I did not come to Islam through theology. I came to it through fear, threat and hatred directed at me and the world I live in. I think the first time I became aware of something called Islam was in 1989, when Salman Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ for writing his novel, The Satanic Verses. Images of furious men immolating books spread around the world and seared themselves into my childhood mind, fixing fear and confusion to something I did not yet know how to name. My father, a bookseller, insisted on continuing to sell the book, but decided, soberly, that it would have to be kept behind the checkout desk, available only if a customer asked for it by name.
My exposure to Islam grew as I did – through bombings justified in God’s name, through chants that promised erasure of my coreligionists, through the casual way anti-Semitism travelled across borders and languages wearing religious dress. Like many non-Muslim westerners of my generation, my first encounters with Islam were not in a library or a classroom but in the shadow cast by violence: the planes of September 11th, the suicide bombings of the early 2000s, the long years of jihadist attacks in Europe, and now October 7th and what followed. That history does not grant me or anyone else moral authority, but it does impose on us a responsibility. When an ideology repeatedly intrudes into people’s life uninvited, through bloodshed and intimidation, indifference ceases to be a neutral position.
