ANY writer approaching the troublesome nettle of relations between Islam and the West might be forgiven for grasping it somewhat gingerly in this book, however, Adam Lebor hauls it out of the ground and waves it fearlessly under the reader's nose. A Heart Turned East doesn't so much open as burst into flames, for Lebor begins, not with a history of mutual co operation and cultural exchange - the things that have gone right - but in the shooting gallery of Sarajevo, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for several British newspapers, and where things went very, very wrong.
An impartial observer? Not likely. Lebor's view, firmly held and eloquently expressed, is that Europe would not intervene to stop the killing because of its perception that the victims were mostly Muslim. But how Muslim were the Bosnian Muslims, in fact? "Drinkers of slivovitz, strong plum brandy, eaters of pork, for many Bosnian Muslims their only connections with Islam until the war," declares Lebor, "were that they had names like Amra and Emir and left their shoes outside their houses." The war changed all that. When they finally realised no help was forthcoming from the West, Amra, Emir and Co gratefully accepted military and financial aid from the Middle East instead, specifically from Iran and Saudi Arabia.
This in turn triggered a new awareness among Bosnians of their Muslim heritage, says Lebor; and so, by turning its back on the situation and hoping it would go away, the West had created the very entity it dreaded. "Economically if not politically, the new Bosnia will be a Muslim Bantustan in the heart of Europe, propped up in part by diplomatic and financial aid from the Muslim world."
Adam Lebor - a Jewish Londoner, by the way, of Lithuanian/ Belarus extraction, "mingled with English, Scots and Irish" - is plainly angry, not just about Bosnia but about Europe's repeated refusal to come to terms with an Islamic presence which has he says, enriched the continent's culture for centuries. It's time to take our heads out of the sand, he believes, time to leave behind the old baggage of hostility and confrontation and he makes an excellent start in this outstandingly articulate travelogue in which he talks to Turkish rap artists in Berlin, young French Algerian artists in Marseilles, Saudi dissidents in London and American converts in Washington, a brothel owner, and the editor (female) of Turkish Cosmopolitan magazine.
Lebor draws a direct line from the development of mathematics in 9th century Baghdad through: to the contemporary revolution in information technology - and gives World Wide Web addresses for various online groups, including Islamic Resources on the Net and Cyber Muslim Information Collection. He interviews liberals like Dr Zaki Badawi, principal of the Libyan funded Muslim College in London, who worked to reconcile Salman Rushdie with the Muslim community following the uproar over The Satanic Verses, and radicals like Bakri Mohammad, former leader of a London based organisation called Hizb-ut-Tahrir which seeks, among other things, the annihilation of Israel. As far as Bakri Mohammad is concerned, moderates of Dr Badawi's hue can be dismissed as "chocolate Muslims"; groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir, counters Lebor, have "absorbed the worst of British yob culture".
This evidence of theological, not to mention social and moral, diversity is perhaps the book's most valuable contribution to an East West debate which, in the vacuum left by the death of Cold War politics, may yet turn nasty. Do we really need another evil empire? And will the soldiers of Islam, marching as one on the strongholds of capitalism, provide it?
Lebor thinks not, and reading the variety of opinion expressed in these pages, from Dr Muhammad al Massari's earnest defence of the virtues of execution by beheading to Basime Korca's matter of fact explanation of why it is that Albanian women won't swathe themselves in black from head to toe, Saudi fashion ("We want to be good Muslims but European Muslims, not Arab ones. We cannot be like them and we don't want to be"), it's hard not to agree with him. Especially since, as he points out, the Turks are no longer at the gates of Vienna but firmly - if not always happily - ensconced inside.
THUS Euroturk rapper Boe B's cheerful assertion "I am first of all a Berliner", and the statistic that by the year 2000, 50 per cent of all Bradford schoolleavers will be of Muslim origin. "Europe," concludes Lebor, "must jettison the tired old stereotypes about Muslims, and begin to meet their justifiable needs, within the framework of a democratic pluralist society. The earth will not spin backwards on its axis and the French Republic collapse if a Muslim schoolgirl wears a headscarf to school. In Britain there will still be crumpets for tea if the Race Relations Act is amended to include outlawing discrimination against Muslims."
Old hurdles will also have to be somehow scrambled across, of course, and Lebor makes valiant efforts on the Rushdie affair - "to burn a book is a deeply unIslamic act" - and the question of sexual equality - "the Quranic view of women's rights was centuries ahead of Europe and the rest of the world".
Ultimately Lebor is convinced that a mutually enriching symbiosis, an ecumenical dialogue for the new millennium, is on the way. "The two cultures are blending and fusing, often in unexpected places," he writes. "I hope so. . ." A moment's relection on the alternatives - Algiers, too dangerous for Western journalists to visit; Solingen, where a four year old Turkish child was roasted alive by neo Nazis; Sarajevo, whose very name conjures up pointless destruction - makes this reader hope so too.
