How a Stanford student helped tell the story of an Afghan girl’s fight for her education and independence

When Stanford student Malaina Kapoor first met Sola Mahfouz during the COVID-19 pandemic over Zoom, little did she know that three years later they’d be on national news promoting a book they would co-author about Mahfouz’s harrowing journey fleeing Afghanistan.

As Kapoor would come to learn, Mahfouz’s story is remarkable: She was pulled out of school at age 11 when a group of men – presumed to be from the Taliban – threatened her father that they would throw acid in Mahfouz’s face, or worse, if she continued her studies.

The only thing she was expected to learn was how to be a good wife: cooking, cleaning, and caretaking for a husband she would meet through an arranged marriage. It was a fate Mahfouz was determined to change.

Mahfouz saw education – particularly, going to a university abroad – as her exit out of Afghanistan. For fear of retribution, Mahfouz secretly taught herself English and basic math, and then more advanced subjects as well, like calculus, physics, and literature. Throughout, Mahfouz faced obstacle after obstacle: For one, she was surrounded by the stresses of the conflict between the Taliban and Afghan forces. But there were agonizing bureaucratic hurdles as well; for example, being self-taught meant she had no formal proof of her education level. Without a high school diploma or certificate, many schools and scholarships were out of reach.

But Mahfouz did find a way out and is now a researcher in quantum information at Tufts University in Boston. Kapoor helped chronicle her journey in their new book, Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education (Penguin Random House, 2023).

Helping tell Sola’s story

While Mahfouz speaks English with near fluency, she wanted to find a co-author to help her tell her story to an American audience.

She found a willing writing partner in Kapoor, whom she met through a mutual friend.

Because of the pandemic, Kapoor was at a loose end after deciding at the last minute to defer Stanford by a year. Kapoor had an unusual education herself. She and her brother were homeschooled, which offered her a range of unique learning opportunities. One year Kapoor did research at an education think tank and helped start a charter school in East Palo Alto. Another year, she worked on a local public radio show that was syndicated nationally.

Mahfouz and Kapoor instantly hit it off.

They shared a number of things in common. Kapoor, whose family immigrated to the United States from India, understood much of the culture Mahfouz grew up in. Pakistan, once part of India, shares a 1,660-mile border with Afghanistan, and their cultures – particularly foods, film, and fashion – have long crossed over. They quickly connected over their mutual love for Bollywood movies and their overlapping tastes in fiction.

Moreover, changing the direction of one’s life through education was deeply personal for Kapoor.

“I grew up on stories of how much our family’s life changed because of education,” Kapoor said. “My dad came to America for school and that really changed the trajectory of our life.”

In the summer of 2020, the pair decided they would write together. They found an agent that summer and wrote a book proposal that fall. By winter, they secured a publisher.

Over the next two years, Mahfouz and Kapoor came to form a close bond. They talked to each other at least once a day and soon their relationship shifted from being collaborators to friends to family: “Sola is like my sister,” Kapoor said.

Translating cultural differences

In helping Mahfouz tell her story, one challenge Kapoor encountered was explaining Afghan culture and traditions in a way American audiences would understand, particularly some of the more complex practices like arranged marriages.

Growing up, Kapoor had heard stories about arranged marriages.

She worked with Mahfouz to describe what it must have felt like and how to articulate the feeling of powerlessness Mahfouz felt.

“Sola and her sisters said they felt like fabric in a market being looked at to see if they were good enough for someone’s son,” Kapoor said. “The process is not in any way really equal. The men and their families hold the decision-making power.”

Another issue that came up in writing Mahfouz’s story was discerning how something Mahfouz would say actually means something completely different in the U.S.

For example, when Mahfouz would talk about doing chores as a child, Kapoor knew that in Afghanistan that meant something very different than in America – especially for girls.

“To us in America, chores are what parents tell your kid to do, like ‘take out the trash’ or ‘do the dishes,’ ” Kapoor said. “But I knew from hearing family stories that for a woman, chores start from the moment she wakes up to the moment she’s sleeping. She is running the household, cleaning, and cooking – but it’s not cooking a one-pot meal. It’s cooking four to five dishes for lunch, and not eating in the same room as the men.”

Talking about “chores” would then have to be described in a way American readers would understand as being far more difficult than what they might think of with their own responsibilities at home.

Persevering against adversity

Another challenge was just understanding how Mahfouz persevered in a world where everything was stacked against her and how she got to where she is today.

“There are a couple chapters that took me a month longer than they were supposed to just because I kept calling Sola and asking her, ‘But how did you learn English so fast?’ ” Kapoor recalled. “I was really just shocked by how quickly she was able to learn English and math. At age 16, Sola couldn’t add or subtract, but three years later she was studying college-level physics and math and reading philosophy.”

Meanwhile, violence raged around Mahfouz, but she never witnessed it first-hand because as a woman, she was confined to her family’s compound. But it was omnipresent, dominating the news she watched on TV. Her brother’s school was attacked. The Internet – which Mahfouz relied on for her studies – was a dial-up connection and extremely slow, which made studying laborious and difficult.

“Sola almost didn’t see anything remarkable in her story, and there was a lot of going back and forth with me just telling her, ‘No – this is incredible. We have to convey just how incredible it is,’ ” Kapoor said.

The power of storytelling

Kapoor hopes that sharing Mahfouz’s story with a wide audience will deepen people’s empathy for what life is really like for women in Afghanistan and inspire change.

“We write about how Sola couldn’t do simple things that we take for granted, like going out for ice cream with her brothers, swimming, listening to music, dancing, or even laughing inside her own home for fear she would be heard. I think when people learn about these stories, they can’t help but be driven to action.”