She was born on July 7, 1977 in Isfahan. Her grandparents are people of Bakhtiari and Qajar descent. Her father, Sayed Kamal Faghih Imani, is a senior ayatallah in Iran and was a devoted follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, in whose house Maryam has been, while was brought up playing as a child with the children of other ayatollahs. She was educated in a religious school that taught her to hate Israel and that erased the Holocaust from history books. She was the youngest daughter of nine children and was “a rebellious child” who read forbidden books and “asked questions that angered her father.” Although her right to higher education was denied by her father due to her gender, but with her insistence, she was permitted to attend college unlike her other four sisters, in spite of not being marri