He was a hero, the man who risked his life to save the books of Afghanistan. Imprisoned twice by the communists, he was jailed again by the Taleban who forced him to watch some of his most precious works go up in a huge bonfire. When he was freed, he hid the books in attics all over the city and smuggled others out to Pakistan.

For Western journalists and lovers of Afghan culture, a trip to Shah Muhammad Rais’s bookshop was an essential pilgrimage during any visit to Kabul over the past 30 years. He claims to have 10,000 books on Afghanistan, the world’s largest collection.

After the fall of the Taleban in 2001, everyone wanted to interview “the man who saved the books”. Then a Norwegian journalist came to dinner. Realising that she had found “a history book on two legs”, she asked if she could stay a few months with his family and write a book about his life. Neither of them could have dreamt of the result. The Bookseller of Kabul has been a worldwide hit with sales of more than 1m.

The author, Asne Seierstad, presents Shah not as a hero, however, but as a tyrant who buys a teenage bride without telling his wife of 30 years, sells books yet deprives his sons of education and uses his sister as a maid, refusing to let her become a teacher. He also gets a poor carpenter jailed for three years for stealing a few postcards, leaving the man’s destitute family — including two daughters who have polio — with no means of support.

The book has turned Shah into the personification of the repression of women by Afghan men. It has provoked a torrent of abusive e-mails and letters from around the world and, Shah told me last week, led to threats to his family, forcing his first wife to flee to Canada — taking their two youngest children as well as his four-year-old daughter by his second wife.

“Throughout the Russian occupation, the civil war, the Taleban, my family always stayed together,” said Shah, sitting in his dimly lit bookshop, surrounded by volumes on the Anglo-Afghan wars. “Now this book has torn us apart.”

A broad-shouldered man with a small neat beard, Shah said that he bitterly regretted the day the young Norwegian suggested writing about him. At the time he was flattered and the Afghan tradition of hospitality made it impossible for him to decline.

While she was their guest, he said, the family refused to accept anything towards her keep and paid for meals out and trips outside Kabul. “It’s not a five-star hotel but we eat well and she was always a VIP guest,” said Shah, showing photographs of Seierstad’s 32nd birthday, when the family took her to a restaurant and presented her with a silk shawl and a cake.

Seierstad confirms in the foreword to her book: “I was incredibly well-treated — the family was generous and open.” But she adds: “Never have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women.”

For hundreds of thousands of readers around the world, her book is all they know of Afghan society. But was it really as she told it? And if it was, should she have exposed it after receiving such help and hospitality from Shah?

“In every society it is very bad to become rich and famous through defaming others,” said the bookseller, who is taking legal action in Norway and writing his own book to defend himself.

“He says I abused his hospitality,” countered Seierstad last week, “but he kind of fooled me. He gave me the impression of being this great liberal. He was my hero. But it didn’t take long after moving in to see how he controls everything in the house and hear the complaints of the rest of the family. I’m a journalist: what was I supposed to do, ignore what I was seeing?”

The book opens with Shah deciding to take a second bride and picking 16-year-old Soraya, named in the book as Sonya. His first wife Aziza (Sharifa in the book), who has borne him three sons and a daughter is, like him, over 50.

Soraya is not keen to marry him but has no choice as he is a wealthy man in Afghan terms and the large dowry that he will pay will solve her family’s money problems and buy good wives for her brothers.

When Shah tells his family of his engagement, his first wife cries for 20 days. According to the book, she is particularly upset that Soraya is illiterate and has not even completed nursery school whereas she is a qualified Persian teacher. “What has she got I haven’t got?” she wails.

“This is completely untrue,” insisted Shah. “Taking a second bride is very common in Afghanistan and it was Aziza’s idea because I wanted more children. With the shortage of men because of years of war, it is almost a duty under Islam to take more wives if you are economically and physically able. It was a deal because she wanted to go to Canada where her brothers and sisters were already living. I love Aziza very much and I miss her badly.”

He pointed out that in early 2002, when she writes of him bullying his sons to tend the bookshops and not go to school, the schools were still closed. Seierstad, who had never been to Afghanistan before the defeat of the Taleban, conceded: “Perhaps I should have put more context.”

“Whoever you believe, there are factual things that are completely wrong,” claimed Shah. “She said I was born to a poor family yet talks of me taking trips to Tehran and Karachi to see the sea as a young boy. How could that have been possible if we were so poor?”

According to Shah, when he flew to Norway to confront Seierstad, “she was trembling and crying, saying ‘What have I done, I’m so sorry’. I think she thought she could write what she liked about this place because it’s far away and poor.”

At this point I should declare an interest. On visits to Afghanistan, stretching back to 1987, I always stopped in on Shah M, as we called him. When I received the book to review I was both gripped by its intimate mix of weddings, relations and gossip, and horrified to see this hitherto unknown side of the man. My comment — “an intimate portrait of Afghan people quite unlike any other . . . a compelling read” — graces the cover of the British edition and I bought it as presents for several friends.

On my next few visits to Afghanistan I did not go to see Shah. But last year I met Seierstad at a literary festival. Clearly worried, she asked me if I had seen Shah, inquiring: “Do you have any idea how he would take the book?”

I wondered why she should be so nervous. Like Seierstad, I knew only too well the advantage of being a female journalist in Afghanistan; we enjoy access to the half of the population that our male colleagues never meet. But in all my 17 years of going to the country I have never heard Afghan women express such intimate comments as they make throughout the book. Seierstad does not speak Dari and the only people in the Shah family who spoke English were Shah and his sons.

It also seemed strange that she had changed Shah’s name to Sultan Khan. Anyone who had ever been in Kabul would instantly recognise him and his bookshops, one on a busy crossroads, the other in the dark, leaking lobby of the Continental hotel.

She spoke of his sons being forced to work in the bookshops. Yet their English was fluent and although the eldest, Iraj, had an almost perpetual glower, I had never heard him express any dislike of the job. In fact he told me that he was planning to write his own book on the Jews of Afghanistan, based on the thesis that the Pashtuns were one of the lost tribes of Israel.

To try to get to the truth of the story, I asked Shah if I could spend some time with his family last week to see for myself how the private persona conflicted with the public figure.

Shah lives in Mikrorayon, a row of depressing Soviet-built apartment blocks scarred with bullet holes. I arrived at 7pm to find the blocks in darkness; three years after the fall of the Taleban most of Kabul still has electricity only for a few hours a day.

Only Shah’s flat was lit: he has his own generator. Inside it was full of people, his wife’s cousins visiting from Tehran. The first surprise was that his mother, brother and youngest sister were there, as Seierstad had written of how the family had split up.

We talked for a while, sitting on the floor on carpets and cushions Afghan-style, and were served with cups of green tea and glass bowls of shiny-wrapped creamy toffees from Pakistan. Occasionally Timur, Shah’s two-year-old son by his second wife, wandered in. The bookseller tousled the boy’s hair indulgently.

Iraj, 19, and his brother Toraj, 15, also came in to talk about Seierstad. “I never liked her from the start,” said Iraj angrily. “She was a very ignorant lady and this is a very complicated culture. It’s not like a Norwegian going to Sweden that in five months you could think you understood anything.”

His experience has completely put him off the West, he said. When his father recently asked him to go to the Frankfurt book fair he refused. “I prefer the East,” he said. “The westerners I see here are always drinking, dancing and smoking.”

We moved into another room where a plastic cloth had been spread across the floor and laid out with dishes of pilau rice, spinach, leeks stuffed with mince, mutton in broth and nan bread. As usual, the men sat and ate while the women stood in the corner watching.

Shah lorded over the room and nobody spoke unless he did. I asked him about this weekend’s elections and was shocked to hear that he had not registered to vote.

“I don’t like any of the candidates,” he explained. “Karzai [the President] has small hands, which I do not trust; and even after three years we have electricity only two or three hours a day. Besides, we have a proverb which says it’s no use putting a new pilot in a plane with a faulty engine.”

Shah’s greatest anger was reserved for the Americans. “They come into my country, building walls around themselves,” he said, “then stand around chewing gum, wearing dark glasses, saying dirty words.”

The following evening I had a rare chance to speak to Iraj alone. I pressed him on whether he really did want to work in the bookshop or wanted to study instead. “I cannot talk about that,” he said. “I have to respect the traditions and dignity of my country.” When pressed further he said: “Everyone everywhere wants to study.”

His second son is a talented sitar player and goes to music school in the morning before tending the hotel bookshop in the afternoons. “I’m hoping to send him abroad to music school next year,” claimed Shah.

Later I spoke to Soraya, who was nursing a four-month-old baby girl and at 20 is only a year older than Iraj. What did she think of Seierstad’s book? “I liked Asne very much,” she said. “I don’t understand why she should write such a bad book about us. When I heard what she had said I became very angry.”

How did she get on with Shah’s first wife? “Aziza and I were good friends. I trusted her so much that I sent my four-year-old daughter with her to Canada.”

Seierstad has not remained in touch with any member of the family and has never returned to Kabul, even though she has given some of her royalties to fund a girls’ school on the Shomali plains. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go back,” she said.

“Of course, I never expected a book on an Afghan family to take off like this and I am very sorry for his reaction. But I have had numerous e-mails from Afghan women telling me, ‘You have described my life’.”

Some say Shah’s real grievance is that he has received no share of the mounting royalties.

“I don’t begrudge her success,” he insisted. But he added: “When she left Afghanistan she never even sent a small letter of thanks.She had promised a CD player for my first wife and a ‘head torch’ for my second wife and to help fund a library, but she never sent anything.”

When I dropped into the shop, he was searching out a book on old Persian ghazals (a particular form of poetry) for a customer before eagerly unpacking some new books on his country in the half light.

“My favourite book is always the latest book on Afghanistan, which I have just received,” he said. Except, that is, for the one book that will never grace his shelves.