Shortly after 11th September 2001, Tamim Ansary of San Francisco sent an email to 20 friends, telling how the threatened US reprisals against Afghanistan looked to him as an Afghan American. The message spread, and in a few days it had reached and affected millions of people - Afghans and Americans, soldiers and pacifists, conservative Christians and talk-show hosts; for the message, written in just 20 minutes, was one Ansary had been writing all his life.West of Kabul, East of New York is an urgent communiqu? by someone who has experienced the two very different worlds of the Islamic East and the Secular West. The son of the first American woman to live as an Afghan, Tamim was brought up in the intimate seclusion of Afghan family life, until emigrating to San Francisco. There he found a huge expatriate community, all dreaming of returning to their home country, something that Tamim found himself drawn to, only to witness the beginnings of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Ansary has emerged as one of the most eloquent voices on the conflict between Islam and the West. His book is a deeply personal account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.