Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation.
As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And we’d better understand it, because it’s an interesting story, and often a positive one — the way vast crowds streamed onto the streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran in demonstrations against authoritarian rule over the past decade, for example. Western-style participatory democracy remains the dream of the man and woman in the souk. Globalisation means that technical innovation and modern ideas cannot help seeping across borders. And Islam is a notably broad church, by no means totally uncompromising: witness the popularity of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen who, from American exile, preaches inter-religious accord while being accused of trying to overthrow the Turkish state.
De Bellaigue approaches his subject largely through those three cities — Cairo, Islam’s intellectual centre with its famous though often sclerotic Al Azhar university; Istanbul, once capital of the vast inter-denominational Ottoman empire which straddled Europe and Asia; and Tehran, the furthest from the West, with its powerful Shia tradition.
Back in our own Dark Ages, Abbasid openness to science and philosophy provided a bridge between ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe. However, these advances were reversed as ijtihad, or independent reasoning, gave way to taqlid, or emulation of authority. The razing of the Galata Observatory in Istanbul in 1580 epitomised a waning intellectual curiosity.
The Islamic world was forced to deal with the post-Enlightenment West after Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798.
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