For a man who rose through the notoriously tribal arena of Iraqi politics, Ali Allawi seems strangely unafraid of striking out on his own.
The minister for defence and finance in the post-invasion government, Allawi rose to fame in the west with The Occupation of Iraq, a scathing attack on American mismanagement and his cabinet colleagues. Now retired from politics, Allawi's latest provocative j'accuse is directed at the Islamic world. 'Muslims have failed our own civilisation,' he says.
In his new book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, Allawi argues that the Islamic world is suffering a deficit of influence, wealth and, fundamentally, spirituality.
Before the arrival of modernity in the Muslim world, Allawi argues, a global Islamic civilisation was held together by cultures, institutions, economies and governments that 'were basically indigenous and reflected Muslim spiritual experiences'. But in the face of colonialism, modernity and globalisation, Allawi says 'all this collapsed' and Islam 'capitulated to a manifestly stronger and materially superior western civilisation'.
In the process, the central place of Islam in society has been subsumed by secular western ideologies and systems of economics, law and culture; its role 'reduced to all but its religious and political expressions'.
This fact, Allawi argues, does much to explain not only the obvious decline in Islam's scientific, economic and political fortunes in the past 300 years but a crisis of confidence that lingers in the Muslim consciousness to this day.