Letters to a Young Muslim By Omar Saif Ghobash, Picador, £12.99
This is a thought-provoking book, written by the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Russia to his two teenage sons. Omar Saif Ghobash, the son of a Russian mother and an Arab father who was killed by terrorists in 1977 when the author was four, is a voice rarely heard in the West: that of a devout Muslim, educated at Oxford, speaking Russian, Arabic, English and French, who is keen for his sons to reject all violence and know that “Islam is a religion of peace”.
There is much in what the author writes that all responsible parents would agree with: he wants his sons to spread the “Islamic values of respect, care for others, humour, generosity and the search for knowledge and justice”. He is anxious that they should grow up to feel responsibility for “orphans, the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, the fearful”. He also hopes that this “wholesome Islam” will enchant them with stories that “come from our rich Islamic and human imagination”.
The problem is that this is not the version of Islam that is generally portrayed in the West, so it is hard to assess how widespread Ghobash’s views are and what authority or influence they have within the Muslim world – in, say, Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
He regards ISIS and the terrorists who regularly engage in outrage, in Western countries as having “nothing to do with Islam”. He argues that the voices of “aggressive clerics” who portray Islam as a “religion of power through violence” – and project “a worldview onto Islam that ties the experience of early Islamic empires to the core of our religion … that must dominate religiously, territorially and militarily” – are not the “true Islam”.
Yet Western scholars of Islam will point to problematic surahs and verses in the Koran, used by extremists to justify their behaviour. Despite this, Ghobash states that the Koran “provides a stable reference point in a world of change, or turmoil and of turbulence”.
Others would say that a book which, as Ghobash writes, has been “unchanged and uncorrupted for over 1,400 years” is part of the problem rather than the solution. Not only does the author tell his sons of his love for recitations of the Koran, he also informs them that “the Prophet Mohammed is the finest role model we have”.
He raises questions that suggest there is not only a tension within his religion but also within his own mind. When he reflects on what is “more ethical: to have a strict Islamic system or to have a psychologically healthy Islamic community?” he is unwittingly drawing attention to an unresolved conflict within Islam. Many, if not most, of its adherents would respond that a psychologically healthy Islamic community is one which does follow a “strict Islamic system”. To Western eyes, the faith appears to resist either reform or development.
As a child, the author was taught about the wrongness of suicide – but also of the rightness of suicide bombing. Teaching his children not to hate anyone, he discovers that the religious teacher in their school has taught them to hate those outside the faith.
Ghobash wants his sons to understand “how to be faithful to their inherited religion … and its deepest values” while at the same time accepting that there is a “grey area of uncertainty and doubt as to what is right and what is wrong” which they must learn to work out for themselves.
He writes defensively, implying that the Ummah (the global Islamic community) is under attack in the West. He does not mention the widespread persecution and martyrdom of Christians in Muslim countries around the world.
The question remains: which view of Islam is the right one?
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