''They said choose: poetry or us.'' After reading the lame praise for Kerry's interest in poetry, I was especially struck by this passage from Elizabeth Rubin's brilliant article in the NYT Magazine, "The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why":

Abdullah Thabet, the poet in Asir [Saudi Arabia], told me that back in the late 90's, after years of training him to become part of the new generation of religious organizers, the Salifiyya teachers discovered through informers (his friends) that he was reading Hemingway and Hugo and an Arabic Communist philosopher and that he was writing and reading love poetry -- absolute heresy. They beat him mercilessly. ''They said choose: poetry or us.'' He cried for days, not wanting to lose that solidarity. But Abdullah Thabet needed music and poetry more than the harsh Wahhabi creed. Now that he has broken the spell and criticizes Wahhabism, openly writes poetry, advocates women's rights and the teaching of music and painting in school, his parents say they think he's an infidel, and his former Islamic brothers threaten to kill him -- as they did when they saw him with me outside an Asir restaurant.

Yes, poetry is a nice enough thing to dabble in, but would you risk death to keep it in your life? More on Thabet:

[H]e's the image of apostasy -- long sideburns, no beard, jeans, leather jacket, cigarettes. I drove with him around the province one day as a Muzak version of Lionel Richie's ''Say You, Say Me'' strained on his old Ford speakers. ''You can't have a girlfriend in this society,'' he told me. ''It's too expensive to marry, and as a young man, all you're thinking about is sex. So the 'teachers' would tell us, Don't worry, no need now, when you kill yourself you'll have plenty of girls in heaven.'' ... ''If there were girls in our high school,'' he said. ''I never would have joined those groups.''

There's something so sweet and sad about Thabet finding solace in a Muzak "Say You, Say Me." There is much, much more in this article, which is mostly about another man, "the most daring and idiosyncratic of these reformists," Mansour Al-Nogaidan.