Invisible women

AlJazeera.com's Afghanistan Live Blog is a wonderful resource, but then one realizes the posts, at least recent ones, largely overlook women.

So we can only imagine their experience ... and that is the source for Fear of Beauty. Imagination. 

Afghanistan is not alone. Every society has its invisible people. And they can have fascinating stories.

Screenshot courtesy of AlJazeera.com.

Islamic fiction

Demand is high for Islamic fiction in the English-speaking world.

"Storytelling is a traditional Islamic art and the novel brings this art right into the home. Muslims of all ages need the contemporary Muslim story as a vehicle for interpreting the world in an Islamic light. Non-Muslims might also appreciate an insight into the diversity and unity of the Muslim way of life that the art of storytelling can provide," writes Yafiah Katherine Randall for Islamic Fiction Books.

Well, Fear of Beauty is about a woman in rural Afghanistan who struggles to learn to read with only the help of the Koran.

So is the book Islamic fiction if the author is not Muslim herself?  You decide. It would be nice to think of the novel as one that bridges cultures as some do ... and not offend as did the opening song to Arabian Nights.

"Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text," explain Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: East and West on Oxford Scholarship Online.  "Inspired by a 14th-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period."

Still, those banned books are good. 



And don't forget to sign up for the Goodreads Giveaway of Fear of Beauty. 

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and The Arabian Nights. 

Power of literacy

UNESCO provides statistics on global literacy efforts: More than one out of six of the world's adults are illiterate, two thirds of them women. Those who are illiterate and their children are likely to encounter a bleak future with limited opportunities. Among the 122 million who are illiterate worldwide, 60 percent are women.

The statistics are stark in Afghanistan, where going to school can be a dangerous venture. So about 40 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women were literate in 2000, according to The World Factbook of the CIA. UNESCO monitors populations, but of course, there is a lack of reliable cross-national data on literacy.  And lands with high rates of illiteracy are often too dangerous to monitor.

"Literacy contributes to peace as it brings people closer to attaining individual freedoms and better understanding the world, as well as preventing or resolving conflict," explained UNESCO on Literacy Day this year. "The connection between literacy and peace can be seen by the fact that in unstable democracies or in conflict-affected countries it is harder to establish or sustain a literate environment."

Fear of Beauty is about a rural Afghan woman who always wanted to read, but becomes desperate after her son dies in a fall and she finds a paper nearby. She begins by picking out words in her family's Koran, but soon realizes the process will go much more quickly with a teacher. And yes, literacy empowers her.

Photo of Kabul book press in 2002, courtesy of US Department of State and Wikimedia Commons.