City Journal (USA) Theodore Dalrymple 16/07/2009

What is the cause of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist violence, and why do a few people become suicide bombers? These are the urgent questions that Kenan Malik, a respected and intelligent British journalist of Muslim origin but secular convictions, sets out to answer in From Fatwa to Jihad. It would be simplistic to ascribe the violence to Islam itself by citing those verses from the Koran that seem to justify or even require it. Selective quotation does not explain why extremism is the province of the young, and why, for example, the first generation of Muslim immigrants to Britain (and elsewhere) were not at all attracted to it.

The merit of Malik’s book is that it seeks the answer in modern conditions. Even in Islamic countries, fundamentalists are not medieval throwbacks, however they may see themselves. They derive their ideas, even if they do not acknowledge it, at least as much from Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao as from Mohammed. They claim to want to return to seventh-century Arabia, but this is no more realistic or sincere than the wish of Victorian admirers of the Gothic to return to the Middle Ages.

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