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Political Islam will take exception to this book. Zionists will take exception to this book. Political Islam will take exception to this review. Zionists will take exception to this review. Richard Poplak is a Canadian White South African Jew living in Toronto. Male. I am a Canadian Christian Palestinian living in Toronto. Female. He wrote it, I am reviewing it.

I love Canada.

The Sheik's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World is, in a way, a spiritual sequel to Poplak's first book, Ja, No, Man: Growing up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa (2007). White, South African. Yeah, we really want to hear all about what a drag that was. But.

“It may seem unbelievable, not to say wrong, that a comic memoir can emerge from South Africa's white-power days,” wrote John Allemang in this newspaper. “But after a reading of Richard Poplak's breezy and brilliant Ja, No, Man , you're more inclined to ask: What better place?”

• The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World, by Richard Poplak, Penguin, 366 pages, $24

Well, I would read Poplak if he wrote about watching paint dry. He is a gifted addition to the exploding and increasingly sloppy literary non-fiction genre. Dark, funny, self-deprecating and poetic, Poplak is a punk Graham Greene both exploiting and being exploited by the cultures he inhabits.

In Kazakhstan, he bowls with the chief of police. “Outside, under a chemical spill sunset, the brand new Kazakh city of Astana glittered like a gaggle of teenaged drag queens dressed as Tammy Faye Baker.”

In Kazakhstan, they don't like Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's ebullient, uncowed and racist characterization of, let's face it, not just Kazaks but all Muslims. The chief of police's daughter grins when she shows him a picture she has downloaded of Borat in the yellow thong.

In Libya, Poplak follows the trail of Lionel Ritchie. Yes, Lionel “No Wonder Nicole is so F----d Up” Ritchie, who's earnest schmaltzy pop is so huge there, that he claims, while in a Libyan bazaar, street urchins followed him miming his Hello video.

In Dubai, Al Shamshoon, the Arabic dub of The Simpsons, doesn't fly but Freej, a cartoon based on The Golden Girls, does. (A moment for Bea Arthur please; the cutest thing about the forty-something Poplak is that he loves The Golden Girls.) Every Arab family has at least one aunt or grandmother who is fierce, large and caustic. I had Great Aunt Georgette, whom I adored. Who, with dyed bright-red hair, black brows and beak nose, flew in from Beirut to give me velvet housecoats, take me to beauty salons and drive shoe salesmen crazy. She bought me a feathered roach clip and made me wear it in my hair at a creperie. Who, after her husband died, and after the Nakba (the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians), literally banged on doors to get her children educated. They became international financiers, poets and members of the United Nations.

“ Poplak seems most at home culturally in Indonesia following the country's explosive punk scene ”

Palestine/Israel. Well, a Palestinian knows from the start that's this is going to be annoying. “Palestine” is not on his map at the beginning of the book. And don't EVER call a Palestinian an “Israeli Arab.” No matter where they live. Poplak hangs out with DAM, a Gazan hip-hop band (featured in the film Sling Shot Hip Hop). He loves hip hop. They love hip hop. They bond. Since Poplak's visit, the young members of DAM have all lost homes, friends and relatives to the bombing of Gaza.

Poplak seems most at home culturally in Indonesia following the country's explosive punk scene, although he almost gets the crap kicked out of him and sounds exhausted in an “I'm too old for this shit” kind of way.

When he cruises through the worlds of Lebanese plastic surgery, Afghani wrestlers and Iranian world beat, he occasionally comments on anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism without contextualizing it. Besides a real nasty racism against Jews, which yes, tragically exists and must always be guarded against, the dispossession of an entire Arab people by Israel, supported by America and Starbucks, is what's really pissing off the Muslims. That and female sexuality, of course. If there's to be any discussion of the “Muslim world,” we have to stop being coy about these elephants in the room.

Poplak's also a little free and easy with his stats. Palestinians are not 98 to 100 per cent Muslim (dude, it's Jesus of Nazareth, not Paris. Like, the Pope was just there, man.) And it would have really helped if he spoke Arabic.

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It's perplexing runs to baffling how someone so educated, so well travelled, so versed in the nuances and dangers of stereotyping, could, in a time where broad strokes can and do fuel illegal wars by inciting the populace, contribute to stereotypes. And Poplak, understandably a bit of a tortured fellow, is not insensate to this contradiction.

Early in the book he references Palestinian cultural theorist Edward Said: “Said insisted that the body of Western scholarship, literature and popular culture concerning ‘the orient' (in the context the Middle East) was in service of and created the foundation for the imperial aspirations of successive Western powers.”

Something like the book The Girls of Riyadh, about Saudi girls and their sex lives, surgery and cell phones, written by a Saudi girl, will give you amore authentic picture of pop culture in the Muslim world. Still, Poplak does have complete authority as an outsider absorbing American culture. If I understand his conceit correctly, it is that pop culture is the great leveller of identity politics. Level identity politics and we stop killing each other. I'll buy that for a shekel.

Mary-Lou Zeitoun is a Toronto-based author, teacher and journalist.