Security fears and money worries take toll on Afghan literary scene

Poets’ weekly gatherings suffer slump in fortunes as budgets tighten after the withdrawal of western troops

Every Thursday, down a quiet residential street, hundreds of men gather inside a red tent. Here, they turn off their mobile phones and settle down for an afternoon of poetry reading.

In Afghanistan, which has a literacy rate of 28%, poetry and the oral tradition of it has long been part of the culture. Even an illiterate farmer will have a few lines of Rumi, the nation’s preferred scribe, committed to memory. The medium has served as a glue that binds together the ethnicities that make up the modern state of Afghanistan.

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