No matter that this Californian is surrounded by Harvard students as she speaks, is the daughter of a physician, and is third cousin to the exiled king of Afghanistan.

Amiri says that the terrorist attacks have transformed her previously quiet life, turning a shy academic into a focused activist intent on rebuilding her native country at any cost.

Amiri, who fled Afghanistan with her family as a child in 1973, has even written a will.

''My life has turned upside-down,'' she says. Now, Amiri is asking herself such questions as: ''What will you live for, and what will you die for?''

The transformation has been sudden, triggered by a statement Amiri made to Senator John F. Kerry during his Sept. 18 meeting with Muslim students at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

When the floor was opened for questions, Amiri emphasized that not all Muslims think the same, or bear hatred toward America.

''The color of our hair and our skin does not reflect what is in our hearts and minds,'' Amiri said.

After the speech, Amiri was approached by reporters. Since then, she has emerged from ivory-tower anonymity at Tufts and Harvard to become one of the region's leading voices for women's rights and refugee assistance in Afghanistan.

Since then, she's given lectures, written opinion pieces, appeared on TV news programs, and participated in forums regarding the fate of her native country.

And over the past two weeks at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, in a colloquium ending today, Amiri has been participating in an annual gathering of ''Women Waging Peace,'' a network of activists from conflict areas around the world.

Amiri's short-term goal is to focus media and humanitarian attention on the millions of refugees who have fled the rain of bombs and bullets that a US-led coalition is dropping on Taliban forces in Afghanistan. The refugees' fate, made increasingly perilous by the approaching ravages of winter, is intimately bound to the future security of the United States, she argues. 

Just as the Afghanistan civil war following the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet forces created an opportunity for Taliban extremism, Amiri says, Western indifference to the new refugees could breed further resentment and dangerous political instability.

From such tumult, Amiri says, future terrorists could emerge.

''We can't say that [Afghanistan] is not our backyard, that it is not in our interests,'' Amiri contends. ''The United States has to take a leadership role.''

Amiri plans to return to Afghanistan soon and work for the political reconstruction of the country, and the reemergence of women in all levels of Afghan society. When the Taliban came to power in the 1990s, women were forced into second-class citizenship, stripped of most rights, and ordered to hide their faces and bodies in public.

Until she does return, Amiri will work behind podiums, at microphones, and on the other side of reporters' notebooks. But speaking out has its price, even if that cost is so far measured only in fleeting moments of personal anxiety.

''There are people in our midst who hate that an Afghan woman - especially a woman - has taken a stand against the Taliban,'' Amiri said. 

Amiri has expressed that stand on CNN, National Public Radio, and WBUR-FM, and in speeches at the Fletcher School, Harvard University, Boston College, Simmons College, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

She also has written opinion pieces for journals and newspapers, including The Boston Globe, and has been quoted in articles and editorials published throughout the country.

Amiri has managed all this while studying central and southwest Asian affairs at the Fletcher School, working as a senior research associate for the Women and Public Policy program at the Kennedy School, and advising the refugee relief efforts of the Afghan Women's Educational Fund in Pakistan.

''I have lost my social life completely,'' says Amiri. ''Everything I do is geared to the Afghan issue.''

The issue resonates deeply with Amiri, even though she has not returned to Afghanistan since her family fled after a 1973 coup d'etat that toppled the king. ''My father felt his life was under threat,'' says Amiri, whose tribe includes the elderly exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. The monarch lost his throne in part because he had angered Muslim extremists when he tried to extend education and other rights to women.

Amiri sees herself in the present-day images of Afghan refugee children, clasping their parents' hands as they struggle toward the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Even though she was 4 or 5 at the time - Amiri is unsure of her exact age - the connection is painful. 

''By some celestial flip of the coin, my family had the resources to leave,'' Amiri says.

After a short stay in Bombay, the family immigrated to the San Francisco area, where they maintained an Afghan life among the stark cultural differences of California.

''My family only speaks Farsi at home. We listen to Afghan music, eat Afghan food. Our weddings are Afghan,'' Amiri says. ''We lived in that frozen culture. We preserved the notion of what it meant to be Afghan.''

Now, despite a quarter-century in the United States, Amiri is compelled to return home. For the children, she would go, and for the women who she says played a vital role in the education and commerce of pre-Taliban Afghanistan.

''I'm in a position to do that, just by the reason of my identity,'' Amiri says. ''I'm a human face on the problem.''

Amiri also brings intelligence and sensitivity to the discussion, says Najim Azadzoi, head of the Afghan Community of New England.

''She has a very good understanding of the situation. She is not biased. She is not politically linked to one party or the other,'' Azadzoi says. ''We really need someone of that character, especially among the women.

For Amiri, the cause is both globally important and personally natural - to relieve the suffering of the Afghan people.

''I can't take sides in a war. The only side I've taken is the side of the people,'' she says.