You’ve read Tamim Ansary’s e-mail? Now read his book

Not that Ansary held any sympathy for the Taliban, the al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. ‘‘When you think Taliban, think Nazis,’’ he wrote. ‘‘When you think bin Laden, think Hitler.’’ But in the long run, levelling Afghanistan would only serve Osama’s diabolical end of starting a war between Islam and the West. ‘‘Who has the belly for that?’’ Ansary’s e-mail concluded. ‘‘Bin Laden does. Anyone else?’’

Like ripples from a stone tossed in a shallow pond, Ansary’s message radiated into cyberspace, exponentially replicating.

Within days, his electronic inbox was flooded with thousands of responses from across the globe. Everyone from Oprah to ABC’s ‘‘World News Tonight’’ was calling, eager to anoint him the official voice of the Afghan people. From there it was a short, perhaps inevitable step to a book contract, and the publication of his memoir West of Kabul, East of New York (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), an account of a life split between Islamic Afghanistan and the secular West.

‘‘At first I felt weird about having stumbled into a position where I speak for other Afghans, and I still think it’s weird a little bit,’’ Ansary said during an interview. ‘‘But I feel what I’ve been able to do is build a richer picture, so there is more appreciation, more sympathy for Afghans.’’

After moving to the US when he was in his teens and earning a degree from Reed College in Oregon, Ansary has earned his living by writing textbooks and books for children. (He and his wife, who live in San Francisco, have two children of their own.) He also taps out a regular column for Microsoft Encarta, an online encyclopedia. For the last two years, he said, he has been working on a series of books in which he has to summarise complex concepts in 25 words or less.

What remains ironic is that Ansary is best known for an electronic missive of a few hundred words, dashed off in a state of high emotion. He believes this unguardedness may have been a boon. ‘‘If I had written with a consciousness that I was going to write for thousands of people or for a public I didn’t know, and if I wrote with a sensitivity to making myself immune to criticism and judgment, it probably wouldn’t have been as effective a persuasive essay.’’

Ansary’s father was an Afghan who met Ansary’s Finnish-American mother while pursuing a doctorate in education in Chicago. When the couple married and moved back to Afghanistan in 1945, Ansary’s mother was the only American woman in Kabul.

While Kabul had barely made it into the 20th century by 1948, ‘‘most of Afghanistan might as well have been living in Neolithic times,’’ he writes. ‘‘Everything that made life worth living was private, and the splendid secret was there behind every door along that lane, behind every compound wall.” But when he moved to the US in 1964, he took to American culture, growing his hair to his waist and worshipping Bob Dylan ‘‘back when his voice still worked.’’ Later, the family split up. Ansary’s father moved back to Afghanistan, and Ansary’s brother turned toward fundamentalism during a trip to Pakistan. That prompted Ansary to embark on his own pilgrimage in the 1970s. He got as far as Turkey, though he was blocked from re-entering his homeland. He hopes to visit there for the first time in years this summer.(LA Times-Washington Post)