On women’s education: reflections on individual empowerment
by SOLA MAHFOUZ
Sola Mahfouz, co-author of Defiant Dreams, reflects on her own education journey and the power of education to empower women to make their own choices and find their individual selves.
Education allowed me to break away from old myths and thinking, creating new possibilities. Education also gave me the intellectual arsenal to defend myself against what others claimed I was.
The oft-cited African proverb—“If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation”—has always left me cold. It implies that the only value of a woman’s education is to make her a better mother, especially to her sons, traditionally viewed as the nation’s future leaders.
Luckily, another voice spoke to me more intimately: “Education is like opening a window to the world,” my grandfather said. “A window that lets in the breezes of other people’s wisdom and sends out yours to them.” He had never been to school. He taught himself. I grew up listening to how he would put down his book or his pen only when he was too sick to hold them. He went on to become a renowned scholar and poet. For him, learning was a sacred act and a way to affirm his presence in this world.
My self-education
When I was 14, I barely knew how to read or write in English or even do basic arithmetic. But my grandfather’s words had power—they inspired me to become self-taught. Because of that, I am now a researcher at Tufts University, developing quantum algorithms.
If I believed that my goal was to educate a family or a nation, I would never have begun studying. My mother was a professor, but the civil war and the Taliban takeover forced her to stay at home. “If her education didn’t change the nation, how could my education in a room do anything?” I would ask myself. But my grandfather’s words encouraged me and sustained my efforts. For me, education was a sacred affirmation of my own presence in the world.
My education was not just about learning facts and theories; education allowed me to break away from old myths and thinking. Education gave me the intellectual arsenal to defend myself against what others claimed I was.
As a woman living in patriarchal Afghanistan, I often doubted my own intelligence. Whenever I was stuck on a calculus or physics problem, a nagging voice in my head would tell me that I was not smart enough. While I would resist this thought, push it away, and return to my work, it never left me.
It was through reading books of anthropology—books that traced the origins of our patriarchal world and showed me how it could be otherwise—that I began to liberate my mind from patriarchy’s grip. I realized that the fault lay not in me as a woman but in the world that had shaped me. This truth gave me strength, as well as a new way to look at myself and engage with the world.
Fulfilling the self
But when it comes to women, this profound value of education is downplayed or ignored altogether. The African proverb is repeated: that to educate a woman is to educate a nation. As if women were not individuals worthy of learning for their own sake. This responsibility limits our curiosity and our choices. When we define the importance of education for women in that way, we are taking the freedom to choose away from them, whether that be what fields to study or what inquiries to pursue.
By individualizing ourselves and our education there may not be immediate change but instead lasting impact on oneself. We eat food not just to survive but to enjoy. We listen to music not just to fill the silence but to feel. We learn not for the nation but to thrive personally.
Weaving together Plato’s and Aristotle’s wisdom with my own intuition, I discovered a hidden truth: we are born with a faint outline of ourselves; and by learning and reasoning, we fill in the colors and shapes of our ideal selves.
Science tells us that education changes us. When we learn something new, we do not just deposit information into our memory. New knowledge changes the very architecture of our brain. Learning protects us from the erosion of time, from the loss of who we are. Those who keep educating themselves are less likely to succumb to the darkness of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Learning preserves our identity.
Wilson Center for more
‘Defiant Dreams’ memoir tells of Afghan woman who risked everything to get an education
by DEEPA FERNANDES & ADELINE SIRE
In 1996 — the year Sola Mahfouz was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan — the Taliban took over the country for the first time.
Under a brutally repressive regime, the Taliban banned girls from attending school and confined women to their homes. But the country would undergo major changes.
WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you’re reading right now, give today.
Mahfouz says her parents remember Sept. 11, 2001 well. They learned about the attack from a BBC radio broadcast. At the time, none of them had ever heard of New York’s Twin Towers or of Osama bin Laden. But finding out about the attack still caused Mahfouz’s grandmother concern.
“‘Do you think what has happened in America will affect us?,’ she asked at dinner one evening,” Mahfouz writes in her memoir “Defiant Dreams,” co-authored by Malaina Kapoor. “My father and my uncle actually laughed at her. They couldn’t imagine that a tragedy from so far away could ever have an impact on Afghanistan.”
But then, in October 2001, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, leading an international coalition in Afghanistan in response to 9/11.
Women regained some freedoms during the occupation, but Mahfouz says the city of Kandahar, 300 miles away from the capital of Kabul, did not see much progress. The Taliban still threatened her for attending school. At age 11, after they told her parents they’d throw acid in her face if she kept on, she stopped going.
But Mahfouz says she envied her brothers’ ability to get an education. So she eventually took the matter into her own hands.
“At age 16, I did not know how to add and subtract,” she says. “I started learning English and math, and this was the first thing that I was able to do it all by myself. I think just being able to do that was so empowering that it just kept me going.”
Co-author Kapoor says Mahfouz’s life, which had been geared towards taking care of domestic tasks around the house, changed drastically when she began learning on her own. After reading a Time magazine that had arrived from Pakistan, Mahfouz learned about Khan Academy, an online learning website.
“Using this extremely slow dial-up internet connection, she was able to access the website in the middle of the night, the only time that she wasn’t required to cook and clean,” Kapoor says. “She set her sights on this goal of getting to the United States, and she kept working at it to the point that within three years, she was studying calculus and college-level physics.”
Mahfouz managed to cross a dangerous border into Pakistan to take the SAT test. She passed and obtained a visa to study in the U.S. And so the teenager who couldn’t add or subtract at the age of 16 became a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University just about a decade later, and she details her journey in the memoir “Defiant Dreams.”
WBUR for more