'Defiant Dreams' memoir tells of Afghan woman who risked everything to get an education

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.

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.”