Make your mind up Rageh

Only Half of Me - being a Muslim in Britain by Rageh Omaar, published Viking, hardback £17.99

RAGEH Omaar was the face of BBC television in the early days of the US/British invasion of the country in 2002.
His book is a plea to the authorities waging the 'War Against Terrorism' and the public at large to understand the problems and sensitivities of being a Muslin in Britain which indeed is the sub-title to the work.
I am not so sure after reading Omar's rather chaotic and episodic memoir that the non-Muslim will be any the wiser over problems facing Islam and the Muslim community.
He complains early-on that British Muslims are often silent while their identity is being made by others going on to assert: "We, as a new generation of British Muslims, have to learn to speak about ourselves and our lives forcefully and honestly; to proclaim who we are."
In his discussion of home-grown terrorist, particularly Yassin Hassan Omar, who grew up in the Somali Ogaden area of Ethiopia, and who was captured after the second, abortive, attack on the London underground, he poses two questions: Should the focus be on finding out what influences, social and political, have created Omar; or should the question be: What is it in Islam that produces a terrorists.
Rageh Omaar half answers his own question by saying Muslims in general would rather not defend their faith in the face of the anti-terror war because: "To do so would be in some way to acknowledge that it is religion that drives these men to act as they do."
The notion that the terror phenomena is no more caused by Islamic religious doctrine than the Irish nationalist struggle and the IRA were caused by Catholicism is very much worth exploring because, if this is the case, it constitutes an intellectual admission that attempting to lay the blame for terrorism at the feet Islam as a religion is fallacious, and that terroristic violence is generated by non-religious factors rooted in history, imperialism and continued occupation (Iraq, Palestine, Iran!?); or, in the UK, social conditions of exclusion, racism and poverty.
Unfortunately Rageh Omaar does not really pursue this inquiry and the rest of the book is a rather rambling and random description of his travels as a journalist and Muslim. This is not without its interest but the chapters do not lead to any conclusions about anything.
He is obviously disturbed by the Iraq invasion calling his chapter on it The Catastrophic War reserving particular disquiet for the US decision to take on the Shia leader Moqtada al Sadr's forces in the city of Najaf thus violating a most sacred place for Shias containing the tomb of their martyr Ali. But apart from registering general unease he does not make clear his own position on the invasion or US/British policy which continues to attract near universal condemnation from the Muslim world though he recently walked out of the BBC criticising it's coverage of the conflict to join the Arab TV station Al Jazzra.
In all a rather slight and indecisive chronicle from Rageh.

Steve Hammond