Shouts from Beneath the Burqa

Two things are bothering me today. One is such my embarrassment as an American Christian over Franklin Graham's comments on Muslims and the Holocaust -- and the other my consternation at how far behind I've fallen in my reading.

I hope that Graham isn't behind in his reading, and that it at the very least includes books like Nabeel Qureshi's Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (about an American Muslim college student who struggles through to finding his real identity in Jesus; as you can guess, it is not an easy road).  It seems to me that there is enough anti-Muslim feeling among American evangelicals without stoking the fire. And whatever Graham says will always hit the headlines.

I can only wish that we'll listen to other voices.

I'm almost always behind with my reading, including one of my favorite journals, Books and Culture.  So on a recent trip, I took along a pile of the most 'recent editions'--like September/October 2014!  So if you've read that one, my apologies. But 'Shouts from Beneath the Burqa: Eliza Griswold's Translations of Afghan Folk Poems' is one page that is well worth reading a few times.

Here's a small quote from the article:

I am shouting but you don't answer—

One day you'll look for me and I'll be gone from this world.

Such was the landay—a two-line folk poem repeated over centuries among Afghan nomads and farmers—that Rahila Muska recited over the phone to fellow Afghan women in 2010. A women's literary group, Mirman Baheer, meets every Saturday afternoon in the capital, Kabul, and hosts a call-in hotline that attracts young poets from rural provinces. After Rahila's sister caught her reading love poetry, Rahila's brothers beat her and destroyed her notebooks. Two weeks later, Rahila set herself on fire, then died."

And here's a bit more:

Others are brazenly confrontational, challenging husbands and fathers (most of Afghanistan's 15 million women are married by age 16; three out of four are forced marriages) as well as the political forces that shape their future:

May God destroy your tank and your drone,
You who've destroyed my village, my home.

The poems are from Griswold's newest volume, I Am the Beggar of the World.

The statistics show that nearly half of the Muslim population in the world is under the age of 15. And I don't know for sure, but I suspect that half of the Muslim population is also women?

Evidently evangelical Christians in the US care about the 20 million Jews in the world. I'm not always sure that they care about the 1.6 billion Muslims.

I don't think God has forgotten either, especially, 'the least of these.'

US Director