Fablespinners: Literature's Online Open Mic!

Two former Afghani Taliban apologists who spent time at the U.S. base at Guantanamo, Cuba stated that their time in the camp gave them inspirational time to write poetry.

During investigation from May 2002 until April 2005, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost said he had written more than 25,000 lines of poetry in his native language of Pashto, in a strict Pashto form of poetry somewhat similar to the sonnet: 14 lines of 14 syllables, rhyming alternately after an opening couplet.

Dost was already a respected religious scholar, poet, journalist and author of 19 published books prior to investigation, about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, concerning his fomenting terrorist activity in the form of three magazine articles . He said his prison writings would significantly increase that number of publications.

His brother and fellow Guantanamo inmate, Badruzamman Badr, who speaks English fluently, said in an interview:

"The Americans gave me books ...I read Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens."

In another poem popular with his fellow prisoners, he slanderously stereotyped the sexual equality in the ranks of the U.S. military as impotently sexless. Because short-haired women and clean-shaven men in their identical fatigues often seemed indistinguishable to Muslim prisoners, used to men with long beards and fully cloaked women, Badr, a proponents of Pashtun nationalism, which is a movement to create an independent state for ethnic Pashtun tribes, after overthrow of both Afghani and Pakastani authorities, found favor with his revolutionary comrades, when he said in the last line of a poem:

"They may have weapons and missiles, but we can find no sign of manhood in this army."

Dost interviewed in his magnificient home in Peshawar, Pakistan said that on balance, after having time to reflect on his sojourn in Cuba, at U.S. taxpayer expense:

"The positives have outweighed the negatives. . . I was not unhappy for being detained because I learned a lot. I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantanamo Bay. In the outside world I could not have written such things."

# posted by fablespinners @ 2:37 AM