Omar Saif Ghobash is the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Russia. He studied law at Oxford University. In 1977, when he was six, his father, Saif Ghobash, the UAE’s first foreign minister, was shot dead at Abu Dhabi international airport by a young terrorist whose target was a Syrian minister with whom Ghobash was travelling. In his father’s memory Omar has established a prize for Arabic literary translation, and is a sponsor of the Arab Booker prize. He is on the advisory body of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. His book Letters to a Young Muslim, published this month, confronts the broader education of children in Islam, and proposes a more open and free-thinking model. He wrote the book with his own sons, Saif, aged 16, and Abdullah, 12, in mind.

What do your boys make of the book?

My younger son is enjoying it. My older son, for whom the book was really written and to whom it is directed in my mind – well, I like his reaction. He has read a couple of chapters, but at the moment he is not reading it. I am fine with that. I really don’t want to burden him with my own projections. He is free to read it whenever he wants, but I don’t want to pressure him if he is not ready for it just now.

It opens with your observation that many voices are competing for the attention of young Muslim men, and that some are much more strident than your own. There is an urgency about moderation…

Yes, I’ve been asking these questions of myself for many years. Part of the reason that I have not been able to come up with answers is because of a kind of self-censorship. But I felt some things had to be said. Recently I found out a friend of mine who had a brilliant western education, as I did, has really been unable to bridge the gap between that and his Islamic upbringing. Basically he has decided to shut his eyes and ears and just do what he is supposed to do as a Muslim. He has given up any personal responsibility. That sort of story really worries me.

We need to tell young Muslims they can raise the flag of Islam without running about in the desert in flip-flops with a gun

Was there a moment when those worries formed?

11 September 2001 was a turning point for me personally. I was deeply upset by it. I had lived in New York from 1993 to 1995 and I had a strong attachment to the city. Some of the things I heard at the time in the Arab world – that it was payback time for Americans – I just rejected completely. I mean even if a crime has been committed against you I don’t believe you should ever respond with a crime in return. I wanted moral clarity around that. I felt for the first time that the rhetoric and the fantasies of the hardline clerics had turned into a reality. I had never expected that would happen. You always looked at these people as unhinged, and marginal, and then all of a sudden they seemed to have got the upper hand.

Your response was to involve yourself in arts and education projects…

I thought, what can I as an individual do? I didn’t have any contacts in government really, or the ear of any powerful person. So I went another way. I opened an art gallery, which is continuing to grow, and there were the literary initiatives. I was thinking increasingly about the role of the individual in change, which we have been told in the Arab world is insignificant.

You felt the important thing was to open up spaces for the individual imagination, individual responsibility?

We are often told by clerics: don’t concern yourself with questioning, it is not your role to think, it is your role to follow the instruction of the Imam. That might have been useful 1,000 years ago, when the clerics had the most knowledge but in today’s world knowledge is everywhere. To live an ethical life, you would do well at least to examine psychology, economics, social theory, philosophy. That’s not to dismiss the learning of the clerics, but to fill in some of the gaps…

How do clerics respond to that idea?

I have spoken to a number. When you think critically and out loud about Islam, many people think you are trying to demolish something, that you are trying to deprive people of their relationship with Allah. That is the opposite of what I am doing.

How possible is doubt within Islam, though? From the outside it seems less possible than in other faiths



It’s interesting. I have googled the world “doubt” in Arabic and I have come across some debates in which clerics short-circuit the argument. They imply any kind of doubt means you are an atheist, and they won’t debate that at all. But that is something that is being imposed – [whereas] there has always been debate within Islam.

But all over the world people seem to be turning away from complexity and nuance. It sounds like a losing battle in Islam in particular at the moment…

On the contrary, I think it is a winning one, but not enough people are making it. It does require some courage to do it, but it can be done.

Omar Saif Ghobash, right, with Singapore ambassador to Russia Simon Tensing de Cruz (centre) and then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow, 2009. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Part of your book is about grappling to understand the circumstances of your own childhood and the tragedy of your father’s murder. Was it useful to try to make some sense of it?

It was. I had written an earlier text which had got the publisher’s interest in which I was trying to be more theoretical about these issues. My editor said, now think about how you would tell this story to a 15-year-old. I rewrote the whole thing in two months and it was an immense pleasure. In a direct way I felt I was transferring some knowledge I had taken from my absent father to my son. And when I finished it, I found I had a huge burst of energy, so I spent the summer climbing mountains in France, with a very clear head.

One thing you describe is the sheer scale of change in the Emirates through the four generations of your family, from this desert community to a kind of global meeting place. Part of what is happening now seems to be about trying to come to terms with the speed of that change…

The book has a context. I am an Emirati, a government employee. People in my position tend to be careful of what they say. But I felt comfortable to put these ideas out there, because I think they are ideas that the UAE understands even if it doesn’t always express them. One of the problems with the generation in their teens and 20s now is that they are told the past of the country was very religious. In fact, if you speak to older Emiratis, they say: “What is going on? We were a much friendlier bunch when we were in the desert.”

I was struck by your account of going to England and to Oxford, where the freedom to study, or more importantly not to study, was an enormous shock to your system. One of the consequences of that initially was to send you off to Mecca on pilgrimage…

It was a shock. My mother said my father always wanted his children to go to Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard, and from the age of eight I thought I should start at the top of that list. I worked very hard, very regimented, to get in, and then you know I had one hour of compulsory teaching a week, and I was on my own. I was terrible at it. At Mecca I was safe in a totally black and white world again. It is such a physical and sensual religion, Islam. The incense and perfumes, the soft carpets under your feet, it is very comforting. I often try to explain that to people. But I did go back [to Oxford].

It lets you avoid the need to take full responsibility?

One of the things I try to think about is: can we have too much of religion? There is a passage in the Koran where a man tells the Prophet, “I prayed all night” and he is told off for that. When we do the five prayers a day there are compulsory elements and additional prayers. I would pray with friends and do the obligatory pieces and then leave the mosque and they would say: “What about the other prayers?” I would say: “They are not obligatory.” They would say: “The prophet did those prayers.” And I would say: “Yes, but he specifically said they were not obligatory.”

Has that pressure to be ever more pious become more intense?

I’m not sure. You sometimes see it in the adult world now. And I thought these were schoolyard questions.

Has atheism never tempted you? Why not reject the whole system?

For me personally it would be an even greater burden to rethink all of these processes of how to approach life. I take for granted the existence of God, and that I am Muslim. But the key thing is I don’t think it should end there. For me it is about how you approach the teaching, what you arrive with. You know if you’re a psychopath who likes chopping people up, you are going to find what you want in the Qur’an. But can that possibly be the point of religion? Those are the questions you need to come with.

It seems a good moment to be publishing this book in the US. Have you felt a hardening of attitudes to your faith when you have travelled in recent years?

To be honest I haven’t felt that. Maybe people are just being polite. Also I have a very earthy sense of humour, which helps. I am in the States talking about the book. Otherwise I divide my time between Russia and the Emirates.

‘The book wasn’t written to offend anybody’: Omar Saif Ghobash. Photograph: Mike McGregor/The Observer

Your mother is Russian. Her influence presumably gave you a built-in wider perspective



She had enormous influence on me, yes. Whenever I asked her advice on things, she would say: “You should do what you think is right.” But that idea troubled me. How could I know what was right? From an Islamic perspective, that is the debate that needs to be revived. Are our human qualities innate and Islam has perfected them, as I would say? Or is it the case that we have no values until we read the words of the prophet, which is the dominant paradigm today.

Why did you help to set up the Arab Booker prize?

My mother brought me up on the classics of Russian literature. It seemed to me there was no equivalent in Arabic literature, which traditionally prized only poetry. The poetry is wonderful but it is less tangible than a novel. I wanted to see more linear thinking in prose. So that was one of the motivations for setting up the prize. To begin with, all the titles were about misery and death and prison. But things have changed a bit since then and some of the Arab poets have even switched to writing novels.

Following the money?

Following the glory.

Novels can seem threatening to fundamentalisms in that they give you an alternative reality…

They can. When we think about all the issues in the Arab world it seems to me that novels might help pinpoint exactly where we are. The power of fiction can be to express things that we feel but don’t know how to express.

Have you experienced criticism for promoting such ideas in your own book?

No. It wasn’t written to offend anybody. Maybe my career as a diplomat has led me to this approach. To be honest I expected for there to be censors, but actually when I told my bosses in the UAE that I was writing a book about Islam, they were just very supportive.

In your day job in Moscow you are on the front line of what is happening diplomatically with regard to Syria. How hopeful are you that the

situation can improve?

There is a basic moral question: is it better to let the Syrian civil war extend for 10 years? Or is it better to use decisive force to try to end the war now? I feel that the west thinks that as long as we are fighting on the right side, that justifies hundreds of thousands more deaths. There is a more pragmatic approach from Russia which is to staunch the flow of blood in order to prevent the spread of radicalisation. But there are no simple answers.

In the wider fight against Islamic State, do you believe that fundamentalism can sustain itself, or will it inevitably fail?

I believe it can sustain itself. IS is a manifestation of a mentality which is quite widespread. And my worry is that some of the more traditional Islamic thinkers are only a couple of moves away from IS-type work. That is scary. You cannot call for jihad on Tuesday and deny it on Thursday.

When it comes to young men, the subject of your book, we have endless debates about how to prevent radicalisation – and governments can clearly do some things – but doesn’t this debate really need to be happening in the mosques?

Yes, clerics will say the correct things, that Islam is the religion of peace, that they condemn the violence. But I fear that doesn’t have much of an impact on young boys. It’s too static. The radicals they hear are all action and dynamism. We need to be telling our young Muslims that there are many more positive ways to raise the flag of Islam in the world than running round in the desert in flip-flops with a machine gun.

How would that rival message sound?

I know people who are trying things. But you need to go to the heart of traditional Islam really. There are these rock star clerics with 17 million followers on Twitter. I have the sense that some of them love the adulation, without using the responsibility that goes with it. These are the people who need to reach out and say not only that this is wrong, but also that there is a better way.

• Letters to a Young Muslim by Omar Saif Ghobash is published by Picador (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99