The Fate of Abraham:

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, London, 2022, 514pp. ISBN: 9781398501027

While exploring the ‘collapse of integrity’ in Britain, it became clear to Peter Oborne that “truth based on empirical evidence no longer existed in our society.” In this masterly work, Oborne sets out to forensically examine how Islamophobia and prejudice against Islam became “arguably the UK’s last remaining socially respectable form of bigotry” and how through “deceitful private collaboration between police (or security services) and media... fabricated stories about Muslims have become endemic in British public culture.” Journalism is fast becoming a repetitive reproduction of boring stories paddled helpfully to the lazy journalists by interested quarters; in depth investigative journalism is fast becoming a rare commodity in today’s British media. Peter Oborne is probably one of the last remaining inheritors of the distinguished tradition of investigative humanitarian journalism. One of the rare breed of journalists who dare to take up the cause of the dispossessed and voiceless such as Muslims. British Muslims owe him a huge debt of gratitude for the powerful, eloquent and humane testimony of their otherwise neglected stories that Oborne introduces in the national discourse.

He describes how he “gained some understanding of what it is like to be Muslim in Britain.” They are “subject to arbitrary arrest, their bank account gets frozen for no apparent reason, they get libelled and insulted at will in national press and broadcasting media and slandered, spat at or physically attacked in the streets.” Dissecting the whole host of terms and words “think tanks and politi- cians deliberately constructed or moulded ... in order to categorise and control British Islam.” Terms and phrases such as Islamism, extremism, non-violent extremism, radical and British values are often used in “a pseudo-scientific discourse ... to stigmatise Muslims.” Peter Oborne shows that, in Europe, while ‘Anti-Semitism has not gone away ... Islamophobia is the most virulent phe- nomenon of recent decades” which has “moved with ease from far-right fringes to the political mainstream.” Worldwide “this has resulted in two genocides of Muslims in the last twenty-five years, the first in Bosnia in 1995 and second in Myanmar in 2017.” China “has carried out extreme repression of Muslim Uyghur people ... and anti-Muslim pogrom swept through parts of ...India.”