Crying in the wilderness

For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in May 2002.

In the summer of that year an Israeli newspaper named Crooke as an agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, and shortly after he was recalled to London. It has been reported that his sympathy with the Palestine cause caused embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government. However, he soon returned to the Middle East to set up Conflicts Forum, a think tank which encourages engagement with Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist movements.

Resistance is Crooke’s first book and a work of first-rate importance. He invites the reader to look at Islamism — the creed of political Islam which lay at the heart of the Iranian revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon — in a fresh way.

Mainstream western intellectuals, politicians and journalists habitually denounce Islamism as nihilistic, beyond redemption and dedicated to the violent destruction of civilisation itself. The great strength of Crooke’s book is that he examines Islamism on its own terms: he argues that it embraces an entirely different understanding of humanity to the one that is available in the secular West.

He maintains that Islamism emphasises altruism, love for our fellow human beings and communal social structures in sharp contrast to the selfishness and materialism of modern Britain and America. This involves a radically different way of ‘thinking about thinking’, in contrast to what he denounces as ‘instrumentalist’ Western methods of thought.