by TAYLOR MCNEIL
Sola Mahfouz pursued an education in isolation in Afghanistan, starting with online kindergarten math as a teenager, and now she does research in quantum computing at Tufts
In 2007, when Sola Mahfouz was 11 years old, men came to her family compound in southern Afghanistan, and told her father that if she and her sisters went to school again, they would get acid thrown in their faces. It didn’t come as a shock—the region had many supporters of the Taliban in the late 1990s.
The quality of education at the girls’ school Mahfouz had been going to wasn’t good, but when schooling abruptly stopped, she was at loose ends. Her days soon became a series of listless activities in her family home—cooking, cleaning, watching Bollywood movies—with no end in sight.
Now, 15 years later, Mahfouz is a staff researcher in the quantum computing group at Tufts. She narrates that sometimes wrenching, sometimes heartwarming, and often astounding transformation in her new book, Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for an Education, published June 6.
Mahfouz—a pseudonym she uses to protect family members still in Afghanistan under the Taliban—wrote the book (with co-author Malaina Kapoor) in part to convey a far more personal and nuanced view of her country than most Americans have read or seen.
“There are not a lot of books written about the Afghan experience by Afghans,” she says. “Journalists visiting the country observe things and then interpret it through their own experience. I have this urge to show the complexity of life there. The story is not just about me. I tried to pick stories to shed light on something bigger.”
She hopes that her book gives readers a glimpse of Afghanistan and the world through an Afghan woman’s eyes. “I don’t know who said it, but the job of the writer is not to give you the solution, it’s to make you think, to see things clearly,” she says.
How History Plays Out
Hers in some ways is the story of Afghanistan’s recent history. To write the book, she had to research her own country’s history, and talked to her parents and other relatives to learn what they were doing long before she was born.
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(Thanks to reader)