In his book “The Muslim Revolt: A Journey through Political Islam,” the British journalist Roger Hardy draws on his 25 years as Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst at BBC World Service radio to explore the often fraught relationship between Islam and the West. During his time at the BBC Hardy made and presented a number of fascinating and insightful radio series including “The Making of the Middle East”; “Turkey Today”; “Islam: Faith and Power”; “Israel Among the Nations”; “Waiting for the Dawn: Muslims in the Modern World”; “Islam's Furthest Frontier” (on South-East Asia); “Europe's Angry Young Muslims”, and “Jihad and the Petrodollar”. While making these and other programs Hardy traveled extensively in the Arab and Muslim worlds and interviewed many people of diverse backgrounds and points of view. These encounters, plus further research, provided him with a wealth of material for his book, published recently by Hurst & Company of London. “The Muslim Revolt” is a highly readable and lively book which covers much ground in only 239 pages. Alongside its economically presented history, past and contemporary, and well-judged, nuanced analysis, there are vivid accounts of Hardy's travels and interviews. “The crisis in relations between Islam and the West is the most important and the most dangerous issue of our times; it is also the least understood,” Hardy writes. A BBC colleague remarked to him long before 9/11 that “the West is ill at ease with Islam” and that “even communism was more familiar.” Unlike communism, which was the West's main enemy for the second half of the twentieth century, Islam is “alien as well as threatening. We fail to understand it, and we are paying a high price for our failure.” The Muslim revolt is the product of a double failure he writes: “that of the regimes of the Muslim world to make a successful transition to modernity, and that of the West to deal intelligently and equitably with a part of the world vital to its strategic interests.” The West tends to see Islam as monolithic, but Hardy stresses its diversity. He points out that for a long time Islam and the West have not been monolithic terms. They no longer exist in blocs as they did in medieval times when they “confronted one another across the Mediterranean. Each now inhabits the world of the other.” The Islamic revival is all too often viewed in one-dimensional terms. But “violent rejection of a global jahili culture is only one strand within a rich tapestry. At its core, the Islamic revival is about belief and identity, about restoring Islam's dignity.” Hardy points out that while the Western view of Islam tends to be Arab-centered, most Muslims actually live east of the Middle East. Nearly half of the world's Muslim population is in South Asia: India's Muslim population of around 160 million is roughly double that of Egypt. There have been many books on political Islam, so why another one? Hardy hopes that as a journalist he may help explain “a phenomenon that still seems to madden and perplex both the public and the policymakers.” He notes that experts explain Muslim militancy by variously invoking five factors: the historical, the political, the economic, the ideological and the cultural. By cultural is meant the claim that Islam is “inherently aggressive, intolerant and anti-Western” – a claim that may be fashionable, but which Hardy rejects as bogus. But these five factors “are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive”. Hardy considers that to focus only on the events of the past few decades is to ignore the much deeper roots of the crisis. Groups like Al-Qaeda are protagonists in the “latest and most destructive phase of a struggle which Muslims have been waging for more than two hundred years.” It is a battle both against Western domination and against the failures and disappointments of modernization. “The Muslim Revolt” takes the form of a journey, with chapters on Egypt; Iraq and Iran; Pakistan; Sudan and Algeria; Saudi Arabia; Turkey, and “the Muslim Archipelago” of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Hardy describes meetings with a wide range of characters, from politicians, Islamists, scholars, clerics and philosophers to a Moroccan taxi driver in the Netherlands, and a schoolgirl in Turkey who refuses to go to school unless she can wear her headscarf. Hardy aims to create two narratives. The first explores Islam in particular countries and regions, while the second is an overarching narrative of Islamism from its origins during the era of European colonization to the emergence of global jihadists. The book's country chapters are followed by a chapter on Muslims in Europe, and by a concluding chapter entitled ‘Hearts and Minds'. According to Hardy, jihadist movements have succeeded in winning Muslim hearts and minds through a narrative with three interlocking elements: humiliation at the hands of the aggressive West, with Muslims as victims; the use of “redemptive violence” to treat the humiliation, and the conveying of the narrative of humiliation and de-humiliation through modern communications and graphic images. In contrast, Western leaders have signally failed in the hearts and minds department. Hardy criticizes former US president George W Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair. “The Bush administration left a toxic legacy whose effects will be felt for some time to come.” Through over-emphasizing the military aspects of Al-Qaeda, Bush inflated it into a global menace of grotesque proportions. He also made the mistake of lumping all Islamist movements together as “some vast, amorphous ‘axis of evil'.” And Hardy dismisses Blair's claim that Muslim indignation at Western policy is “a wholly imagined grievance”. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, have played into Al-Qaeda's hands, fitting with its narrative of Western aggression and Muslim humiliation. There are some omissions in Hardy's journey; it does not, for example, take in Palestine or Lebanon, and there are only a few references to Hamas and Hizbollah. But in his concluding pages he stresses the importance of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a central issue for Al-Qaeda. He cites Princeton scholar Thomas Hegghammer, who said the belief that Palestine was irrelevant to the “war on terror” was “arguably the greatest delusion of the post-9/11 era.” Hardy concludes his book by saying there is “a triple challenge: to understand Islam, Islamism and jihadism in all their diversity; to appreciate the roots of Muslim grievance; and on this basis to craft a set of co-ordinated policies – local, regional and global – designed to foster a less hostile and more equitable relationship between the West and Islam.” Without a new approach, based on a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, “the Muslim revolt will continue for generations to come.” Hardy wrote much of the book when he was a visiting fellow in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2008-09. He will soon be leaving London for Washington DC as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where the theme of his research will be Obama and the Muslim world. This theme is very timely. The introduction to Hardy's book begins with Obama's Cairo speech of June 2009 in which he spoke of a new beginning in relations between the USA and Muslims. But Obama's performance in office has bitterly disappointed many. It is questionable that he will draw up the policies to defuse and rebalance the West-Islam relationship on the lines that Hardy considers essential.
