The last caliph of Islam, Abdulmejid II, was a European-style artist, among whose paintings is a portrait of his wife in a satin dress, high heels and a bob cut, reading a copy of Goethe’s Faust. The caliphate, the symbolic leadership of Sunni Islam abolished in Istanbul in 1924, was really quite different from the febrile imaginings of fringe Islamists seeking to revive it and Islamophobes living in fear of it. The Ottoman caliphs saw themselves not just as figureheads of Islam, but as heirs to the Roman empire; among their regnal titles was “Caesar”.
In the interest of secularism but also in fear of Islamisation, governments across Europe have banned face veils, Switzerland has banned minarets, and even the burkini — a modest swimsuit — is considered by French municipalities too bashful for their beaches. But the more significant historical trend is, rather, the Europeanisation of Islam, already evident in the caliphate and now embracing the mass of Europe’s Muslims who speak the same languages, abide by the same laws and celebrate the same national sporting victories as their fellow non-Muslim citizens.
Yet, the irony about Europe’s discourse around Islam is that the majority of books focus on a minority of Muslims perceived as Islamising their societies, while only a minority of titles focus on what is happening inside the thoroughly Europeanised majority of Muslims on the continent. In the latter camp are two welcome new books by European Muslims — the British lawyer Tawseef Khan and the Turkish thinker Mustafa Akyol — while the prominent British-Muslim think-tanker Ed Husain joins the ranks of polemicists Douglas Murray, Éric Zemmour and Thilo Sarrazin in stoking fears about the admittedly vocal minority of Muslims out of step with Europe’s mainstream.
According to Husain’s travelogue about Muslim Britain, Among the Mosques, British Muslims are gripped by “caliphism”, an ideology that “is anti-Western and seeks to subvert British culture, laws and institutions.” Husain turns up unannounced at the central mosque of 10 cities from London to Glasgow, where he interviews imams, congregants and theology students. In northern mill towns such as Dewsbury and Blackburn, hubs of ultraorthodox Islamic scholarship, he’s troubled by his findings. Women are segregated. Sharia law is favoured. Though no one advocates violence, clerics are evasive about their response to cartoons of Muhammad (within the last year, a teacher in Batley, northern England, was suspended and in France a teacher was murdered for showing such images in lessons on free speech).
Husain doesn’t really explore the vast matrix of Muslim Britain, only a narrow cross-section: mosques and madrassas. That skews his portrait in favour of out-of-touch mullahs, not everyday Muslims. In interviewing religious adepts from seminaries of the austere Deobandi movement originating in 19th-century India, Husain gets predictably conservative responses. These cannot be attributed to the Muslim community generally. Deobandi clerics do indeed forbid musical instruments — but there’s hardly a British-Muslim household that doesn’t cherish music, usually of numerous genres from Bollywood to devotional music.
Defying caliphism, Husain speaks for a “world of reason and logic, science and data”. But his account of Muslim Britain is devoid of those virtues, preferring personal anecdote to objective evidence. Not one poll is cited to reflect Muslim views. In fact, survey data collated by Ipsos MORI cast serious doubt on his central claims. Eighty-eight per cent of Muslims strongly feel British. Seven in 10 Muslims believe western liberal society and Islam are compatible. Only 1 per cent supports “fully separate Islamic areas in Britain, subject to sharia law”, but readers of this book would be left to conclude this is what Muslims are striving for.
No longer The Islamist — the excellent 2007 memoir that made him a public figure — Husain identifies now as a Burkean conservative and moderately practising Muslim. His Whig-like faith in “British uniqueness” is as outdated as caliphism — both being imperialist ideologies that revel in past glories. Despite nodding to Britain’s Islamic heritage in the book’s coda, Husain clearly sees contemporary Islam as alien to Britain. In Manchester, he feels like he’s in Lahore and in Dewsbury in “a different . . . century.” Like a parody little Englander, he is everywhere affronted by “halal butchers”, “Asian shops”, “ethnic clothing”, “cheap Arabian perfumes” and the ubiquity of Muslim taxi drivers. On one especially disturbing excursion, “there is not even a McDonald’s to be seen.”
Characterising Britain’s first mosques as “outposts” of foreign Islamic empires, he is troubled by their continued proliferation, especially the conversion of churches and pubs that recalls imperial conquest. But it’s really a continuity of sorts: derelict spaces renewing their communal function. Holding his nose in musk-scented shrines, Husain doesn’t grasp the patriotic phenomenon unfolding before his eyes, the sanctification of England, where pilgrims now venture from across the Muslim world.
Behind the believe-in-Britain bluster lies profound pessimism. The UK has only three million Muslims — one in 20 — but Among the Mosques is laden with demographic angst. Alluding to Brexit, and its associated anxieties about migration from the EU, and a growing Muslim population, he asks: “If Britain could not tolerate white, Christian Europeans, what is the fate of its Muslims?” He presumes we are capable of only so much diversity — despite elsewhere extolling Britain’s “unique” tolerance. The threat of mass deportation is seriously entertained. Lecturing an imam about Habsburg Jews, he warns that if Muslims don’t “modernise” and “contribute to Western society”, they will suffer a similar fate.
This more than anything exposes Husain’s muddled thinking. Rarely in history has a minority contributed more to western society than Austro-Hungarian Jews. Indeed, they practically invented European modernity. That did not spare them from Nazism. Husain’s reflex is always to blame minorities for not assimilating, rather than challenging prejudice and iniquity. And he uncritically repeats quite ludicrous claims (no one in Blackburn is supposedly allowed to fly the Union Jack).
This tendency in public life to denounce Muslims is what Tawseef Khan’s book, The Muslim Problem, is all about. A Manchester solicitor with a PhD in social policy, Khan builds the case against Islamophobia, which he claims “is buried deep in the marrow of western society”. Borrowing from critical race theory — an originally American idea of racism being as often implicit as explicit that is often dubiously applied in other contexts — Khan characterises Islamophobia variously as “structural”, “systemic”, “institutional.”
If that means governments are implicated, he’s right. The official “countering violent extremism” agenda, known in the trade as CVE — of which Husain was a well-intentioned pioneer post-9/11 — has under both Labour and Conservative governments victimised Muslims. Khan cites a family put on notice because a child wore a Palestine badge at school. But by portraying the west as essentially Islamophobic, he maligns societies that have voluntarily integrated millions and millions of Muslims with little complaint.
The Muslim Problem dismantles claims that Islamic societies are inherently violent, yet applies to the west the same sweeping essentialism. Khan even claims the entire discourse around Islam is a “smokescreen for Western problems”, that it’s actually the west’s “inability to face up to the evolving world” that is at issue.
There’s no such deflection in Mustafa Akyol’s argument for Islamic enlightenment, Reopening Muslim Minds, which admits to a “big crisis of Islam” while being optimistic about Islam’s direction of travel. Akyol arguably resembles Husain: a fellow habitué of Washington think-tanks and a would-be reformer from a more literalist background. Both their books contain calls for enlightenment. But where Husain hectors Muslim clerics to accept his highly partisan interpretation of western enlightenment, Akyol argues for an authentically Islamic enlightenment, engaging with the Muslim intellectual tradition’s forgotten riches — scientific invention and legal creativity — to which his book also doubles as an entertaining introduction.
Whereas western calls for reform see the Koran as an obstacle to overcome, Akyol takes inspiration from its positive invocations of reason — a word, I would add, that appears 50 times in the Koran. Reason featured prominently in the formative period of Islam, in all schools of thought from the orthodox law schools that hold sway today to the now-dormant medieval tradition of Islamic philosophy inspired by Arabic translations of Plato and Aristotle. Akyol seeks to revive reason’s application to ethical and legal questions such as blasphemy and women’s rights. Medieval jurists, he notes, used to uphold a wonderful legal maxim: that sharia “aspires for freedom”.
Akyol’s hero is the Muslim philosopher ibn Rushd, known to the west as Averroes. As long ago as the 12th century, he argued women were the intellectual equals of men, criticising the way their “ability is not known, because they are only taken for procreation.” He believed they were capable of doing his own day-job: working as a judge. (True to his spirit, the UK has female sharia judges, a more senior position than imam, though women remain barred from the latter in most mosques).
Ibn Rushd is actually lauded in all three of these books by Muslims of different persuasions, each author wrestling — as ibn Rushd did — with the same urgent challenge of maintaining an ancient faith in an era of change. Ibn Rushd is still taught in orthodox seminaries, yet also acclaimed by freethinkers such as Salman Rushdie, who is named after him. Praised by Dante and Chaucer and best preserved in a Hebrew translation, ibn Rushd hugely influenced Christianity and Judaism too.
Perhaps most significantly, he was a European, from Córdoba in Spain, where a statue of him proudly stands today, testifying to the shared legacy of Muslims and non-Muslims on this sometimes fractious continent — where Muslims live now not as trespassers, but heirs.
Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain Bloomsbury £18.99, 352 pages
The Muslim Problem: Why We’re Wrong About Islam and Why It Matters by Tawseef Khan, Atlantic Books £14.99, 288 pages
Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance by Mustafa Akyol, St Martins Press £23.99, 336 pages
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