Letters to a Young Muslim
By Omar Saif Ghobash, Picador, £12.99
This is a thought-provoking book, written by the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Russia to his two teenage sons. Omar Saif Ghobash, the son of a Russian mother and an Arab father who was killed by terrorists in 1977 when the author was four, is a voice rarely heard in the West: that of a devout Muslim, educated at Oxford, speaking Russian, Arabic, English and French, who is keen for his sons to reject all violence and know that “Islam is a religion of peace”.
