Malise Ruthven

Malise Walter Maitland Knox Hore-Ruthven (born 14 May 1942) is an Anglo-Irish academic and writer who has specialised in work on Islam and Muslims.

Born in Dublin in 1942, he earned an MA in English Literature at Cambridge University, before working as a scriptwriter with the BBC Arabic and World Service, and a consultant on Middle Eastern affairs.

Family and education

Malise Ruthven is the younger son of Patrick Hore-Ruthven and Pamela Margaret Fletcher. His elder brother is Grey Ruthven, 2nd Earl of Gowrie, formerly a minister in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Alexander Hore-Ruthven, 1st Earl of Gowrie, was his grandfather. He is the godson of the late Dame Freya Stark, whom his parents knew in Cairo in 1942. The Independent describes the family background of his brother Grey Ruthven as follows:

His father, a commando in the SAS, was killed in action during the Second World War. His mother worked in Intelligence with Freya Stark, so their two small sons - Gowrie and his younger brother, Malise - were left with their grandparents in Ireland.

He earned his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. Having pursued a career as a writer, journalist and teacher, he focuses his work on religion, 'fundamentalism', and especially the history and role of Islam.

University work

Ruthven has taught Islamic studies, cultural history and comparative religion at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Birkbeck College, University of London, UC-San Diego, Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA) and Colorado College (Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA)

He has been described by Madeleine Bunting for The Guardian as "one of today's most perceptive observers and historians of religion".

Views on Islam

Islamofascism

The term "Islamofascism" is defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary as "a term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century".

The earliest example of the term "Islamofascism," according to William Safire, occurs in an article penned by the Malise Ruthven writing in 1990. Ruthven used it to refer to the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. "Nevertheless there is what might be called a political problem affecting the Muslim world. In contrast to the heirs of some other non-Western traditions, including Hinduism, Shintoism and Buddhism, Islamic societies seem to have found it particularly hard to institutionalise divergences politically: authoritarian government, not to say Islamo-fascism, is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan." Ruthven states that he doubts that he himself coined the term, stating that the attribution to him is probably due to the fact that internet search engines don't go back beyond 1990. It is of course the case that then - as now - the internet was capable of searching for material published before 1990.

Publications

Books

• Torture: The Grand Conspiracy (1978). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Cairo (Time-Life, 1980)
• Islam in the World (1984, 1999, 2006). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Traveller Through Time: A Photographic Journey with Freya Stark (1986). London: Viking.
• The Divine Supermarket: Travels in Search of the Soul of America (1989). London: Chatto.
• A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam (1990). London: Chatto.
• Freya Stark in the Levant: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine (1994) Reading: Garnet Publishing
• Freya Stark in Iraq and Kuwait (1994) Reading: Garnet Publishing
• Freya Stark in Persia (1994) Reading: Garnet Publishing
• Islam: A Very Short Introduction (1997, 2000). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fury for God: the Islamist Attack on America (2002). London: Granta.
• Fundamentalism: the Search for Meaning (2004). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Historical Atlas of the Islamic World (2004). (with Azim Nanji). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Articles

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220802542820