Koofi has survived two assassination attempts, the latest this past summer as she and her daughter rode back to Kabul from Parwan Province (a bullet shattered a bone in her arm). As the Taliban come closer to gaining power in the government, violence has increased, including targeted killings of those best able to maintain the gains of the past two decades: activists, intellectuals, journalists and government workers. She went on to spend more than a decade as president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society and remains closely associated with the Red Cross/Red Crescent.īoth Gailani and Koofi know that many Afghan women are worried that after being victims of men’s wars, they will be victims of peace. She has earned a series of degrees, including a master’s in Islamic studies and the law from the Muslim College in London.Īfter the Taliban government was driven out in 2001, Gailani was a delegate to the international conference in Bonn, Germany, convened to recreate the structure of Afghanistan after more than 20 years of war. For Gailani, born into a peaceful Afghanistan in 1953, education was always a given. He was also, she says, a strong advocate for women’s rights. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, her father, the head of a Sufi order, became a prominent leader in the mujahideen fight against the Russians. She is currently one of four women on the government team at the peace talks, negotiating face-to-face with the Taliban.Īnother woman at the talks, Fatima Gailani, brings a different personal history to the negotiating table. At 46, Koofi is a well-known women’s rights activist and parliamentarian, the first woman ever to be second deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s National Assembly. It also offered the freedom to do what her father would never have allowed: for her to go to school, dream big and become-as her mother promised-someone special. Her father was sent on a peace mission by the Soviet-backed government and was killed by the Mujahideen. All that changed when Koofi was still small. In The Favored Daughter, Koofi writes that her father was a member of Afghan Parliament, wealthy enough for the family to lead a privileged life among the gardens and rushing waters of one of the country’s most remote and beautiful provinces. Years later, her mother added a sadder motive to that story, telling her, “I didn’t want to have another girl to suffer as much as I suffered.” Her mother, deeply unhappy and desperate for a son after her husband took a new wife, allowed her newborn daughter to be left out in the sun to perish. That is how Fawzia Koofi’s memoir begins. “Even the day I was born, I was supposed to die.”
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