AMONG THE MOSQUES

A JOURNEY ACROSS MUSLIM BRITAIN

Ed Husain’s account of Muslim Britain received a mixed reception from reviewers. His identification of increasing extremism in many British mosques lit touch papers in the Daily

Mail. According to Jawad Iqbal, who interviewed him in the Times, Husain ‘encountered many liberal, progressive Muslims championing causes such as LGBT rights. But he also identified serious problems. In town after town, he found mosques that discriminated against women and taught a highly literal interpretation of Islam. Husain also came across books by authors banned in parts of the Middle East for being extremist, and mosques that conducted Islamic marriages without legal registration and the protections that come with it. “There are large numbers of people in activist sections of Muslim communities who think creating a caliphate [a state under a single Islamic ruler] is a good thing,” he tells me.’

Husain, now a professor at Georgetown University, knows something about Islamic extremism having been a member of a hardline Sunni group as a student. In an interview with the New Statesman, he reflected that Daily Mail headlines

were only half the problem. ‘As well as rebuking those on the right who portray all Muslims as intolerant, Husain warns that the left’s insistence that all is well among Britain’s Muslim community is deeply problematic because “all is not well”.’

In the Literary Review, however, Sameer Rahim was underwhelmed by the book which he thought showed the unbalanced ‘zeal of the recovering extremist’. Rahim thought his arguments lacked rigour. ‘Husain takes the temperature of Muslim Britain by visiting mosques in ten cities across the UK at Friday prayers. There are 3.4 million British Muslims, divided by culture, theology and class as well as temperament, and many rarely attend Friday prayers since they are either working or not especially religious. But the small sample size does not stop Husain drawing sweeping conclusions. While his title alludes to VS Naipaul’s

Among the Believers, Husain is unable to match the novelist’s magisterial prose or penetrating insights. Instead, his book careers painfully from the risible to the frankly sinister.’