ANYONE CURIOUS about what our failed recent First Minister, Humza Yousaf, will experience when he leaves Britain for new Islamic territory would do well to read a wonderful book recently published by Princeton University Press entitled: A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Beginning of Modernity.
The author is Michael Cook, a British academic who now teaches at Princeton and has written extensively on Islam; he was editor of the series New Cambridge History of IslamYou can see his interview about the book in question in an interesting (but irritatingly badly filmed) YouTube video here. You should read the book instead – all 800 pages!
I went into it as someone who knew little about Islam, except that I had been given a tour of a mosque in Russia by a Muslim friend from Kyrgyzstan, a patient, kind and learned professor of linguistics in Moscow. After prayers, we sat on the floor of the stylish but austerely empty room while he explained to me and a friend, among other things, that “jihad” does not mean what most Europeans understand it to mean.
My strongest memory of that day, however, was his description of the class structure of the city’s three mosques. One of them, near Putin’s home, is small and exclusive, catering to influential Muslim oligarchs and mini-garchs; the mosque we were in, not far from the Kremlin, is catering to professionals and other middle-class people; the third mosque, huge but less central, is frequented by Muslim workers.
The latter flock to the area from Central Asia to earn money on construction sites or by breaking ice on the roads in winter, and live in converted shipping containers stacked two or three deep in parking lots and on the side of public highways. The Russians call them “chornies” (чёрные) or “blacks.” I can well imagine which group Yousaf would like to join, and which he would fit better with, given his enormous lack of talent.
I emphasize this stratification because one of the most lasting impressions that Professor Cook’s book has left on a person as bored with Islamophilia as with Islamophobia is the impression of a religion with immense reach but no overall coherence beyond adherence to the sacred texts.
Politically, nation-building has never been the Arabs’ strength. “We can imagine Arab society as a society made up of tribes, instead of states.” (p. 12, emphasis in the original) Cook also writes: “Under premodern conditions, fragmentation was a common, though not inevitable, plague of large political structures throughout the world.” (p. 538)
This, of course, is what Yousaf and his party want to do to Britain. The reason, it is often said, is the SNP’s preference for tribalism over rationalism. Unlike in the Arab world, Scottish tribalism has not broken away from the clan society that plunged the entire Highlands and much of the Lowlands into poverty and political impotence in the late Middle Ages. The same destructive process was at work in Yousaf’s politics. If he did not hate the Tories “on principle”, then he was telling us that there were too many white people in Scotland.
In contrast, the Arab world has shown a more mature approach to politics than Yousaf and his half-educated tribalists. They seem to be trying to move from tribalism to identity politics without understanding much about how the rest of the world, including large parts of Arabia, has evolved.
Ignorance can be forgiven, but contempt is another matter. Consider that Yousaf’s former colleague, the narrow-eyed former transport minister Michael Mathieson, was holidaying in Morocco and spending his time watching Scottish football on his iPad. Why wasn’t he wandering the markets of the Medina, visiting the galleries in the Kasbah or reading about the relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in this fascinating and colourful country? My impression is that Mathieson is too stupid and provincial to understand what he has missed.
Of course Mathieson will slide back into well-deserved obscurity, but his attitude strikes me as dangerously common among sullen nationalists. The tribal mentality takes in little that is new or foreign. I doubt Yousaf would fit in the world beyond Glasgow and Dundee. Even in Perth he never felt at home, so I can’t imagine him being comfortable in Pakistan or Palestine.
I have emphasised the Arab aspect of this book, but there is much, much more. The Islamic world stretches from China to Central Africa. Inevitably there is not only a political (i.e. vertical) division between different countries as successors to the original tribes or peoples, but also a horizontal class division, as the mosques of Moscow demonstrate. Since Yousaf thinks there are too many white people in Scotland, and most of his followers also think there are too many English people here, a word on race is in order. Here too Prof Cook is fascinating. He writes:
“If we go back to the time of the Moors, we find that in addition to the vocabulary for describing gradations of skin colour, we also have a simple binary scheme based on two terms, appropriately capitalised here, as they make something like a distinction between castes: White (bidan) and black (Sudan). The Moors are the whites.” (p. 715) But “whites and blacks were not equal, and it was better to be white than black.” (p. 716)
If Michael Mathieson had the curiosity of the average monkey when placed in front of a mirror, he would have discovered that Morocco’s national hero, Ibn Battūta (1304-1377) – one of history’s greatest travelers, on a par with Marco Polo (mural above) – had “a generally dim view of blacks.” Cook adds: “Overall, we can take for granted a sense of white superiority among whites in the regions of the Sahara and the North, where whites held blacks as slaves.” (p. 716)
If it is sad how little Yousaf knows about Scotland, it is shocking to realise how little he knows about his own Culture. Given the aggressive feminism of so many members of the SNP, it is relevant that Cook notes that inequality between men and women is “explicitly expressed in the Qur’an: one verse says that men are a step above women (Q2:228), another that they have authority over them (Q4:34) … (there is) a tradition attributed to the Prophet that women are intellectually deficient.” (p. 840)
I can only warmly recommend this book to anyone interested in this vast subject. It is written for the educated layperson, but contains all the background information and notes that any scholar would find equally informative – and beautiful maps to go with it. Allah akhbar!
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the green dream (forthcoming). It’s a slightly humorous account of the immigration struggle on the remote Scottish island of Great Todday, where Gobson lives and films seaweed for the Hebridean Centre for Marine Meditation.
Photo of “Morning Prayers” by Otto Pilny – Bonhams, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20972013
