There is something strangely affecting about prison memoirs. From Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol to Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom, there is a pathos in the writing of those who have been denied their liberty yet retain the composure to make some sense of their ordeal.

With Wilde the pathos rests partly in the inherent injustice of incarcerating a man for the nature of his love, and partly in the sympathy he evokes for his fellow inmates. In Boyle’s memoir we are left in no doubt of his guilt, but we learn how trust and compassion can bring redemption.

The ability of works which deal with conditions of abject misery to nevertheless inspire endures. One of the most successful books of the last year has been a fascinating prison memoir. Moazzam Begg’s Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back, has been met with near-universal praise.

The Guardian acclaimed its “strikingly generous spirit”, “humour” and “insight”. The Independent reviewer said that after reading the work “all you want to do is welcome [the author] back, hug his book and punish his tormentors”. Mr Begg has attracted huge audiences to readings of his work at bookshops across the country. And the dignified figure he has cut has helped jolt the British Government, in the form of the Attorney-General, to demand the closure of the detention centre at Guantanamo.

Mr Begg’s account of life in Guantanamo is indeed horrific. It has understandably pre-occupied the minds of readers and reviewers. But equally interesting, in its own way, is the path Mr Begg trod before incarceration. He took a curious road on the way to Guantanamo, one which has passed curiously unscrutinised by most reviewers.

By his own account, Mr Begg travelled to Lahore to visit a centre run by an organisation called Jamaat-e-Islami, which he describes as “Pakistan’s largest Islamic organisation and its third largest political party”. What the reader is not told is that Jamaat is a party dedicated to the creation of an Islamic state which its founder acknowledged would bear “a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and communist states”.

After spending time in Lahore, Mr Begg then travelled with some of those he met at the Jamaat-e-Islami centre to a Mujahidin training camp in Afghanistan. As well as spending time in one camp run by Pakistanis, he visited another run by unidentified Arabs.

These were not the only occasions when Mr Begg spent time getting to know Islamist warriors. Again, by his own account, he made two visits to Bosnia in the early Nineties to “deliver aid”, where he spent some time at camps run by Islamist fighters. During his stay, he found that “most of the people in charge were Arabs”. Under their command were “Turks, Gambians, Pakistanis, French, Filipinos and Malaysians, as well as Bosnians and a strong influence from Saudi Arabia”. Mr Begg is open in his admiration for the fighters but explains that, after wrestling with the temptation to join them, he decided instead to return to Birmingham.

Where he opened a bookshop. Of a fascinating kind. The most popular title in stock, Mr Begg recalls, was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s Defence of the Muslim Lands. It’s an interesting work which argues that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which killing kuffar (unbelievers) was fard ayn (a personal obligation) for all Muslims. The edict was supported by Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti (highest religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz.

While working in the bookshop Mr Begg’s wanderlust did not desert him and he tried to travel to Chechnya to support friends there. He was disappointed not to be able to make it to the war-torn republic, but a few years later he moved, with his family, to an even more exotic location. The Beggs relocated to Taleban-run Afghanistan in the summer of 2001.

Under the Taleban public executions and punishments (such as floggings) became regular events at Afghan soccer stadiums. Frivolous activities, such as kite-flying, were outlawed. In order to root out “non-Islamic” influence, television, music, and the internet were banned. Men were required to wear beards, and subjected to beatings if they didn’t. Mr Begg’s stated reason for moving his family to the world’s hardest line Islamist state was his desire to continue with aid work and the cheap “cost of living there”.

There may well be people who have freely chosen to spend large stretches of the past 15 years visiting Mujahidin camps across the globe, who have sought out every battlefield on which al-Qaeda and its confederates have fought, from Bosnia through Chechnya to Afghanistan, who have chosen to set up home in Taleban Afghanistan, and who have earned a crust along the way selling, among other works, jihadi textbooks who are, in every sense of the word, innocents abroad. Mr Begg may well be one of them.

But in the understandable desire so many feel to condemn what has gone on in Guantanamo, I fear something is being missed. Mr Begg may well have retained his fluency and composure after his ordeal. But judging from the reviews his book has so far received I am not sure we have yet entirely made sense of his story.

Is there an expert in the house?

There seems to have been a surprising amount of attention paid to the BBC’s recent embarrassment when a completely ill-equipped novice, apparently an applicant for a post in the IT department, was ushered on to the screens of News 24 and then interviewed for several minutes on the Apple v Apple court case.

No one in the studio noticed that the interviewee, a Mr Goma, was not the expert commentator Guy Kewney, who had been booked to appear. The mix-up became apparent only when the real Mr Kewney identified himself.

The BBC should not feel too bad about it all. This is not the first time in which someone who didn’t know what on earth they were talking about was interviewed at some length by News 24. I’ve been on their shows several times.

• The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone