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During the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, I got to know the minister of education there, Enes Karic, a gentle scholar of Arabic who was also the author of what he claims to be the first complete translation of the Koran into Bosnian. He told me that every time he met a Western delegation, someone would ask a question which said, more or less politely (sometimes much less politely): “What are you people doing here, a Muslim population in a European country?”
He would give them a calm smile and reply: “Yes, it’s true that we follow a religion that came from the Middle East. Like the Jews. And like the Christians.”
Like Karic, Tharik Hussain, the author of Muslim Europe, is a devout Muslim; but in most other ways he cuts a different figure. The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, born and brought up in Tower Hamlets, London, he is an enthusiast for ideas but not a scholar. Yet he too has a mission to educate and inform, by exploring every aspect of what it means to be a Muslim in this predominantly Christian continent. In a previous book, he described his travels through Bosnia and other Balkan countries where Islam was introduced by the Ottomans. Now he turns to a different set of European territories, where Muslim rulers and settlers arrived during the early centuries of Islam.
Starting in Cyprus, before visiting Sicily and Malta, and finally exploring Portugal and the cities of southern Spain, he searches for the physical traces of Islamic culture, beginning with the 7th century (Cyprus) and ending in the 15th century (the fall of the Emirate of Granada). In several of these places he seeks out local experts, whether academic or not. Much of the exposition takes the form of clunky didactic dialogues with them; yet the evidence they produce is fascinating nonetheless – a church in Palermo, for example, which seems to rest on the floor plan of a mosque, and is aligned to point at Mecca.
But this is no dry archaeological or architectural study. Much of the human interest here comes from Hussain’s meetings with actual Muslims, both residents and visitors. He encounters a half-Tatar dervish “sheikh” in Cyprus, a learned Tunisian imam in Sicily, a half-Libyan law lecturer at the University of Malta. In Nicosia, in Northern Cyprus, he finds a fellow Bangladeshi – homeless, sleeping on the floor of the mosque – who had paid his life savings to people-smugglers; they promised to take him to the EU, and then dumped him in the wrong half of the island.
Wherever possible, Hussain attends services in mosques. As I read his simple but loving descriptions of the various actions (beginning with ritual washing) and prayers, it struck me that it is rare for Western readers to be given any such account of the duties and pleasures of Muslim worship. That is even more true of his description of “dhikr”, the ritual chanting and physical movement which plays a large role in the dervish orders. And these things are not as tangential to the main aim of the book as they may seem: it matters to Hussain that he is performing the same devotions that would have been made in these places many centuries ago.
While he expresses constant respect and deference towards his Muslim informants, however, the information they give him is of – ahem – variable quality. In Cyprus he is told that 40 “companions of the Prophet” (people who had known Muhammad personally) are buried there, and is shown the tomb of Omer or Umar, a Companion who led a Muslim invasion of the island; an old religious teacher he meets then confides in him that “none of the names of the Companions was known, and Omer was also made up”.
No less dubious is the story of the migration of the Prophet’s aunt to Cyprus, where, the moment she died, three huge stones flew through the air from Palestine to cover her body. Hussain notes the suspicious resemblance to a Neolithic dolmen of this three-stone tomb, which was “discovered” in the 18th century, more than a millennium after her death. With great respect, he quotes the local imam’s account of how he has communed with this holy lady, before adding: “I realised it didn’t actually matter that Cyprus was historically a haven for female cults, and that some commentators viewed her as just a Muslim version of that. It didn’t even matter that she might not be buried at this very spot.”
What might matter, on the other hand, is another piece of information conveyed to him by the same imam: he had it on excellent authority that Prince Charles (as he then was) had converted to Islam, and was now leading the life of a secret Muslim. While this was indeed a popular rumour in the Islamic world more than 30 years ago, it seems odd to give it new currency in what is meant to be a serious work of non-fiction.
But this raises the question: what sort of readers is Hussain writing for, and why? Sometimes – as here – one senses a kind of confidence-boosting exercise for Muslims, whose self-esteem must be burnished so far as possible. Given the lowly status of many Muslim immigrants in Western societies, the motivation is understandable. At the same time, however, Hussain seeks to teach them about the history of their religion; and proper education should focus on the truth.
The main aim of the book is to educate West European readers, and here too there is a worthy ulterior purpose: Hussain wants us to understand that Muslim culture played an important role in our own history, and that Islamic civilisation actually helped to civilise us. This is the main theme of the second half of the book, with its concentration on the Muslim territories of southern Spain. Much of this material is more familiar, but it certainly bears repeating: medieval Andalusia was a much more civilised place than the barbarous kingdoms of northern Europe. As Hussain notes, while English doctors prescribed crushed snails and smouldering goat’s hair, learned physicians in Muslim Córdoba were performing successful caesareans and cataract operations, on patients who recovered in airy hospital rooms with clean sheets and running water.
One other target readership emerges at the end of the book, when Hussain meets a cousin who has settled in Madrid, and thinks about the future of his children there. He wants them to develop what he calls a “place identity”, a sense of belonging to this new European home. Showing them that there is a Muslim element in European history is, he thinks, the way to do it.
Again, the motive is benign, but this raises some questions. Surely it’s possible for the children of Chinese or Hindu immigrants, in Spain or the UK, to grow up feeling an attachment to the new homeland, even taking an interest in its medieval churches or country houses, without looking for the remains of ancient Indian or Chinese buildings? And what is the significance of identifying these notional roots entirely in terms of religion, so that an Indonesian Muslim is meant to feel just as rooted in medieval Andalusia as an Arab one?
Much will depend, in fact, on the kind of Islam that these children grow up to practise. As Hussain explains, when he first encountered the tombs (or alleged tombs) of Companions of the Prophet, he was shocked: at that time, he was following the fiercely pared-down Salafist Islam of Saudi Arabia, which regards the veneration of holy men as blasphemous, and also rejects the dervish orders as a corruption of the true faith. His own journey towards valuing these practices has been a journey away from the neo-orthodoxy which Saudi preachers wish to impose on the Muslim world.
For the neo-orthodox, there is only one important thing to be said about these early centuries of Islamic rule over European territories: places that were once Muslim should be regained for Islam. And, far from valuing – as Hussain does – the blending of Islamic and Western culture, they see the latter as irredeemably corrupted and decayed. The more Muslims we have who think and feel like Tharik Hussain, the better it will be for all of us. But we are entitled to doubt whether just studying medieval history can bring that about.
★★★☆☆
Muslim Europe is published by Viking at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
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