I had never received a petition from such women defending the right of Palestinian women to safety from Israeli bombing or daily harassment at check­points, asking the United States to reconsider its support for a government that had dispossessed them, closed them out from work and citizenship rights, refused them the most basic freedoms. Maybe some of these same people might be signing petitions to save African women from genital cutting, or Indian women from dowry deaths.

pulling the black head cloth over the face in front of older respected men is considered a voluntary act by women who are deeply committed to being moral and have a sense of honor tied to family.

Although I am not an expert on Afghani­stan, I imagine that the majority of women left in Af­ghanistan by the time the Taliban took control were the rural or less educated, from nonelite families, since they were the only ones who could not emigrate to escape the hardship and violence that has marked Afghanistan's re­cent history.

Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier histori­cal and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Alge­ria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.

Why were these fe­male symbols being mobilized in this "War against Terror­ism" in a way they were not in other conflicts?

A fantasy withers in the sunlight of realism.

It is to indulge in fantasy

Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record.

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.

But women have survived. As poets

we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.