What a wonderful Muslim! What a wonderful book! Imam Abdessalam Yassine, born in 1928 in Marrakesh, leader of the Moroccan Islamic Movement "Al-'Adl wa'l-lhsan", was feared by the late King Hassan II as much as Sayyid Qutb by Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser. A public figure ever since his Open Letter to the King in 1974, Shaykh Yassine was in and out of prison and, since 1989, under tightly surveillanced house arrest at his residence in Rabat's twin-city of Salé. (In order not to endanger him even more, I never attempted to visit him there during my tenure as ambassador.) Crucial was his view that Hassan could well claim to be monarch, but not Amir al-Mu'minin, if only because of his scandalous dungeon at Tazmamart.

Never beating around the bush or mincing his words, Yassine used to make fun of the hypocrisy of official Moroccan Islam and its unending transition to democracy (calling it a veritable "Punch-and-Judy Show"), with politicians ceremoniously praying in front of cameras before hitting the bar, (see pp. 15, 117, 152 f.). Only now, under Mohammed VI, after 30 years of political suppression, the world at large has access to Yassine's astonishingly up-to-date thought. The publication under review, originally illegal, is the first of 27 books of his to be available other than in Arabic. Yassine may have been isolated for a long time. Yet he managed to keep abreast of even the most recent political events and of issues like the Internet (a "time-saving tool that devours everyone's time"), Huntington's clash theory, Popper's views on psychoanalysis, quantum physics, the concept of civic society - down to deforestation, global warming, and toxic wastes ("the massacre must stop").

The French edition was appropriately called Islamiser la Modernité because this much punchier title reflects what Yassine is after: a "message of peace for a violent world, a message of sanity for a directionless world, a spiritual message for an ailing modern humanity" (p.xiii), and to move via a most eloquent critique of "Holy Secularity" (François Burgat) and its sainte laicité, in which immorality is seen as innovation (p.68), to a situation where the Muslims against a back foil of "moral decadence" are going to be "the last moral and political refuge", (p. 152). Yassine expects this to happen in a wiser post-modern, but also post-moral world. In the process, is a distinguishing of "islam" (as religion) from capitalised "Islam" (as civilisation, in which religion may have become State confiscated). Although their psychology currently makes Muslims "highly improbable candidates for playing an honourable role on the world stage" (p.52), the author is optimistic enough to speak of abolishing the "artificial borders of the nation-States that imprison Muslim peoples", (p.86), and even of a second Khilafa (p. II). In fact, even though secularism is "militant religious indifference" and modernity is "built on a nihilist tenet", in marked contrast to Sayyid Qutb Shaykh Yassine believes that Muslims ought to interact with, and "buy into, modernity" on their own terms, acquiring and adapting Western features useful for them.

Dealing in particular with obstacles like Israel, the "51 st US State" (p.xix), the author predicts that - as the second great disorder mentioned in the Qur' an in 17: 4 - it will fare like the 'Ad and Thamud and crumble like all other Crusader States, since "rotation of civilisations" is a law (pp.xix, 51 f., 58). He is equally outspoken on the subject of the torture of thousands of Muslims in Tunisia (p-43) and the Algerian tragedy (pp.31-43) where "no one is able to prove any Islamist identity whatever of the killers". On the future of the country he muses: "Sow the wind and reap the storm ... But what will be the harvest when the seed is storm from the outset?", (p.40).

Yassine makes clear that his vision can only be realised if Muslims worldwide attack the viruses of disbelief and discouragement that have befallen them and mobilise yet again like their forebears (pp. 123, 125). In doing so, they have to:

• scuttle "a juridical system that is paralyzed and chained to the jurisprudence of the past, well short of Qur'an and Sunnah", (p.83);
• "deliver the contemporary Muslim woman, fallen again, perhaps lower than her pre-Islamic sister", "oppressed creature", "stunted by illiteracy and weighted down by unjust Macho conditions", (p.93);
• develop the economy according to the models of Malaysia and Singapore (p-132-4), devoting part of zakat funds for productive investment (p. 137);
• once in power, abide by the principle of non-violence, avoiding repressive laws, the enforcement of hijab, or "cultural revolutions" à la Mao (pp.89, 105, 119, 152). Rather, the social fabric of a new Islamic State should result from a patient reconciliation policy a la Nelson Mandela (p. 146), the aim being deep, not superficial, change (p. 154).

In this respect, Shaykh Yassine's attitude towards democracy seems ambivalent. On the one hand, he sees it as a method without truths, frequently degraded to a cult of money, religion of profit, capitalism gone mad, and pluralistic social management without fixed values (pp.4, 156 f.); thus, he shuns political parties (p. 154) and insists that "Islam is the absolute negation of everything the other side thinks and teaches", (p.86). On the other hand, he realises that all power corrupts and that democracy - if it were a method only without in-built secularism - would be the least evil and functionally the most efficient way of practicing shura. So, in the end, he supports division of power, party pluralism, the ballot, freedom of the press, and human rights guaranteed by democratic checks and balances (pp. 161-5). At any rate, Shaykh Yassine is a man of dialogue, saying "If our heavens are not of the same color, our earth is the same", (P-57).

Clearly a dangerous man for monarchies and despotic governments in the Muslim world, an intellectual and moral visionary of the calibre of Izetbegovic, and a magnificent Islamic guide for the 3rd millenium CE. May Allah preserve him for many years to come for his Umma!