AN AMERICAN MUSLIM WRITES:

As a Muslim in America I was already used to being treated with ignorance and suspicion and now I was increasingly sickened by the prospect of a reckless but inevitable war in Iraq. Of course, I was impossibly naive: the Middle East existed for me, like all things Islamic, in a sort of exotic orientalist ether of veiled women, the Ka‘ba and the Virgins of Paradise. I set off for Egypt convinced that, unlike America, there was no corruption and hypocrisy in the Arab Muslim world and that it bore no responsibility for its own appalling condition. People told me that Egypt was, like its Muslim neighbours, a ruthless dictatorship, but until I lived there I refused to admit this to myself. I wanted only to be an expatriate novelist, a dissident, and to enjoy the celebrity of being a convert in a Muslim country.

For a week I managed to persist in the happy belief that I was not living in a brutal police state. . . .

In Mecca, I found the same mixture of confusion, oppression and apathy I thought I had left behind in Egypt. But as in Egypt, nothing worked, even at the blessed hajj, for we were visitors not to an Islamic state but to yet another cynical Arab kleptocracy which only pretended to adhere to the true ideals of Islam. . . .

I fled home the next week, leaving all my illusions of the Arab world in my Cairo flat. I couldn’t wait to be in America again. On the long flight home, I promised myself I would never accept anything less than full democracy for my fellow Muslims in the Arab world or apologize for the tyranny that now masquerades as Islam.

Good.