Book: Islam under Siege

Author: Akbar S. Ahmed
Publisher:

When I heard about this book, I expected from its title that the author would discuss the people, countries, cultures, and political powers which were laying siege of Islam. For a person living in the United States, it is not difficult to identify and understand who the besiegers are and many of the more enlightened ones have the inkling of their objectives also. When I read the book, I was disappointed. The title is not the focal point of the book; I indeed doubt if there is any one single focal point in the book. It is general, rambling and discursive, and contains a lot of information which makes it readable although not relevant to what is promised by the title.

The book is more about the Muslims than Islam. The writer possesses impressive credentials for writing a book on Islam and he has written several of them but he has not used his intellectual and analytical capabilities to provide the readers with what he promised in the title. In his Introduction: God’s Gamble, the author describes what the book is about. He says, “Nor is it (the book) about bin-Laden. It is about the world that has created bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network and the world he has helped to create. It is about bin- Laden’s religion, Islam, which by his actions, has been put on a collision course with other world religions. This book is, then, an exercise in mapping the global landscape and pointing out the routes – that lies ahead.” If the book is about what the author says it’s about, a more appropriate title could be: Bin-Laden and his Islam. As a matter of fact the book is quite other than what the author suggests it is about. It is an assemblage of loosely connected or disjointed essays and sub-essays about Islam and the Muslim people but not about those who have laid siege to Islam.

For instance, in his chapter on “What is Going Wrong?” he has included a sub-essay “A Post-Honor World?” in which he has comprehensively discussed the issue of ‘honor’. In itself, it is an interesting piece of writing but it was not connected credibly with the ebullition pervading the Muslim world and how it contributes to the present state of affairs. It may be a contributory cause to the turbulence in the Muslim world but it is not exclusively more significant or important than the political and economic causes. The essay is at best a scholarly piece of writing which does not conflate with the title of the book.

Similarly, in his chapter on “Ibn Khaldun and Social Cohesion”, there is a sub-article “The Man in the Iron Cage”. The author discusses how ‘ilm’ (knowledge) is degraded and disparaged in the Muslim world. How the true scholars are marginalized, sidelined and ignored and how the forces of ignorance, the mullahs and the corrupt rulers, dominate. To buttress his thesis, the author quoted Professor AbdulHamid AbulSulayman, “The Muslim scholar is either caught between the ignorant mullahs threatening him with jahannum (hell) or the corrupt rulers threatening him with jail.” This is well and good but what does it have to do with the siege of Islam? Unless, of course, the author is suggesting that it is the junta of these dark forces, the mullahs and the corrupt rulers, which is besieging Islam. Had he made this suggestion explicitly and cogently, this chapter would have been properly linked to the focus of the book.

In this chapter, the author has also talked about Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the eminent translator of the Holy Quran. He described how he died in misery and despair, about his wife’s disloyalty, and neglect on the part of Pakistani Government. I admit I didn’t know any of it before reading the book. I have the greatest respect for Abdullah Yusuf Ali but I fail to understand in what way this information was crucial to “Islam under Siege”.

In this chapter under a subtitle “A letter from the death cell” (written by Dr. Yunus Sheikh), the author deplored the falling standards of education in Pakistan and said, “Pakistan has moved a long way from the time of my education in the 1950s when there appeared to be more tolerance in society.” The author also confessed that he was educated in an elitist Catholic boarding school for boys. Based on his experience in this school which in no way can be called mainstream and representative of the Pakistan school education, he has made an extreme generalization to extol the education system of his own times.

Only the holocaust in Gujarat, India, narrated by the author appears pertinent to the title of the book. Herein, the author has shown how Islam is waylaid and besieged by the crazy BJP fundamentalists locally in India. Unfortunately, this description was hidden under the opaque though scholarly sub-title of “The difficulty of maintaining asabiyya in a non-Muslim land” in the chapter on Ibn Khaldun and Social Cohesion. This was crying for a title of its own, for instance, Islam under Siege in Gujarat, India.

Although Gujarat holocaust was greatly tragic, it is but only a patch on a vast canvas on which the bloody carnage against the Muslims and Islam is being painted in their blood. Whole of the Middle East is ablaze.

In the end, I would like to say that the book is interesting and worth reading for its own sake forgetting what the title promises. Some of the non-specific titles which would have been more suitable for the book can be:

• A Discursive Study of the Muslim World and Islam.
• A Radar-sweep View of the Muslim World.
• 9/11 and how it affected the Psyche of the Contemporary Muslim World.

However, if the author insists on keeping the title of his book which seems incomplete ‘as is’ to the reviewer, he should consider adding one more chapter titled “Islam under Siege”. He should paint in this chapter the socio-economic-politico-religious picture of the events leading to 9/11 and its aftermath and consider at least the following items and discuss them:

• Who created bin-Laden?
• Afghanistan’s Jihad against the Soviet Union and its Mujahideen.
• Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq: True Causes and Motivations. The 9/11 was only a convenient catalyst and excuse but not the true cause of these wars. Oil and regional hegemony and control were the more important causes of these wars.
• Who are the besiegers of Islam? The western news media, the neo-conservatives, the Imperial powers and their post-cold war ambitions.
• Reaction of the Muslim world.