"The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life," by Tom Reiss, Random House, $25.95, 429 pages. If you wanted to get a start on understanding the tensions between Islam and the West, you could do worse than read a 68-year-old, near-cult novel, "Ali and Nino," a Romeo-and-Juliet love story involving a young Muslim man and a young Christian woman set in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the time of the First World War. If you do, it may captivate you so much that you will, like Tom Reiss, want to know more about Kurban Said, its mysterious author. He wanted so badly to know that he spent five years on Said's trail. Whether he fully succeeded in capturing the elusive writer even Reiss might concede is open to question, but one thing is certain: After reading "The Orientalist," his account of the hunt, you will, besides having enjoyed a ripping good literary mystery, know even more about Islam-Western conflicts. Reiss came upon his subject after going to Baku to write an article about the oil boom on the Caspian Sea. At the urging of Western tourists, he read "Ali and Nino," originally published in German in 1937 and considered the national novel by educated Azeris, who offered numerous suggestions as to the author's identity, none of them accurate. Intrigued, Reiss did a little investigating and discovered that Said was really Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Baku in 1905 of an oilman father and a revolutionary activist mother. That was but the tip of the iceberg. If no one today knows who Said really was, it is because few then knew who Lev Nussimbaum was, or even that he was Lev Nussimbaum. Through extensive travel and a remarkable blend of sleuthing and scholarship -- interviews and searching of police records, love letters, diaries, and deathbed notebooks -- Reiss arrived at the beginnings of an answer. In some ways Nussimbaum's world resembles ours, Reiss says. The global order that had held for decades was crumbling. Terrorism was a fact of life, even more than it is now. Wild flights with his father through the Caucasus to escape the spreading horrors of the Russian Revolution nurtured Nussimbaum's "view of Islam as a bastion of heroic resistance in a world of brute force and injustice." The author says Nussimbaum "would come to see the Muslim and the Jew united in their struggle against the West and its mass violence." Nussimbaum was utterly captivated by Constantinople, seat of the sultanate and caliphate of all Islam, both soon to disappear when the city became Istanbul, "a realm of lost glory and mystery." He felt nostalgia for a culture that was dying even as he discovered it. Father and son eventually landed in Berlin, then a hotbed of Jewish Orientalists, where Nussimbaum immersed himself in Oriental studies at a university. In 1922 he converted to Islam, seeing it as an enlightened path, fostering ethnic diversity, between brutal ideologies. By his mid-20s he was already becoming famous as the prolific author of numerous biographies and other nonfiction works under the pseudonym Essad Bey. He married an international heiress, courted Benito Mussolini, traveled throughout Europe and to the United States, hobnobbed with the Nabokovs and Pasternaks and other intellectuals, and told everyone he was a Muslim prince, sometimes sporting a turban and flowing robes, or fur hat, bandolier and dagger. "He was simultaneously a Jew, an Oriental, and a German," Reiss writes, "but he never inhabited any one of these identities to the exclusion of the others -- all were products of a defiant mind that refused to be branded or categorized from the outside." Still, there were those who knew of his true Jewish identity, and as such he finally was forbidden to publish in Germany. Nussimbaum adopted the name Kurban Said to publish "Ali and Nino." Abandoned by his wife, fearful of the Nazis, he ended up in Italy, intermittently starving and, in the absence of medical treatment, slowly dying of Raynaud's syndrome. From 1939 to 1942, the year of his death, he was aided by an admiring Mussolini-era salon hostess named Pima Andreae. The great bulk of "The Orientalist" is less Nussimbaum's story and more that of the places and the times, particularly the wild, anarchic world of the Caucasus before and after the Russian Revolution. In general this is perfectly reasonable, even needed, since Nussimbaum reacted so idiosyncratically against those times. He had several opportunities to save himself by going to live with his millionaire in-laws in New York, but he passed them all up. Little wonder, for the compelling thing about him was, Reiss concludes, that "he believed he could invent his way in and out of anything." Roger K. Miller is a Janesville, Wis., freelance writer for the Tribune-Review.

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