Tony Blair's Sister-in-Law Converts to Islam

Britain's new convert.

Tony Blair's sister-in-law Lauren Booth recently announced that she converted (or "reverted" in Islamic saying) to Islam. The 43-year old journalist and broadcaster made her decision after a "holy experience" in Iran, but says she has long been "impressed with the strength and comfort [Islam] gave." And she has long been a supporter of the Palestinian cause and has spent time working in the occupied territories.

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Islam has quickly changed her life. Telling the British press: “Now I don’t eat pork and I read the Qur'an every day. I’m on page 60. I also haven’t had a drink in 45 days, the longest period in 25 years." She also tries to go to the local mosque as often as she can.

Unfortunately Tony Blair himself could use a more thoughtful understanding on Islam. I have wrote about Tony Blair's myopic views when it comes to the faith and his fallacious use of a theolocentric paradigm toward understanding any conflict involving Muslims.

This metanarrative was properly addressed and critiqued in the exceptionally text by French orientalist Maxime Rodinson in “The Fascination with Islam.” In the text Rodinson coined the term “theolocentrism,” which he defined as the practice of attributing all observable phenomenas amongst Muslims to Islam. It is the belief that Muslims do as they do simply because of Islam.

The doctrine is incredibly fallacious. Those who advocate it are more obsessed with Islam than most Muslims. They seek to also find an Islamic motive when no actually exists. Instead of treating Muslims akin to all other people who compromise a diverse community and are actuated by myriad motives, the proponents of theolocentrism would instead prefer to reduce Muslims to a few characteristics and exclusively use Islam as the paradigm.

The person who championed this practice is the orientalist Bernard Lewis who - and, please, read his texts to see this yourself - while discuss contemporary events in Muslim countries by going back to medieval Islamic texts. Instead of understanding the political motives - the yearning for self-determination - that sparks Palestinians resistance, Lewis prefers instead to “find” a reason in something Ibn Sine wrote in Islamic Spain that most Palestinians have never even read.

This tactic is not innocent. It serves to de-legitimize the real grievances that Arabs and Muslims might have. Instead of addressing the injustice of Zionism, of Israeli occupation, of Western footprints in the region and highlight this political causes of angry between East-West, Lewis always offers up Islam as an “explanation.” You see, that way Israel and the West is never wrong. How they be? Lewis makes it out to be that Palestinians are angry not because they are occupied, but, simply, because of atavism within Islam.

So the problem never is “our” policy, but always “their” religion and an effort to have a thoughtful discussion about Israel occupation and American military bases in the region is lost as the chance for introspection is subdued in any effort to always paint Islam as the enemy. Lewis tells us that Arabs and Muslims do not actuate out of any concrete political motives, but, simply, do so because of who they are.

Blair is a fan of this ideology, as Fareed Zakaria recently noted in the review of Blair's memoir:

Blair describes Dick Cheney as wanting to work “through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it.” Blair endorses this view. “It is one struggle,” he declares flatly. The problem with this perspective is that it ignores politics, national interest, history and specificity, shoving a set of widely disparate phenomena into one grand narrative. So two secular dictatorships and a Shiite theocracy are lumped with Al Qaeda, a Sunni fundamentalist movement that actually despises all those regimes.

One smaller example: Blair reveals that in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and then president, he was “sympathetic” to the fact that Putin’s war in Chechnya was being fought against “a vicious secessionist movement with Islamic extremism at its core.” But as a student of history, Blair surely knows that the Chechens were forced into the Russian Empire in the mid-19th century after decades of fierce resistance and have been desperately trying to free themselves ever since, on purely nationalist grounds. Over the last two decades, the Russian Army has killed 100,000 Chechen civilians, 10 percent of the population, and transformed more than a quarter of the republic into a wasteland. So yes, today there is Islamic extremism in Chechnya, but to describe the situation as Blair does misses something crucial.

Nuance is all lost. Political factors are sidelined. It all becomes the absurd fallacy of using "theolocentrism" as a metanarrative, a tool to describe all observable reality no matter the context and no matter how relevant and no matter if it really makes sense and explains anything.

Booth hopes to educate Blair on the Palestinian cause and on Islam and seek to make Blair more enlightened on the subjects. It is a tall order for a man like Blair. At least she has found personal solace.