My favourite historian on Islam

While on the subject of Islam, it is always a joy for me to come across anything written by Edward Norman, one of the greatest living historians and my favourite. I just found this, which I'd forgotten, from a book review he wrote in 2007.

In Britain public money is being allocated to identify and promote ‘moderate’ Islam, in the hope of discouraging the ‘extremists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ whose supposed misunderstanding of the Faith is, in fact, the version most practised in those societies where it is the majority religion. The result is not likely to be much more than the detachment of a favoured westernised coterie of leaders from the main body of believers.

A great friend of mine, now dead, a very erudite British Bengali Muslim, would have vehemently disagreed with this view and shown much learning in arguing against it. But he was a Guardian reader and Labour supporter, Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernised in many ways, despite his considering race the explanation for most behaviour and his covert antipathy to Jews. I suspect his Western education made him have less rather than more understanding of the Koran. 

Come to that, Nigerian Christians may understand the Bible better than affluent Ivy League educated American Episcopalians, but that's another story.

I loved Edward Norman since he delivered his drily funny attack on the modern Church of England in the Reith Lectures all those years ago. His The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History  is a stimulating and mischievously provocative essay rather than a mere coffee table book, with an irony almost worthy of Gibbon, but deployed in favour of Christianity. He mentions modern Christians' apologies for the Crusades and comments

Perhaps, however, a balance of remorse might be achieved if the Islamic bodies were, in turn, asked to apologise for their own invasions of the Byzantine provinces and Holy Land some three and a half centuries earlier.

He says of Moorish Spain, 

All those placid courtyards and sparkling fountains, that poetry and art, rested upon the existence of one of the largest slave populations the world has ever seen.

He also tells us that the Moors developed savage techniques for extracting confessions from suspected heretics and

there is a sense in which the notorious Spanish Inquisition was a Moorish legacy.

This reminds me that I spent forty minutes with Augustine Ndeliakyama Shao, the Catholic Bishop of Zanzibar (an island which is 95% Muslim), when I was there. The Bishop asked me how people in England felt about Muslims and I told him about the widespread concern about Islamophobia and that Muslims being brown-skinned were seen as victims. The Bishop told me that

Muslims worry about victimisation when thy are a minority. When they are a majority they are very different.

A number of churches have been attacked in Zanzibar since we met. 

I must say that I have liked a great deal most of the Muslims I have known and I imagine their habit of praying several times a day is part of the reason they are attractive. They have remarkable qualities, a remarkable seriousness and depth, usually. However, John Buchan's description of Islam as a warlike creed (or rather Sandy Arbuthnot's) in Greenmantle is clearly accurate. Islam will give rise to countless conflicts in the future in Europe as well as Africa and Asia. 

I agree with a fair bit of the Muslim critique of the modern West. I want there to be peace between the world's religions and there should certainly be peace between Christians, Jews and Muslims, who all worship the same God, but there will not be. 

The cantonisation of England along racial and religious lines became inevitable as soon as immigration from the New Commonweath reached several hundreds of thousands back in the early 1960s, I suppose. Here is a very saddening article by Ben Judah, a fantastically gifted young journalist, about widespread anti-Jewish feeling among Muslims in Bradford. Nothing is written in the papers, as far as I know, about how Muslim communities in England feel towards indigenous white English Christians. It would be interesting to find out. Judging from what British Pakistani friends of mine say on Facebook, it might not be very positive.