At age 16, Sola Mahfouz could barely add and subtract. Three years later, she had mastered calculus and delved into physics, philosophy, and many other subjects—and was trying to leave her home country of Afghanistan to study abroad. Today she is a staff scientist at Tufts University, where she develops quantum algorithms.
Mahfouz (who uses a pseudonym to protect her relatives) grew up in an educated family in Kandahar. Her mother graduated from Kabul University and then taught chemistry there but stopped in 1992 when civil war broke out. Mahfouz’s own education was cut off early because she was a girl; it had been poor in any case, she says.
One by one, her brothers left Afghanistan to study in other countries and her sisters married men who were moving or already lived abroad, following pathways that promised a better life. Like her sisters, she too was paraded in front of mothers looking for wives for their sons.
But Mahfouz didn’t want to marry; she wanted education to be her ticket out of Afghanistan. She went to the Kandahar Ministry of Education to take an exam she hoped would serve as a high school equivalency test so she could apply to college abroad. Ministry officials refused to let her take the exam, saying it would be unfair to other children who had attended school for 12 years.
She persisted, and despite her lack of formal education, she secured a spot at a US university. In July 2016, when she was 20, she flew to the US on a humanitarian parole visa, a temporary document that allowed her one-time entry into the country. She obtained her visa largely because of US press coverage of her predicament—including having been denied a student visa previously—and her flight was paid for with money that an American friend she met online raised through GoFundMe.
Since arriving in the US, Mahfouz has continued to blaze her own path. She tells the story of her youth in Kandahar and her emigration to the US in her memoir, Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education, published this past June.
PT: You are self-educated. How did that happen?
MAHFOUZ: I stopped going to school when I was 11 years old. But I saw my brothers going to school and thriving academically. I saw the life around me, and I had so many questions. There were so many contradictions about what women could and could not do. Why can my brothers study and I can’t? Is there something wrong with me because I am a girl? But then, why is my mother educated?
My grandfather put great emphasis on learning English. He said it’s like a window to the world, and I was really inspired by that. When I was 14, I started to teach myself English. I would read newspapers and listen for hours to the BBC and CNN on TV. I didn’t understand anything. One time I translated hundreds of words, because each time I looked a word up, I found more I didn’t know. It was a complicated journey, but I could see that from one day to the other, I was learning. That in itself was very liberating.
Then, in 2012, when I was 16, one of my brothers was going to Pakistan. I asked him to bring me anything in English. He brought me Time magazine, and there I read about the Khan Academy, the educational website. Immediately I felt that this is what I wanted. I became really obsessed with learning math. In three years, from not knowing how to add and subtract, I began taking college-level calculus, physics, philosophy, astronomy—anything that was available through Khan Academy.
PT: Why did you pursue physics?
MAHFOUZ: The meaning of life is tied to understanding where we are from, what we are made from, how the universe started. Physics comes from those philosophical questions. I wanted to become a physicist because I had so many questions and it felt like physics is about small things, but it also asks bigger questions.
PT: What was your path to the US?
MAHFOUZ: I was learning English and I wanted to practice with someone. I connected with someone named Emily through a website I found on YouTube. She was a university student. We became good friends—we talked almost every day for an hour on Skype.
I didn’t have a high school certificate. First I wanted to take the GED exam, but it wasn’t available. Emily said that if I took the SAT, I could apply to US colleges. I had to travel to Karachi, Pakistan, to take the SAT.
Later, I flew with relatives to Kabul to apply for a visa to enter the US. The visa officer didn’t believe I was going to study. I had worked so hard for years, and in one minute that person decides that I am not there to study, that I am not worthy of a visa. It was heartbreaking. I felt like the ground beneath my feet was taken away.
Emily was furious about what had happened. She helped connect me to a professor at Arizona State University whose book I had used in my studies, and he helped me get a visa and a scholarship to ASU.
In 2016 I got a humanitarian parole visa. This past May I was granted asylum in the US; with that, I can now travel and return to this country. I plan to visit my family soon.
PT: What were some of your first impressions when you got to the US?
MAHFOUZ: It didn’t feel real. I was in Chicago at first, and for the first few days, every time there was traffic, I felt a bomb would explode. That’s because when I was leaving Kabul there were many suicide bombings. The night before I left there was an explosion that killed hundreds of people. It took some time to realize explosions wouldn’t happen here.
Another difference is that here there is no boundary between the street and home. In Afghanistan, whenever I left the house I had to wear a burka. Here I felt like a child again. No burka. I could go out whenever I wanted. I could go swimming, which I had loved as a child and then had to stop because I was a girl.
PT: Tell us about your US studies.
MAHFOUZ: I got lucky with mentors. I was majoring in physics at ASU, and [physics Nobelist] Frank Wilczek visited to give a weeklong seminar for undergraduates. The topic was the perception of new reality. I met him and there was an immediate friendship and mentorship. We had similar interests in literature and philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks. My learning originally was inspired by my grandfather, and then I saw this same love of learning in Frank. He really got me interested in quantum physics.
At ASU I met Cindy Keeler, a quantum chemistry, quantum gravity person, and I started working with her. She pushed me to read research papers. That’s when I got really interested in quantum information. She nominated me for a workshop that was held at Caltech. There I met Peter Love, who was on sabbatical from Tufts. His group was developing quantum algorithms to simulate quantum chemistry. I got really interested in his work, and a few months later, in 2020, I quit my bachelor’s degree program and joined his group.
PT: What are you working on now?
MAHFOUZ: I run problems that are solvable on existing quantum computers to develop algorithms for future error-correcting quantum computers. Quantum computers still have a lot of errors. How do you test an error? You take a problem that you know the answer to and test your algorithm to see the error between the exact answer and the solution from the quantum computer.
I love it. I love the creative work.
PT: Do you see yourself staying in physics?
MAHFOUZ: Yes. When I am away from it for a few days, I miss it. My work in physics is so clear, and it challenges you intellectually in a different way.
PT: What are your longer-term plans?
MAHFOUZ: I want to write. I feel that I can contribute more to the world through literature. I have been seriously working on a novel set in Afghanistan. It explores the 20 years during which the country was under US occupation.
Every day I would look at people’s faces on the street and think a car was going to explode. It’s those experiences that I want to examine. I feel that Afghanistan has not been creatively explored. I have been reading Russian, German, Egyptian literature. I’m particularly interested in how individual lives relate to politics. I want to tell stories that have not been told, that deserve to be told.
War strips you of your humanity, and the story behind each human is reduced to a headline: a bomb blast here, a land mine there. But what makes us human is not the grand events but the small everyday things—the way we hold a cup, the thoughts that cross our mind when we see the sun setting, the songs we listen to. When the headlines are too big, the small things get buried under the rubble of shattered homes.
I have thought a lot about this because I have seen Afghans in extreme situations that are hard to imagine for those who have not lived them. When we see a headline saying that 100 people died in a bombing or an air strike, we do not see their faces before they died. We do not know their names, their dreams, their loves. We are distant from them. I think good works of fiction allow us to empathize.
I feel there is so much injustice in the world. And the stories we hear often dehumanize people. I think the attitude to immigrants is often “What are they going to take?” Very few people talk about what immigrants give.
PT: Is there anything you’d like to add?
MAHFOUZ: A lot of the time people think about education as a learning path. But for me, education is about training your mind to think in new ways and to break away and see the world with new possibilities. We are living in a world that is constantly changing, and there is so much to understand.
I have faced many challenges, and I haven’t given up. I always try to find an answer. I think my self-learning has equipped me to understand how different things interconnect. I feel more independent and intellectually confident.
