DESPITE its title, we learn little about Islam and Muslims in this book. To understand the travail of contemporary Islam, you need to read alongside it Kim Ghattas’s The Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the rivalry that unravelled the Middle East (Wildfire, 2021). What we are given, instead, in Parts 1-3 (which comprise 250 pages) are historic overviews of the changing dynamics of state policy and attitudes to Islam within three countries, America, Britain, and France.

There is plenty of interesting material here. Most readers will probably not realise that the American navy was created as a response to the depredations of “Barbary” pirates in the early 19th century. Also, the very different colonial histories of Britain and France prefigure their distinct policies towards their respective Muslim populations. The heart, however, of Oborne’s book, Part 4 — as befits an award-winning journalist — represents an admirable piece of sustained investigative journalism, “The Enemy Within” (100 pages).

This outlines how a secretive unit in the Home Office, drawing on Cold War methods, along with a network of influential think tanks, some drawing on dubious American funding, over a period of 15 years, have developed a specialist religious vocabulary, which routinely conflates conservative Muslim practice with militancy. As a result, many ordinary Muslims find themselves demonised as a “suspect” community, as government policies such as Prevent seek to modify how they think and act.

Part 5 concludes with ten snapshots drawn from Oborne’s reporting from across the Muslim world, “Huntington’s Bloody Frontiers”. This latter, a reference to the American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous 1993 essay, in which he proposed that future fault lines in international relations would turn less on ideology than on inter-civilisational conflicts, especially the West versus Islam.

Oborne’s admirable aim seems to be to subvert the lazy group-think among many journalists, who lack direct experience of the Muslim world, as well as to subvert Huntington’s simple binary. Unfortunately, many of the excerpts are too short to provide enough context to make sense of the complex situations that they are intended to illuminate.

At times, this book, by a practising Anglican, reads like a work of atonement. As political correspondent of The Spectator — “the political magazine of the former ruling class” — and, later, leading political commentator on The Daily Telegraph, Oborne had a unique insight into the workings of the British state. In 2015, he resigned from the Telegraph, and, in 2019, he left the Conservative Party.

The fallout from the Iraq war shocked him into a realisation that the British State was “a party to a lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an illegal war”. Then he began to investigate attacks on Muslims in the press and concluded that “collaboration between police (or security services) and media in the manufacture of fabricated stories about Muslims has become endemic in British public culture”.

For those interested in the malign impact of Islamophobia in Britain, Part 4 genuinely breaks new ground and deserves to be widely read and debated. Oborne maps the shift in government policy towards Muslims from cohesion to surveillance. This is evident in 2011, when the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, announcing her new Prevent strategy, first used the term “non-violent extremism”.

Oborne, as an astute political commentator, recognised that such a concept marked “a significant moment in political history because it implied massive new powers for the state to police not just criminal activity but also opinion”.

While the study has real strengths, there are weaknesses. Oborne’s historical judgements not infrequently smack of anachronism, always a danger when the past is seen through the prism of addressing contemporary prejudices.

The most egregious example is his presentation of the Venerable Bede (d. 735) not just as the father of English history, but as “the father of English propaganda against Islam”. Yet, the historian whom Oborne cites makes clear that while Bede described the “Saracens” in pejorative terms, he used “Saracens” as an ethnic, not a religious category, since “authors . . . in Anglo-Saxon England appear to have known no such thing as Islam” (K. S. Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, page 242).

The irony here is that Oborne, when writing about contemporary issues such as “grooming gangs”, rightly warns against explaining such networks of sexual predators in religious terms. For Bede, “Saracens” were just one more military threat to Christian communities, albeit of less immediate danger than the Vikings.

Reading Oborne’s somewhat bleak analysis can unwittingly present Muslims in the West as simply victims of state and societal Islamophobia. In reality, recent research indicates massive inter-generational shifts, as young British Muslims, male and female, create a vibrant civil society, participating in public life, while being increasingly visible in advocacy work, charity and the creative arts. This, in part, was enabled through the £60 million allocated to an early phase of the Prevent strategy (2007-10): “easily the largest single investment ever made in British Muslim civil society” (T. Modood, Taking Part: Muslim participation in contemporary governance, 2013).

As Russia and China are now placed in the foreground as the main threat to Western security, we can hope that Muslims are able to continue this more positive trajectory without being regarded as a “suspect” community. Oborne’s work remains a notable contribution to dismantling such a notion.

Dr Philip Lewis is a consultant on Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, advised Bishops of Bradford for some three decades, and taught in Peace Studies at Bradford University.

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is wrong about Islam
Peter Oborne
Simon & Schuster £25
(978 1 3985 0102 7)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50