Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise

"This is a very interesting counterdose to On Being Abbas El Abd . It’s not fiction , but the autobiography of a young man who grew up in a city in Upper Egypt. His parents are middle class and he drifts into joining one of the most important Islamist groups, the Jama’a Islamiya. A few years later, after spending six months in prison, he drifts out again, as he becomes acquainted with, and attracted to, a humanistic, secular world view. But he explores, from the inside, many of the issues that we in the West never gets to grips with about the Islamist movement: the sorts of things that really matter to them, the sorts of debates that they have. Some of it is almost abstruse. But these issues are vitally important to those people, and make it clear why, for example, the Jama’a Islamiya is at daggers drawn with X other Islamist group. It shows the internal debates and jealousies and tensions that exist there. But despite being a very straightforward, insightful exposition of that sort of material, the book never loses sight of the fact — and this is really interesting and nice — that this was a rebellious, grumpy teenager who really cared about what he looked like and the way he wore his hair. Absolutely. They don’t get it because, first of all, they look at them simply as actors on a political stage, and in relationship to the non-Islamist world view. They don’t ever bother to try and get inside the Islamist world view and see what that is. It’s very different, but it’s not without its logic, and it’s carefully elaborated. For me as a non-Islamist it may be difficult to summarise. But there’s a rather interesting passage in which Khaled al-Berry recounts how, one day, he was sitting on his own in the mosque, and a stranger came and sat down next to him and got into conversation with him. The older man raises a very complex issue of theology, and the young man, who is only 14 or 15, realises that he’s swallowed the whole of Jama’a Islamiya’s — his particular group’s — thinking. He’s been told what their stands are on various issues, but he’s never had to think it through, he’s never been subjected to debate. And he doesn’t know how to answer this guy, who, as it turns out, represents a different group and is fishing for new adherents. Then a person from Jama’a Islamiya is furious with him, and says, ‘Don’t ever let yourself get into conversation with a stranger again. If someone comes along you tell me and we’ll deal with them…’ The other thing that’s interesting about this book, and the insider view it gives, is the way the group deals with quite ordinary issues. For example, one of the members of the group turns out to be gay, or is discovered in a compromising situation. How does an Islamist group deal with a gay member? How can an Islamist group even have gay members? Well, life is life, people are people, and some people are gay. And even in Islamist groups some people are gay. So what do you do about it? No-oo. Not adapt. No, definitely not. Though they don’t actually finally expel the guy from the group. But they do subject him to very vicious punishment. But how exactly that is handled is really interesting. The author himself asks, ‘But I thought we were all saints, we’re all good — otherwise we wouldn’t be in this movement. So how can somebody break the rules to do something so taboo?’ And he has to deal with that. All the way through it’s a teenager’s voice, and it’s very authentic. One of the other nice things about this book is that the author scrupulously avoids demonising the Islamists. Right at the beginning, he says, ‘I’m not an Islamist, but some of the best people I knew and ever met in my life were members of that group.’ He has immense respect for some of them, even though he has totally rejected their actual point of view."