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Book Review: Embracing the Infidel: stories of Muslim migrants on the journey West

and deep interest in other people enabled him to connect with guards, and even an interrogator, whose portraits are an unforgettable part of this book. He shares a wavelength with people as different as Jennifer, a Republican from the South who liked to dress up like a Goth; Thomson, a white Virgin Islander who identifies as black and tells him that ‘Black is a state of mind, not a color’; and assorted ‘rednecks’ whom, he discovers, do not entirely conform to stereotype. The friendships he forms against all odds with US soldiers contrast sharply with the dehumanising system created by the US military to break the ‘most dangerous people’ on earth. The ideological debate in Enemy Combatant comes into focus when Begg is finally released from solitary confinement and gets to know some of his fellow prisoners. He has far-ranging discussions about Islam, US imperialism, the problems of the Muslim world and reasons behind the attacks of September 11 – and even British poetry – with Feroz Abbassi, a black man from Britain who had been walking to Japan in search of Buddhist enlightenment when he discovered Islam, and the learned Uthman al-Harbi, an al-Qaida member from Yemen. The dispute over al-Qaida’s justification for the September 11 attacks – with Moazzam and Feroz on one side of the ‘fault line’ and Uthman defending Osama bin Laden on the other – gives the reader the kind of insight into the motivations and aspirations of the Muslim world that has totally eluded the administration. Throughout this riveting book, Enemy Combatant holds up a mirror to America that reveals a globalising and homogenising superpower trapped in the limitations of its ownManichaean world view, with considerably less understanding of the world it seeks to dominate than those it holds in its power beyond the rule of law. ‘What you really mean – but are afraid to say’, Begg told an interrogator, ‘is what links aid organizations, missionary groups, and militancy to al-Qa’idah is Islam. So you are potentially investigating 1.6 billion enemy combatants. Good luck.’