WEST OF KABUL, EAST OF NEW YORK

An instructive memoir by an Afghan-American thrust into the news after September 11, 2001.

On September 12, responding to talk-show callers who urged that Afghanistan be nuked or otherwise pounded into submission, Microsoft Encarta columnist Ansary wrote an impassioned E-mail defending his native country. “Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age would be redundant,” he wrote. “Twenty-three years of war had taken care of that already. The horrific crime in New York was not committed by the Afghan people, but by nationless thugs who had moved into ruined Afghanistan like rats into rubble.” Widely circulated, the E-mail brought Ansary to international attention, affording him both the celebrity and the occasion for this memoir. Born in Kabul in 1948 into an influential family, Ansary lived in two worlds from the start by virtue of having an American mother. When his family was forced to leave Afghanistan at the outbreak of the long civil war, Ansary relocated to the US, grew his hair to his waist, listened to rock ’n’ roll, and became an American—but always with a backward glance at his homeland, which clearly could have used his talents and level-headedness. He had an opportunity to revisit his native culture when reporting on militant Islam for the Pacific News Service, which, he writes, required that he put a Marxist, materialist slant on what he considers to be the “spiritual and not material hunger” of the young adherents to fundamentalist theology. Much of this slender book is given to recounting Ansary’s travels through North Africa and the Middle East, where he hears many variations, some of them quite twisted, on the themes of Jewish evil, American perfidy, and Islamic superiority. This reportage is highly useful for anyone seeking to understand the Muslim world’s hatred for the West, and it adds much to an already thoughtful consideration.

Lucid, often surprisingly funny: a very welcome contribution to our understanding of this tragic nation.