No easy answers

An unsettling interview with Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay for three years, and with his father Azmat, began with the haunting cry of the muezzin as it rang out across a cityscape, unnamed and unidentifiable, and the clashing of heavy iron gates being shut. Two sounds that perhaps sum up what’s been happening in the world since the events of September 2001.

British Muslims, Father and Son (Radio 4, Monday) gave us a refreshingly frank account of Begg’s life before and after his ‘extrajudicial’ imprisonment. He was seized one night in Islamabad, where he was living with his young family, after he answered the door to a group of men who pushed a gun to his head, forced him to his knees, shackled his hands and legs, ‘hooded his head’ and carried him off to three years of incarceration in a converted sea container. He was under suspicion as a British Muslim whose passport revealed he had visited all the major war zones in which the Muslim world had been under attack — Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya — and on several occasions. Yet if MI5 had looked further back in his family records, they would have discovered that generations of Beggs had fought in the British army as Indian Muslims and that he had considered joining up himself before the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 made him realise that as a British soldier he would be involved in fighting against other Muslims.

Nothing is straightforward in Begg’s life. As a young boy his parents (who emigrated from the subcontinent to Britain in 1966, having as children been forced to flee to Pakistan from the anti-Muslim riots which followed Partition) sent him to a Jewish school because they thought he would get the best education there.