Chapter 17 Anatomy of Islam ‘A single people refused to join the common intercourse of mankind,’ so wrote Edward Gibbon about the Jews, and thought that ‘the Jewish religion was admirably fitted for defence’. If the Jews puzzled the medieval world, their religious cousins, the Musalmans, with their accent on separateness, perplex the modern world. What Nehru wrote in ‘The Discovery of India’ seems to prove the parody that is the Muslim Brotherhood. “When Italy suddenly attacked Turkey in the Tripoli War of 1911, and subsequently, during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, an astonishing wave of sympathy for