ANYONE CURIOUS about what our failed First Minister of recent memory, Humza Yousaf, is likely to experience when he leaves Britain for Islamic pastures new would be well advised to read a wonderful book recently published by Princeton University Press called A History of the Muslim World: From its origins to the dawn of modernity.
The author is Michael Cook, a British academic who now teaches at Princeton, and who has written extensively on Islam; he was series editor of the New Cambridge History of Islam. You can see him interviewed about the book under review in an interesting (but irritating badly filmed) YouTube film here. Better to read the book – all 800 pages of it!
I approached it as a person who has little knowledge of Islam beyond having been shown round a mosque in Russia by a Muslim friend from Kyrgyzstan who was a patient, kind and erudite professor of linguistics in Moscow. After prayers, we sat on the floor of the stylish but austerely empty space inside, while he explained to me and a friend, amongst many other things, that “jihad” does not mean what most Europeans think it means.
My strongest memory of the day, however, was his description of the class basis of the three mosques in the city. One, out near where Putin lives, is small and exclusive, for influential oligarch and minigarch Muslims; the one we were in not far from the Kremlin caters for professionals and other middle-class people; while the third one, which is huge but less central, is patronised by working class Muslims.
The latter stream in from Central Asia to earn money on building sites or by breaking ice on the streets in winter, and live in converted shipping containers stacked two or three deep in parking lots and on the edges of the public highways. The Russians refer to them as “chornies” (чёрные) or “blacks”. I can well imagine which one Yousaf would want to attach himself too, and which one he would be better suited to by virtue of his prodigious lack of talent.
I stress this stratification because one of the most enduring impressions created Professor Cook’s book on a person who is as bored by Islamophilia as he is by Islamophobia is of a religion with immense reach but no overall coherence beyond adherence to the sacred texts.
Nation-building has never been the Arabs’ strong suit, politically. “We can see Arabian society as having tribes instead of states.” (p. 12, emphasis in original) Cook also writes: “Under premodern conditions, fragmentation was a frequent, though not inevitable, affliction of large-scale political structures the world over.” (p. 538)
This, of course, is what Yousaf and his Party want to inflict on Britain. The reason, it is often said, is the SNP’s preference for tribalism over rationalism. Unlike in the Arabian world, Scottish tribalism has not moved on from the clan society which in the late middle ages reduced all of the Highlands and much of the Lowlands to poverty and political impotence. The same corrosive process was at work in Yousavian politics. If he wasn’t hating Tories “on principle”, he was telling us there were too many white people in Scotland.
By contrast, the Arabian world has demonstrated 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 much of Arabia, has evolved.
Ignorance can be forgiven but contempt is another matter. Remember that Yousaf’s ex-colleague, the pin-eyed ex-Minister of Transport, Michael Mathieson, went to Morocco for a holiday and spent his time watching Scottish football on his iPad. Why was he not walking through the markets of the Medina, or visiting the galleries in the Casbah, or reading up on the relationship between Christians, Muslims and Jews in that fascinating and colourful country? My impression is that Mathieson is too stupid and parochial to understand what he was missing.
Obviously Mathieson will sink back into well-deserved obscurity, but his attitude strikes me as dangerously common among crab-eyed nationalists. The tribal mindset takes in little that is new or foreign. I doubt Yousaf would fit in to the world beyond Glasgow and Dundee. He never looked at home even in Perth so I cannot see him settling comfortably in Pakistan or Palestine.
I have stressed the Arabic 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) separation between various countries as successors to the original tribes or peoples, but also a horizontal class separation as illustrated by the mosques of Moscow. Since Yousaf thinks there are too many whites in Scotland, and most of his followers think there are too many English here too, a word about race is in order. Here again, Prof. Cook is fascinating. He writes:
“If we go back to the time of the Moors, we find that alongside the vocabulary for describing gradations of skin colour we also have a simple binary schema based on two terms that it will be appropriate to capitalise here since they make something like a distinction between castes: Whites (bīdān) and Blacks (sūdān). 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 had the curiosity of the average monkey when confronted by a mirror, he would have discovered that the national hero of Morocco, Ibn Battūta (1304-1377) – one of history’s greatest travellers, on a par with Marco Polo (mural pictured above) – and had “a generally dim view of Blacks.” Cook adds: “Altogether we can take a sense of White superiority for granted among Whites in the regions of the Sahara and the north where Whites had Blacks as slaves.” (p. 716)
If it is sad how little Yousaf understands about Scotland, it is shocking to realise how little he must know about his own culture. Given the aggressive feminism of so many in the SNP, it is relevant that Cook notes that inequality between men and women “is explicit in Qur’an: one verse states that men are a step above women (Q2:228), another than they are in authority over them (Q4:34)… [there is] a tradition attributed to the Prophet according to which women are deficient in intellect.” (p. 840)
For anyone interested in this vast subject, it would be hard to recommend this book too highly. It is written for the literate layman, but with all the background and notes which any scholar would find equally informative – and beautiful maps too. Allah akhbar!
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the Green Dream (forthcoming). It is a lightly humorous account of the immigration battle on the remote Scottish island, 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
