The Battle For The Soul Of Islam, And Other Things About Which I Know Nothing

Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being, 
The All-merciful, the All-compassionate, 
The Master of the Day of Doom.
Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour. 
Guide us in the straight path, the path of those 
Whom Thou hast blessed, not of those against 
Whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray.

So begins the Quran, a document secular Westerners spend a lot of time talking about without ever actually reading. It's been sitting on my Kindle for ages resolutely unread, however many times I make the pledge to get started on it. I imagine I'm not alone in this. There is the desire to know but none of the dedication. So many conversations since 2001 have revolved around Islam and what they actually believe, but a familiar hesitancy creeps into the voice of anyone who isn't either a scholar or a bigot as the conversation continues. Doesn't it condone beheading? Aren't there seventy-two virgins in there somewhere? I remember reading something somewhere... never mind. Because none of us have a clue what's in it. Of course we don't - none of us can be arsed to read it.

We should have long ago, as a country, had a "let's all read the Quran" month, or two or three or however long it took. We should have all just bitten the bullet and got it done, because there seems little sign we're going to stop the conversation any time soon, what with a new birth of Salafi butchery in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria stalking our headlines, not to mention Rotherham and assorted other Muslim-related problem areas. We ought to have those lines inscribed in our head as firmly as "In the beginning God created the heavens..." because it is considerably more relevant to our current debates.

"Yeah, but the thing about the hadiths regarding zakat is..."

The fact is that Islam is having a pretty tough time of it right now, and only Muslims themselves know the way out. However much the opinion of the average Daily Mail (and Guardian) online commenter holds that the entire religion is at the root of the problem, it is of course irrelevant as far as solutions go - Muslims are not going to give up their religion because they've seen the worst excesses of it any more than the Siege of Munster was going to convince Protestants that the whole Reformation thing was not worth the effort. Almost all talk about the current jihadi problem talks around the issue - it's either about the wisdom or lack thereof of Western intervention in the Levant, or it's about how Saudi Arabia is to blame for the whole thing, or it's about immigration policy in the UK. Seeing as you can't bomb people into moderation (whatever Netanyahu believes) and you can't kill every militant, this problem only ends when jihadi recruitment from a young male population across the world dries up.

And the reason we don't talk about that is that we don't know anything about what that would look like. We don't know what the average British Muslim's life looks like. We might hear the routine condemnations of what's going on from Muslim communities, but the nightly news never gives them space to say anything more than "not in my name". My suspicion is that the process of migration over the last half century has led to a vast number of sub-par imams - the settlement into new areas gives imams extra authority as guardians of the "traditional" way leading to poorly-educated clerics from rural Pakistan, say, who aren't capable of dealing with the demands of their young charges. This seems to be common-sense - but how would I know what a good imam looks like? I could tell you what I think a good priest might be like, but I have no starting context for the Muslim equivalent because I have no Muslim acquaintances.

Isn't that extraordinary? A full five percent of the English population, and a greater percentage than that in my age group, and not a soul to be found in my contact list. I don't know who is to blame for this - there are certainly not enough British Pakistani students at Cambridge, for one thing, and I went to a private school where that demographic is even scarcer on the ground. I'm not going to blame myself for not going and actively looking for Muslim friends - it is no one's responsibility to create heterogeneous social groups, only to not resist them. 

According to stock photos, that's not hard.

In any case I'm not alone in having little to no actual contact with Islam on anything more than a cursory basis - plenty of people might have Muslim co-workers and friends, but the fear of getting into hot water prevents us from enquiring too far about the practices, let alone the scripture and belief. There is no mainstream depiction of Muslim life on TV, no adept media spokesmen who have any time to do anything but blurt condemnations of atrocities, no niche in the cultural sphere for a character like Omid Djalili's Mahmud in The Infidel, coasting in the comfortable contradictions of going to mosque, listening to rock music and occasionally having a beer. I actually think a country in which we could make more jokes about Islam would be a better one, because as Dara O'Briain says, the reason we don't is because no one knows a sodding thing about Islam.  

And because we are so totally ignorant of our countrymen's way of life, we can't talk about radicalisation properly. How can we if we don't know what moderation looks like? And the cliché that "moderates" need to win out in the Muslim communities is for the same reason pretty meaningless. A week or so ago a Guardian commenter called MalikIsmir as far as I can tell coined this rather useful aphorism: "A fundamentalist will kill you. A moderate will watch you die". We don't need moderate Islam to win. We need liberal Islam to win.

Hurrah, boys, hurrah.

Liberals get a rough press in the West because they've won most of their battles, so now they come across as hand-wringing and spineless. But the essential truth they fought for  - that no one race, class, religion or creed has such authority that it deserves us to unquestioningly kill for it rather than argue for it - took slaughter from the Wars of Religion to the First World War to drum into the public conciousness. Liberalism is hard. And Liberal Islam faces an almost unimaginably tough task in the parlous state of the Muslim world today. Wars and insurgencies almost unbroken from Nigeria to Indonesia should have shown us by now that we are facing a massive generational cataclysm, the result of the failure of Arab liberalism, Arab nationalism, Arab autocracy, and Arab economic policy over a century. Western policy has been harmful but not instrumental; believing that these wars will end due to a change in our stance is naive.

In fifty years' time, the Islamic State or its successors will either still be going strong or will have ceased to exist as a significant threat to global peace. If it has failed, it will not be because the current generation ever gave up the fight (they are true believers) and it won't be because they were all killed by drones (if the full force of the world's strongest military cannot defeat an insurgency over a decade in one country what chance has it against twenty?). It will have failed because the recruits dried up. It will fail because it ceased to appeal to young men because it was supplanted by something more attractive. Salafism has had all the momentum in Islamic discourse for decades now. That is not to say it commands anything near a majority of Muslim opinion, but simply that it "mainstream Islam", whatever that is, is largely inert and reactive, a vacuum leaking young hearts to its more confident wild-eyed cousin.

The old Beltway line "if you're explaining you're losing" extends to religion as much as it does to politics. The various imams who have placed a fatwa on ISIS are playing catchup, unable to provide a compelling vision of their own religion that allows them to do anything more than condemn the jihadis as "unIslamic". But the new caliph would say the same of them, of course. And anyone who's been in a message war of any kind knows that when it's one person's word against another, the more dynamic one wins.

What does a dynamic, attractive, liberal Islam that appeals to the young and can outpace Salafism and its cohorts look like? Will a form of ijtihadi thinking gain a sheen equivalent to that of the American evangelicals of the past fifty years? Will something closer to Sufism eventually appeal to a youth weary of the bloodshed and the endless calls for more struggle? I don't know. I have no idea. None of us non-Muslims do. But simply because we don't know anything about Islam doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that that is the central issue in resolving this crisis. There is a generational war to be fought, and we have to sit on the sidelines. Nevertheless, it might still be helpful to read the Quran at some point. We're going to be talking about it for a while longer.