It would be nearly impossible to guess from speaking to him that Kamran Nazeer, a 29-year-old civil servant, had ever been diagnosed as autistic. He is intellectually brilliant, socially deft and good at friendship. You'd have to be a master analyst of minuscule behavioural strategies to discern in him the traits that once worried his parents. "If you'd met me when I was child, you wouldn't have had any doubt," he says. "But now it hardly explains me at all."

Having observed changes in himself, Kamran views autism and Asperger's syndrome as developmental disorders, rather than as fixed neurological conditions. Most significant has been his handling of the defining feature of autism: an inability to comprehend other people's motivations and feelings. As he was growing up, Kamran was confined by "mind-blindness". He spoke late, showed no interest in other kids and would stake out a corner of the classroom as his own, pushing away anyone who tried to enter it.

He was fortunate that, at the age of five, he was sent to a special school in New York, while his father worked as a banker in the city. There, until he was eight, Kamran received a therapeutic education that helped kick-start an ability to communicate. He once told a psychiatrist that speaking was, for him, like "walking down a tightrope, only to discover, halfway along, that your laces were untied".

He was taught question-and-answer dialogue to get him to the end of the line. But it wasn't until much later that he figured out what people were doing when they had a conversation. "I could reply, and I could ask," he says. "I just couldn't talk."

At home he was blessed by a different aspect of linguistic development. His mother's native tongue was Punjabi and his father's was Urdu, and the family insisted on speaking on a rota, with English reserved for the outside world. Kamran was remote and isolated, but he was also a show-off. He enjoyed befuddling visiting relatives by speaking all three languages at once.

It was at the age of 10 that other kids started telling him he was "autistic". When he asked his parents what this meant, there was little point in their discussing it with him, but Kamran was a spectacularly precocious reader, so they simply handed over the appropriate books. From these he gained a theoretical notion of what it was he lacked. "It was as if I started speaking because I understood it to constitute an intellectual challenge," he says.

After four years in Pakistan, his parents moved back to their family home in Glasgow and the teenage Kamran was confronted by one of life's great mysteries: the pub. This was a form of entertainment he couldn't at first comprehend. People would go into a room and do nothing but talk - for hours! "How could there be enough to say, evening after evening?" he wondered.

The autistic self abhors having its structures broken. Conversation is confusing. It makes people say arbitrary things; things that they don't necessarily think. But at university Kamran began to realise that it was permissible to be inauthentic, to have fun with postures, to let his self become fluid. He had already taught himself the game of debating, where you constructed arguments even if you didn't believe them. Yet conversation is more than that. "What matters in conversation," he says, "is whether something is funny, or disputatious, or revealing, or sad."

A few years ago, he was sitting on a plane next to an elderly Israeli couple who started telling him they had left the country because they were disillusioned with Zionism. Instead of congratulating the couple, however, it occurred to Kamran to treat the situation like a pub game. So he suggested a notion that would horrify many Muslims, proposing that Pakistan and Israel shared a common ideal of homeland. As a result, the elderly couple relaxed, tentatively recalling their dreams as young kibbutzniks, and the hope that Israel had once represented for them. "I had a lovely time on that flight," he says. "I also just plain learned a lot. And this happened because I treated the situation not as an argument, but as a conversation."

Whether by developmental chance or by conscious determination, Kamran has devised his own self, including his pseudonym, under which he has written a book that follows the lives of his autistic school friends, called Send In The Idiots. His first name is a gentle Scottish joke; a Muslim Cameron. His surname, Nazeer, is a tribute to an uncle who was murdered in Pakistan, probably for political reasons. He still doesn't fully get it when people tell him how they feel, or inquire as to how he feels, but on a spectrum from humour to seriousness, he has learned - as most people learn - to play the game.