Book: Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, by Ed Husain. Publisher: Bloomsbury, £14

By 2050, there will be 13 million British Muslims. Ed Husain visited towns with growing Muslim populations to gauge how well people are integrating and what the future will look like. Instead, he found mostly self-contained monocultural groups embracing an intolerant and narrow Islam. "A parallel Muslim-only environment has emerged for those who want it," he comments. "The obedience, control and hierarchy of the villages of Pakistan appears to be thriving in the cities of England, too."

Husain reflects that Islam is more at ease with itself in Middle Eastern cities he knows well through his extensive theological study and travel. Books advocating violent jihad and a return to the attitudes of 7th century Arabia are available in Islamic shops around the UK, while they are being removed from Saudi bookshelves.

The author is alarmed by how few mosques allow women to pray, even from segregated galleries. As he browses Muslim shops, he finds popular tomes denying the Earth orbits the Sun; approving of domestic violence so long as women's faces are unmarked; demonising music or connecting with the opposite sex remotely on social media, refusing to condemn slavery, and encouraging little girls to cover up and marry "the younger the better". He also finds imams conducting Islamic marriages that leave women with few rights under secular law. ("Women are the strongest factor in destroying men's noble character" according to popular Tableeghi Jamaat scholars who recommend women wear tight headscarves even in bed).

He witnesses a well-financed battle between competing literalist sects (Deobandi, Barelwi, Salafi) anticipating the return of the caliphate. In their "sectarian silos" Husain despairs of finding any interest in modern Britain or British current events. "What is the future when people make all their interactions about identity?" he wonders.

Politicians play "a dangerous game of communalism to get votes" from clerics and their mass blocks. They ignore forced marriages, high rates of domestic violence, and the well above average rates of disability arising from marrying first cousins.

Husain knows his Koran intimately, and gets a frosty reception when he asks imams and "scholars" to show him the sura where the Prophet assigned women, Jews, Christians, Black people or gays their lowly place. Their ignorance is matched by their determination not to allow discussion. "Why are you asking such difficult questions?" he is told by an imam. "We cannot criticise our religion".

Husain's well-informed, intellectual Islam is a far cry from the increasingly hostile attitudes expressed by young Muslims coming from war zones, "seeking revenge and justice for the wrongs done to their countries," he comments.

He wants the government to stop according respectability to intolerant self-appointed Muslim representatives, and to insist schools have modern curricula. But ultimately, the struggle for the soul of Islam - between the literalist Islamists and those who see Islam as an evolving faith - is a battle that Muslims, not non-believers, must fight. Yet, it is an unfair fight because so much money is backing those who yearn for the return of the caliph and who despise innovation. Modern Muslims are silent, he remarks, while an organised minority control the mosques, bookshops, schools and charities, and they are vocal online, intimidating and judging their more liberal co-religionists.

This is a depressing but essential book.