Second anniversaries are tricky. What’s left of passion (love, loss, whatever) when the earth’s twice circled the sun? Have first sentiments morphed towards new forms, matured towards new ends? Has revisionism – always uncomfortable, often invaluable – begun raising its critical head? Or do we, two years after the fact, still indulge in original emotion?

Here in Afghanistan, I wondered about America this past 9-11. September is now pregnant with meaning for both countries. Afghans marked another second anniversary two days earlier.

The Afghan world turned upside down on 9-9-01. As of daybreak on that date, the Taliban – with the support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even (early on) some of America’s professional Afghanistan “experts” – had conquered 90 percent of the country. One man denied them the last fraction. His name: Ahmad Shah Masood.

At about 10 a.m., in an obscure village named after a long-forgotten holy man (Khowja Bahauddin) in Afghanistan’s northeast corner, a bomb went off. Ignited within a video camera, it killed the legendary Commander Masood and critically injured his closest companion (and my closest Afghan friend). The Taliban seemed bound for 100 percent domination.

Wrong. In the single positive decision of a dreadful presidency, George W. Bush sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Things happen on the ground when B-52s fill the skies. Occasionally they happen to good effect. Example: Two years later, my friend was tapped to emcee “The Second Annual International Conference of Ahmad Shah Masood Studies” at Kabul’s newly restored Intercontinental Hotel.

My friend is three men in one: former war leader (side by side with Commander Masood), current diplomat (Afghan ambassador to India), and (despite his efforts at self-effacement) a sort of poetic-spiritual pop star. The first two identities go together in our own culture. Note that Colin Powell’s persona, albeit now much diminished by Bush blunders on Iraq, combines military gold braid with State Department striped pants.

But poetic-spiritual pop star? Colin, however laudable his pre-Iraq debacle achievements, never enjoyed John Lennon status. And yet my Afghan friend is surrounded by just that buzz. Son of the nation’s foremost 20th century poet, erstwhile reciter par excellence of Persian poetry on Afghan radio, and – above all – miraculous survivor of the bomb blast two years ago, he is known across the country as shaheed-i-zinda, the Living Martyr. His brief stays in Kabul attract uninvited visitors who simply want to sit nearby, to share in the barakat (blessing) which he’s now said to embody, and to hear him speak in his famous “lion’s voice.”

It’s what happens in a country that, unlike the United States, relishes language merely for its sound. Here’s one great difference between our two cultures. We Americans, so recently engaged in the muscular conversion of forests into log cabins, are disdainful of fine talk. “Sounds good,” is a form of dismissal. Instead we celebrate the “strong and silent,” tell ourselves that “actions speak louder than words,” and prefer dumbed-down W-isms to Clintonian eloquence. Afghans, on other hand, love the roll and lilt and verb-heavy rumble of Persian. They don’t necessarily suspect golden tongues. On the contrary, their greatest heroes are warrior poets.

(Can we learn something here from the Afghans? In automatically separating the efficacious from the rhetorical – in disparaging the gifted talker while encouraging the inarticulate doer – are we Americans fatally limiting our concept of political leadership? Are we dooming ourselves to a sequence of dunderheads whose main supposed virtue is “plain speech”?)

And yet, as I was reminded at the Intercontinental Hotel, love of language for its sound can lead to intellectual dead-ends. “Ahmad Shah Masood Studies” – the announced topic of Kabul’s two day conference earlier this month – promised me a scholarly holiday from my mundane duties downtown. There’d be new information, I told myself, new biographical facts about the great man. My knowledge of him would be concretely increased.

Wrong. The sound of language got in the way.

Things began, stunningly, with the 1,400-year-old Qur’anic invocation delivered by a sightless cleric. What a voice! The impossibly high, nasal delivery pierced ordinary consciousness, plunged us beyond logic into ethos of myth and martyrdom.

It also illustrated a paradox whereby Islam has been preserved or stunted (take your choice) for the past thousand years.

This paradox has to do with form and content. First note that in recent centuries we Westerners have experimented with both. The forms of Western art, for instance, have been endlessly inventive. Painting, sculpture, music, literature, architecture – all these have changed in form (been “transformed”) repeatedly. And likewise the contents of our culture, its basic ideas, have evolved. Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, Freud – these men changed the shape of what we know as “reality.”

Now consider what has and hasn’t happened to form and content within Islam.

Take the Qur’anic invocation. No two are delivered in exactly the same form. Their style varies with the inventive artistry of each vocalist. Likewise other Muslim arts from calligraphy to mosque building: considerable stylistic variation across Islam.

Experimentation, however, ends with form. The actual content of Islam – its basic ideas and sacred truths – is timeless and unalterable. The words of that Qur’anic invocation, no matter how creatively and individually vocalized, are exactly as set forth 14 centuries ago. Ditto the words in all Muslim calligraphy. Ditto the basic components of every Muslim mosque. Form may change; content is changeless.

Result: A Muslim listener or reader or architectural admirer will already know – and accept as true – the basic content of what’s before him. He’ll expect no additions to content, less still any critique of it. And since content is constant, he’ll concentrate instead on the variables of form and style.

So it was with “The Second Annual International Conference of Ahmad Shah Masood Studies.” Speaker after speaker praised Commander Masood in glowing but always abstract terms. What mesmerizing words and sounds! There was adulation over his accomplishments, lamentation over his death, celebration of his martyrdom, denunciation of his enemies, and manipulation of his memory for sundry political purposes. There was not, at least in my hearing, one single new anecdote to enlarge our knowledge of the man. And, of course, no hint of critique.

It was beautiful but oddly vapid. My friend, a superb emcee, followed each speech with some snatch of poetry. The audience alternately dozed and swooned. I left the conference with a mix of sensations all-too-typical of Muslim experience over the past thousand years: feeling more intense but knowing nothing more.

This pair of second anniversaries – Afghanistan’s on 9-9 and America’s on 9-11 – has me musing on form and content. The two countries, it seems to me, face mirror-image dangers. Afghanistan – and the Muslim world – must somehow get beyond forms and get into content. Intensity of feeling is no substitute for expansion of knowledge.

And America? We’ve always prided ourselves on openness, on expansion, on exploration of content. And yet, for the past two years, we’ve acted like shell-shock victims. We’ve let ourselves be scared and suckered by Bush & Co. Their bet: That we’ll put form before content. That we’ll celebrate W’s landing on an aircraft carrier. That we’ll ignore the foolish, bloody, costly shambles he’s made of Iraq.

Second anniversaries give us a second chance. Which will it be for America: form or content?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is available from Waveland Press.