If Islamist terrorism drove James Fergusson to start writing this book, it was moderate Islam he uncovered on his year-long journey around Britain researching it.
Britain’s rapid increase in its Muslim population since 2001 has created consternation among policy makers and newspaper proprietors through each successive year.
And yet Fergusson, a long-time foreign correspondent and contributor for papers including The Independent and The Daily Mail, uncovers a diverse and proudly British Muslim community – not without its problems, but largely downtrodden by successively inept government attempts to make it assimilate into a homogeneous whole.
Flagship counter-terrorism measures such as Prevent are handed scathing feedback from interviewees, as are similarly poor educational wrangles in densely-populated Muslim areas like Birmingham.
The relationship between British Islamism and terrorism is more complicated: as Fergusson notes, many of the Muslim-majority areas he explores are ridden with extreme poverty, and a governmental shift in attitude towards multiculturalism in the wake of the 2015 Tunisian attacks has only served to further isolate those at risk of extremist ideologies.
Fergusson’s travelogue is a triumph of detail, and doesn’t fail in its mission to ask hard questions of all concerned parties. The fact that it is gracefully written and thoughtfully put together makes it thoroughly engaging to read.
