Light in the East | 9 March 2017

Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation.

As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And we’d better understand it, because it’s an interesting story, and often a positive one — the way vast crowds streamed onto the streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran in demonstrations against authoritarian rule over the past decade, for example. Western-style participatory democracy remains the dream of the man and woman in the souk. Globalisation means that technical innovation and modern ideas cannot help seeping across borders. And Islam is a notably broad church, by no means totally uncompromising: witness the popularity of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen who, from American exile, preaches inter-religious accord while being accused of trying to overthrow the Turkish state.