LOS ANGELES: The young woman did not know the name of the book she was after when she wandered into a Santa Monica, California, bookstore. She just knew she needed to read it. “What is their book, the one like the Bible?” she asked Margie Ghiz, owner of Midnight Special. The Holy Quran, Ghiz responded. Then the owner apologized; she had just sold out. In that case, the woman asked, could she look at anything related? “I think I need to know more about how other people think,” she said.

Books about the Taliban, Palestinians and Islam are suddenly top sellers as growing numbers of Americans try to arm themselves with information about issues and regions once deemed too complicated to grasp or too remote to affect them.

They are gathering at campus teach-ins on Afghanistan and US foreign policy, and seeking foreign news in newspapers, on broadcasts and on Web sites. They are calling Islamic education groups and buying maps and atlases.

And in far greater numbers than in recent years, they are signing up for language classes - especially Arabic. The same is true for the US State Department’s foreign service exam, the test for would-be diplomats. A campaign to boost applications also may have played a role. The number of registrants for the test, given at the end of September, nearly doubled to more than 23,000.

Edward S. Walker Jr, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington said that the institute’s Web site, which typically gets about 8,000 hits a day, has averaged 50,000 since the attacks. Many people are clicking on its primer, ‘Introduction to Islam,’ by M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born international law expert at Chicago’s DePaul University. “It can only help us if we all have a better understanding of these issues,” said Walker.

At a bookstore in Pasadena, California, clerks fielded so many questions about the area that a prominent display now invites customers to “learn about Islam and the Middle East.” Volumes on the crowded table include the Holy Quran, alongside histories of Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islam.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.