Smash hit

In the 1980s he travelled to Afghanistan — then the training ground for Islamic militancy—– and a decade later visited Kosovo, where he saw that the viciousness of Serbian racism had met its match in the spiritual confidence of Muslims.

When some British Muslim leaders backed Ayatollah Khomeini’s chilling fatwa against Salman Rushdie and an Islamic conference in Bradford endorsed Iraq’s call for a “holy war against western forces” in 1990, Selbourne sensed that these were not one-off aberrations but signs of a profound cultural shift.

“History didn’t begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001,” he says. By chance, he was driving to Cambridge, Massachusetts when the attacks occurred and was impressed by the unity, dignity and restraint of Americans. But that consensus soon dissolved as attacks on President George Bush escalated.

In Selbourne’s view Americans are at a loss to understand why they are so hated, so they are turning their fire on their leader. “When you like yourself well enough, it is very hard to hear that anti-Americanism is rife in the world, so he’s made a scapegoat. Americans don’t want to be tarred with his brush.”

As for the Europeans: “They’re anti-American because of fear of Islam, which is being projected as Bush-phobia. People are very frightened by Islam’s strength and they need to blame somebody for it.”

The worst of it is that people in the West are so willing to suspend their judgment about Muslim extremists, including clerics who issue bloodcurdling anti-semitic remarks or denunciations of women’s emancipation and homosexuality, while vilifying Bush as a liar.

If, like Selbourne, you take the long view, there is not much point in hating the Americans or their president. “The odium for Bush is clouding people’s judgment,” he says. “It’s not Bush’s fault that Islam is advancing. It is being propelled by its own organic power.”

He is pessimistic about the outcome of this religious and cultural war. “We’re up against a terrific foe. The United States and the non-Muslim world are in a desperate predicament. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t take them on.”

In Iraq, he fears the situation is becoming hopeless and that Bush is chasing an “illusion about the democratisation of the Islamic world”.

“You know what’s happening. The United States is trying to groom democratic liberal figures in the Muslim world and I fear it will lead to the same end as President Diem in Vietnam.” (Diem, America’s placeman, was killed by his own generals in 1963 after he was overthrown in a military coup.) The irony is that history may well be on Islam’s side with or without violent tactics. “I don’t think there’s any need for Islamists to be killing and terrorising people — even though such behaviour is sanctioned in the Koran, no matter what people say,” Selbourne says. “Islam is advancing willy nilly as a moral force, whether you like that moral force or not.”

For Selbourne, the fragmentation of western society has left it intensely vulnerable to a challenge of this nature. “We used to have an animating idea,” he points out. “It used to be a belief in civil society and community. We’re dismantling the social order in which Muslims so firmly believe in their own society.”

Islam is a religion on the rise, winning converts among the poor and needy, from Africa and Indonesia to inmates of American jails. “It’s the politics of the underdog, the marginalised. If it’s the socialism of our time, with an ethic that appeals to the oppressed, it will have the same force.”