Sola Mahfouz, Afghan author: 'The burka’s a symbol of what is taken from a woman'

Sola Mahfouz Defiant Dreams co author

At the age of 16 in Afghanistan, Sola Mahfouz didn’t know how to add or subtract. Today at 27 she’s a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University, Boston.

Along with Malaina Kapoor, Sola is co-author of newly-published Defiant Dreams, The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education. 

She’s also the subject of the book. At our three-way Zoom meet – Malaina’s joining from California where she’s studying International Relations at Stanford University – I discover that Sola Mahfouz is a pseudonym.

“It’s for the privacy of my family, the safety of my relatives in Afghanistan,” she explains, adding that she chose the name, Sola, for its meaning: ‘peace’.

Sola – born a year after the Taliban took over her home town of Kandahar – was just days past her 11th birthday when men came to her home and gave her father a dire ultimatum: stop sending his daughters to school or they’d suffer acid attacks, be kidnapped or worse.

“I was still young and I hated school, so I saw it more as a child at that stage. It was years later when I understood what it meant.” 

What it meant was a life “suffocated” by restrictions. “I was only allowed go outside a few times a year. And when I went out I had to always be accompanied by someone and wear a suffocating burka, which covered me from head to toe. I was very jealous of my brothers, of the freedoms they had.” 

I ask Sola what it’s like to wear the burka – to be the person inside that garment? “It’s like you are never seen as a person, you are just like an object standing there. The minute you wear it, you stop being you – you enter this space of non-existence.” 

Malaina tells a story, which she says eloquently shows how the burka handicaps women – a story about one of Sola’s brothers thinking their burka-clad mother was blind. 

“You can see, but through these tiny mesh holes. Wearing the burka, women do become blind because they can only see a tiny straight line in front of them. Sola’s brother was guiding their mother – ‘be careful, don’t step there’.

“For me, the burka’s a symbol of what is taken from a woman, how it strips her of the basic dignity of being human.” 

By the time she was 14, Sola realised education was the way out of this oppressed, restricted life. And what she achieved educationally over the next few years is nothing short of mind-boggling. Secretly teaching herself Maths and English, she read dictionaries and whatever newspapers she could lay her hands on – despite finding news reports about her country’s problems “really disturbing”. She translated vocabulary, recorded it in her own voice and, while cleaning and cooking, “listened to understand”.

She discovered the Khan Academy, an American non-profit educational organisation with the goal of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The organisation offers thousands of lessons in maths, science and the humanities for students of all ages. Sola downloaded lessons and study sheets and did much of her learning in the dead of night.

“I studied philosophy, science. I read diverse literature from all around the world. I was so obsessed with learning that within three years I was able to study college level calculus.” 

Malaina Kapoor, author of Defiant Dreams.

For Malaina – who was introduced to Sola by a mutual friend during the pandemic and who began writing down the stories the Afghan woman shared about her life – what Sola has achieved is stunning.

 “She barely had a handle on the alphabet. Yet, using the Internet and an extremely slow dial-up connection, she was able to move from kindergarten level to studying calculus and reading philosophy and science.” 

And this was despite Sola having so many household responsibilities. “She had to take turns with the other women to cook these huge spreads for breakfast, lunch and dinner. What struck me was how I see cleaning and cooking, versus how all-consuming it was in her life.” But despite the obstacles, Sola says it was all about keeping trying. 

“In my life, I was dependent on someone else for everything – on my father for food, on my brother to take me out. So each word I learned, each equation I solved was empowering. It was something in my control.” 

In freeing herself from her life under the thumb of the Taliban – in finding a road out – Sola had to surmount seemingly-impossible challenges. To get a college place in the US, she had to prove what she knew – “I tried to get a high school certificate in Afghanistan, the official at the Ministry of Education wouldn’t even look in my eyes”. 

She needed to secure a visa for the US – “in one minute the officer denied me a visa, I felt the ground was taken from me”.

But she managed to conquer the barriers, even if doing so involved, for example, crossing the dangerous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. She finally arrived in the US in 2016, where aged 20 she began studying physics and maths at Arizona State University.

For Sola, education isn’t about learning facts. “I’m still educating myself. It’s a never-ending process through which you become who you are. For me, it’s about breaking away from old ways of thinking. I’m learning about patriarchy, how our values developed under that – and I’m trying to break from it.” 

She spends her free time reading, studying different styles of fiction, something she says helps her in understanding her homeland. “Life is so complex in Afghanistan. Fiction gives us a way to understand human dynamics, emotions. I love Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the story of the clash of different generations and different values.” 

Defiant Dreams, by Sola Mahfouz and Malaina Kapoor

Sola dedicates the book to her mother, crediting her ‘positive outlook toward life, like light in a dark lane’ as giving her ‘courage to go through the darkest time in my life with defiance’. 

As a young woman, Sola’s mother was a Kabul university student. She wore skirts and short-sleeved blouses and had ‘a fashionable bob haircut that she rarely covered with a veil’. She eventually became a university professor.

With the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting in March this year that 20 years of progress for women and girls’ rights have been erased in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, Malaina points to a central theme of Defiant Dreams: “In Afghanistan, mothers had more freedoms [in the past] than their daughters do today.” 

Sola sees the very free life her mother enjoyed as a young woman as evidence that nothing is set in stone about what Afghanistan is. “The news says our society is backward, but it is so much more the politics.” 

Does she miss her country? “I don’t feel I want to be there now. But I’d like to go back to that place of childhood. I think about and I miss the music, the smell of the food, the way my mother would be when we came back from school – I want to go back to that time.”

Malaina says the book is the story of one girl – but also the story of all the girls in Afghanistan today, and the girls who’ve suffered in Afghanistan through history. “And it’s the story of girls fighting for freedom in other places, like Iran. It is so personal, but also widely relevant.”

• Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education, Sola Mahfouz and Malaina Kapoor, €21.25.