This summer, I am reading a delightful book both to escape and learn: Jed Rubenfeld’s "The Interpretation of Murder." It's about a murder and an attempted murder on the day Sigmund Freud first set foot in the U.S. accompanied by Carl Jung. You get a good mystery, engaging writing style, and you learn a lot about New York social life at the beginning of the 20th century -- not to mention the psychoanalysis, from Freud and Jung to Shakespeare. What more can one say?

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If we must go by what is in the book, then there is really only one rape scene that is consequential and it has nothing to do with the Taliban. Hassan is raped by the neighborhood thug Assef, who later becomes a Taliban official and does the same thing with many boys, including Hassan’s son. The scene in the book is as much about Amir’s cowardice/jealousy/betrayal as it is about the rape itself.

Such incidents are not uncommon in all societies, not just Muslim ones. This is certainly not a particularly distinct Afghan pattern of behavior. The record is obviously mixed on how Afghans relate to homosexuality. It is a stain on one’s name in certain parts of Afghanistan and in some contexts – but just read Asne Seierstad’s book The Bookseller of Kabul and you’ll find that in certain parts of Afghanistan the boy lover is an institutionalized fact, with its own rituals and codes of behavior.

There is nothing surprising about the filmmakers’ underpayment of the actors, though it is obviously unacceptable and draws into question the standards of ethical behavior for the producers. Neither is their insensitivity to the consequences of filming the scene surprising (but then one must wonder why there was no outcry against the book’s author, since it is he who has produced the scene in his book). Insensitivity does not necessarily have to be because of malice, either.

But then again, the reaction points to a major problem that we will continue to face in the coming years and maybe the coming decades. The West has such diminished moral capital in the rest of the world these days that everything will be seen as part of a campaign to defame the non-Western – with particularly violent reactions in the Muslim world, which believes it is under mortal attack. Therefore anything that emanates from the West is condemned. The walls of cultural particularism are raised for bad reasons perhaps, but with some justification.

How do you then square this circle without falling into the trap of moral relativism? I honestly don’t know.