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.

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