A few weeks ago, I met a young squash champion at a conference in Manhattan called “Women in the World”. Normally, that would not excite me, since I am not much of a sports fan.

But this particular woman, Maria Toorpakai Wazir, left me feeling profoundly humbled; indeed, after chatting with her I will never look at a racquet in the same way again.

Twenty-five years ago, Toorpakai was born in Waziristan, a mountainous, tribal corner of north-west Pakistan that is struggling with Islamist fundamentalism. As it happens, this is close to the birthplace of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 because she was attending school (she survived and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for championing female education). Toorpakai, like Malala, grew up chafing at the oppression she saw. So much so that when she was five years old, she refused to wear girls’ clothes.

“I wanted to hang out just like my brothers,” she recalls. “They were running around, and wrestling, and I thought I would be just like them. So I tossed all my girly clothes in a fire [and] cut my hair.”

Initially, her family was horrified. But, eventually, her father, Shamsum Quayyum Wazir, let her do some weightlifting, dressed as a boy and using the nickname “Genghis Khan” — and she won some competitions.

Then, when her family moved to Peshawar, Toorpakai tried squash too, a popular sport in Pakistan. “Genghis” proved even better at that, and she started winning (boys’) championships. But when the organisers asked to see her birth certificate, she was exposed as a girl — and the Taliban threatened to kill her for the “crime” of wearing shorts.

She tried to face the Taliban down. The government even posted snipers on the squash courts to protect her. But Toorpakai became haunted by a vision of exploding glass. “I wasn’t scared for myself,” she said. “I was scared for everyone out there, because if I [went] to a squash court, it was going to get blown up.”

So, eventually, she gave up, and then spent several years as a teenager trapped at home, endlessly hitting balls against the walls. To pass the time, she wrote “thousands” of emails to squash champions around the world, asking for support. One day, Jonathon Power, a Canadian squash luminary, answered her call. And, as Toorpakai turned 20, she entered the professional circuit in Canada. She is now ranked 56 in the world and number one in Pakistan (although the latter ranking is somewhat academic, since she can no longer actually play there).

In some senses, this is a profoundly depressing story. Three decades ago, I worked as a charity volunteer in north-west Pakistan during a gap year and, while it was conservative, back then it was also a society of great kindness, courtesy and hospitality. As a teenage girl, I moved fairly freely, albeit wearing a headscarf. But now, as Toorpakai’s story shows, this sense of civility has been ripped apart by the war(s) in next-door Afghanistan, by corruption in the Pakistani state and by a rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism. It is a sad indictment of a national dream gone wrong.

Yet Toorpakai’s story is also uplifting: if nothing else, it shows the courage that people sometimes display in the face of horror. And this is not just on the part of Toorpakai; her parents have also been extremely brave. And that highlights a crucial point that can be forgotten by feminists or at “women’s” conferences: that whenever a story emerges about a woman who has escaped from religious oppression, there is often a brave man involved too.

If you are a father in a place such as Waziristan or Peshawar today, it takes guts to permit your daughter to defy the gender convention. The behaviour of women is deemed crucial for family “honour”. As an anthropologist might say, the cultural identity of the community is embedded in female behaviour, and any breach of the rules is viewed as a symbolic threat. Yet Toorpakai says that her father was “very supportive” of her desire to hit squash balls. “He believes in equality,” she insists. The same is true of Malala’s father: he took the brave decision to let her attend school.

So the next time I see a squash racquet, I will silently salute girls such as Malala and Maria Toorpakai — and be profoundly grateful for the freedom that women take for granted in the west. But I will also pay tribute to Shamsum Quayyum Wazir and the other (largely invisible) men who have been willing to break with convention. Without them, Toorpakai’s tale would not have had a happy(ish) end; and sadly this is rare.