Moataz El Fegiery
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Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo today is meant as a fresh start for America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But the simple fact of choosing Egypt, a bellwether state in the Arab world, matters just as much. The Bush administration, in another Cairo speech by Condi Rice in 2005, pushed it pro-freedom agenda by openly criticising Egyptian democracy, embarrassing the government and bolstering Egyptian human rights activists. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq ultimately lead such words to be associated only with unwise military intervention. But even this should not entirely over-shadow the real successes of some US democracy promotion policies; successes Obama would do well not to forget when he speaks tomorrow.
The speech is something of a diplomatic rebirth for Egypt itself, and an end to a recent diplomatic freeze with the US following President Mubarak’s first White House visit in five years. This freeze was in part a legacy of pro-democracy pressures from both Europe and the US between 2003 and 2005, which implicitly helped to trigger a wave of popular opposition protests unprecedented in the country’s history. The Egyptian authorities, in turn, were forced to show relative tolerance, both towards demonstrations and increasingly vocal criticisms of political and social conditions. Similar tough love strategies had also begun to show democratic chinks of success in Iran, the Middle East’s other key strategic state.
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Kenan Malik
Discuss this article on First Drafts, the Prospect blog; and read a web-exclusive article from Anshuman A Mondal, who, 20 years after The Satanic Verses , has talked to young British Muslims throughout the country about faith and politics
Twenty years ago the Rushdie affair became a watershed in the relationship between British society and its Muslim minority. The campaign against The Satanic Verses, the book-burnings that accompanied the protests and Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that forced Salman Rushdie into hiding for nearly a decade helped to transform the political and cultural landscape of Britain.
The Rushdie affair was different from the previous conflicts between British society and its minorities. Muslim fury was driven not by questions of discrimination or poverty, but by a sense of hurt that Rushdie’s words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from, and why was it being expressed now? Could Muslim anguish be assuaged and should it be? How did the anger relate to political questions about citizens’ rights, duties and entitlements? Britain had never asked itself such questions before. Twenty years on, it is still groping for answers.
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Anya Hart Dyke
I’d never been inside a mosque in Britain before September 2008. I have come a long way since then.
Despite the headlines, too little is known about Britain’s second largest religion. The majority of us don’t have Muslim neighbours or colleagues. Perhaps this is why, as I set foot for the first time in a mosque in Leyton, east London, I did so with mild trepidation—feeling as I have done innumerable times when I have been in unfamiliar surroundings, be it in Albania, Cambodia, Morocco or The Gambia. It was quite unexpected; I was still in England. I was there by appointment, yet felt oddly self-conscious. What was the protocol?
I was shown first to the women’s section that was alive with women and girls preparing for an event. I watched closely for hints on how to behave appropriately. Of course, I learned nothing new beyond what my common sense dictated. What on earth had I expected?
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Ehsan Masood
Surely Islam needs a reformation? Isn’t literalism in religion an obstacle to open minds; and isn’t the promotion of rationalism the best way to boost the slow pace of science and innovation in the Islamic world? Until a few years ago, I believed that the answer to all these questions was a qualified “yes.” Today I am not so sure.
This is because I’ve spent the past few years reading my way into the history of science during what is known as the golden age of Islamic civilisation. This is the 700-year period between the 8th and the 16th centuries, when the Muslim faith spread across the world and produced stunning innovations in art, architecture, crafts, medicine, science and technology.
When I began my investigations, there was one core idea that I didn’t expect to be challenged on: that blind literalism in religion is essentially a bad thing for science and for society, and that rationalism is always a force for good. Yet, as I immersed myself in the Islamic contributions to astronomy, mathematics, medicine and optics, I discovered something far more complex. Not only was a literal interpretation of religion often a positive influence on the course of science in Islamic times. More astonishingly, a policy of state-sponsored rationalism had led to much suffering, even death; and it had been largely, if unintentionally, responsible for keeping science out of Islamic colleges and universities.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
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For most of this decade, as the price of hydrocarbons broke record after record and the big oil exporters watched their revenues soar, Iran seemed capable of riding out all the shocks that international politics, and George W Bush in particular, could throw at it. Bush included the country in his 2002 “axis of evil” speech; he invaded its neighbours to the east and west; and in 2006 the UN security council, pushed by the US and its European allies, imposed sanctions in response to Iran’s nuclear programme.
Yet none of these actions dented the Iranians’ sense of immunity from misfortune. America’s travails in Iraq and Afghanistan ended whatever hopes Bush may have harboured of attacking Iran itself; the Americans were even forced to solicit Iranian co-operation in pacifying both. (Iran helped fitfully). As for sanctions, initially designed to curtail Iran’s purchase of nuclear equipment and its leading personalities’ ability to travel, these seemed a trifle next to the spiralling sums that the Iranians earned from the sale of their oil: $47bn in 2005, $58bn in 2006, $70bn in 2007. Tehran boomed while Baghdad and Kabul suffered, and a new middle class, shedding the old revolutionary austerities, discovered consumerism.
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Paul Adrian Raymond
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George Mitchell’s first tour of the middle east as President Obama’s envoy in late January came amid stratospheric expectations of the new US administration, Muslim outrage at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and election fever in Israel.
But the diplomatic games being played on the Arab stage are of equal significance for Mitchell’s mission. Understanding the rivalries between key regional players will be crucial to achieving progress between Israel and the Palestinians.
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Shereen El Feki
The Jewel of Medina
by Sherry Jones (Beaufort Books, $24.95)
“Three things were made beloved to me in this world of yours: women, perfume and—the delight of my eye—prayer,” the prophet Muhammad is said to have once remarked. Reports of his sayings and actions, called hadith in Arabic, are one of the main sources of Islamic law, and they include guidance on how to lead a satisfying sex life. This full-blooded approach incensed medieval Christians, who used the prophet’s sensuality as a key indictment against Islam as a whole. Lately, many Muslims too have become uncomfortable with discussion of the prophet’s sexual relations. At the start of 2008, Love and Sex in the Life of the Prophet, a non-fiction book in Arabic which examined some of the lore surrounding the prophet’s sexuality, landed its Egyptian author and publisher in hot water with religious conservatives.
So it is little surprise that a novel about the prophet and his women, written by a non-Muslim (and an American to boot), should raise some hackles. By now, the saga surrounding The Jewel of Medina is better known than the story itself. The book, originally to be published by Random House in August 2008, was dropped on advice that its “soft-core pornography” might incite violence against the company and anyone associated with it. The house of the British publisher who then picked it up, Gibson Square, was, coincidentally enough, firebombed, putting the British print run on hold. But a second American firm, Beaufort Books, decided to push ahead. This is just as well, as it allows readers to judge the book on its own merits, rather than others’ violent reactions to it.
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Anshuman A Mondal
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In his response to my article “A Muslim middle way?” (Prospect, August 2008), Ed Husain does not so much rebut my arguments as reassert his own. While Husain concedes that Islamism is a diverse phenomenon, he continues to insist: “it is a fact that Islamism, in all its diversity, has led to jihadism.” The implication is clear: whatever kind of Islamist you are, one day you will graduate to jihadism. Since all Islamist roads lead to the single destination of extremism, presumably “moderate” Islamism is a contradiction in terms—despite overwhelming evidence that moderate Islamists exist.
To make his point, Husain uses the example of individuals who have taken the “escalator” from Islamism to jihadism. But, as I pointed out in the article, this in no way proves that there is a causal link between the two. If so, how do we explain those Islamist groups like the forebears of the AK Party in Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who have moved in the opposite direction, away from jihadism? (Husain cites the case of Zawahiri, but he must know, surely, that Zawahiri left the Brotherhood to join a radical splinter group precisely because the Brotherhood was moving in a more moderate, centrist direction.) Indeed, how would Husain explain his own movement—and those of others he cites—away from Islamism?
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Ed Husain
I wrote my book The Islamist last year to try to break the hold of closet extremists over British Muslim discourse. One year on, the debate is in far healthier shape. Thoughtful young Muslims are becoming more boisterous in their rejection of Islamism as a political model—much to the frustration of Islamists and hard-left dinosaurs.
Last month’s Prospect essay by Brunel academic Anshuman A Mondal was a reasonable attempt to assess the Quilliam Foundation, Britain’s first counter-extremism think tank, which I co-founded last year. But there were several factual and analytical inaccuracies that I want to put right.
Mondal suggests that Quilliam “represents” moderate or liberal Islam. In fact, Quilliam has argued that British Muslims should now move away from the first-generation Islamist immigrant game of “Muslim representation,” and engage with mainstream civil society as full citizens. Bodies such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) were established by a Tory government, and others have been promoted by Labour. They have done more harm than good, putting emphasis on religious identity above the other factors which shape human identity. Quilliam seeks to provide new thinking for western Muslims, and does not wish to play “community leader.”
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Anshuman A Mondal
In recent months, two British groups representing moderate or liberal Islam—British Muslims for Secular Democracy and the Quilliam Foundation—have been launched to considerable media fanfare. The Quilliam Foundation in particular has caught the eye. Partly because it is the work of two ex-Islamists—Mohammed “Ed” Husain and Maajid Nawaz, deputy director and director respectively—Quilliam is being seen as a major new development in the battle against extremist Islam in Britain.
Quilliam’s profile has been boosted by the success of The Islamist (Penguin), Husain’s book about his years in London as a member of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Islamist was one of the publishing sensations of 2007, selling over 50,000 copies. The paperback comes garlanded with praise from some of Britain’s leading opinion-formers. And the book’s influence has reached into government. The BBC reported that “one government official emailed scores of colleagues inside Whitehall… instructing them to read it.” Given that Quilliam’s agenda has been substantially shaped by Ed Husain, it is worth taking a closer look at the account of political Islam in Britain found in The Islamist.
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Husain’s active involvement in Islamism—the modern, politicised form of Islam which seeks to impose an Islamic state and sharia law—seems to have begun in 1990 and lasted roughly a decade and a half. His early devotion to an elderly Bengali Sufi mystic whom his Indian Muslim father had introduced him to, and whom he called “Grandpa,” made him eager to learn more about Islam at school.
“The first book I read about Islam in English was Islam: Beliefs and Teachings by Ghulam Sarwar,” Husain writes. Sarwar was “the brains behind the… Muslim Educational Trust (MET). What seemed like an innocuous body was, in fact, an organisation with an agenda… It all seemed harmless but the personnel all belonged to Jamat-e-Islami [a Pakistan-based Islamist party] front organisations in Britain.”
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