– Seymour M. Hersh, the New Yorker, May 24.

Poolside in Baghdad last June, I told some American journalists that I thought Iraqi men were pretty cute. They thought I was joking. The invective exploded: “Fat, sexist Arabs” was the party line. I was shocked, not least because these same reporters routinely criticized the American occupation for treating Iraqis poorly. And I was hurt, too. Many Iraqis looked like my own people. They looked like Jews. If Arabs are fat and sexist, what are they saying about Jews behind my back? Slurs against Arabs are, after all, just another form of anti-Semitism.

At the time, I worried that these casual bigotries showed an American inability to see Arabs as fully human. Perhaps this incident should have served as a wakeup call for me that my optimism about our ability to win Iraqi hearts and minds was misplaced. But as a supporter of the war I buried these doubts, and hoped for the best. Even if the journalists were giving vent to prejudices they would have been ashamed to voice about Jews, blacks or Asians, I thought better of the American soldiers I met.

I still support the war, and I still think most of the American military in Iraq did a remarkable job in seeing past such bigotries. But the abuses of Abu Ghraib make me think I should have taken the journalists’ remarks more seriously. There is something about Westerners and the Arabs and sex, it isn’t simple, and it needs discussion before it capsizes our relationship with the Arab countries. One good place to start is a bad book by an American Jew.

It is hard to take seriously a book titled “The Arab Mind,” though apparently some influential people in our government did. The simple-mindedness of the title sticks in the throat, even knowing that author Raphael Patai, who died in 1996, also published a book called “The Jewish Mind” and even knowing that the pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism popular at the time he wrote might have influenced his decision to group all Arabs together. The Arabs Patai studied lived in Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq and Somalia. It is rather like writing “The North American Mind” and treating Mexico, the United States and Canada as part of one culture.

No matter that Patai earned two doctorates, and studied not only Arabic and Hebrew but also Aramaic, Syriac and Arabian inscriptions. No matter, even, that he professed an “incurable romanticism” about the Arabs and a “lifelong attachment to Araby.” Only Patai’s own history — he was born in Hungary and educated in Budapest and Germany at the cusp of the Nazi era — reassures us that he would have every reason to avoid racist stereotypes. Patai was among that generation of Jewish refugees who lived in Palestine (for 15 years in the 1930s and ’40s) and then in the U.S., where he taught at Columbia, Princeton and — his longest stint — at Dropsie College, a Jewish institution later merged into the University of Pennsylvania.

As its title might suggest, Patai’s book lacks intellectual rigor. Worse, it’s a smear job masquerading under the merest veneer of civility. In fact, it’s so sloppy and so biased that the best reason to read “The Arab Mind” today is for what it tells us about Westerners and what we want to hear about Arabs. In 1972 it was still possible to write as though psychology were something that applied to other folks; today it’s fascinating to discover just what Patai fastened upon. What’s interesting isn’t so much that, in Hersh’s words, Patai believed that “Arabs are especially vulnerable to sexual humiliation” as that Patai mirrors a long stream of highly sexualized or sex-obsessed Western views of Arabs. There is no straight line from “The Arab Mind” to Abu Ghraib, or to the war in Iraq, but there is a suggestive trail.

The Western preoccupation with the sexual aspects of Arab culture is so deeply ingrained that it remains unanalyzed: Think of “1,001 Nights” and “The Sheik” (which was an international bestseller before it became a vehicle for Rudolph Valentino), or the imagery of the harem and the veil. Of course the lowest-common-denominator Western imagery of Chinese, Japanese or sub-Saharan African cultures incorporates sexual stereotypes too, but the focus isn’t as intense as in our view of Arab cultures.

Part of the problem may be that there aren’t all that many Arabs living among us — 3 and a half million, or hardly more than 1 percent of Americans, in the most generous estimates. But the other part is that the stereotypes have little to do with our actual experience with Arabs in the United States or during travel overseas. Even more than their cousins the Jews, who represent only 2 percent of the American population, Arabs are the stuff of myth.

The myth begins with sexual repression — not ours, of course, but theirs. Only one-tenth of the pages of “The Arab Mind” discuss sex, but nearly all the discussion circles around the issue of repression. It begins in the cradle: Patai’s diagrammatic Freudianism leads him to assign a prominent place to “Arab Child-Rearing Practices,” the third chapter.

“Is there such a thing as a general pattern of child-rearing practices in the Arab world?” he begins, and answers that “even two such widely separated cultures as those of Morocco and Iraq appear quite similar when compared with the Greek, or Italian, or Sub-Saharan Negro culture.”

Appear quite similar to whom? The French anthropologist Germaine Tillion, whose expertise is Berber culture, famously argued the opposite a decade before “The Arab Mind.” She wrote that the key traits of what northern Europeans take to be Muslim or Arab society — the seclusion of women, endogamy, male circumcision, the prohibition against eating pork — are more usefully treated as fragments of an ancient Mediterranean culture underlying what are now Muslim, Christian and Jewish cultures. Tillion argued that child-rearing practices in southern Italy and France had until recently a tremendous amount in common with North African mores. Tillion’s subtle, elegant and concise book, published in English as “The Republic of Cousins” (and recommended to me in Baghdad by the Iraqi-American intellectual Kanan Makiya), is, unfortunately, largely unknown outside France.

It certainly appears to be unknown to Patai. Having determined by fiat that his method is valid, Patai goes on to claim that because every noun in Arabic is either masculine or feminine, “there are no words for ‘child,’ ‘baby,’ ‘infant,’ ‘toddler’ and so on.” Patai argues that because of this linguistic structure, there are no child-rearing practices in Arab culture, only boy-rearing or girl-rearing. Therefore Arabs imprint unusually sexist attitudes on their children from the day they are born.

It apparently did not occur to Patai that while nearly every noun in French, Italian and Spanish is masculine or feminine, there are words for “child,” “baby” and so on in those languages. As common sense would suggest, there are words for “child” and toddler” in Arabic too. In both modern standard Arabic and Iraqi dialect, at least, “tofl” means child and “radhee” toddler, regardless of gender. And of course Arabs speak of children and toddlers in general, just as other speakers of gendered languages do.

Did Patai make a basic mistake, hardly credible in someone who had taught Arabic at the high school level? Or was he perhaps trying to mislead the reader? A few pages on, Patai’s discussion of the raising of little boys suggests biases so strong as to show bad faith.

“Comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals. Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but simply to make him smile … The association of the mother, and hence women in general, with erotic pleasure is something that Arab male infants in general experience and that predisposes them to accept the stereotype of the woman as primarily a sexual object and a creature who cannot resist sexual temptation. The most frequently stated purpose of female circumcision is to ‘calm down’ the women, that is, to diminish their libido.”

One wonders how Patai’s avowed Arab friends reacted to this extraordinary piece of rhetoric. Patai’s sources for the caressing of little boys’ genitals are few; in the footnotes, he writes that an anthropologist “informed me that, according to one of his informants, this practice stopped in Lebanon after the child began talking and walking.” One informant of one anthropologist is worthy of citation? The data is thin indeed. Common sense suggests that some mothers in all cultures fondle their children inappropriately, but most mothers in any given culture do not. Short of a massive study of Arab mothers, I’m not prepared to accept that they are systematically so different from Israeli or Italian or Spanish mothers.

Even if Patai is right about Arab mothers, his reasoning remains highly flawed: The upper-middle-class Viennese Jewish children observed by Freud also associated the mother with sexual pleasure. Apparently that is what breast-feeding children do.

So why do only Arab men grow up thinking of women as sexual objects? And how is this connected with the pre-Islamic North African practice of female circumcision? A culture can believe that women can’t resist sexual temptation without circumcising them (for instance, traditional Afghan society). But a casual reader might come away from this paragraph with the impression that Arab mothers, by masturbating their infant sons, lay the groundwork for the circumcision of their daughters and the pathology of Arab society.

It will come as no surprise that the eighth of Patai’s 16 chapters, “The Realm of Sex,” emphasizes the repression of Arab societies compared with European culture. But it also abounds in elementary mistakes and misleading remarks. “Whenever a man and a woman meet, the devil is the third” may well be “a Sudanese Arab saying,” as he writes, but it is also a variant of a celebrated hadith, or saying of the Prophet, reported by Tirmithi. This hadith is far more important than a regional folk saying; Patai should make more rather than less of it if he means to diagnose Arab pathologies. It underlies what Tillion has called “a sort of etiquette that obliges any boy to pay court to any woman he may find himself alone with”; she observes that in Mediterranean society — not merely in its Islamic variants — “we see sexual obsession imposed on men.”

Patai is also on shaky ground discussing how Arabs talk about sex. He claims that “the very word for ‘wife’ (zawja) in Arabic is felt to be too indelicate to use, because of its sexual connotations (it is derived from the verb meaning to couple).” Yet my sedate Iraqi Arabic conversation book — originally published in 1949 — calmly uses “zawja” and the related adjectives “mitzawij” and “mitzawja” (“married”); the Quran also uses a variant of the word in distinguishing prohibited sex from sex within lawful marriage.

In fact, Patai’s insistence on Arabic repression doesn’t square with the Quran, which can be strikingly plainspoken about sex. In the important sura 24 aya 31, referenced by Muslims as one of the justifications for veiling women, the Quran urges “believing women” to keep secure their faroujejooneh, or genitalia, and in sura 3 aya 4 (often referenced because it permits Muslim men to take up to four wives) we are told fenkahou matab, “have intercourse according to your taste.”

It is obvious by the time we reach Patai’s fourth chapter, on the Arabic language, that no matter what he claims, Patai is not illuminating a culture he loves so much as building an indictment. Here the goal is to show that Arabs are irrational. Patai states that because of the structure of the Arabic language, “for the Arab mind it is of relatively little concern whether two past actions, events or situations recalled were simultaneous or whether one of them preceded the other. It is almost as if the past were one huge undifferentiated entity.”

It is true that in classical Arabic, as in biblical Hebrew, the tenses do not correspond to those in the Indo-European language group. But in the Arabic dialects, there are prefixes to denote action currently going on and action in the future (in Iraqi, “d” for current action and “rah” for the future, and in formal Arabic, “sah” or “sofa” for the future). In formal Arabic, and the Quran, the prefix “f” is added to a series of verbs expressly to show a sequence in time (more or less, “and then this happened, and then this, and then that”). In both formal Arabic and Iraqi there is a structure approximating the Indo-European subjunctive (“if I were rich, I would buy a Ferrari”). The past is no more “one huge undifferentiated entity” than the Arab dialects or the Arabs themselves.

Whatever the merits of Patai’s argument about Arabic’s tense structure, if he is going to argue the inferiority of Arabic on this basis, he could just as well argue its superiority on the grounds that it is far more logical and complex than any of the modern European languages. It is also puzzling to think of the people who gave the world the zero, algebra and the foundations of astronomy as indifferent to calculating time. But Patai doesn’t spend even a page on the scientific aspect of “the Arab mind,” and to the extent that he takes notice of Arab cultural achievements at all it is to proclaim their inferiority to Western models. The Arab decorative arts represent a “neglect of reality,” and Arab music is also deficient: “Many music-loving Arabs who have had a European education despise traditional Arab music … Most musicians and music critics incline toward Westernism.”

By now it should be clear that those Americans who took “The Arab Mind” seriously as a sourcebook on Iraqi culture would have reinforced any existing negative images of Arabs they had and added plenty of new ones. Although there is something to be said for Patai’s willingness to analyze rather than merely describe, the reader interested in a philosophical treatment of Arab culture would do better to consult the Tillion book, or Columbia University anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Veiled Sentiments” (about the Bedouin of Egypt’s western desert). Both books are far more intelligent, careful and subtle.

The seriousness with which this amateurish text was apparently taken does no honor to this administration; more experienced Arabists than I might want to investigate just how well Patai really knew Arabic. The majority of his citations from books published in Arabic are drawn from translations into the European languages or Hebrew (and thence into English by Patai), which also raises questions about accuracy. He does indicate in the notes that his translations of some Arabic newspaper articles are his own, which gives one pause after finding so many errors in his remarks on the language.

But the larger point is that no one seems to have cared much about accuracy, neither Patai nor his neocon readers. Patai says more or less what we’ve long wanted to believe, and that was enough. And the objectifying, dehumanizing and contemptuous tone of Patai’s discussion of a people he claims to like is inseparable from his arguments. It is a great tragedy if it influenced American conduct in Iraq.

Part of the reason I supported the war is inseparable from my conscience as a Jew. If I am not willing to intervene to save Arabs from a tyrant, why should Christians have been willing to intervene to save Jews from Hitler? “Never again” can’t apply only to my people. It is terribly ironic that Patai’s repressed Arabs are the inverse of the Jews of medieval and 19th century myth, oversexed, underinhibited and, in the case of women, readily available. But maybe it is to be expected. It might be that the two anti-Semitisms are inseparable the one from the other, and that it is no coincidence that European sentiment against the Jews has risen along with European and American sentiment against the Arab world and the Arabs and Muslims among us.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that the main reason Bush attacked Iraq was to strengthen Israel, not least because it would play too neatly into the anti-Semitism that positions Arab-Israeli relations as a zero-sum game. But I suspect that any influence “The Arab Mind” had on American policymakers tapped into the deepest level of Westerners’ troubled feelings about Jews, Arabs and sex.

Thanks to the always gracious and patient Dr. Ameer Hassoun, originally of Baghdad, for his assistance with the Arabic language.

Half their people want to come here anyway; instead of worrying about visas and quotas and green cards and policing our borders, we could make there become a lot more like here, with decent-paying jobs and free public education and the rule of law and freedom of speech and the newspapers to prove it, with driver’s licenses and auto insurance and real roads and building permits and trash pickup and all of the rest of it. Farewell to child labor, honor killings, female infanticide, illiteracy, casual bribery. Liberals will have to stop whining about wars for oil, because the oil will be ours, and conservatives will have to stop whining about foreign aid, which won’t be foreign anymore. European intellectuals will have to stop comparing Ariel Sharon to Hitler, because the Palestinians will have a state, and it will be one of ours.

This modest proposal is only slightly more outrageous than the imaginative leap Lee Harris advocates in his startlingly original and visionary work “Civilization and Its Enemies,” which aims at nothing less than providing the vocabulary and theory for political thinking post-al-Qaida. Harris thinks that the world is at the brink of something he calls American “neo-sovereignty,” which means that America is recognized globally as having not only the power but also the moral credibility to lead. When a country is unable to restrain ruthless gangs operating within it, Harris argues, it must be the U.S. “who decides what is to be done” because “the United States represents the ultimate source of legitimacy in the world.” The U.S. also has the characteristics to serve as a template for remaking the world: “a practical design for the next stage of human history: a utopia that works.”

Our diversity, Harris says plausibly enough, is “a historically unprecedented microcosm of the rest of the world.” He asserts that Americans have created and mastered a social technique that can solve many of the outstanding human and humanitarian problems facing the world today. “We have figured out a way of living together, and others can learn it from us, if they are willing.” This sanguine assessment appears at odds with European public opinion and media, not to mention a generation or two of academic America-bashing, but Harris has an answer:

“There are many Americans who did not like Clinton as president, and many who do not like Bush, but only a handful disliked them so much that they would have preferred to see them removed from office at the cost of a civil war. This is how much of the world feels about the United States today. They bash us, and yet they recognize our legitimate authority … Indeed, the world is beginning to show toward us that cynical disrespect for authority that has always been one of the hallmarks of our national character … But this is fine, so long as the world is also displaying the other great hallmark of our national political character, which is to accept the legitimate authority even of men we can’t stand.”

Note the repetition of the word “authority.” Although he does not quite say so, Harris seems to envision a gradual drift toward American rule, where countries obey even where they do not love. As he has said earlier, “by agreeing to act like Americans [people] became Americans.” Acting like Americans means following the “code of honor” of what Harris calls, with an unfortunate disregard for euphony, “team cosmopolitanism,” which combines respect for the individual conscience and the rule of law, for office and for fairness.

To Harris’ great credit, he has not written yet another screed defending the West against the Others, or “traditional values” against “multiculturalism.” Diversity is one of the core values he envisions in the future of American neo-sovereignty. Harris, who is gay, invokes San Francisco’s Castro District as well as Detroit’s Muslim neighborhoods as examples of the America he envisions the rest of the world resembling and learning from.

Harris’ most controversial remarks are probably those defining what constitutes a state. He is caustic on the new “honorific concept of sovereignty” in which “the state is no longer restricted to a political entity that can in fact defend itself against all comers … it is now … an entity called into being by the formal recognition of the international community.” Thus he takes no prisoners on the subject of the “Palestinian state”: “If the Palestinian people were indeed a genuine state fighting a genuine war, they would have long since been annihilated root and branch or else forced to make a realistic accommodation with the state of Israel … That [Palestinian] state will exist as a viable entity only by virtue of the liberal conscience — and seemingly inexhaustible forbearance — of the Israeli people.”

Such outspokenness and common sense are not often met with in the pundit class, and Harris is an interesting character. A longtime resident of Stone Mountain, Ga., he was a divinity student, a mystery writer and a glazier before taking on the mantle of “reigning philosopher of 9/11,” in the words of Daniel Pipes’ jacket blurb. Only in America, as my people say. And perhaps Harris’ lack of the usual antecedents accounts for the absence of reviews. There is nothing worse than not knowing in advance what one is supposed to think of a book. (I should note that I know Harris slightly by e-mail; in the fall of 2002 I exchanged a few e-mails with him after his article “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology” appeared in Policy Review, a publication of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.)

“Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology,” which is incorporated in this book, made the point that the 9/11 hijackers didn’t have a rational program, or a larger plan. Indeed, they didn’t even announce who they were or what their goals were or how the attacks were supposed to further them. Their suicide-murders were nothing but symbolic drama. They were not Clausewitzian war. The hijackers professed what Harris terms a “fantasy ideology,” in which suicide was “not a means to an end but an end in itself.”

Harris’ debut was a nearly perfect essay in political theory: The model he proposed explains facts and answers open questions more elegantly than competing theories. For instance, why weren’t the attacks immediately followed by others? Because al-Qaida isn’t fighting a conventional war, it is engaging in theater, and “followup acts would have had no glamour, and it was glamour — and grandiosity — that al-Qaida was seeking in its targets.” Why is there no easy answer as to “what we did” to inspire such hatred? Because rational causes such as poverty and tyrannical governments in the Arab world did not create this fantasy ideology; America is just a prop in al-Qaida’s psychodrama. “There is absolutely no political policy that we could adopt that would in any way change the attitude of our enemies,” Harris writes.

If this book has an obvious flaw, it is Harris’ slighting of his motivations in beginning to write on these topics. Harris’ brilliant outpouring of political philosophy came after 9/11 and was spurred by the wounding of his country; his words sprung from the heart as much as the mind. But very little of what Harris says in his book takes into account the relative weights of heart and mind in determining how people live and organize their societies.

Take his remarks about the family and the difference between East and West: “Where the family rules, the team cannot prosper, and if the team cannot prosper, then neither can the society … the West got rich and free because it followed this pattern; the East remained poor and unfree because it continued to be immersed in the family … there is a cost (to the East’s choice) just as there is a cost to living in any one social order rather than another.”

Harris says what most conservatives are too chicken to admit: American values are by and large anti-family. But he doesn’t seem to think that there are any costs to the choice we have made.

He might have a hard time making his case for “team cosmopolitanism” to most of those people who remain immersed in the family, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in various other spots of current interest. They value depth of feeling over variety, continuity over change, security over upward mobility. And they would rather see the same 20 or 30 people day in and day out than live the way we do. They would rather call their cousin’s sister-in-law’s son at the passport agency than live under the rule of law.

Harris’ invocation of American subcultures betrays a somewhat mechanistic view of what a culture is. Like many Americans, I happen to enjoy our varied subcultures. But a society containing varied subcultures is a particular kind of society. Living in a family-oriented subculture in the Bible Belt or a religious Muslim subculture in Detroit is not the same as living in a traditional Christian or Muslim society per se. Some people want to live in societies that are relatively monolithic, just as some people want to be friends with those much like themselves in background.

Harris might also want to carefully distinguish the traditional, and pre-Islamic, structures of Middle Eastern society from Islam itself. As the French anthropologist Germaine Tillion pointed out 40 years ago, Islam set itself in opposition to tribalism and endogamy. If team cosmopolitanism aims to create “a society where membership is open to all who want to embrace the team ethos of their new community,” there is no better description of early Islam; it just so happens that Mohammed preached in an area characterized by clans and cousin marriage, and Middle Eastern Islam reflects this as much as it reflects the Koran.

There is a deeper philosophical problem with Harris’ view of our “way of living together.” Even here in the 50 (or will it be 80?) states, “team cosmopolitanism” doesn’t sound like much fun. The world of work that has been responsible for the great achievements of the West can be a dreary and unpleasant place. The good fellowship it provides is, even in the best case, pallid compared with family feeling and romantic love. Its cohesiveness depends on discouraging imagination, playfulness, contrarian thinking and risk taking, some or all of which most people enjoy. Teams can be fun, but they can also be nasty.

That’s probably why Harris was working as a glazier, not nestled in the bosom of a giant corporation or university (and why I work from my home as a legal recruiter, dear reader, to support my habit of writing for Salon). That’s why more and more Americans have turned to experiences that promise a warmer, mushier, more emotional or less competitive way of living. Fundamentalist Christianity is the most popular among them and the most socially influential in large parts of the country, but we should include chic bicoastal pastimes like yoga and studying the cabala too.

Many of us more-or-less conservatives — and I count myself in — have at one point or another found ourselves recommending to others, even to Others in the non-West, ways of life that we find profoundly unengaging ourselves. Harris has to defend “team cosmopolitanism” because it is the basis of most reasonable societies and it is exactly what fantasy ideologies rebel against. But he should acknowledge the costs, and not just in terms of the vanished sweetness of life.

“To force other cultures to stay permanently in the cake of custom imposed by the tradition of their ancestors,” he writes, “is a perverse way of expressing appreciation for their humanity.” I’ve heard this before: Why do you want this particular group of people to keep their quaint mud huts or rice terraces while you live in New York? This question assumes that custom is only a handicap and not a source of pleasure for traditional societies. It assumes that they take no joy in being who they are. And the remarkable thing is that whether or not you or I or Lee Harris would want their lives, they do.

“The West acknowledges the Other and is willing to compete with him,” Harris writes; “other civilizations would prefer that he not exist. It is the West that has gone to study the East, and not the other way around.” Even leaving aside the fact that this is true only, say, since 1492, that it ignores the intrepid travelers of medieval Islam and the fact that the Spain that sent forth the conquistadors had only just completed the reconquista — even so, this is rather like arguing that single people are more curious, lively and aware than married ones because they go on dates. People who are satisfied do not go in quest of something else. Nor, of course, do they blow people and things up in the service of fantasy ideologies. They stay at home. The lack of progress — look, no scare quotes! — in the East (I think Harris really means the Middle East) could also be seen as a sign that their society works for them.

Definitions of “West” and “East” also change over time. Until well into the 19th century, European Jewish culture was considered backward and “Eastern” by Christian (and even many Jewish) European intellectuals, and it mainly was. What happened? Jews were legally allowed to enter mainstream society and did. Dynamism is neither a property of particular ethnic groups nor of particular religions.

Harris’ book would have reached another level had he gone on — as I have no doubt he is capable of doing — to turn his erudition and originality to the flaws in our society. If it is worth defending, as most of us agree it is, it will still be so even when its fault lines are acknowledged. This is actually a better distinction between West and East than the one Harris draws. If there is anything that has constituted the strength of the West (keeping his capital letters), it’s our capacity for living with self-doubt.

The reality, when I made two trips to Afghanistan in 2002 to teach English and buy supplies for schools, was otherwise. From schoolboys at play to university students, Cabinet ministers to legendary commanders, Afghans were quieter, gentler and more self-contained than Americans. One young man confided that to him and his friends in northern Afghanistan, Americans’ body language and loud voices seemed exaggerated, like the gestures of stage actors.

It was hard to pity the women when I lived with an extended Uzbek Afghan family in Mazar-i-Sharif and Maimana for a couple of weeks. A withered 80-year-old widow sat bala, or at the head of the room, and she was the only person who smoked. The family’s resources were lavished on a bright teenage daughter, who had her own room and computer and was preparing for her university entrance exam. And the men were tender with their children and treated their wives, sisters and mothers with dignity. I felt at home more quickly than I ever have in an American household, and the fondness and respect I saw between young and old and men and women gave me new yardsticks for my own life.

Still, I often found myself unable to leave my American ways behind. When I asked my English students what they would buy their mothers if they were given $20, burqas (more properly called chadoris) were the gift of choice; when I asked what improvements the girls sought at Balkh University, they mentioned a changing room to put on their chadoris at the end of the school day. I was surprised at my own vehemence when I suggested that they throw the chadoris out instead. Later, then-deputy women’s minister Tajwar Kakar complained to me that the only topic female journalists wanted to discuss was the veil — not education, not job-training, just the veil. If I’ve finally gotten beyond this fixation it’s because I’ve started to suspect that it’s about projection, and that our deeply divided feelings about our own sexual culture makes Westerners so eager to attack other ways.

Whatever a Westerner writes about Afghanistan is going to be gravely wrong in some respects. But as long as we write with the awareness that we are probably projecting as much as we are describing, we might as well go ahead. After all, the goal of psychoanalysis is learning to recognize the transference and countertransference, not to stop us from ever falling in love again. Or in less specialized vocabulary, we’re not OK, they’re not OK and that’s OK too.

But for the way she nails the physical details, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s account of a large, unhappy Afghan family in “The Bookseller of Kabul” would seem to describe another country entirely. Seierstad has an eye for what looms large when you’re in a bad mood: the slipshod construction of Afghan houses, with gaping holes in windows and ill-fitting doors, the dubious sanitary arrangements, the grease in some of the food. She’s good at details, though either she or her translator never met a cliché they didn’t like. But of the many Westerners I know who’ve lived in Afghanistan, Seierstad seems among the least sympathetic to the country and culture.

In the spring after the defeat of the Taliban, the 33-year-old war correspondent lived for several months in the household of a 50-ish bookstore owner she calls Sultan Khan. She says at the start, “I was incredibly well treated; the family was generous and open,” but continues:

“I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family, and I have rarely quarreled as much as I did there. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women.”

Seierstad doubtless expects her readers to be nodding in agreement — we already know the truth about Afghan women, don’t we? — and, sure enough, “The Bookseller of Kabul” has broken all records for Scandinavian book sales, with a half million copies sold. This is a concrete demonstration that Orientalism is by no means out of style, even when handled by hands as crude as Seierstad’s.

Her choice to narrate from a God’s eye viewpoint — she does not appear in the story — allows Seierstad to cloak speculation and condescension with a veneer of journalistic veracity. Seierstad delivers the sensationalism she knows Westerners will lap up, describing Khan’s courtship of the 16-year-old who became his second wife, together with an obligatory Taliban book-burning, within the first nine pages. Seierstad has used omniscient narration to make it appear that these events, which she did not witness, are as objectively reported as the family’s cuisine.

“Seems like things are pretty bad over there,” a smart writer friend said to me with a grave look after finishing “The Bookseller of Kabul,” and doubtless many Western readers will assume that Seierstad is revealing the (single) “truth” about Afghan marriages and families.

Yes, like most Westerners, I find some of the bare facts Seierstad presents — notably how Sultan Khan takes a 16-year-old bride, Sonya, without consulting his middle-aged first wife, Sharifa — appallingly cruel. But isn’t it reasonable to think that the first marriage might have had some problems? The middle-aged Afghan men I met had grown old with their wives; polygamy is uncommon. And since Seierstad herself portrays the marriage between Khan and Sonya as relatively happy both in bed and out, Khan might have some good qualities Seierstad misses. Would we let a reporter get away with these sloppy tactics in America?

Perhaps because she deep-down believes that the people she is among are unfathomable savages, Seierstad never tries to find out why they do the things she describes. Sultan Khan himself remains an enigma, a man who endured two prison terms for selling books by immersing himself in Persian poetry, yet pulled his sons out of school to mind his shops. But Seierstad was too busy restraining her desire to hit Khan to find out who he is, or to try to explain his contradictions.

As the owner of the fabulously well-stocked and ridiculously pricey bookstore in the Kabul Intercontinental, Sultan Khan is easily identifiable in Kabul as a real man named Mohammed Shah Rais, and unsurprisingly, Rais isn’t happy. He insists that “The Bookseller of Kabul” defames his family and especially the honor of its women, and, most unusually, he’s seeking to sue Seierstad in Norway. News reports aren’t clear on the details of the case, or on what constitutes defamation under Norwegian law, but it seems that while Seierstad has dedicated $300,000 of her royalties to the Norwegian Afghan Committee, she paid the family nothing.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules about the ethics of these situations, but if Seierstad were truly concerned about the women and children of the “Khan” family, giving each of the adult women $10,000 or $20,000 would release them from dependence on the man Seierstad is eager to convince us is a monster. But this would imply that Seierstad cared for these particular human beings, as opposed to using them as props to demonstrate her preexisting opinions of Afghan society. In the plump publicity pack accompanying my copy of her book, one of several photos of Seierstad shows her with a group of Afghan women in a courtyard. Presumably they’re the women of the family, yet they’re not identified, as befits anonymous “victims.”

Of course, Seierstad’s experience isn’t invalid just because it was very different from mine. But even if Rais is a monster, that doesn’t entitle Seierstad to make sweeping generalizations about Afghan marriage. “In Afghanistan, a woman’s longing for love is taboo,” she writes. For love outside of marriage, yes. But surely not for a loving marriage. What would Seierstad make of the old Uzbek saying, meant to come from one aged spouse to another: “I hope we meet in the afterlife, because 50 years together was not enough”? The people who passed that down for generations cannot have thought of women as simply “objects to be bartered or sold,” even though the marriages they had in mind were arranged. And if body language, eye contact and tone of voice mean anything, the marriages I saw compared favorably with American marriages in terms of affection and, especially, respect.

Because Seierstad devotes so much space to sneering accounts of marriage negotiations, it’s worth adding a thought or two. In the Khan family, she notes, marrying one’s relatives is preferable. Here’s one place Seierstad didn’t generalize enough: In Afghanistan as a whole, most people marry their relatives when they can, and the marriage with a paternal first cousin is the most sought after. But in many ways this system protects women more than, say, Indian practices. Usually the spouses have known each other all their lives, and the new house the bride moves into contains relatives who are much less likely to abuse her than if she were marrying a stranger.

However alien the tradition of cousin-marriage may seem to Americans, for centuries it was the norm, and not only in the Arab world where it persists. As Germaine Tillion points out in her brilliant “The Republic of Cousins,” cousin marriage was the norm in the entire Mediterranean basin, including southern France and Italy, and among Jews. (Two of my mother’s older cousins married their first cousins, just 70 years ago). It’s even prevalent in Jane Austen’s novels.

Seierstad also stumbles in her account of the family’s social level. It’s misleading to give them the surname “Khan”, which in Afghanistan denotes old landed families who need not work for a living. Rais (which means “leader” in Farsi, and was probably a name taken during his ascent) is an upwardly mobile peasant from an illiterate village family — not a “good” family by Afghan standards, where genealogies may arch back a thousand years or more.

It’s true that the lives of the women of the Khan family don’t compare favorably with their best-case Western counterparts, educated, financially independent women with loving husbands and stable children. But the lives of the women of the Khan family don’t compare favorably with those of the Mazar household I visited either. Seierstad commits the major sin of writing about Afghanistan while failing to take into account her biases as an observer. Most Afghan women, I suspect, would find the lives of privileged, young professional women in chick-lit novels — working painfully long hours at jobs of questionable meaning and worth, living alone in a tiny apartment, dating boorish men, estranged from their family — lonely and pointless.

Additionally, Seierstad never considers that the family’s strained tempers or her own simmering rage might have something to do with the crowded conditions of the Khan family, whose three-room apartment in a once upscale but now decrepit Russian-built housing block housed as many as a dozen people. Would an Afghan journalist who lived with a Norwegian family in similar conditions report that all was sweetness and light? (My similar-sized Uzbek host family, by contrast, lived in a spacious house of more than a dozen rooms in an uncrowded area outlying Mazar-i-Sharif.)

This sort of parochialism and unwillingness to challenge one’s assumptions — together with a language barrier nearly all journalists are too lazy to cross — helps explain the uselessness of most writing about Afghanistan by outsiders. More interesting insights into Afghans, especially Afghan women, tend to come from anthropologists with good language skills (Benedicte Grima’s excellent “The Performance of Emotion Among Pashto Women,” which studies Afghan refugee women in Pakistan, or Charles Lindholm’s somewhat heavy-handed “Generosity and Jealousy,” about Swat Pashtuns) or those who went to Afghanistan to do a job rather than prove an ideological point, and spoke at least a little Farsi (Rosanne Klass’ elegant memoir of 1950s Kabul, “Land of the High Flags,” or Mary Smith’s artless, moving account of the women of the Hazara Jat in “Before the Taliban”).

But the best epigram I’ve ever seen about Afghans comes from the first Afghan-American novelist, San Francisco physician Khaled Hosseini. “Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules,” says a character in his moving debut, “The Kite Runner.” When you consider that Westerners are nearly the opposite, the inevitable collision of cultural styles becomes clearer.

Hosseini’s epigram can be unpacked to explain what I came to see as the Afghans’ tragic national flaw: risk-aversion. Coasting on the familiar tide of custom, insulated from the need for organized institutions by their hundred cousins, Afghans have been motivated to develop only the merest skeleton of a civil society. A tendency toward consensual decision-making and risk-aversion means stasis. Especially for those born into higher-status families, there’s more to be lost by trying and failing than there is to be gained by trying and succeeding.

Oddly enough, this propensity for risk-aversion, rather than a propensity to violence, may be the best explanation for Afghanistan’s often-decried “warlordism”: When thinking big is outlawed, only outlaws will think big. Most “warlords” in Afghan society are strivers from poorly connected, low-status families. Meanwhile, Afghan’s khan class — the landed gentry — collect advanced degrees and impressive job titles like ornaments, and treat government posts with tremendous casualness.

Precisely because few people want to rock the boat, it’s easily tipped over when someone does. Bad geopolitical luck, combined with the lack of strong civil institutions, leave custom and the gun as the two easy alternatives. Afghans can’t seem to stop killing each other because, like a couple in a bad marriage, they’ve never tried the scary venture of learning how to have survivable fights.

We Americans, on the other hand, don’t leave much to the realm of habit; we interrogate and debate everything; we are never satisfied. While we have created an immensely rich culture and a civil society that makes good on many of the utopian promises of 5,000 years of dreamers — religious freedom! Legal equality of the sexes! Universal education! — all too often we have the taste of ashes in our mouths. Cherishing rules over customs does not do much for the heart, and Afghans seem to understand this.

And handcuffs — well, seeing them at Sam Goody made me wistful. Once upon a time, you could still shock a guy by pulling them out. I suspect that there’s a connection between the collapse of masculine authority and the mainstreaming of S/M; neither gender is too good at distinguishing power and authority, and nostalgia for male authority can translate into fetishizing symbols of power. Women secretly want men with authority, but they fall for insecure passive-aggressive guys who view every aspect of life as a power struggle, or for cranky killjoys or petty sadists.

The collapse of the patriarchy was supposed to make women happy — we were supposed to get more sex, freer sex, better sex, more loving sex and better relations between men and women. If you went to an Ivy League college in the last 20 years or had a professor who did, you probably heard something about this.

But instead men treat women worse than ever, women are retreating to 1950s notions that sex is something men like, and the nearly successful effort to stamp out gender contrast has made upper-middle-class American sex miserably dull, with or without handcuffs. Men and women are just too much alike stylistically now for much erotic energy to arise from their conjunction.

This is especially true of those in their 20s. Here’s a relevant confession: Ever since I’ve been in my early 30s I’ve tended to date younger men. I’m now 45, and in the last five years I haven’t been able to get interested in men in their 20s, no matter how cute or buff. Men in their 20s — well, the Ivy League, professional sorts I meet, with their yoga classes and exquisite sensitivity about treating a woman any differently from a man — just aren’t masculine enough to be bedable.

Thus the legacy of two decades of feminism in academia. Younger people have bought into the idea that your lover or spouse is a friend of the opposite sex — although one who will exhibit bad manners you wouldn’t expect from your friends’ pets, much less your friends. The bad manners and androgyny go hand in hand; along with the erotic aura, tenderness and respect have disappeared. These young guys feel free to admit to physical fears, grooming preoccupations and social anxieties their fathers had the good sense to conceal, if they had them. They dress like overgrown toddlers, in oversize T-shirts and baggy pants, clothing that begs you not to take them seriously as grown-ups. They’re pussy-whipped and tamed by 30, but just below the surface they seethe with hostility and resentment at women, because they’re quite aware that their girlfriends or wives treat sex as a commodity to be doled out in return for something better. Neither the young men nor the young women enjoy it as much as they were told they would. Maybe the situation is worse for the women because, after all, it’s the men who are more like women, not the women who are more like men.

The women have won, if you’ve won when you have worse sex than your grandmother did. Secretly they don’t find these men very exciting, either. And they don’t feel feminine when they’re with them. What does “feminine” mean anyway, besides the result of a lot of grooming rituals drag queens can do too? Maybe it means having a baby. Sex is for corralling a man long enough to secure a “commitment” and then a baby.

The new joylessness: Talk with someone in their 20s about marriage and they bring in the word “work” in the first three minutes. I didn’t think like that when I was with a man for seven years in my 20s, and I don’t recall that my friends did either. This “work” goes along with the ubiquitous use of the word “relationship” in the romantic sphere, a word first used for a sexual connection in 1944, according to the OED; before that it was only used in a business context. And now that the patriarchy’s gone, everything isn’t pleasure, as radical theorists imagined, but business.

It makes perfect sense that the most popular sex act among younger people is oral sex, which lends itself so well to exchange. One for you, one for me. Check any online dating service and you’d have the impression that the male sex organ was the tongue. A recent scan revealed that of the 4,108 men on Craig’s List seeking women for “casual encounters,” 209 used the word “fuck” in their ads, 219 referred to their “tongue” and 363 to their “oral” predilections. Heaven knows what the rest of them planned to do in bed.

Oral sex is what American women say they want, and they have their men trained to do it, but do either men or women really prefer it to intercourse? No one dares say it, but the clitoral orgasm might be as much a myth as the vaginal — or as little. If you return to the original article that debunked the idea that women enjoy fucking, Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1970), you’ll notice that she gave no medical evidence for her belief that the clitoris rather than the vagina is the source of female sexual pleasure. You’ll also notice that she has a strong aversion to the vagina. It’s one thing to say that women only have clitoral orgasms, but one doubts the sanity of someone who writes that “women need no anesthesia inside the vagina during surgery.” Who’s first in line for that?

My bet is that just as many or more women have orgasms from fucking as from oral sex while many others don’t have either and fake them. That’s right, they fake the clitoral orgasms their boyfriends congratulate themselves on having the sensitivity to bestow. If we’re ready to believe that many women fake vaginal orgasms, even over many years with their husbands, why are we so sure some women don’t fake their clitoral orgasms too? It’s likely that many men believe they can tell more easily that way — and that, not some extraordinary new access to kindness and generosity, might be the source of the new male “enthusiasm” for oral sex. But pin them down and they’ll admit they can’t be sure.

Meanwhile, women who have orgasms from being fucked have learned to be quiet about it. Fucking is a suspect preference these days, as handcuffs used to be; after all, everyone knows that penetration is politically incorrect, involving all sorts of issues of gender difference and dominance and submission. Women who want a man to do what only a man can do in bed have to stick to over-40s or men from the Third World who haven’t heard that they’re supposed to pretend to like cunnilingus. But most American men have to pretend if they want to get laid, just as many women over the millennia have pretended to enjoy intercourse.

Nothing I say is meant to deny that oral sex is pleasurable for some people to give as well as to receive. But cunnilingus can be interpreted just as fucking can and neither is simple. Each has a cultural role. And just as some people like fucking partly for its cultural baggage, some people like cunnilingus for its associations or its lack of them.

The new American ideal is an equal relationship, satisfying our craving for justice and for simplicity. When I hear American women in their 20s and early 30s talk about their boyfriends, they seem preoccupied with whether they do 50 percent of the dishes and whether they spend 50 percent of the time talking about their problems and anxieties. Of course this is compensation for years of institutionalized unfairness, but it also sounds a lot like a defense against the powerful feelings they have for the men they love. And so with oral sex. It fits the 50-50 ethos better than fucking.

It also fits our new suspicion of deep emotions. Another reason fucking is out of fashion is that it makes us feel too much. Part of the appeal of oral sex — and why it is rapidly becoming a favorite of teenagers — is that it’s lite sex. No one loses control, loses track of where they are, forgets that music is playing, screams, or weeps, when someone performs oral sex on them. But fucking stirs deep emotions that go to our core as animals and humans. And with the absence of tenderness and trust between men and women, we’re more and more inclined to banish deep emotion from our post-patriarchal lives.

What’s often lost in the insistence on equality is quality — how the people feel about each other, how much love they can give each other. We now feel queasy about the romantic language of our ancestors, who used the metaphors of slavery and devotion unabashedly. But is there another language with which to speak of love? Love does involve two people putting themselves in the power of each other. We’ve forgotten that what we are looking for between men and women is fairness and compassion, not identity, and there can be justice between people who acknowledge that their balance of power is unequal. The heterosexual act of love does involve women putting themselves literally in the power of men. And we no longer trust enough to do so.

Kemal continued in his perfect, nuanced American School English, speaking of a loss of faith that had been spurred by reading Omar Khayyam, and I almost laughed. This reminded me of the last man I’d cared about, the only Muslim I’d ever dated. Amir had said he was a believer, but the two men shared a bedrock gravity and naiveté about religion I’d never found in a Christian or Jew I had dated. Here was also a seriousness about the written word I could only envy as a writer. Oh, I could imagine a fundamentalist Christian turning against his upbringing and cursing Jesus, but I couldn’t imagine it happening because of a poet. In Anglo-Saxon culture, poetry has not had such power for hundreds of years. But Muslims are people of the book, and as a student of Farsi I knew the centrality of poetry to Islam.

I let the topic of Allah drop, sensing that the cursing was part of a flirtation. And to my delight, for I was very attracted to him, Kemal turned the conversation to sex. At home in Istanbul he had a girlfriend, and he was convinced she was cheating on him during his three-week vacation in New York.

“Listen, this year in Istanbul I slept with one Italian woman who was on her honeymoon and another, Turkish, who was married for only one month. What does that tell you? ”

“That you’re cute.” What it really told me was that Kemal was preoccupied with female fidelity and was sending out signals that attracted women who were promiscuous, or wanted to be.

“And you, do you sleep around when you have a boyfriend?”

“It depends. Anyway, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

We soon came to the topic I’d dreaded, my age. Kemal wanted to know the year of the first of my five trips to Turkey, but it had been in 1978 so I didn’t want to say. It turned out he was just 32, 12 years my junior, the same age as Amir. Fate was laughing at me; though I’d sometimes found our age difference intriguing or moving, more often I’d been disappointed by Amir’s immaturity. I was telling myself that it would be perfectly understandable if Kemal walked away, but instead he asked if we could go somewhere for a drink.

I suggested my house, a little nervous because we hadn’t so much as touched. But when we got home things moved very quickly. Kemal was everything I was looking for in bed, or almost everything. He was intense but without the slightest flicker of warmth, not even the reflexes of a man used to caressing a girlfriend. There was no love to be made here. We had cold and breathtaking sex for a couple of hours, and then Kemal moved very far away, as the queen-size mattress allowed, and began to speak. I was disappointed that the sex was finished; Kemal was a skilled and satisfying lover. Perhaps his mind had drifted to his girlfriend; I missed what I had felt for Amir.

“If you get too close the sex isn’t exciting anymore. That’s the problem with most marriages. Couples should have separate bedrooms, the way my parents and grandparents did. They shouldn’t sleep together like lovers, holding each other. And you don’t need to talk so much to your girlfriend. You talk to your friends. When you meet a woman you want to fuck, you don’t talk to her. You see if you like touching her, you smell each other. Then you go to bed together.”

I sat up straight, all languor gone. These were the same questions that obsessed me. Perhaps Kemal was right, though he’d never been married. Some of the marriages I knew that worked best were those where husband and wife spent a lot of time apart. My own longest relationship — seven years — might have owed its longevity to two months-long stretches we spent living in different cities. And I’d grown to feel that Americans were too quick to make friends of their lovers, or to think that what they needed in a lover or a spouse was another friend. If I could satisfy my curiosity about a man by talking with him, I didn’t need to go to bed with him. The ones I wanted, now, were those whose hearts I learned through their bodies, those I got to know by making love.

I wanted to put feeling first, and sometimes it seemed the only way I could do that was to date men who didn’t see a relationship as mainly conversational. Perhaps this was why there had been a lot of musicians in my love life years ago. And it could be that men from some of the Muslim countries shared this style. Amir had spoken more to me, and much more eloquently, when we were friends than he ever did in the hours and hours we spent making love. Physical intimacy made American men voluble and open, but it had quieted Amir.

A friend of mine had said that the problem with Amir was he couldn’t both fuck and talk to a woman, and maybe this was the other side of what Kemal endorsed. What would it mean for a husband and wife to be “too close”? Wasn’t this a sad idea? But I also thought of one of the lines from the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi I had copied 100 times with a bamboo pen, practicing my Persian calligraphy : “Be silent that the lord who gave you speech may talk.” If we explore ultimate things when we make love, perhaps men and women learn more about each other in their silence than in their speech.

“I could sleep with a different woman every night in New York. You’re the third in three weeks.”

I had also been seeking consolation in sex; I wasn’t shocked. Then Kemal continued, “If I wasn’t staying with friends I could have fucked three more — an Italian woman who didn’t have a place of her own, and two 18-year-olds I had talked into a threesome. I met them at a club, one was Greek and one was Ukrainian. But they didn’t have somewhere to take me.”

Kemal stood up and put on his underwear, then sat down along the wall opposite the bed, facing me. He was now as focused and serious as if we had been discussing politics.

“New York is easy. It’s the major leagues in Turkey. It is so difficult to get a woman there to go to bed with you. You have to make her jealous. I only go to clubs where I know a lot of women, so I can dance with one and then another. Just as soon as one of them is getting hot for me, I excuse myself and dance with another one. If I didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be interested. That would be overkill in New York, people would think I was crazy. But in Istanbul it is what you have to do.”

Kemal spoke again of the faithlessness of women, musing that his girlfriend was probably doing exactly what he was doing, and I asked whether Turkish women liked American men.

“Turkish women are interested in American men. They’re tall, blond, and they have the same accent as the actors in the movies.”

How touching, after years of envying British and Italian accents, to realize that we Americans are glamorous for others just as they are for us.

“I met my girlfriend when she was with her boyfriend, an American. I asked for her number and she gave it to me. Later she told me that she lost respect for him because he let her give me her number. If it had been a Turkish man I would not have asked. And if I had asked, he would have stopped it, or started a fight, or said something, something humorous. What’s worse, her former boyfriend is still my friend! American men are not men.”

I could picture the American, studiously p.c., trying not to be possessive or treat his girlfriend as if he owned her. I shared Kemal’s scorn; I also missed an element of gender contrast with most American men and didn’t often find them erotically appealing. Still, I didn’t like hearing it from a foreigner. And American men had a basic kindness and generosity that was a desirable part of masculinity too.

“Your country is completely crazy now, with all these rules about sexual harassment. In Turkey the society takes care of sexual harassment. If a man is harassing my woman friend, I will warn him, and if he continues, I will beat him up. If a man rapes a woman, and he goes to prison, he will be killed there. If a man in a subway molests a woman, he will be beaten up.”

I wondered if that were true. The social compact Kemal mentioned, which Amir had also invoked, held that men protected women and in return women deferred to and took care of their men. It had its beauty, and I had known something of what they spoke. But it had broken down everywhere, not just in America; women largely kept their share of the bargain, but men no longer treated them with kindness and respect. Amir had shown me passion and tenderness, but he wasn’t even aware of how little respect he had for women. I heard none as Kemal mentioned his girlfriend, or the games he played to entice women.

Kemal went on, bestowing advice to Americans. “You women shouldn’t be too nice to us men. Turn your boyfriends down sometimes, we love that. But you have to recognize when we are being nice to you. It isn’t always easy for a woman to tell.”

This made me sigh, for Kemal was on to something. American women have been indoctrinated so well to demanding the outward show of love that we can have trouble recognizing affection when it is emerging. The more fragile and difficult fondness between men and women becomes in the West, the more strenuously we demand the duty call exactly at the correct time after the first date, the right restaurant for the second date, a dozen long-stemmed red roses on Valentine’s Day. We focus on the forms because we are afraid even to look to see if the content is there, afraid to look at our own hearts, and our lovers’.

“I worked in Russia for four years. I love Eastern European women. If they like you they will fuck you and if they don’t they won’t, there’s no bullshit.”

There is no courtship, Kemal may have meant. Maybe he didn’t get it about courtship, the Western ritual in which a man feigns submission in order, ultimately, to dominate. Asking a woman for her number in front of her boyfriend? Bold and direct, but also crude and charmless. The sort of man who would do that might also ask another woman for her number in front of his girlfriend. This was the behavior of someone for whom all of life reduced to power relations — a premise I had grown to find immeasurably sad, and also boring.

As Kemal pulled on his jeans I noticed that they were peculiar; at the ankle there was a horizontal seam and a flared part like none I’d ever seen. Then he drew on a pair of terry socks, as short as the white ones with pompoms I’d worn as a girl, but these were black.

I laughed. “You shouldn’t wear those in the States,” I told him. “Only women wear socks like that here. And one doesn’t wear socks at all with those loafers.” I flashed on another man, an Arab friend who wore a white tie on a black shirt, and on Amir’s oddly bulky black shoes, policeman shoes. Then I felt ashamed for congratulating myself on knowing the rules of my own culture.

“What do you do in Turkey?”

“Lawyer. And you?”

“Writer.”

“Are you going to write about this?”

“Maybe.”

Kemal kissed me on both cheeks; we were back to being near-strangers. But when he saw my cats on my couch he cuddled them. “I miss my cat at home.” As Kemal walked out the door, he said, dripping sarcasm, “Tomorrow’s Friday, my last day in New York. I have to find a mosque.” He had perhaps asked God one too many times for solace he did not receive. I knew the feeling. And I went downstairs to my computer and wrote down what he had said.

A month later, a mutual friend told me that Kemal and his girlfriend had broken up just before he came to New York; they are back together now and he is reportedly very much in love.