Daniel ignored or failed to notice the gesture. He folded one arm, rested the other elbow on it and stood stroking his soft red beard. ‘From the days of its birth Islam has had to struggle against those who seek to suppress the truth. In 1095 Pope Urban II launched the Crusades that began with Christian slaughtering of the Jews in Europe. Four years later the crusading Christians murdered 70,000 men, women and children in Jerusalem. They boiled Muslims in cooking pots and roasted children on spits. But when the Muslims under Saladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 they spared the Christians and protected the holy places. Yet to this day Christians continue to depict Islam as a threat and Muslims as barbaric and inferior.’

Akela squeezed past her husband with a submissive smile and went through to Sarah in the kitchen. ‘D’you think they do?’ Charles adopted what he hoped was a tone of disinterested scholarly enquiry while again indicating to Daniel that they should move into the sitting room. ‘Most of those I’ve met—’

‘During the colonial period the Christian west plundered and looted Muslim countries and when oil was discovered they dismembered the Ottoman Empire, destroyed the Caliphate and used the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement to enable the Zionist land-grab in which powers that did not own the Holy Lands of Palestine gave them to the Zionist jackal that has suppressed and terrorised the Palestinians ever since and which they support to this day.’

‘What can I get you to drink?’ Charles stepped decisively into the sitting room, leaving Daniel to follow. In recent years he had become all too familiar with the Single Narrative, the centuries-old litany of Muslim victimhood comprising truths, half-truths, fictions and myths. ‘Fortunately, Muslim integration into British society is working quite well, isn’t it? Compared with other countries. You and Akela, for example—’

‘Islam is politics and society or it is nothing. Islam cannot be integrated without ceasing to be Islam. It is necessary for it to become the society it inhabits. Some Muslims argue that we should participate in elections in order to bring the Islamic movement to power so that the necessary changes can then be made. But others argue that the democratic path is a Western illusion, that it has failed Muslims in Algeria, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine and that anyway it violates the sharia. For myself—’

‘Elderflower cordial?’

‘Thank you.’

‘And for Akela?’

‘She drinks only water.’