RAGEH OMAAR, FAMILIAR TO many through his brilliant reporting of the Iraq War for the BBC, describes himself as black, Somali and Muslim. In contemporary Britain, this is a lethal combination.

Although Omaar has been spared, his relatives and friends have suffered serious harassment for no other reason than being who they are. Soon after the July 7 bombings, one of his cousins was attacked by a gang of white youths and had his throat cut. He survived but was totally paralysed. An aunt was picked out as a terrorist suspect and spreadeagled at a bus stop at gunpoint, simply for being, as he puts it, “fat and Muslim”.

Not surprisingly, Omaar is angry. His rage is directed not just at the rising tide of Islamophobia, but also at media representations of Muslims. “As a British Muslim in London after 7th July,” he writes, “I did not recognise my life and the lives of my relatives in the representations I read in newspapers and saw on television.”

Why, he asks, does the suffering of British Muslims go unreported? Why is so much attention given to the blood-curdling rhetoric of fanatics such as Omar Bakri Mohammed and Abu Hamza? Why are the voices of moderate, liberal Islam so consistently ignored? Although these questions are raised by the Muslim community as a whole, Only Half of Me is about a specific Muslim community, the Somalis. Omaar’s parents came to Britain to enrol their children in private English schools. He lived a relatively privileged and serene life in Edgware Road, London, which has a well established Somali community. The tranquillity of that community was shattered when it was revealed that one of the failed London bombers on July 21, 2005, Yassin Hassan Omar, was Somali.

We are whisked to Harar, Yassin’s home town, to discover what turned him into a bomber. Yassin went to a Koranic school, for there was no other education in town. In 1990, the place descended into lawlessness; and a teenage Yassin, brutalised and traumatised by the civil war, escaped with his sister and her husband to London. He was moved from foster parent to foster parent and eventually settled into a one-bed council flat.

During this period he was radicalised by Ibrahim Muktar Said, ringleader of the failed bombing. Ibrahim, too, arrived as a child refugee from conflict and displacement in the Horn of Africa. He was transformed into a fanatic at Feltham Young Offender Institution, West London, where Somalis are one of the largest minority groups.

Omaar contrasts Yassin’s life and beliefs with those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch Parliament. From a well-off family of dissenters, Hirsi Ali had a traditional but relatively privileged life in Somalia. To obtain Dutch citizenship, she claimed to have arrived directly from the violence and chaos of Somalia, omitting details of her family’s comfortable residences in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

In the Netherlands, she converted to liberal secularism. She joined Pym Fortuyn’s right-wing VVD party, flirted with neo-fascism, declared Islam to be a “barbaric” religion, and fought to stop Muslim immigration.

Through her statements, Omaar shows that Hirsi Ali acted as a handmaiden of hate and played a crucial role in the dehumanisation of Muslim community. Both she and Yassin are zealots, albeit of different kinds. Why is it, Omaar asks, that we rightly condemn one form of zealotry but put the other on the pedestal? Omaar is good at raising pertinent questions. Unfortunately, he is weak on history and context. His explanation of Islam as a faith is trite. Even the description of a pilgrimage to Mecca appears second-hand.

We learn little about the history of British Somalis, who came to Britain in two waves. The first wave, during the second half of the 19th century, consisted almost exclusively of seafarers. They formed transient communities in the dock areas of East London, Cardiff and Liverpool. Most were from Northern Somalia, then a British protectorate, so were entitled to British citizenship.

The second wave started in early 1990s. The new immigrants were mostly fleeing the civil war. Somalia has experienced nothing but violent conflict since the collapse of the pro-US military government of President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

Much of this violence has been perpetuated by warlords heading armies of young men. The refugees, overwhelmingly young orphans, single mothers and the elderly, brought with them many of the disputes that plagued Somalia. The community faces numerous internal problems, not least the increasing violence of criminal gangs, the acute alienation of Somali children and the difficulties of distressed single mothers coping with acute cultural shock.

Omaar touches on these internal problems only tangentially. His main recommendation for their ills is individualism. We should focus on individual lives, he suggests, and celebrate success stories. This is a strange prescription for a community whose traditions are deeply anchored in nomadic and collective identity. In Somalia, they were an integral part of something larger — a clan, an extended family or an integrated community. Most of their problems in Britain stem from the fact that they feel unanchored and adrift. To feel at home in Britain, they have to reconnect among themselves. It is not individualism they need, but the spirit of community they have lost.

Only Half of Me works best as an urgent, passionate and angry polemic. Omaar writes movingly about his own family and is at his best when describing the plight of Somalis he meets in London. In the end, his deep humanity and compassion win the arguments.

EXTRACT
from ONLY HALF OF ME Being a Muslim in Britain
by Rageh Omaar

I lived in a street just off the Edgware Road in northwest London from the age of 5 until I was 25. When we arrived, Edgware Road was a haven for wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti families who came to London for their summer holidays . . . A few years on and it had been transformed into London’s “Little Arabia”, as thousands of less well-off immigrants from Middle Eastern countries settled in the area. The first Iraqis I met were the Husseins, a family of Shias who opened a corner shop near our house in the mid-1980s.

As a child I would run into their shop on my way home from school to buy sweets or I would be sent there by my mother for a pint of milk or packet of tea. Behind the till they had hung up a huge poster of an Islamic shrine which I didn’t recognise because I’d only ever seen pictures of the shrine at Mecca. I got to know the family well and one day asked one of the brothers what the picture was and he told me it was a place called Karbala, the shrine of the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, one of Iraq’s holiest places.

The years during which my family and I lived along the Edgware Road witnessed some of the most important events to shape the Arab and Islamic world in the last hundred years. I grew from a young boy to a man and became more drawn to the events in the region where my family’s roots lay. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan at the end of 1979 had given rise to the Afghan mujahideen, funded principally by the United States and Saudi Arabia. It was a war in which young men from the Muslim world who wanted to fight against the Soviet forces were supported by the Saudi Arabian and American governments and agencies, including Osama bin Laden.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist