Malise Ruthven

Are the Muslims of Bradford, ‘Britain’s Islamabad’, incurably militant? There have been troubles in other cities with Asian Muslim populations, but the Muslims of Bradford have shown a consistent pattern of refusing to ‘take insults lying down’. They first demonstrated their militancy during the Honeyford affair in 1984-5, when the headteacher of the Drummond Middle School, 90 per cent of whose pupils came from Muslim families, was forced into early retirement after publishing anti-Pakistani remarks in the Salisbury Review. The city became notorious in December 1988 for the public burning of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Although not the first group of Muslims to demonstrate their sense of outrage in this fashion (the first burning actually took place in Bolton) it was the Bradfordians who knew how to grab the headlines, by alerting the media and selling them videos of the event.

In the Sixties it was widely assumed that politics were becoming divided from religion and that as societies became more industrialised religious belief and practice would be restricted to private thoughts and actions. The processes of modern industrialism, which Max Weber had seen as being characterised by depersonalised relationships and increasing bureaucratisation, were leading, if not to the final ‘death of God’, at least to the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The numinous forces that had underpinned the medieval cosmos would be psychologised, subjectivised and demythologised.

Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors. Fire and Blood, however, does not properly explain the religious background to the tragedy and therefore fails to account for Koresh’s hold over his followers. Preacher of Death has the advantage of Marc Breault’s contribution. Breault, a senior member of the Branch Davidians who defected in 1989, was the prime instigator of the legal moves that culminated in the ATF raid last February. Martin King, an Australian television reporter who interviewed Koresh before the siege, has in corporated into his narrative parts of Breault’s original diary, as well as extensive interviews with him.’

The title of Frances FitzGerald’s new book comes from the sermon John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered on board the Arabella shortly before landing in the New World in 1630. Fully conscious of the exemplary character of their enterprise, he urged his companions to walk humbly in the ways of God by remaining true to the Puritan tenets of a faith they could no longer practise in England. ‘We shall find that the God of Israel is among us,’ he promised, ‘when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’

When, shortly before the Second World War, Freya Stark was asked by a publisher if she would write Gertrude Bell’s biography, she turned the idea down. Although she admired her famous predecessor as a fine traveller and considered Amurath to Amurath one of the best travel books she’d read, Freya was not ‘very fascinated by her as a woman’. At first sight, this judgment seems surprising. Throughout her active career as a traveller in the Middle East, Freya was compared with Gertrude Bell. Both women travelled in remote and dangerous regions. Both wrote about their experiences in highly praised books. As well as being talented linguists and accomplished photographers, both women showed unusual physical courage, having received their early training in the tough and demanding school of Alpine mountaineering. Both women acquired formidable reputations for mental toughness, and for getting their own way. Both were frustrated in love, through indifference, betrayal or bereavement, but enjoyed close and enduring friendships with men. Both were Imperialists who served Britain with distinction in wartime, placing the special knowledge acquired in their travels at the disposal of military intelligence. In the carefully ordered realm of public service, both women showed scant regard for the rules of masculine hierarchy, corresponding with chiefs above the heads of their superiors, inviting accusations of meddling and intrigue. Both of them at times appeared jealous of other women, not least because each was conscious of her reputation as an exceptional woman in a man’s world.’