Bloomsbury (London 2018). 336 pages. Pbk. £9.99.
In his first book, The Islamist, Ed Husain traced his own life story towards and then out of Islamic fundamentalism. In this latest volume, he takes the reader on an enlightening journey through the 1,400 years of Islam. The focus is very much on the Middle East and Europe and not so much on Asia or the Americas, so it’s not quite the ‘global’ history promised in the title, but in a very readable and informative three hundred or so pages, Husain does a pretty good job of painting the picture of Islam’s spread across the world and of its more positive cultural and political contributions to the world.
The central concerns of the book, however, revolve around the substantial presence of violent extremists within Islam, the failure of those in positions of responsibility and authority within the faith effectively to deal with them and the failure of ‘the West’ correctly to read the motivation and trajectory of the Muslim world. ‘The house of Islam is on fire’, he says, ‘and the arsonist still lives there’.
Husain argues that there is a failure in the Western world to take account of the feelings, narratives and perceptions of religious believers. But Husain’s main interest is not so much in pointing out the blind spots of Western materialism and ‘strident secularism’ – he notes how grateful Muslims should be for the benefits of living in secular states that allow real freedom of religious expression – as challenging the failures within Islam to purge itself of the ‘puritans’, who claim to be Believers yet who have lost touch with the fact that the Qur’an has multiple meanings and may be open to many inward and outward interpretations.
A mistake being made by those he terms Islamists relates to the concepts of Halal and Haram. The majority of Muslims generally, and jurists particularly, hold that everything is Halal – permissible – apart from a few exceptions. For Islamists, everything is prohibited – Haram – unless it is specifically permitted in the Qur’an and the Sayings of the Prophet. Further, for these Islamist puritans, Haram acts should be punished by the state in this world, as well as by God in the next. This is a key to understanding the mind-set of those inflicting death and destruction in the name of Islam. As Husain says, ‘When the Salafi puritanism of forbidding everything unless it is expressly sanctioned by scripture is combined with Islamist legalism, the result is totalitarianism and fascism.’
For Husain, education has to play a large role in the future of an Islam that is comfortable in a plural world. The average Arab child, he reports, reads for six minutes a year, as against the 200 hours of reading by his or her Western counterpart. Not just this, but the emphasis on rote learning of the Qur’an and other subjects at the expense of critical and productive thought, is damaging the ambitions of children in many Muslim families. Girls and women are also victims of this on-off binary way of thinking. In Egypt and the Yemen, almost all girls and women report that they have been sexually harassed, while in Saudi Arabia nearly 90% of men blame such experiences on ‘women’s excessive make-up’.
Husain offers some ways forward. The West will not defeat the lone suicide bomber through surveillance alone. The extremist tap needs to be turned off at source. For Husain, this means enabling a Middle Eastern Union along the lines of the EU to form, helping to counter the conditions in which violent extremism breeds: poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, water shortages. This would need to be supported with an equivalent of the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, with Arab countries with a higher GDP sharing wealth more equitably with poorer neighbours in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, for example. And Muslims must no longer tolerate the fanatical and violent extremists in their midst. Their yaqeen – total certainty – must be exposed and thoroughly rejected so that young people will find no easy route to join them.
This book is a compelling account of the origins and sustenance of extremist Islam, and when one reads again today, of another atrocity taking place at the hands of an alleged Islamist, one cannot but hope that some such solutions as those that the author proposes may soon receive the urgent attention they deserve.
Dave Francis is an education consultant, a trustee of the SOF Network and editor of the ‘Solarity’ materials for Young People’s Philosophy and Religion Clubs: www.solarity.org.uk