The climate here is not exactly beckoning. Yet people are starting to speak of Abu Dhabi and Dubai—the two wealthiest and most powerful of the oil-rich principalities that make up the United Arab Emirates—with the kind of eagerness for the exotic that, say, Bali evoked a decade ago. Celebrities like the Beckhams and Robbie Williams are said to have bought vacation homes in Dubai recently. Abu Dhabi is selling itself as a cultural destination. The U.A.E. is blessed with enlightened royalty and a seemingly bottomless supply of energy wealth, including about 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, and it is pouring billions of dirhams into reconstructing its global image.

Abu Dhabi's government has recently unveiled plans to build branches of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and—according to early rumors—the Hermitage here. A satellite campus of NYU is reportedly under discussion. A pamphlet about planned building projects on Saadiyat Island, just off Abu Dhabi's coast, reads like a roll call of the world's most famous architects, including Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.

But once you’re actually in Abu Dhabi, the largest Emirate and the country's capital, the prognostications about its grand future as a global cultural capital seem ludicrously at odds with the city's present offerings, which are slim by any standard.

A more accurate reflection of Abu Dhabi as it is today can be found in the classified ads in the local newspapers.

Engulfed by promotional material about Abu Dhabi's future, it's weirdly refreshing to find advertisements that are so grittily descriptive of Abu Dhabi's present. Anti-discrimination laws aren't a consideration here, so housing and help wanted ads are very specific about matters like gender, nationality, religion and visa status in a way that would be unthinkable in the United States:

"House Boy, Filipino male, live-in, preferably with HRM degree, required to serve as a Personal Assistant to an American executive."

"Lady Driver, Indonesian/Indian, with UAE driving license, required for a local family."

"Receptionist, female, Indian, on father's/husband's visa, required in Abu Dhabi."

There are scores of notices advertising labor camps, bed spaces, and spare bedrooms in family apartments to be shared by two or three people. Again, these tend to be quite precise about the ethnic groups that the advertisers are hoping to reach. It is hard to read them without imagining the economic pressures that have brought so many people halfway around the globe, the cots pressed close together in stuffy rooms, the anguished sense of dislocation.

"El Dorado cinema building, bed spaces available for Filipino bachelors."

"300 rooms labour camp available in Al Quoz."

"Big room plus wardrobe in Electra available for a non-cooking, single, executive bachelor, to share with a Tamilian family."

As the ads suggest, city life in Abu Dhabi has a strange, provisional quality. Most of the buildings are newly constructed. Their windows are tinted green or blue or purple, and iridescent like the inside of a shell. Construction cranes loom everywhere.

Abu Dhabi's planners want you to believe that the city is a model of contented multi-ethnicity. In fact, it is a deeply stratified society, and Emirati nationals, who make up only about 10 percent of the population, are at the top. None of these strata really mingle, though all of Abu Dhabi's inhabitants seem to spend much of their leisure time in the city's vast, chilly malls.

The U.A.E. also has a gender ratio that is more radically skewed than any nation in the world. There are about 2.74 males for every female here, though that number alone does not convey the horror of these contracted laborers living away from their wives and families for years on end.

Sometimes it can seem like everyone you meet in a given day has been here for less than five years, like everywhere you look, in cheap little restaurants all over the city, men are eating meager little meals alone, all facing in the same direction, not reading anything, looking slightly stunned to find themselves here.

Companies of all kinds are starting up here willy-nilly, and the housing ads are wrapped in advertisements for a host of firms that promise various kinds of assistance (attestation, debt collection, labor, immigration) necessary to start a business. A friend here who works for the Abu Dhabi government describes life in the emirate as "our gold rush," and it's true that there's a very Wild West feel to the place.

But that doesn’t begin to describe what a novel thing is truly happening here. Abu Dhabi is testing, as no place has ever tested before, whether money can make a society, and how fast this can be accomplished.

What happens if you drop, just as suddenly as modern capital markets will allow, a practically infinite supply of money onto a mostly inhospitable and uninhabited stretch of salty sandy soil? How do you build a great city? How do you build a great society? Will it work out? If Abu Dhabi builds it, will the people of the world come?

For now, they are coming in their multitudes. Yet the UAE doesn't extend the promise of citizenship, or even permanent residency, to more than a handful of these people. Does it matter that everyone is here for a more or less temporary stay, and that so few of these people have any kind of lasting stake in the society that they are spending years of their lives helping to build?

The new museums and performance centers will eventually go up, and Abu Dhabi no doubt has a lot more growing to do. But for now, beneath the breathless predictions and the gold rush excitement, the present here feels soulless and a bit surreal.

There was little fanfare. Beirut's streets were no longer reverberating to the sound of nightly Israeli air strikes, but as thousands of refugees returned home and reconstruction efforts commenced, it didn't seem like the right time to throw a wild party, Coup d'Etat's owner, Raed Habib, said.

"We kept things very low-key," Mr. Habib recalled. "It was a terrible war that we had last summer, and we knew we'd offend some people by celebrating this very sexual place in that context. There was a small party, yes, but Coup d'Etat opened quietly."

Yet Coup d'Etat opened all the same, and the launch of the cozy two-story lounge bar on a side street in the western Beirut neighborhood of Hamra a year ago became one in a series of historic Beirut firsts for the Middle East's often beleaguered gay community.

In a region where even well-educated and reform-minded citizens often regard homosexuality as an imported Western vice, where homosexuals are frequent victims of honor killings and where in some places (Saudi Arabia, Iran) those convicted of homosexual activity may even be subject to the death penalty, relatively liberal Beirut has in recent years become both a beacon of hope and a safe haven for many gay Arabs.

"Beirut in the last decade has become for gay Arabs what San Francisco was in the 1970s for Americans," explained a British gay man who has spent several years living in Beirut. "It's the place in the region where people come to be gay, to feel free in their sexuality."

Though homosexuality is still technically illegal in Lebanon, he explained, it is widely tolerated, and a handful of gay and gay-friendly clubs have opened in Beirut in recent years, helping to turn Lebanon's capital into an important destination for gay men and women from around the region. Helem, the first gay civil rights organization in the Arab world, was founded in Beirut in 2005, and that same year held the first marches for gay rights to be held in the Middle East outside Israel. Barra (the Arabic word for "out"), the first gay-interest magazine in the Arab world, was launched soon after.

As meaningful as these freedoms are for Arab gays with the means to visit Lebanon, Lebanese scholars and activists warn that their days may be numbered. In January, the first lesbian bar in the Middle East closed its doors as quietly as it first opened them, because gay Lebanese women were staying at home, and gay visitors from other parts of the Middle East simply weren't coming to Lebanon any longer. And though Helem's office is still open and the organization still produces health and information pamphlets and offers free counseling sessions, its founders say that they have all but ceased formal political activism on behalf of gay rights.

"During the war last year, we stopped activism entirely and simply joined the relief work," explained a young Helem volunteer who asked not to be identified because his family doesn't know of his sexuality.

"And now, well, volunteerism is down across the board. All the non-governmental organizations are suffering. We were making a name for ourselves, and gays from the other Arab countries were even coming to us. But because of the situation, everyone is turning their attention to political work."

The situation in question is the Lebanese government's nine-month-long political deadlock. After UN resolution 1701 put an end to last summer's 34-day war, there was a very brief period of calm as the country threw itself into the rebuilding effort and monies flowed in from abroad. But by fall, a new spate of assassinations and factional scuffles had commenced, and by December, thousands of opposition protesters, led by Hezbollah, were occupying downtown Beirut.

Yazan, a gay man in his early twenties from Damascus, Syria, said that he and his friends make the three-hour trip to Beirut as often as they can, and that since their high school days they've been fascinated by the climate of experimentation—political as well as sexual—that is on display there. They're more cautious about visiting Beirut now, Yazan says, but they still take inspiration from the freedoms they see on display here.

"I remember coming out of Boa a couple of months ago," Yazan said, referring to a popular gay club in central Beirut. "There were people striking for Hezbollah outside, in their tents. And here you've got all these gay guys coming out of a club, not hiding or being careful but just walking in the street, through the strike, and no one was bothering them. I thought to myself: 'I'm standing in a free country.'"

Carla, a lesbian woman from Damascus, said that she was thrilled to find a pirated copy of the film "Brokeback Mountain" at her local DVD kiosk, until she noticed the Arabic translation on the cover.

"They'd translated it as 'Perverted Mountain,'" Carla said. "But when I was in Beirut, I didn't have to hide. We all go to Lebanon so we can breathe."

Now, many gay Arabs who once frequently visited Beirut are staying away. This spring and summer, Lebanon saw tourist numbers plummet as the usual influx of tourists from the wealthier Gulf Arab countries went elsewhere, and dozens of restaurants and shops, especially in the downtown area still occupied by the protesters, have been forced to close.

Andrew Tabler, an American political analyst who has worked in the Middle East for more than a decade, said that Beirut, normally bustling with tourists from the other Arab countries during the summer months, has been quieter in recent weeks than he can ever remember seeing it.

"All the Lebanese I know are trying to find a way to leave, to get out of town," Mr. Tabler said. "And the tourists from the Gulf are all going to Syria this year instead."

The meaning of all of this for Lebanon's openness is profound.

"Before the war, Helem fit in very nicely with the new discourse of 'freedom and democracy,' and was trying to take advantage of that," a former Helem member, Rasha Moumneh, told Beirut's Daily Star newspaper late last year, adding, "It's just not the time for advocacy and it's not the time for lobbying."

"Lebanon is an oasis for many people from around the region, and not just in the realm of gay rights," explained Samir Khalaf, a sociology professor at the American University of Beirut.

"But watching the Hezbollah demonstrations go on and on, many people are asking if not only the lifestyle"—Dr. Khalaf continued, referring to the relatively free gay life that has been possible in Lebanon in recent years—"but also all these manifestations of openness, freedom, experimentation might be under threat."

“I’m not really into the whole New York mom thing, so I guess I wasn’t aware that Tibetans were such a big thing,” Ms. Ballantine said.

But they are.

By the time Gawker.com fingered the trend in a posting last summer—“Victims of Religious Oppression Hot New Childcare Accessory For Fall”—the Tibetan nanny craze had been the talk of playground-mothers’ groups and online parenting bulletin boards for many months.

“My nanny is Honduran,” read one posting on the popular Urbanbaby.com site. “Should I get a Tibetan? I hear they are all the rage.”

“Tibetan nannies … any ideas of where to find?” read another. “I like the idea of a Buddhist caring for my child.”

One of the site’s many enthusiastically pro–Tibetan-nanny subscribers assured fellow mothers that child-care workers from Tibet were “very balanced and Zen”; yet another explained,“Their personality is such that it makes them amazing nannies. Very patient, never lazy, soft-spoken and generally very caring.” Several suggested vaguely that the Tibetan nannies’ Buddhist heritage was the source of their supposed saintly qualities, even that a Tibetan nanny could contribute to a child’s “spiritual development.”

Other postings dealt with related topics such as where most of the Tibetan nannies in New York City could be found (Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights and the West Village seemed to be the general consensus), whether to hire a Tibetan nanny who was known to be a victim of torture (could she accidentally harm a child while in the throes of a flashback, the subscriber wondered), whether Tibetan nannies should be given a day off work in honor of the Dalai Lama’s birthday, how to respond to snobbish mothers who openly brag about having bagged Tibetan nannies for their babies and whether some non-Tibetan Asian nannies were pretending to be Tibetan during job interviews in the hopes that it would help their prospects.

Any liberal-minded person not currently awash with post-partum hormones may well find such conversations bewildering, if not outright offensive.

Cringe-inducing testimonials to Buddhist child-care aside, isn’t seeking out a nanny of a particular ethnicity just a little, well, racist? Is the Tibetan nanny trend simply a new iteration of the already well-documented New York nanny fashion for hiring Chinese nannies capable of giving well-heeled little ones a leg-up in learning Mandarin? Or is the nanny-hiring process one of the few remaining areas of social discourse wherein it remains somehow acceptable to trade in crude ethnic stereotypes?

These are thorny questions—and embarrassing ones—for many new mothers.

“There’s kind of a mutually agreed unspoken agreement among mothers that all the normal rules about racism are off when you’re talking about nannies,” said one book editor in her early 30’s who asked not to be identified because her Filipina nanny is illegal. “People talk about ethnicity in a way they never would at any other time. Even people who are very aware of not making racial stereotypes will put that on hold when talking to other mothers.”

“Part of it is just a shorthand way of saying what you’re looking for, and what qualities you’d like to instill in your children,” the book editor continued. “Before I knew that Tibetan nannies were a status thing, a friend’s friend was telling me that they were the very best. You hear that Filipina nannies are the best because they have a history of being caretakers in the Philippines. You hear that Caribbean nannies are a bit tough, so they’re good if you have an unruly child with discipline issues.”

Lucy Kaylin, the executive editor of Marie Claire and author of The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies, explained that many mothers are simply grasping at anything in the arsenal that might help them make what is at base a very emotional decision.

“As a good liberal, I certainly recoil at the labeling of people based on where they come from,” Ms. Kaylin said. “But among the mommy ranks it is strongly felt that you can make these distinctions. Some of the more common stereotypes that you hear are that Filipina nannies are deferential and quiet, whereas Caribbean nannies might be more inclined to be assertive about how the child should be dealt with. You hear that Latina nannies are very affectionate, and that English nannies and German nannies will run a tight ship.”

“When it comes to this high-risk critical juncture in your life as a family, you find people talking in terms that they would never normally use in polite society,” Ms. Kaylin continued. “Mothers caught in the grip of the nanny search can get a bit crazy. You’re desperate for clarity and information, and you find yourself poking around in realms of your psyche that you thought were well sealed off.”

Though much—some say most—nanny-hiring in the New York area is done illegally, the directors of Manhattan’s nanny-placement agencies are quick to point out that requesting a nanny from a particular nation or ethnic group runs afoul of U.S. anti-discrimination laws.

Joan Friedman, who has run the A Choice Nanny placement agency with her husband since 1991, said that she frequently hears requests from families for a nanny from a particular ethnic group.

“I don’t think people are trying to discriminate,” Ms. Friedman said. “I think it’s a simple lack of education about what the laws are in terms of discrimination. It’s funny. I’ll get a call from a family one day saying, ‘Please get us a Filipina nanny no matter what.’ And then the next day I’ll get a call saying, ‘We’ll take anything but a Filipina nanny.’ But there are a number of things that we’re not allowed to address with our nannies. For example, we can’t ask her whether she’s married or has children or what her religion is. And these are all things that are important to many people when they’re having someone working in their home.”

Cliff Greenhouse, the president of the Pavillion Agency, a Manhattan nanny agency, said that he can only field requests for nannies from a specific ethnic group if there is “a bona fide educational reason.”

“It certainly is totally legal for families to have any nationality preferences that they wish, but as an employment agency we’re not allowed to search for people from a particular place unless it’s related to a bona fide occupational qualification,” Mr. Greenhouse said. “If there is a bona fide need for a nanny who is actually an expert in the Tibetan culture—that could be for religious reasons, or for dietary reasons—then that’s one thing. But when someone says to us, ‘I heard the Tibetan nannies are great,’ then that’s something else, and we can’t do that.

“I get lots of families in New York who want Mandarin Chinese culture and education in their homes, and of course that is a bona fide educational request,” Mr. Greenhouse continued. “We’re seeing this more and more. It’s a result of the growing number of extremely wealthy families who can afford to seek out and employ someone to teach their children a language. And as the pool of Tibetans doing household work grows, then people are starting to request them as nannies more. People love the Tibetans.”

Of course, people of different cultures do raise their children differently; that’s why there’s such a thing as culture. Could there be some grains of truth behind the current hype about Tibetan nannies?

Malika Browne, a diplomatic wife who had her baby two years ago while on a posting to Nepal, where there is a large Tibetan community, explained in an e-mail why she’d never considered hiring a Tibetan nanny.

“They are a matriarchal society and you do not want to mess with Tibetan women!” Ms. Browne wrote. “Plus, Tibetans are stupendously beautiful most of the time, and I would worry!”

Farfur, a Mickey Mouse clone with a bow tie, tailcoat, and screechy high-pitched voice, was the star of Tomorrow's Pioneers, a Friday morning program aimed at preschoolers. He was played, Barney-the-dinosaur style, by an adult wearing a plush body suit topped off with a large, wide-eyed and perpetually smiling mouse head, and he appeared alongside Sara, a pretty teenaged presenter with a penchant for pastel headscarves.

Together, Farfur and Sara presented a series of short skits about subjects ranging from the importance of taking pride in the Arabic language to the goal of achieving Islamist rule in historical al-Andalus (present-day Spain and Portugal), and they took live on-air phone calls from children as young as three.

In one episode, Farfur spoke a few words of English and was scolded for doing so by Sara, who explained to him that he shouldn't be fooled into thinking that English is the language of progress. In another episode, Farfur was sitting in an elementary school classroom among a group of children taking a test when a teacher suddenly began twisting one of his black cartoon-mouse ears and accusing him of cheating. Farfur burst into tears, explaining that he'd cheated because "when the Jews destroyed our home, I couldn't find my notebooks."

The Farfur character drew horrified reactions from officials of Fatah, the Palestinian party that Hamas has been battling for control of the territories, as well as from Israeli and Western commentators.

The New York Daily News dubbed Farfur "terror mouse."

A Palestinian political analyst, Hani Habib, flatly told Reuters that Tomorrow's Pioneers was a recruitment tool for Hamas. Several Arabic newspapers, including Al Watan and Asharq Alawsat, covered the Farfur controversy.

Diane Disney-Miller, the only surviving daughter of Mickey's creator, called Farfur "pure evil" and demanded that he be taken off the air. Farfur was called "despicable" by Walt Disney C.E.O. Robert Iger, though Disney stopped short of issuing a formal statement on the subject.

"We were appalled by the use of our character to spread these messages," Mr. Iger said at a convention of the Society of American Business Editors & Writers, according to news reports, adding that Disney didn't "want to prolong the situation." "We didn't believe us making a statement would make Hamas do anything differently," Mr. Iger added.

Some Beirut-based friends of this writer jokingly gave Farfur a nom de guerre, Abu Jibneh (Father of Cheese, in Arabic). But the Farfur tapes – which are still widely available on YouTube--don’t actually provide much in the way of levity: piping voices of kindergarteners saying "We don't like the Jews because they are dogs," a Mickey clone dancing to a song about the joys of carrying an AK-47 against Israel.

After the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Information, Mustafa Barghouti, demanded that Al Aqsa take Tomorrow's Pioneers off the air, the station's programmers responded by killing off the show's mouse hero on live children's television.

On the June 29th episode of Tomorrow's Pioneers, Farfur appeared in a scene with an Israeli agent character who demanded that the mouse relinquish his lands to the Israelis. When Farfur refused, the Israeli agent character beat him to death, and as his anguished screams gradually subsided, the camera panned to Sara, who sat calmly before a wall covered with the kind of colorful foam tiles that might protectively line the play area of a nursery school.

"Yes, dear children, we have lost our dearest friend, Farfour," Sara explained, furrowing her brow and gazing into the camera, in a clip of the final program that was translated by Middle East Media Research Institute. "Farfour was martyred while defending his land, the land of his fathers and his forefathers. He was martyred at the hand of the criminals, the murderers, the murderers of innocent children."

Fatah was quick to take the moral high ground on an issue that was clearly outraging so many Western observers.

"I don't think it's professional or even humane to use children in such harsh political programs,'' Basem Abu Sumaya, the director of Fatah's Palestinian Broadcasting Corp, told the Associated Press.

"Children's nationalist spirit must be developed differently.''

But Farfur is hardly the first cartoon character used to discuss martyrdom with young children. As pro-Israel groups hasten to point out, Hamas and Fatah have employed such characters in the past, forming part of a long tradition of using anti-Jewish symbols to educate young children about nationalism.

"PA TV, Fatah's TV station, has been broadcasting such children's programs and music videos for children for over 10 years," said Itamar Marcus, the director of Palestinian Media Watch, in an email. "A prominent example is Tarabisho the Talking Chick, a talking puppet on a PA children's television program for preschoolers. Some of his messages were as dangerous as ‘Farfur Mouse’ but did not receive as much exposure because they were not Mickey Mouse clones."

Joshua Landis, an historian of the Arab world at the University of Oklahoma who has written about nationalist education in the region suggested that Farfur may be a symptom of growing anti-Semitism.

"Anti-Semitism in the Middle East is growing steadily as the situation in Palestine becomes ever more hopeless and depressing for Arab viewers," Dr. Landis wrote in an email. "The war in Iraq and proliferation of violent Islamist groups and rhetoric is fanning the flames of anti-Semitism."

Though the horror and rage with which many Westerners have reacted to the Farfur character may be based on assumptions about the political naïveté of children and the essential innocence of the cartoon medium, here perverted, some commentators have suggested that these are not functional notions in an environment where children are exposed to extreme violence from a young age. All children's education is to some degree political, they say.

The Disney company itself produced propaganda cartoons during the second World War. Farfur is the product of a time and a place where education about nationalism is done mainly by defining the community in opposition to the other.

Lee Smith, a Hudson Institute visiting fellow who is writing a book about the Arab media, pointed out that though Farfur has received an unusual amount of attention in the Western media, young children dressed up liked suicide bombers frequently participate in parades organized by Hamas.

"I would imagine that Farfur has got a lot of attention because we all know Mickey Mouse, and we can make easy analogies and say, look at how our symbols are being used," Mr. Smith said. "The fact that it's Mickey Mouse really pushes it to another level for us. But in fact, if you're parading 7-year-olds in martyr costumes, you've already reached that level."

"Farfur pushes all of our buttons not just because it's a cartoon figure but because it's our cartoon figure," Mr. Smith continued. "Watching Farfur's death, the obvious comparison is the death of Bambi's mother. And I think that's intentional. When you put the Israelis, the Zionists on a show as the murderers of a fuzzy pet, a nice animal, you're establishing them in children's minds as the absolute embodiment of evil."

When asked about the scene in which Farfur blames the Israelis when he is caught cheating in class, Mr. Smith laughed.

"Not only did the Zionists kill Bambi," Mr. Smith said. "But also, the Zionists ate my homework."

Next month, the English translation of Girls of Riyadh will be released in the United States by the Penguin Press, and though Ms. Alsanea seems unconcerned—perhaps even a bit bemused—by the horrified reactions of some of her countrymen, she admits to a bit of anxiety about how American audiences will receive her book.

“When you criticize your own country for an audience in your own country, that’s one thing,” said Ms. Alsanea, who is presently studying endodontics in Chicago. “But when you criticize your country for an audience outside your own country, it becomes something else entirely. When I write for an Arab audience, I feel pretty confident that they’ll know when I’m joking and when I’m trying to make a serious point.”

Ms. Alsanea said that she has loved living in the United States over the past year, but that the experience has also made her much more sensitive to heightened tensions between the West and the Arab world.

In such a climate, she said, it has been disconcerting to realize that her book is one of very few novels translated from Arabic—and one of even fewer to come out of Saudi Arabia—to find a mass-market American audience.

“It’s a big responsibility to be representing my country like this,” said Ms. Alsanea in a phone interview, speaking rapid, flawless English and sounding much younger than her 25 years. “Just being one of the few books that are translated feels like a huge responsibility. How can a single book speak for a whole country? I wish that many more books were translated into English so that people could see us as we are, how in Saudi Arabia we have liberals and conservatives and a bit of everything, just like anywhere else.”

Two years after it was first published by Saqi Books, a Beirut-based imprint, Girls of Riyadh still ranks as one of the most-talked-about books in the Arab world. Saqi Books was initially forbidden from distributing the book in Saudi Arabia, although that ban was lifted in March 2006. During the ban, contraband copies were sold on the black market for many multiples of the $10 cover price, and even posted on the Internet for download. In neighboring countries like Bahrain, booksellers had trouble keeping the book in stock, and regional newspapers reported that most of the buyers were visiting Saudi men who were anxious to learn about the lives of young women in their country, so close at hand and yet so assiduously hidden from view.

Inside Saudi Arabia and in other parts of the Middle East, Girls of Riyadh was debated in Internet chat rooms and on newspaper op-ed pages. Saudi Minister of Labor Ghazi al-Gosaibi, a novelist and poet in addition to his official duties, wrote the introduction to the Arabic edition of the book and publicly defended it, though he was assailed by Islamists for doing so.

A group of conservative Saudis filed a class-action lawsuit against Ms. Alsanea accusing her of slandering Saudi society and the reputations of Saudi women, and another group tried to petition the government to rescind her state scholarship to study dentistry overseas. When Saqi Books brought copies of the book to the Riyadh Book Fair, a group opposing the book appeared at the start of the fair and bought up scores of copies of the book so that Ms. Alsanea’s publisher would have none left to show or to discuss.

Yet Girls of Riyadh has inspired dozens of imitators, including a 2006 book called Boys of Riyadh, and it has been credited with helping to reinvigorate the novel as an Arabic literary form by encouraging other writers to experiment with colloquial Arabic and contemporary topics in their work. Ms. Alsanea was especially surprised to learn through friends, recently, that it has become common practice in Saudi job interviews to ask prospective employees, especially female ones, “What did you think of the Girls of Riyadh?”

“I laughed so much when I heard that,” she said, explaining that in Saudi Arabia, the question provides a convenient shorthand way to plumb an interviewee’s opinions on a range of social and political topics that would be unthinkable to broach directly. “In an interview like that, they want to get a sense of the personality, and it’s not really polite to ask, ‘What do you think about women driving?’, for example. Many people in Saudi were offended by the book. They said I gave Saudi girls a bad name—that people would think that all Saudi girls are like that.”

Yet Ms. Alsanea’s characters are hardly the stuff of scandal, at least by any non-Wahhabi standard. They are always properly veiled in public, they live at home with protective extended families, and they expect these families to choose—or at least to approve—prospective fiancés. They may invent suggestive screen names and send messages to men in chat rooms for hours on end, or talk to their boyfriends on their cell phones until the dawn prayer. But they rarely meet these boyfriends in public or speak to them face to face. The content that so scandalized readers around the Persian Gulf—scenes in which a group of college-age girls have tea at the home of a divorced woman, or in which they sneak sips of alcohol while one girl’s family is away—is unlikely to raise many eyebrows among Western readers.

GIRLS OF RIYADH IS AN EPISTOLARY NOVEL, written as a series of e-mails to a Yahoo! Group list serve, and it has inspired comparisons to Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City. And though it contains many political themes, the English edition of the novel often does feel like chick lit. True to form, its main characters spend a great deal of time thinking about fashion and lifestyles—the names of the four girls’ favorite brands, like Cavalli, and favorite restaurants in places like London and San Francisco, are mentioned constantly—and how to ensnare successful partners.

But it is chick lit of a distinctly Saudi variety, dealing with the search for cunning ways around the daily frustrations and oppression of Saudi society while basically remaining classic “good girls.”

What do you do when you and your friends want to go to the mall, but there’s no chauffeur or male relative available to take you? What do you do when your family wants to marry you off to a mean-spirited Bedouin almost twice your age? What do you do when your creepy ex-boyfriend comes crawling back and asks you to be his second wife, one of the four allowed him under Saudi law?

Girls of Riyadh has sold in 18 languages to date, and Arab newspapers have reported that a Lebanese satellite channel is planning to buy television rights from Ms. Alsanea for $1 million. Yet it is hard to predict how Western readers will react to the novel. An early review in Publisher’s Weekly seemed puzzled, calling the book “timid by American chick lit standards,” yet it will be a shame if Girls of Riyadh is read by those standards alone.

Liza Darnton, Ms. Alsanea’s editor at Penguin, called Girls of Riyadh “incredibly political” and said that she’s most curious to see how American readers will react to its young author, whose patriotism and great affection for Saudi culture are apparent even while she is criticizing it.

“Rajaa hasn’t defected to the U.S., complaining of oppression back home,” Ms. Darnton said. “She’s very happy being a privileged young Saudi woman. So there’s always that tension in the novel: There’s a desire for change and a recognition of injustices that is balanced by a true belief in her religion and a pride in Saudi culture. She wants to be a good Saudi girl and she shows how good Saudi girls can still have a foot in both worlds. It’s so much more complicated than our limited understanding of that culture.”

Many Syrian dissidents and pro-democracy activists have privately expressed dismay at Ms. Pelosi’s message of friendship to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They say that Ms. Pelosi’s visit, no matter how well-intentioned, has effectively pulled the rug out from under them, critically damaging their efforts to create momentum for reform from within.

“Pelosi’s visit made the regime feel that Americans were divided on how to deal with Syria,” said a Damascus-based women’s-rights activist who, like five other activists interviewed for this article, asked that his name be withheld because he feared punishment. “This sends a message to the regime that the pressure is off, that it can do what it likes.”

It has certainly seemed that way in the weeks since Ms. Pelosi’s departure, during which time the government has imprisoned Kurdish opposition figures while maintaining travel and work bans on political activists.

In the eastern Syrian town of Raqqa, hundreds of people were arrested for protesting rigged parliamentary elections. And over the last month, the Syrian courts have embarked on a veritable spree of sentencing, handing down harsh prison sentences to some of Syria’s most prominent pro-democracy activists.

Last week, the physician and dissident Kamal Labwani was sentenced to 12 years in prison for having met with American officials during a 2005 trip to Washington. This past weekend, the activists Michel Kilo and Mahmoud Issa were sentenced to three years each for having signed the so-called Damascus Declaration, a document petitioning Syria’s government to normalize relations with neighboring Lebanon.

The few Syrian activists who are not presently behind bars say they have all but ceased working.

“Most of us are just sitting and waiting,” said the women’s-rights activist. “It’s too dangerous to try any political activities right now. The regime is making a point, and there’s no telling when the current crackdown will end.”

Even Syrians outside the inner circle of activists seem shaken by the conviction, shortly after Ms. Pelosi’s return to Washington, of Syria’s best-known human-rights lawyer, Anwar al-Bunni. Mr. al-Bunni was convicted of “spreading information that could weaken national morale” and “joining an international organization without proper authorization,” for which he was given a five-year prison sentence.

Mr. al-Bunni is a slight, nervous-looking man, a tireless polymath who, aside from his work defending scores of political prisoners, has helped to found a center offering training in human rights, and has drafted a new constitution for Syria. Last year, he invited a handful of foreign reporters to his home to show them his proposed new constitution, and waved his hands excitedly as he outlined his ideas about what a democratic transition in Syria might look like, how potential power-sharing arguments among Syria’s many ethnic and religious groups could be anticipated and solved.

But Syria’s would-be Thomas Jefferson is in the infamous Adra prison now, and he is known to have been tortured.

“Pelosi’s visit was well-meant, but it’s been bad for everyone, and especially devastating for some of our closest friends in Syria,” an American researcher on Syria said. “The Syrian regime wants to be invited back to the diplomatic table, but at the same time it wants to make the point that none of the concessions that it may make with regard to regional security are connected to the Bush administration’s democracy agenda.”

In an interview last week, Mr. al-Bunni’s brother, Akram, said that he was saddened by Anwar’s sentencing. But even as he offered an explanation of why Syrian dissidents were upset by Ms. Pelosi’s visit, he said that he and his brother hoped at least that such international contacts could prove to have a positive effect in the long run.

“So much of Syria’s opposition was against Pelosi’s visit, against the E.U.’s talks with the regime,” Mr. al-Bunni explained. “They believe that these offers of friendship strengthen the regime and increase its totalitarian tendencies, and they’re angry.

“But perhaps, if the West continues to talk to the regime, our government will wish to improve its image on its own,” he continued. “People who favor this approach point to Turkey. This is a much slower process, but we’ve seen that it can work. The regime would like the world to believe that it doesn’t care about what the world thinks, but we know that’s not true. It will take time, but Syria can be encouraged to cooperate. Now that I’ve seen what happened in Iraq, I fear this is the only way.”

An earlier version of this story included an assertion that Ayman Abdel Nour is in exile. Mr. Abdel Nour is presently in Syria.

He wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap at a jaunty angle, and he practically bounced as he walked. In authoritarian Syria, where the very air can seem to exhaust and oppress those who breathe it, Nash was easy to spot: a skinny Iraqi kid with a big grin and unusual, infectious energy. His accent, when he introduced himself, was pure Alabama.

“Good morning, ma’am. My name is Nashwan, but you can call me Nash—all the other Americans do. Can I help you with anything, ma’am?”

I made the first of many futile attempts to get Nash to please stop calling me Ma’am, and I asked where he came by his flawless, idiomatic English. Nash waved his hand expansively, brushing aside my question and ushering me into a classroom, and asked if I’d like tea. At 24, he was easily the youngest of the dozen or so Iraqi volunteers who were helping Western election consultants to staff the voting station, but he welcomed me in a style that suggested he ran the place.

Nash was born in Mosul, the youngest of 10 brothers. The other Americans that he’d referred to—and from whom he’d learned his astonishing Southern drawl—turned out to be the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, for whom he’d begun working as a translator while still finishing college.

Nash spoke with great affection of the American soldiers he’d worked with, from the guys his own age, who’d taught him the intricacies of American baseball, up to Gen. David Petraeus, then the commander of the 101st, on whose personal translation staff Nash had worked for a few months.

“He’s very quick with languages,” Nash recalled of the man who currently leads all U.S. forces in Iraq. “We taught him to say Ana Petraeus al-Moslawi—‘I am Petraeus of Mosul.’ He’s a very honest, kind and humble person—not like Iraqi big men, who just want you to flatter them all the time.”

Nash had been working with the American forces for about a year when his family started getting death threats from insurgents who saw Nash as a collaborator. Nash asked his American friends for help, only to be told that there was nothing they could do. For his family’s safety, he fled, alone, to Syria in January 2005.

When we met, the news coming out of Iraq was steadily getting worse, and I found his optimism moving, even shaming. If Nash could remain hopeful about his country’s future prospects in the face of open threats to his family, shouldn’t I? Though tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees were pouring into Syria, Nash’s story seemed to me to be full of especially tragic irony, but Nash himself refused to allow me to pity him. He knew the details of dozens of reconstruction projects. He wouldn’t speculate about mistakes that American forces might have made in Iraq.

“They were risking their lives to help Iraq stand up again,” Nash said. “They were like brothers to me.”

Nash wanted, most of all, to join the U.S. Army. He’d heard that non-U.S. citizens were sometimes allowed to enlist. After that, he hoped to do an M.B.A. in the U.S. or Britain before returning to Iraq to start his own business. Once he’d made his name, he hoped to enter politics.

“I want to do something for my country,” Nash said. “This is the thing I learned from the Americans. I need to go overseas and learn, and then I’m going to go back and help Iraq get on its feet.”

Unemployment in Syria is very high, and once the temporary job with the Iraq out-of-country voting program ended, Nash couldn’t find anyone willing to hire a young Iraqi refugee with no connections in Syria. His application for a U.S. visa was turned down, and his requests for information about enlisting in the U.S. Army went unanswered. He researched American M.B.A. programs online and applied for a Fulbright. But a friend who worked at the U.S. embassy in Syria told me that a young Iraqi like Nash was unlikely to get any kind of visa to the States.

“Because Iraq is a free country now,” my friend added bitterly.

In Syria, Nash seemed, if possible, to get even skinnier. When we met, his eyes seemed sad, possibly even reproachful. We fell out of touch for a while. Then, one afternoon last year, Nash called.

Nash had used the money he’d saved while working for the 101st Airborne to start a business buying up high-quality concrete in Turkey and shipping it through Syria to Iraq, where it was used in reconstruction projects. Business was good, he said.

I spent yesterday afternoon in a Damascus pizza restaurant with Nash and Ehab, a friend of Nash’s from grade school in Mosul, who also worked as a translator for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nash no longer has any hope of returning to Iraq to enter politics. Staving off civil war is probably beyond the abilities of even Petraeus al-Moslawi, Nash told me. The young men hope only to earn enough money to get their families out. They’ve applied to the University of Malaya for business school, and if they’re accepted, they’ll move to Kuala Lumpur early this summer.

But both Nash and Ehab said that they bear the U.S. and its allies no ill will.

“I learned a lot from working with the Americans,” Ehab said. “If the U.S. invasion hadn’t come, I’d have taken my university degree, gotten a steady government job and never left Mosul. Meeting the Americans, everything changed—my principles, my thoughts about life. We became more curious. We’re interested in everything now, Nash and me. Under Saddam, we never had the right.”

I asked if the new generation of young Iraqis were feeling these same freedoms.

“We felt these benefits because we worked with the Americans directly,” Nash said. “Iraqi kids these days are really desperate. But maybe, insha’allah, when we finish business school, Ehab and I will find a way to help them.”

I set the phone down and ordered a cup of tea. It was brought not by my usual waitress, but by the café’s owner, who wore a grim expression, introduced himself hurriedly as Raed, and—to my great surprise—pulled a chair up next to mine and sat down.

“Excuse me for bothering you, but I can tell you’re not from Beirut, and you may not know what has just happened.”

I certainly didn’t know, but felt—as one always feels in Beirut—that the news couldn’t possibly be good.

“Pierre Gemayel has been shot, in the middle of the day. Can you imagine? I recommend that you go home and stay there. It will be hours before your phone works again—the government turns off the mobile-phone service on these occasions. The important thing is to get straight home. This will mean war, you know.”

I can be a bit slow on the uptake where political topics are concerned, but discussing politics with a Beiruti always makes me feel especially dull-witted. Politics in Lebanon is often a life-or-death matter, and so naturally everyone takes a keen interest. Childhood nights crouched in bomb shelters, gauging whether the rockets were incoming or outgoing and decades spent following alliances and assassinations in Lebanon’s prominent families have a way of honing native political intelligence to a very fine edge.

I made a clumsy attempt to piece together the implications of this news, as the Lebanese do so instinctively and immediately. Pierre Gemayel was a government minister, I knew, but already that seemed beside the point. Gemayel was from one of the country’s important Maronite families, the grandson of the founder of the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalange. This meant that he was a symbol of Christian power in Lebanon, which meant that his enemies were many, which meant that those wanting him dead could be … well, almost anyone, really.

I turned to Raed. “Who do you think would have the most to gain from Gemayel’s death?”

Raed shrugged. “Almost anyone, really. The point is that our government is being destroyed. This is nearly on the level of the Hariri assassination. This will almost certainly mean civil war. He was shot, can you imagine?”

Pierre Gemayel was shot. It took me another hour and several more conversations with Lebanese friends to grasp the import of this fact. Here in Beirut, arranging a car bombing is seen as a relatively easy way to murder an enemy. But shooting a man on a crowded street in the middle of a sunny afternoon?

That takes daring. That telegraphs insouciance, power wielded in complete confidence. The message to Lebanon’s frail, Western-backed ruling coalition couldn’t have been clearer: You are no longer in control.

Beirut is a diverse and profoundly class-ridden city; the newcomer feels it immediately. But in peacetime, these things seem not to matter. The people seem cheerful, almost supernaturally exuberant. They enjoy watching each other and parsing the differences among them, the small matters that divide neighborhoods and religious groups. The things they mention usually sound to my ear like harmless snobberies, but I wonder how the city would feel if battle lines were drawn as they once were, during the long civil war, when individual neighborhoods became strongholds.

Beirut in the fall smells precisely like Paris in a damp June—there’s an ineffable, very French smell of motor oil and detergents, butchers’ shops and cigarettes. It smells European and yet looks unmistakably Middle Eastern. For all its diversity, it is a very compact city, and I walk almost everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment in western Beirut to Martyr’s Square downtown, where the big demonstrations are always held. It takes no more than a half hour to walk over to friends’ apartments in Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian eastern Beirut neighborhood.

It’s fun examining the differences between the neighborhoods, which up till now have seemed matters of mere sociological interest, often sweetly comical and occasionally sad.

Bourj Hammoud is an image of the striving, jovial Armenian jewelers who fixed my watch. Hamra is the saj bread seller who always corrects my accent in Arabic so that I “don’t have to sound like a Syrian.”

Haret Hreik—or “Hezbollah Central,” as my friend Andrew calls it—brings to mind a certain very enthusiastic taxi driver who took me on a tour of the piles of rubble that were the result of multiple Israeli bombing raids; in the garbage that had collected on the site of one destroyed building, I noticed a Pekingese looking aristocratic and improbably clean as it trotted around among the boulders of smashed concrete.

And then there’s Achrafieh, which in its self-regard and Francophilic pretensions is Beirut’s greatest gift to the amateur sociologist in search of amusement. The image of Achrafieh that sticks most in my mind is of a young housewife I once saw, impeccably coiffed and chatting gaily on her cell phone as she walked out of the Monoprix grocery store. A tiny, elderly Filipina maid trudged a few paces behind her with the goods; the maid’s dress—blue gingham with a lace-trimmed white apron—looked weirdly girlish framed by those stringy brown arms and wizened face. I had briefly mistaken the maid for the woman’s child, the gingham for a summer-school uniform.

Whether the Gemayel assassination will turn out to have been the opening salvo in a renewed civil war remains to be seen, of course. But more than half of the Lebanese people I speak to in an average day seem to think so, and since Lebanon is widely seen as the canary in the mine of the greater Middle East—regional countries from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia all have political interests in Lebanon, and the collapse of the government in Lebanon will have implications far beyond its borders—this is very bad news for the region as a whole.

Marwan, who runs the shop where I usually buy my lunchtime sandwiches, asks me to correct his English.

“I don’t give a shit about this government we have now—there is a nicer way to say that, isn’t there?”

“You could say ‘I don’t care about this government.’”

“Oh, yes—all my English is from the movies. I mean, I don’t care about this government—but the problem is that if Lebanon falls now, we maybe take all the rest of the Middle East down with us.”

Katherine Zoepf is working on a book about young women in the Middle East for the Penguin Press.

I set the phone down and ordered a cup of tea. It was brought not by my usual waitress, but by the café’s owner, who wore a grim expression, introduced himself hurriedly as Raed, and—to my great surprise—pulled a chair up next to mine and sat down.

“Excuse me for bothering you, but I can tell you’re not from Beirut, and you may not know what has just happened.”

I certainly didn’t know, but felt—as one always feels in Beirut—that the news couldn’t possibly be good.

“Pierre Gemayel has been shot, in the middle of the day. Can you imagine? I recommend that you go home and stay there. It will be hours before your phone works again—the government turns off the mobile-phone service on these occasions. The important thing is to get straight home. This will mean war, you know.”

I can be a bit slow on the uptake where political topics are concerned, but discussing politics with a Beiruti always makes me feel especially dull-witted. Politics in Lebanon is often a life-or-death matter, and so naturally everyone takes a keen interest. Childhood nights crouched in bomb shelters, gauging whether the rockets were incoming or outgoing and decades spent following alliances and assassinations in Lebanon’s prominent families have a way of honing native political intelligence to a very fine edge.

I made a clumsy attempt to piece together the implications of this news, as the Lebanese do so instinctively and immediately. Pierre Gemayel was a government minister, I knew, but already that seemed beside the point. Gemayel was from one of the country’s important Maronite families, the grandson of the founder of the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalange. This meant that he was a symbol of Christian power in Lebanon, which meant that his enemies were many, which meant that those wanting him dead could be … well, almost anyone, really.

I turned to Raed. “Who do you think would have the most to gain from Gemayel’s death?”

Raed shrugged. “Almost anyone, really. The point is that our government is being destroyed. This is nearly on the level of the Hariri assassination. This will almost certainly mean civil war. He was shot, can you imagine?”

Pierre Gemayel was shot. It took me another hour and several more conversations with Lebanese friends to grasp the import of this fact. Here in Beirut, arranging a car bombing is seen as a relatively easy way to murder an enemy. But shooting a man on a crowded street in the middle of a sunny afternoon?

That takes daring. That telegraphs insouciance, power wielded in complete confidence. The message to Lebanon’s frail, Western-backed ruling coalition couldn’t have been clearer: You are no longer in control.

Beirut is a diverse and profoundly class-ridden city; the newcomer feels it immediately. But in peacetime, these things seem not to matter. The people seem cheerful, almost supernaturally exuberant. They enjoy watching each other and parsing the differences among them, the small matters that divide neighborhoods and religious groups. The things they mention usually sound to my ear like harmless snobberies, but I wonder how the city would feel if battle lines were drawn as they once were, during the long civil war, when individual neighborhoods became strongholds.

Beirut in the fall smells precisely like Paris in a damp June—there’s an ineffable, very French smell of motor oil and detergents, butchers’ shops and cigarettes. It smells European and yet looks unmistakably Middle Eastern. For all its diversity, it is a very compact city, and I walk almost everywhere. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment in western Beirut to Martyr’s Square downtown, where the big demonstrations are always held. It takes no more than a half hour to walk over to friends’ apartments in Achrafieh, the predominantly Christian eastern Beirut neighborhood.

It’s fun examining the differences between the neighborhoods, which up till now have seemed matters of mere sociological interest, often sweetly comical and occasionally sad.

Bourj Hammoud is an image of the striving, jovial Armenian jewelers who fixed my watch. Hamra is the saj bread seller who always corrects my accent in Arabic so that I “don’t have to sound like a Syrian.”

Haret Hreik—or “Hezbollah Central,” as my friend Andrew calls it—brings to mind a certain very enthusiastic taxi driver who took me on a tour of the piles of rubble that were the result of multiple Israeli bombing raids; in the garbage that had collected on the site of one destroyed building, I noticed a Pekingese looking aristocratic and improbably clean as it trotted around among the boulders of smashed concrete.

And then there’s Achrafieh, which in its self-regard and Francophilic pretensions is Beirut’s greatest gift to the amateur sociologist in search of amusement. The image of Achrafieh that sticks most in my mind is of a young housewife I once saw, impeccably coiffed and chatting gaily on her cell phone as she walked out of the Monoprix grocery store. A tiny, elderly Filipina maid trudged a few paces behind her with the goods; the maid’s dress—blue gingham with a lace-trimmed white apron—looked weirdly girlish framed by those stringy brown arms and wizened face. I had briefly mistaken the maid for the woman’s child, the gingham for a summer-school uniform.

Whether the Gemayel assassination will turn out to have been the opening salvo in a renewed civil war remains to be seen, of course. But more than half of the Lebanese people I speak to in an average day seem to think so, and since Lebanon is widely seen as the canary in the mine of the greater Middle East—regional countries from Iran to Syria to Saudi Arabia all have political interests in Lebanon, and the collapse of the government in Lebanon will have implications far beyond its borders—this is very bad news for the region as a whole.

Marwan, who runs the shop where I usually buy my lunchtime sandwiches, asks me to correct his English.

“I don’t give a shit about this government we have now—there is a nicer way to say that, isn’t there?”

“You could say ‘I don’t care about this government.’”

“Oh, yes—all my English is from the movies. I mean, I don’t care about this government—but the problem is that if Lebanon falls now, we maybe take all the rest of the Middle East down with us.”

Katherine Zoepf is working on a book about young women in the Middle East for the Penguin Press.

The impact sets a couple of car alarms off screaming into the greenish evening gloom, and from further away there’s a familiar clicking sound, that horrible, hard tick-tick-tick that means the bullets are real.

British Airways gave me a couple of foam earplugs when I flew here last week, and I’ve taken to wearing them as I type. But even so, I struggle to remember that all these bangs and pops are, actually, joyful bangs and pops: It’s the Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival that marks the end of the Islamic fasting month, Ramadan. This is a celebration. And yet it’s a wonder to me that the Lebanese haven’t lost their taste for fireworks.

After all, my bottle-rocket-loving neighbors are some of the same Beirutis who, this past summer, were kept awake by nightly Israeli air raids and real, very deadly explosions. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the 34-day war between Israel and the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, scarcely more than 10 weeks ago. My friend Soha tells me that her three small daughters, like so many Lebanese children, are still nervous, clingy, uncharacteristically tearful.

Foreign peacekeepers are still arriving—including a fresh batch from Turkey just today—even while many Lebanese are wondering aloud whether the fragile peace will last.

I’m definitely not enjoying the fireworks right now, I’ve decided, but of course, this isn’t my Eid, and I’m not one of the people that they’re intended to delight. And perhaps, seen in a certain light, it’s a healthy sign that Beirut is having such an apparently normal Eid al-Fitr, complete with syrupy clotted-cream sweets, firecrackers and bursts of celebratory gunfire.

But for many Lebanese, this is far from being a normal holiday. Many of the Beirutis I’ve been speaking to in recent days are furious with Hezbollah for dragging their country into a conflict with one of the best-armed nations in the region, and almost equally angry with their government for being too weak to prevent it.

Most of the Lebanese who fled the country during the fighting have returned home by now, but they’re resuming their work and their studies cautiously, weighted by anxiety.

“The feeling is different now,” my friend Elie tells me. “We are Lebanese, of course—we have that hope that just keeps pushing, no matter what. But people are getting depressed. Even in the early 90’s, just after the civil war, there was more hope than we feel now.”

Nada, another friend, who is in her early 20’s and thus can scarcely remember the civil war, seems to feel a bit of pride at having stayed throughout the summer, at having lived through the bombings and the sleepless nights and the hours of dull anticipation. “War,” she informs me in a world-weary tone, “is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent fear.” Young Lebanese of her generation, who had the greatest hopes for the so-called Cedar Revolution, feel almost overwhelmed by disappointment.

They are also struggling financially. The war dealt a terrific blow to Lebanon’s economy, and many Lebanese companies have slashed employee salaries. For Nada and her similarly ambitious friends, whether to stay in Beirut or to seek better opportunities overseas is a constant topic of discussion.

Of course, Nada and her friends—universally trilingual and well-educated, with the connections and family support necessary to start new lives abroad if they chose to—are the lucky ones. The day before yesterday, searching for cheap towels and sheets for my temporary apartment, I ended up in Haret Hreik, a predominantly Shiite suburb in southern Beirut that my friend Andrew has nicknamed “Hezbollah central,” and which was especially hard-hit by the recent Israeli bombing raids.

As we turned a corner in the direction of the shops I wanted to visit, my taxi driver, Mohammed, a smallish, wiry man in his mid-40’s, dapper in a crisp blue windowpane-checked shirt, gestured at a giant pile of scorched rubble.

“Before the Israelis,” he told me, “that was my apartment building.”

I can’t remember what I said, but Mohammed seemed so touched and delighted by my interest that he seemed to entirely forget that I wished to buy household supplies. For the next hour, he gave me a street-by-street, literally blow-by-blow tour of the Dahiyeh, as the southern suburbs of Beirut are known.

“That used to be an excellent supermarket,” Mohammed would say almost fondly about a certain heap of shattered concrete. And: “That used to be the building of our television station, Al Manar, run by Hezbollah.”

The density of destruction—whole blocks of buildings simply collapsed in on themselves—was stunning. I had seen some of this before, back in August, and found it dispiriting to realize that very little had changed.

The piles of rubble looked a bit more weathered, more trash-strewn, but few of them had been removed, and scarcely anything, so far as I could tell, was being rebuilt.

Mohammed, for his part, seemed to be greatly enjoying himself. Hezbollah, he told me, had given him $12,000 in cash to compensate him for the loss of his apartment, and he fully expected that he and his family would be moving into a better one soon. He slowed the car way down as we passed a clothing store called Gravity, with window displays of acid-washed jeans and bright, cheap, stripy men’s shirts, all at extra-low Ramadan prices, and nearly came to a stop by a massive hole in the ground.

“And this,” he said reverently, “used to be the home of Sayyid Fadlallah,” who is widely considered to be the spiritual father of Hezbollah.

Something, I suddenly realized, had changed. Driving around the Dahiyeh back in August with my friend Andrew, we’d seen scores of dramatic Hezbollah banners, some of them three or four stories high, stretched down the sides of building. On every block, there had been dozens of yellow Hezbollah flags and homemade signs bearing proud, militant slogans. Where were they now?

Even here, next to the destroyed home of Sheikh Fadlallah, they were nowhere to be seen. Was it possible that even here in Haret Hreik, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s core supporters were feeling disappointed and angry too?

I turned to smiling Mohammed in the driver’s seat, but here in the Hezbollah heartland, I felt just a bit too nervous to ask him. Besides, he’d been so kind already, and was starting to pepper me with questions about my family, about life in New York.

Katherine Zoepf, a writer based in Beirut, is working on a book about young Arab women for the Penguin Press.