From: WORD_CHEMIST@HOTMAIL.COM   
      
   The Sunday Times - Books   
      
      
      
   The Sunday TimesJune 11, 2006   
      
   Memoir   
      
      
   How the West was wrong   
   REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HART   
      
      
      
   ONLY HALF OF ME: Being a Muslim in Britain   
   by Rageh Omaar   
      
      
   Viking £17.99 pp215   
   Never have books explaining Islam been more needed. And you might have   
   expected much from a Somali-born, Oxford-educated Muslim and leading BBC   
   journalist, especially when his book is the second in a two-book deal for   
   which Penguin paid around £600,000. Unfortunately, Rageh Omaar's book on   
   growing up a Muslim in Britain, interspersed with asides about his homeland,   
   the Iraq war and the general Wickedness of the West, is a crushing   
   disappointment: bland, platitudinous, muddled, lazy, factually unreliable   
   and morally reprehensible.   
   There is only a single moment here when the disorienting experience of   
   cultural translocation comes alive: when his family first flew out of   
   Somalia in 1972, stopping over in Rome, and the five-year-old Rageh gazed on   
   the city's fountains, astonished by both the naked statuary and the   
   prodigious waste of water. Otherwise the biographical material here is thin   
   and puzzling. He tells us that he lived around London's Edgware Road from   
   "five until I was 25", and while taking A-levels would pop into the   
   "Husseins' shop to buy cigarettes". This is odd because I remember him   
   spending much of his time as a boarder at Cheltenham College, a smiley   
   little chap in the fourth form when I was in the sixth.   
   One would love to know more about his religious beliefs, too. He affirms   
   that, "The Koran is the immutable word of Allah, and cannot be changed,   
   revised or altered in any way. There are no versions of the Koran as there   
   are of the Bible." But is he really such a fundamentalist? Western scholars   
   know very well that the Koran is a fascinating muddle, contradicting itself   
   about how long Allah took with the Creation, and about the use of wine,   
   among other things. But even westerners have to be careful what they say,   
   and those within the Muslim world who dare to entertain more sophisticated   
   theories about the Koran's historical origins can end up like poor Suliman   
   Bashear of the University of Nablus, whose students threw him out of a   
   second-floor window. There is a lacuna, too, in Omaar's description of his   
   homeland as "99.95% Muslim": this may be related to the fact that the few   
   Christians left in Somalia are frequently murdered.   
   Then there are the factual errors, especially about Iraq. He says that the   
   monumental Arch of Ctesiphon outside Baghdad dates from the second century   
   (scholarly consensus dates it to the fourth); and that it "marks the   
   beginning of Islam's flowering in the Middle East", which makes no sense   
   whichever date you plump for. He tells us that the commander of the British   
   forces that captured Baghdad in 1917 was "General Angus Maude". Angus Maude   
   was paymaster-general under Mrs Thatcher, nicknamed "the Mekon" due to his   
   amusingly shaped head. The officer who captured Baghdad was Lt-General Sir   
   Frederick Stanley Maude, who later died of cholera from drinking unboiled   
   milk.   
   More seriously, there is the slant and bias. He describes a horrible knife   
   attack on his cousin which might have been a racist or anti-Muslim attack,   
   although "at the time of writing there has been no conclusion to the   
   investigation". Four pages later, his cousin has become one of "hundreds of   
   victims" of "right-wing British groups, novelists, journalists or European   
   MEPs". This slippery elision is the worst kind of journalism. His attackers   
   might just have been after his wallet for all we, or the police, can   
   determine.   
   Most shocking of all, though, is a chapter in which Omaar lumps together   
   Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the celebrated Somalian feminist and anti-Muslim polemicist   
   who was until recently a Dutch MP, and Yasin Hassan Omar, one of the failed   
   July 21 suicide bombers. While both are driven by identical "bigotry and   
   hate", argues Omaar, Ali is protected by something called the "liberal   
   fascism" of the West. To draw moral equivalence between a woman who has only   
   ever used words to attack what she views as a repressive and outmoded   
   ideology, and a man who set out to kill and maim as many innocent people as   
   he could, is frankly a disgrace.   
   Omaar has now left the BBC and works for the Arab television station,   
   Al-Jazeera, which he feels is free from the bias and "fraud" of western   
   coverage of the war in Iraq. He has won numerous awards for the quality and   
   reliability of his journalism   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)