Fatwa is a dirty word in the west. In truth, nothing more menacing than a scholar’s opinion on religious law, pundits frequently appear to presume that it’s a death sentence for blasphemy, usually one delivered by some slavering psychotic with one eye missing and a hook for a hand the better to grapple with God and sundry other elusive matters, the like of which are probably best left ungrappled. Given the murderously dim view the Ayatollah Khomeini took of The Satanic Verses, the mistake is understandable, but not necessarily excusable. You would have thought that, by now, we would have taken the trouble to get our facts right about something that sends the popular press into such a frenzy of censure, though I guess it’s a little naive to put ‘get the facts right’ and ‘popular press’ in the same sentence.

Personally, I’m not terribly up on religious law, still less on juridical opinions, and I hope to stay that way. The language used by jurists is generally enough to get me reaching for a black cap myself – “You, who have willfully and callously abused perfectly blameless words, serially twisting innocent syntax into forms so devious that they are beyond the comprehension of a compassionate mind, heinous crimes for which you have shown no remorse, shall be taken from this place and . . .” well, you get the idea. However, I recently read about a writer whose books I’ll never read, but about whom I’d like to write, despite the fact that the man has dished out a few juridical opinions of his own.

Gamal Al-Banna is an Egyptian scholar who has got fifty odd publications to his name concerning religion, politics, economics and unionism. He has a library of 15,000 books in Arabic, 3,000 in English, and, at nearly ninety years old, claims he still reads two books in Arabic every day, and a third in English every two days. In short, not so much a bibliophile as a bibliophage.

Among Al-Banna’s numerous fatwas are the following:

 Moslem women are not obliged to cover themselves with a hijab, because the Koran says nothing about women wearing veils.

 Moslem women can marry Christian or Jewish men with impunity.

 Moslem men living in foreign countries have the right to contract temporary ‘marriages of pleasure’ with non-Moslem women, the duration of which should be determined in advance.

 A woman who has had an appropriate education can lead prayers and therefore be an imam.

 A marriage cannot be halal unless both partners accept the religious ordinance.

 Witnesses, dowries, and parental consent for a woman’s marriage are social conventions that have nothing to do with Islam.

 Since marriages are contracted by mutual consent, they cannot be annulled by one party alone.

 During ramadan, Moslems can smoke, since the Koran only demands that the faithful abstain from food, drink and sex.

 The Koran does not stipulate any penalty, least of all death, for apostasy.

 In order to preserve women’s virtue, curb male lust, and avoid wasteful expenditure on superfluous fabric, men must cover their eyes with a thin strip of cloth.

Actually, I made that last one up, but you see where we’re going with this. According to Al-Banna, all those clichés about Islam that incensed western liberals (not to mention those immature moonstruck morons who are forever questing after an outside enemy to help define themselves) love to rehearse –the death sentences, the oppression of women, the instant divorce when a man tells a woman three times that it’s all over– have nothing to do with the scriptural tenets of faith, and are in fact merely an aberration resulting from the vagaries of history.

Doubtless, there are plenty of Moslems who would disagree violently, some of them probably very violently, with Al-Banna’s line, and I don’t want to get into some tedious spiel about ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ Islam. Nonetheless, I do warm to reports of people within the Moslem world who give the lie to the received wisdom about the dogmatism, intolerance, and sexism of Islam. Monotheistic, it maybe, monolithic, it ain’t.

I’m interested in this because I’ve written two books in which Islam serves as a backdrop. The first embraced the debatable image of Al-Andalus: a Moorish Spain of tolerance, humanism, scholarship, and open-mindedness, a place where music, poetry, art and philosophy were pre-eminent, and in which the glories of the grape and a grope were praised as often as those of God.

Compared with much of the rest of medieval Europe, I’m sure Al-Andalus was a thoroughly civilized place to live, but I very much doubt it was a world composed of unwavering sweetness and light. No world ever was. And I’d be mightily surprised if such a world ever existed in the future. Mildly alarmed, too. I doubt there’d be much room for people like me in a perfect place.

The second book featuring Islam serves as a corrective to what may, in the first, have been a slightly starry-eyed evocation of a lost idyll, tackling the sort of mindset (if you can call it a mind; it’s certainly set) that nowadays seems to manifest itself most often, but not exclusively, in the more lunatic fringes of Islam. And it’s because of this second book, Standing At The Crossroads, that I’m a bit sensitive about images of Islam.

While I abhor the nihilism that disguises itself as fundamentalism, I am possibly even more appalled by the sort of people who seize upon that nihilism to justify their own equally rabid xenophobia. Frankly, when I turn on the telly only to be confronted by some reactionary old fart (I’m not talking about myself here, see Mind Your Language), a middle-aged man who has likely never had an egalitarian notion in his life and who probably wouldn’t recognize one if it hit him round the back of the head with a brickbat, yet who has the gall to sit there pretending he is attacking Islam in order to defend women’s rights, I’m half inclined to don a burqa myself and start flashing my parts at the old fart in question in order to persuade him that covering up is no bad thing. Yet there is a risk that, when it comes out, Standing At The Crossroads will be seen as an anti-Islamic text playing into the hands of the bigots who pretend they’re a lot of big-hearted liberals with women’s best interests bursting from their fundaments alongside the other undigested detritus they are pleased to call their principles. Still, you can’t always choose the company you keep. Which brings me back to Al-Banna.

The other brother? Gamal’s elder sibling was Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that, whatever its merits in terms of piety and charitable good works, is nothing if not controversial, and which I sincerely doubt wants to see women whipping off their veils and giving voice to the old Allahu Akbar, Bismillahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim and what have you. It’s certainly a hell of a lot more conservative than the world view propounded in the fatwas listed above.

Back in the 1940s, following Gamal’s release from a spell in chokey after militating against continuing British interference in the affairs of a state that was meant to be an independent republic, Hassan said to his wayward younger brother: "You are working barren land while we have gardens full of trees and fruits just waiting to be picked."

Gamal replied: "The fruits of the Muslim Brotherhood are not those that I wish to harvest."

I know who I’ll be going to for my fatwa.

For the original article about Gamal Al-Banna, see Al-Ahram

For more about dissident voices in the Islamic world, see Timothy Garton-Ash in The Guardian