As the Gaza war enters its second year and Iran buries hundreds after the June 2025 missile exchanges with Israel, one can’t help but revisit ‘The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong about Islam’, Peter Oborne’s sobering 2022 book.
What once read like a warning now feels like a blueprint: a haunting, historically rooted diagnosis of the West’s enduring fixation on Islam as a threat rather than a sibling faith.
More than a literary observation, it is a political imperative. The twelve-day Iran-Israel exchange in June, leaving at least 28 Israelis and over 900 Iranians dead, including 417 civilians, didn’t erupt in a vacuum. Nor did the 56,000 Palestinian deaths since October 2023, one-third of them children, occur in a moral fog. They occurred in a landscape long cultivated by the narratives Oborne charts – where Islam is othered, Palestinian resistance is demonized and power is sanitised through the language of security and civilisation.
I remember vividly a 20-day journey in 2019, guiding Oborne’s cricketing crew, the ‘Wounded Tigers’, through the backroads of Sindh and southern Punjab. Our destination was Multan, but the real conversation took place in the hours between matches over roadside tea and the reflections of the sunset. Partition memories, drone politics, and the philosophy of reverse swing filled those evenings.
When the team returned in April 2024, Oborne handed me a signed copy of ‘The Fate of Abraham’. I shelved it – until Gaza burned and Iran bled. Then I reopened it, and it read like prophecy.
Oborne’s narrative arc begins with William Gladstone waving a Quran in parliament and declaring Islam to be against peace. He traces this logic through centuries: Barbary pirates, Algerian colonisation, Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, all the way to Britain’s 2015 media-fueled myth of Muslim ‘no-go zones’. He even reprints the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 Islamophobia checklist, exposing how little has changed in British tabloid culture. One entire chapter meticulously debunks the ‘Trojan Horse’ school scandal, arguing that once Muslims are suspected, their guilt becomes self-evident in the eyes of power.
But where the book hits hardest – now, quite heartbreakingly – is in its treatment of Palestine. Oborne calls the 1917 Balfour Declaration “the original fake news”, then traces how Western justifications for Israeli policy have shifted post-war by post-war: 1967 was about ‘security’, 1982 about ‘terrorism’, 2001 about ‘civilisation’. Today, those same recycled tropes are used to justify war crimes, blockades and entire city blocks turned to rubble.
Oborne reserves particular ire for the Abraham Accords, describing them as “the first Middle East peace treaty to require a war on Gaza as small print”. And he's not far off. Since 2023, tourism linked to the accords has tanked. Major investments have stalled. Official press releases remain upbeat, but analysts at the Carnegie Endowment now admit the deals survive “only because elites insulate them from public opinion”.
Oborne predicted this exact disconnect. He warned that any future normalisation deal that sidelines Palestine will resemble colonial protectorates – gleaming on the outside, crumbling within.
Only weeks ago, Tony Blair appeared on UK radio to admit the Iraq war “was unjustified and a mistake”. Too little, too late. Iraq buried over 199,000 of its citizens before the apology came. Oborne’s broader point is brutal but necessary: Western regret often arrives only after the blood dries.
And for those of us who knew Craig Murray, the whistle-blower diplomat who joined both of Oborne’s Pakistan tours and once exposed British complicity in torture, these debates are deeply human. Murray wasn’t just a witness to state crimes; he bore their cost.
Oborne’s style can be brisk, even sweeping, especially when discussing American media. But the book is deeply sourced, historically layered and hard to dismiss, especially when read alongside today’s headlines. He walks through history not as an aloof chronicler, but as someone who’s batted on dusty village pitches near Keti Bander, where barefoot teenagers bowl leg-breaks and the political feels personal.
We’re in a moment where every new ‘historic breakthrough’ in the region is followed by fresh horror. Gaza’s hospitals are still overwhelmed. Tehran's skyline still echoes with the sound of sirens. And yet diplomacy, even now, takes a back seat to firepower. That’s why ‘The Fate of Abraham’ is more than a book. It’s a lens – and one that more Western policymakers should be forced to look through.
Because if we keep ignoring the roots of these fires, we’ll keep mistaking smoke for progress.
The writer is an expert on climate change and sustainable development and the founder of the Clifton Urban Forest. He tweets/posts masoodlohar and can be reached at:
mlohargmail.com