Nadia Anjuman Herawi (Nadja Anjoman) was a talented young Afghani poet who died at age 25 under highly suspicious circumstances. What were her crimes? To be a woman and dare to be a poet? To speak her unmanacled mind freely? To become an advocate and spokesperson for women like herself-women who loved literature so much they risked death by reading censored writers right beneath the snoutlike noses of the Taliban? Ireland may have hurt Yeats into writing poetry, but Ireland didn't kill him for having the talent and audacity to be published. And while it may not be possible to say Anjuman's position and stature as an acclaimed female Muslim poet directly brought about her death, the mere fact that such an eventuality seems plausible should give the world pause, as in "Stop and see where the hell we're heading!" To make matters worse, if such a thing is possible, the same Nadia Anjuman who survived the nightmare reign of the Taliban may have died by the hand of her own husband, a scholar and writer... Which plunderer's hand ransacked the pure gold statute of your dreams In this horrendous storm? -Nadia Anjuman, "Strands of Steel" Of all the alarming things that appear herein, what alarms me most is something reported by Christina Lamb, an award-winning journalist/writer and expert on "things Afghanistani," who wrote a book about the celebrated Sewing Circles of Herat, to which Anjuman belonged. Lamb reports: "Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it." Her poems, written in the Dari language, a dialect of Farsi, were dangerous, simply because a woman had chosen to speak her own mind. When the Taliban had been in power, girls not only had been limited to studying the Qur'an (Koran), but they had also been denied the right to laugh out loud, or to wear shoes that made any noise. But when the Taliban was driven from power, Nadia Anjuman and women like her were still not free.