ABSTRACT
This book is intended for beginners. Nevertheless, it would be naive of me to assume that you had no previous knowledge of the subject. How could that be when the media bombard you daily with information about the Muslim world? With this thought in my mind, I decided to spend half an hour with a newspaper before settling down to write this opening chapter. It is Monday May 26 1997. The international news, on page 12 of today's Guardian, begins with a map of the Sudan and a large photograph of soldiers loading their automatic rifles on strips of cloth aligned like prayer mats in the desert. The caption reads, ‘The Islamic state-in-the-making promises martyrs divine marriage with houris in paradise if they fight in the south’, and the accompanying article about the Sudanese civil war is headed, ‘Dark times loom for visionary Sudan’. At the foot of the page, there is a briefer article covering the election results in Iran. It mentions the struggle of the police to maintain dress and behaviour codes; during the post-election celebrations a woman was stopped in her car and arrested for wearing make-up, and schoolgirls (whom the Iranian authorities require to wear Islamic cover from the age of nine) discussed ripping off their head scarves. On the facing page the heading is, ‘Taliban put neighbours on alert’. Beneath it there is another large photograph, this time of turbaned warriors aboard a battered truck in front of a domed mosque. The Taliban have now gained almost complete control of Afghanistan, and an earlier article in the same issue described how yesterday in Mazar-i-Sharif men doffed turbans and long shirts, while the few women who dared to venture outside their homes wore the one-piece head-to-toe burqa. The writer concluded, ‘It is as if the country is being plunged back in time for the sake of peace’. Now, in this article, the focus is on the likely impact of the Taliban victory on the neighbouring central Asian states, which were until recently part of the Soviet Union. The words of a United Nations official are printed in bold type in a central panel, ‘The fear is that you have five new states in search of an identity. Amid all their problems, one rallying identity is Islam’. The only other articles featuring Islam mention matters of more immediate concern to British citizens: two British nurses condemned to be beheaded under Islamic law in Saudi Arabia continue to plead their innocence, alleging that they confessed to murder under duress after being sexually abused by the police; and Mohammed Sarwar, the first Muslim Member of Parliament, is still resisting calls for his resignation in the wake of accusations of bribery.
