following her mother as she made khameeri rotis and tossing one pebble after another in a stream running near their house. ol but kept Abeer home due to security concerns. Neighbours later recalled that she wasn’t allowed to do much other than assist her mother in the chores and tend to their vegetable garden. Their house was only 200 meters away from a US traffic checkpoint, and the neighbours later remarked that they often observed the soldiers watchi...