It's important to understand that violent Islam is only one face of violent religion.

I worked with two young women translators. One died and the other received a death threat from the Taliban.

My upbringing was pretty interesting. It was a rigorous, intellectual upbringing, but with the idea that we were a part of an important and legitimate enterprise. What that meant was sitting around the dinner table from a really early age with people from all different backgrounds who believed in God. When I was reporting in the wake of September 11th in Iraq and elsewhere, I felt I had the capacity to talk to people whose beliefs might sound outlandish to more secular journalists. I felt like I could be a translator between those two worlds.

If we were to see Western landay poems, we'd see them out of disenfranchised populations, maybe out of the legacy of slavery. Spirituals, rap music - that would be the space we'd find American landays in.

You can't be wrong in journalism. Take a wrong turn in journalism, and you are writing fiction. You can take a wrong turn in poetry, and something wonderful can happen.

Islam doesn't have a monopoly on violence in Africa. And violence plays a particularly critical role in places where statehood is weak at best, such as the Maghreb.

The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice. Landays, they're about love and pleasure and oppression and levels of oppression within a family. And because of that, I think rap music is probably closely related.