1. History Of Britain Pdf

'I remind you,' said the Grand Mufti, 'that, during the Crusades, Muslims were attacked by Christians who came from Europe. Seventy thousand were killed in one day. Yet no Muslim authority has ever written against Christianity. We have always made a distinction between the religion and those who sully its name. 'In the case of September 11, you in the West did not make that distinction.

History Of Britain Pdf

That is proof that Western governments have used that event for political strategies that amount to little more than a modern version of colonialism.' Bush's threat to invade Iraq was merely the next stage in that strategy. By this time, the Grand Mufti was really getting into his stride.

'In any case,' he went on, 'what are the human rights of all the civilians the Americans have killed in Afghanistan? Are they any less than the rights of the Americans killed in the twin towers? Bin Laden is said to be a criminal for killing those civilians.

Surely American policy is also criminal when it sanctions the killing of innocent Afghan civilians and gives the green light for the slaughter of civilians in Palestine? 'If you ask me what should happen if bin Laden is really involved, I ask you what we should do to the people who killed civilians in those countries?' But, bin Laden apart, were there not Muslims who were terrorists: the zealots who killed Christians in Pakistan, the lunatic fringe in Britain? 'Of course, there are some Muslim terrorists,' retorted the Mufti, 'but that is true of all religions and not just Islam. Look at Ireland, for example, or Bosnia, where a million Muslims have been slaughtered by Christians. But what is happening now is that the West is terrorising the entire Muslim world.'

The Grand Mufti's impassioned outburst will seem to some people both extravagant and implausible, a denial of the obvious, yet it was typical of the attitudes I encountered in my travels through the Middle East. Nothing could better illustrate the gap of emotion and perception that now divides the West from the Muslim world. Everywhere, whether it was in Cairo, Beirut or Damascus, there was the same torrent of fury against American (and British) policy, the same resentment at the perceived demonising of Islam, the same helpless outrage about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

An entire area of the world was totally of one mind. Whatever we in the West may feel about Islam after September 11,. 'Ninety per cent are low in morale, in identity, in their fear of the future,' a prominent British Muslim, Imam Abduljalil Sajid, told me before I left for Cairo.

'Islam is a victim. Ninety per cent of the trouble spots in the world are Muslim, 90 per cent of refugees are Muslim, 90 per cent of onslaughts are against Muslims - Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq, Gujarat, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Libya.' 'We feel deeply the humiliation, the marginalisation of the whole Muslim world,' agreed Dr Zaki Badawi, chairman of Britain's Council of Imams and Mosques.

'Muslim countries are so divided, so small, so irrelevant. Look at life in them. We are the most backward among nations, and the poorest. Almost the whole of Islam belongs to the Third World. Parts of the Middle East may have enormous oil resources, but, even there, it is the West that ultimately controls them.

'And the more we are painted as enemies of the West, the more it becomes open season on Muslims. We are made to feel beleaguered throughout.

The mood in the Islamic world is sullen and angry. An invasion of Iraq would only fuel that anger and persuade more and more people to commit violence against the Americans. It would be the spark which finally set the Middle East ablaze.

'The suicide bombing culture has already spread to Egypt. The government in Cairo has already arrested several young people who wanted to act against Israel. If this goes on, they will not be able to restrain them. Even if weapons inspectors are allowed into Iraq, the Americans will still use any pretext to invade, as part of their policy to dominate the world. They feel they can do whatever they like.' Nor was it manufactured anger that I encountered as I travelled through the cities of the Middle East.

Those who became enraged at lunch parties in Cairo and Damascus, and at picnics in the mountains above Beirut, were not professional politicians peddling well-practised lines. Often, they were apparently mild and demure bourgeoise ladies. My friend Nagia, a saintly Egyptian who works as a design consultant, said she had felt unable to go back to her job for several weeks because of her anguish about the Palestinian situation. Her despair had been made all the deeper by visits to Cairo hospitals, where maimed Palestinian children have been brought to be treated. Dr Muhammad abu Laylah, Professor of Islamic Studies in English at the Al Azhar University in Cairo, said he had simply been unable to sleep at night because he was so deeply depressed by the way Muslims were being humiliated at the hands of Sharon. 'The Egyptian people are boiling,' he added.

'Everywhere beneath the surface there is psychological chaos, mental discomfort - and we see no solution.' The impact of September 11 has been even more explosive in the Muslim world than it was in New York. Before this journey, I had travelled in the Muslim Middle East only as a tourist, wholly preoccupied with its ancient history. Now, I was going, not just to become involved in the passions and politics of today, but also to meet people in their homes and on the streets, to join them in their mosques and on their family outings, to try to understand a culture that is staggeringly different from our own. In Cairo, I asked Hayfaa Zohni, a pretty young woman of 24 who is training to be a fashion designer, whether she had ever seen men and women kissing in public. She replied, obviously shocked by the question. 'Of course, you'll find a lot of lovers down there beside the Nile, but they do not kiss.

People who do things like that can't do them in front of others. They have to be like animals and go to a place where there isn't anyone. Prof Laylah told me that, if any Al Azhar students were found to be sleeping together, they would be expelled. He did not add that a good many Egyptian students contract so-called urfi marriages without their parents' knowledge while they are still at university. At Al Azhar, the largest and oldest university in the world - it was founded 300 years before Oxford - I was due to talk to the men who supervise the university's 170,000 feeder schools, which teach one and a half million pupils.

After we had shaken hands, they asked me to excuse them for a few minutes while they said the noonday prayer. And off they went to the other side of the room, faced Mecca and went through a far from cursory series of prostrations, before coming back to start the interview. Not exactly the current form at the LSE. In Egypt, it soon became patently obvious that the Islamic world is deeply imbued with religion in a way that has not been true of Western Europe for a very long time. Egyptians, who are among the most pious of Muslims, talk about religion as naturally as we talk about the weather, and always in terms of its application to behaviour.

On my first morning in Cairo, I walked through the crowds to the Egyptian Press and Television Building. There were plenty of soldiers on the Corniche beside the Nile, but neither then nor at any other time did I feel the slightest sense of the fear that I have experienced in cities such as New York and Los Angeles. In the foyer of the building, I found the men arriving for work engaged in a positive frenzy of hand-shaking. They did not seem happy to go through the security barriers until they had pounded the flesh of at least eight other people. Never having observed this display of cordiality at Broadcasting House or Television Centre, I asked Fouad, a government press officer, what lay behind the ritual.

'Guilt slips away through the hand,' he replied, mysteriously: any hostile or resentful feelings you might have been harbouring evaporated when you greeted people in that way. Then, without the least encouragement, he informed me that, during Ramadan, the month of fasting that even secular Egyptians observe, you had to take special care of your behaviour, lowering your eyes if you were tempted to stare at an attractive woman, turning off the television if 'something abnormal' appeared on the screen. It was not just a matter of doing without food and drink during the hours of daylight. He prayed five times a day, he said. So did all his colleagues; some, in fact, prayed 15 times.

This was clearly not the sort of government press office I was used to. Being Muslim was far more important than being Egyptian, added his colleague Fatma, 'because I meet God through my religion, not through my nationality'. For herself, she preferred not to shake hands with men during Ramadan, merely nodding her head by way of greeting.

Clearly, in this society, God and religion are the normal currency of conversation, and not in an intrusive, are-you-saved context, either. Egyptian Muslims pray and fast as naturally as we brush our teeth. Thinking, however, that I might initially have fallen among zealots, I asked the deputy director of the press office, Attiya Shakran, how often he prayed.

'Five times a day, of course,' he replied, as if it were a superfluous question. But that, he added hastily, did not mean that they were extremists.

The instrumentation was just Frances' vocals plus acoustic guitar, violin, cello and African percussion, which together created a quite lovely blend of melody, texture, and harmony — but it was also a combination that presented a real challenge to record and mix to professional levels. This organic creation of the arrangements worked surprisingly well. The main recording problem was obviously mic bleed from the percussion, especially the larger instruments, whose low tones sometimes filled the room. Samplitude 2015.

One of the saddest consequences of September 11 has been to make Muslims feel that, in the mind of the West, devoutness and regular attendance at the mosque imply both fanaticism and a penchant for violence. Again and again on this journey, people pleaded with me not to draw that conclusion. There was a saying of the prophet, Shakran continued, in the same slightly apologetic tone, that special care should be taken of the Egyptians because they were one of the best peoples on earth. 'Because of that honour,' he said, 'we believe God gave us the University of Al Azhar to maintain the moderate message of Islam around the world.' So, what is so special about Al Azhar, apart from its age and enormous size - 350,000 students, 100,000 of them women? Certainly not the buildings, many of which are concrete blocks of a particularly unattractive kind.

What makes this university really unusual is that, to be a student there, you have to be able to recite the entire Koran by heart - all 114 chapters and 6,000 verses of it. 'That is a must for any student who wants to come,' said Prof Laylah.

'It applies even to people who are training to be doctors or engineers. In any case, they'll have been taught to memorise the Koran in our primary and secondary schools, and examined on it twice every year. I had memorised it by the time I was eight.'

At this point, I may have looked somewhat sceptical, so the professor asked whether I would like him to take a student at random from out of the corridor and tell him to start reciting. 'He'd just go on from wherever I suggest that he starts,' he assured me. I decided to forgo the pleasure. But surely, I asked Sheikh Shawki el Nwegy, head of the institute that runs Al Azhar's feeder schools, they would make an exception if they had very bright applicants whose only weakness was that they couldn't recite the Koran from memory? 'No,' he replied flatly, 'such people cannot come.

In fact, they would not even be given one of our secondary school certificates.' Trying to lighten the conversation, I remarked that their students must thank God that their holy book was not the Bible. El Nwegy's colleagues roared with laughter, but the Sheikh himself was not amused. There was a difference, he said, between the Koran and the Bible. The Koran had been revealed by God to the Prophet Mohammed, and not a jot of it had been changed. The Bible was merely the work of many men's hands. But what was the value of this bizarre exercise of learning the whole thing by heart?

Was it perhaps that it became part of your mental furniture? 'Of course,' replied el Nwegy. 'For the believer, the Koran will always be in his heart and mind. Even his emotions will be attracted towards things that are allowed by God and away from things that are forbidden. It acts as a barrier against sin.' It sounded to me, I said, like the ultimate form of brainwashing. 'Not at all,' retorted el Nwegy, unimpressed by the comparison.

'It is just a basis for good judgment and, since God has made it, it is very easy and pleasant to recite.' No doubt largely because of Al Azhar's insistence that all its students must know the Koran by heart, there are now - according to Tim Winter, a Muslim lecturer in religious studies at Cambridge - 15 million people around the world who can perform the feat and 100 million who can reel off large chunks of it.

So it was hardly surprising that, throughout my journey, people were constantly saying, 'there is a verse in the Koran.' There is little doubt that Islam has a profound effect on the behaviour of most Muslims. The following day, I set out for an address in College of Agriculture Street. Since Cairene taxi drivers usually speak little, if any, English, I had asked the hotel receptionist to write down the address in Arabic. That still, however, produced a grotesque result. Driving through the Cairo traffic is an alarming experience.

It gives one roughly the same sensation as white-water rafting, since Cairene taxi drivers define a traffic lane as any space through which a car may squeeze. Once you understand that convention, it can be thoroughly exhilarating. What was not at all exhilarating was that, on this occasion, the driver deposited me not at College of Agriculture Street, but, as I soon discovered, at an agricultural institute in entirely the wrong part of the city. Flourishing the hotel receptionist's Arabic note, I asked half a dozen people - none of whom spoke a word of English - for help. All were polite, but totally baffled. I must have conveyed a sense of general need, because one kindly soul led me to the nearest lavatory.

I walked the streets for at least half an hour until, by divine providence or sheer good fortune, I encountered a man who had taken a short economics course at Reading University. When I mentioned that the place I was looking for was near the zoo, he immediately hailed a cab, climbed into it with me, insisted on paying for the ride and then stayed with me for another 20 minutes to make sure that I found the block of flats I was looking for. I found the same abundant warmth and friendliness wherever I went in Cairo. Coming out of the grand but decrepit offices of the opposition newspaper El Wafd, I met a squat old lady, swathed in black. I offered her the standard Muslim greeting assalaam alaikum - peace be with you. She gave me the broadest of smiles and replied: 'It is a beautiful morning because you are here.'

Calling at the headquarters of the Arab League to meet its chief of staff, Hisham Badr, I talked to a 19-year-old trainee called Ahmed Farooq. Ramadan came up again, this time in the context of the demoralising influence of the West. When he was young, said Farooq, he hadn't enjoyed Ramadan at all. Perhaps he had started when he was too small. He'd done a half-fast when he was only nine and then took on the full deal the following year. There was no doubt it was good for moral behaviour. 'If I say a bad word during Ramadan, I have broken my fast and, if I look at a woman, particularly her legs and face for a long time, I have certainly broken it.

'Of course, watching the satellites and the channels makes teenagers such as me think in bad ways. I look away when bad things come on and, if there is no one there, I change the channel to football or boxing, anything but sex. That must be between me and my wife only.' His boss, who worked in Washington for five years in Congress and came away with no great opinion of the Americans ('They can hardly find Egypt on the map'), admits that he is not a particularly good Muslim, but none the less sets great store by Ramadan. 'It's good for you because it's ordained by God,' he said.

'It cleanses your soul, gives you self-discipline and makes you think of the poor and needy who don't have enough to eat and drink. It's a cleansing, purifying experience that tests your will and your faith. It gives meaning to my life.' All of which makes giving up chocolate for Lent seem rather feeble. There are, however, still plenty of rum characters in Cairo.

On my way to lunch with a female lecturer in business studies at the American University, a well-dressed man with sleek hair sidled up and murmured: 'It's all right, no money, no baksheesh, I am a doctor,' and produced a selection of dog-eared business cards to prove that he had European and American acquaintances. I inquired what kind of doctor he was.

'A wrinkle doctor,' he replied. That, I observed, must be a very good business. Well then, he said, would I by any chance like to visit the flower-juice factory that provided him with the perfect remedy for that particular affliction? I decided to hang on to my wrinkles.

The business studies lecturer, Latifa Fahmy, told me that she had been brought up in England and, at her own request, had been allowed by her parents to go to Anglican Sunday schools for several years. She had seven Bibles inscribed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to show for it. She was also perfectly frank about the fact that the reactions of a great many Muslims to the events of September 11 had been mixed, to say the least. 'In this part of the world,' she said, 'we were really hurt by what happened in New York, but, at the same time, a lot of people were happy, not only that it could happen to the great superpower, but also that it was done by someone like bin Laden. The Americans have all the technology and he didn't even have a computer, yet he could humble them.'

The reaction was much the same throughout the Muslim world. The favourite name for newly born male children in the city of Kano in northern Nigeria is now Osama. 'Part of the trouble,' Latifa Fahmy went on, 'is that the West looks down on Muslims. They think of us as a lower form of human being. On September 11, I picked up the telephone to a close American colleague here, asked whether he'd been able to contact his family and whether there was anything I could do for him. 'The line was silent for a long time and then he said, rather coldly, 'We must get together and have coffee some time.' His attitude, I felt, was 'that it should come to this, a member of the great superpower being asked by Latifa whether she could do anything for him!'

'The university was closed for a few days after September 11. Until that point, I had never wanted to advertise my religion. Some years before, a member of my family had given me a bracelet with the word Allah on it, but I'd never worn it or thought of doing so.

When we came back after September 11 and I thought about what to wear, the first thing I brought out was the bracelet. 'I wore it because that was how the West had made me feel. I was put on the defensive by the assumption of the Western media that we were the guilty parties and I wanted to show that I was proud of Islam. Now Bush has left us with no middle ground. He has told us that we're either with him or against him. My reply is, 'I'm not with bin Laden and I'm not with you, either!' 'I was never in favour of Arafat, but, because he has been confined by the Israelis, I am now with him.

I was never a supporter of Nasser or Saddam Hussein, but we stood with him because they became symbols of our identity. The West creates these people.'

Even the notion that Muslim women were everywhere oppressed was a piece of Western brainwashing. 'The opposite is true,' Latifa declared.

'I have more rights as a Muslim woman than any woman in the West, and it was Islam who gave them to me long before Western women dreamt of having such rights. I get equal pay for equal work, I keep both my name and my property when I marry. 'The other thing is that women here are far more feminine than women in the West. There, they've lost a lot of their femininity because they have to fight so hard to prove that they're equal to men. I don't have to prove any such thing, because it's a woman's world here, not a man's.

That's why I prayed that my child would be a girl and that my grandchildren would be girls. 'I chose the man I wanted to marry. I made it clear to my boyfriends that the one I decided to kiss would be the one.

Men live in a highly competitive world, whereas women can get away with anything.' It all sounded too good to be true. I thought of the Taliban women who were not even allowed to go to school, of the stories I had been told (by Muslims) of women who are routinely beaten by their husbands to keep them in their place. Was Latifa, I wondered, speaking only for an elite of Egyptian professionals? Yet, as the days in Cairo went on, I met more and more fiercely outspoken women who were not being imposed on by anyone and, indeed, if there were trousers to be worn, were plainly wearing them.

'Islam does not make women suffer,' insisted Safaa El Meneza, professor of paediatrics at Al Azhar. 'It's true that, in some Muslim countries, the cultural tradition is for men to try to control and dominate their wives, but that has nothing to do with Islam. Islam actually preserves women's rights. I can inherit, I can have a bank account of my own, I am paid the same as my male colleagues and I can have my own possessions, separate from my husband's.' That, however, was not quite the end of the story, as I discovered in Damascus.

The American threat to invade Iraq cropped up again and again in conversations with leading Egyptian editors and columnists. There was not the thickness of India paper between them. 'The Americans don't understand the people of this region at all,' said Fahmy Howeidi, who writes a weekly column for both the government newspaper, Al Ahram, and for El Wafd. 'They don't even understand American interests in the area.

'If they invade Iraq, they will lose even more credibility than they have lost already because, by doing that, they will be helping Saddam Hussein to become more popular. Many people in the Arab world do not like Saddam, but, if his country is threatened by the Americans, he will become a hero because he has been threatened by the great superpower. 'At the moment, the choice is not between Saddam and another Iraqi regime. It is between Saddam and Bush, and people here are bound to choose Saddam. Bush is actually creating a positive image for him. 'The other thing Bush and his allies are doing in threatening to invade Iraq is creating more fanatics and extremists, simply because the actions of America are fanatic. If the Americans acted in a moderate way, the reaction would also be moderate.

They ask why Muslims hate them. The answer lies in the way they behave.' 'The Americans,' agreed Salamah Ahmed Salamah, editor of the influential monthly Wughat Nazar, 'are behaving more and more like an imperial power that wants to dominate the whole world.

The only people who would profit from an invasion of Iraq would be the Israelis. Maybe that's what the Americans want - to reshape the whole region according to plans made in the Pentagon and Israel. 'If they do invade, it will destabilise the whole region. It will also fuel public anger against the very regimes that the Americans want to protect because they kowtow to US control.' 'The British have gone,' said his predecessor as editor, Gamil Mattar, 'but we still feel colonised. Our president Mubarak goes off to Washington in March every year, like the head of a subsidiary company reporting to corporate headquarters.

And it is not only him. Musharraf in Pakistan is exactly the same. They would not admit that they are client creatures, but they are.

We can't do anything on our own. The boss is always there. 'The Americans are always telling our rulers what to do and the message is always the same - toe the line, have democracy, have privatisation, join us in the war against terrorism. The irony is that Bush and yourselves are asking us to join that war at a time when public opinion here feels that, in reality, it is a war against Islam. And people like Mubarak and Musharraf feel that, if they don't toe the line, the Americans would topple their governments.

Just like the Iraqis, we'd get economic and military sanctions. 'When the British were here, there was at least a touch of aristocracy about your leaders. People could respect Lord Cromer and Lord Mountbatten, but these Americans are just employees of the State Department.

We feel no respect for the new imperialists. We fear them, that's all. 'After September 11, I tried in my articles to persuade my readers to feel that what had happened in New York was bad, but the truth is that a lot of people here felt that the Americans deserved it. A great many were simply glad that Big Brother had been given a sock under the chin.' Muslim leaders in Egypt and elsewhere despair of ever getting the West to understand Islam, to distinguish between the religion and the acts of individual Muslims. They launch endless conferences, promote endless dialogues, welcome endless delegations from the West and distribute pamphlets in their hundreds of thousands to refute allegations that their religion fosters violence, but fear that their efforts yield little fruit.

They long to find friends somewhere, anywhere in the West. Why, they ask plaintively, are Christians friendly with Jews, but not with Muslims?

What do they have to do to be understood? 'Although we believe in Jesus as a great prophet,' complained a student at Al Azhar, 'Christians have good relations with Jews, but not with us. We provide the West with oil, but get nothing but misunderstanding in return. An American guy from Alabama said to me: 'We take your gas and we'll kick your ass!' ' I visit the home of my friend Nagia.

Over lunch, her eldest son, Mostapha, a young architect, tells me of his fears. 'I feel very insecure,' he said. 'There is something being plotted against Islam. We are slowly being swallowed by the Americans.

A few years ago, they were in Somalia, supposedly peacekeeping. Then there was the Gulf war. Now they're in Afghanistan and threatening to go into Iraq. Gradually, they are going back to the old system of military dictatorship. 'They speak of globalisation and many people here say that means that, in a few years' time, nobody in Egypt will find work. We shall have to sign a treaty saying there must be no restrictions on imports. Then foreign companies will come with their employees and there will be no jobs for us.'

Already, unemployment is so high that, for the first time in living memory, Egyptians are committing suicide because they cannot find work. Before moving on to Beirut and Damascus, I asked my friends if I might join them at their mosque for the Friday noonday prayer. I knew that we would not be a small, select band. I had been told that 70 per cent of Egyptians go to the mosque on Friday and I could believe it, because of a visit I paid, a few years ago, to Casablanca. On that Friday, it was raining quite heavily.

Even so, thousands of men were kneeling in prayer outside the city walls because the mosque inside was full. It was an astonishing sight. They scarcely seemed to notice the rain, made little attempt to shield themselves from it and cared even less for the noise of traffic from the nearby dual-carriageway. So it was no surprise when I found worshippers pouring into the Salah ed-Deen mosque in Cairo. Nagia's son Mostapha ushered me into the sheikh's office, where a group of men were sprinkling their palms with flower juice 'to make us smell nicer when we pray', as one explained. Was it, I wondered idly, the same flower juice that the wrinkle 'doctor' had recommended? As we waited for the prayers to begin, the muezzin was telling, in his sing-song voice, the story of Jesus's mother, Mary, who is a revered figure in the Koran.

She was sad, he said, that she herself could not become a prophet, but accepted the fact and so God blessed her. She was visited by an angel who told her that she would bear a son without having a husband. When Jesus was born, many people criticised her, but Jesus defended her and declared: 'I am a prophet of God and was born without a father.'

I was much moved to hear the story of the Virgin Birth told so reverently in a mosque and wondered how many Anglicans - not to mention their bishops - actually believe it any more, as the Muslims in the Salah ed-Deen so plainly do. By now, thousands of men of every age packed the main hall of the mosque. Most were casually dressed.

A hundred fans softened the heat of summer with a gentle breeze. I sat at the back, on one of the chairs provided for the physically handicapped. Everyone else squatted on the carpet. I crossed my legs, just to be comfortable. The man sitting next to me said: 'Please don't do that!'

Why, I asked, mystified? 'Out of respect for this place,' he replied. 'That is something for relaxation.' The sheikh began his sermon in a booming voice, further amplified by a microphone. The sound level was roughly 20 times that of the average Anglican cleric. It completely drowned the traffic outside. He was never, I thought, going to get complaints from the faithful that they could not hear.

When he sat down, after 20 minutes or so, everyone shuffled forward. The man sitting next to me inquired whether I intended to pray and, when I said that I didn't, asked if he could change places with me. 'While we are praying,' he said, 'we must all be together.' When the prayers were finished, each of the worshippers turned his head to left and right before getting up.

'They were greeting the angels who are always keeping watch,' the man beside me explained. A man with a piercing gaze came up and, after inquiring who I was, said atham dean - Islam is the best religion - and departed. As pitches go, it was surely the shortest ever. We went back into the sheikh's office.

He called me 'my brother' and told me that he had been the imam of the Islamic Cultural Centre in London during the 1990s. He had fierce, smiling eyes, but did not readily give way to humour. When I made a wry comment on the decibel level of his sermon, he took it as a compliment and replied: 'Everything in Islam is clear.'

I then made the mistake of asking whether he knew the Koran by heart. 'Of course,' he replied, and invited Mostapha to tell him at which verse he should begin reciting so that he could prove it. He went on for several somewhat embarrassing minutes.

'I started to learn it at the age of six,' he said. 'A child of that age can do it easily because the mind is very open, very nice.' That turned out to be a launching pad for a more general statement of truth. Every child, the sheikh declared, was born a Muslim, with 'the Islamic nature'. It was just that their parents 'made some changes after that'. To be a Muslim meant that you were completing the various versions of religion - first the Old Testament, then the New Testament, finally the Koran. It was not a matter of choice.

When God revealed a new book, you were obliged to accept it; you couldn't just hold on to the old ones. He had the sort of certainty that is not open to discussion, still less question.

Though flawlessly courteous, he displayed the same kind of closed mind as fundamentalist Christians. Was it, I wondered, his kind of dogmatic certainty that is so easily misread in the West as the precursor of fanaticism? As we left the mosque, my head was still ringing and I was still banging on about the noise level. Mostapha's younger brother, Ahmedullah, observed that there was a verse in the Koran about it. 'I bet there is,' I replied, and walked out into the searing sunlight.