if you cannot hold a fish

A fishing story from an unlikely source. In 2001 the journalist Jon Ronson published a book with the title Them: Adventures With Extremists. The first chapter describes a period spent in the company of Omar Bakri Mohammed, the fundamentalist Islamist who was very much in the news in the late 1990s, operating out of the Finsbury Park Mosque and calling for jihad within the boundaries of the UK. 'I very much wanted to meet Omar Bakri,' says Ronson, 'and spend time with him while he attempted to overthrow democracy and transform Britain into an Islamic nation'.

As is Ronson's style, much of the piece is taken up with the incongruities between Omar Bakri's everyday life and the ideas he promoted. We see him watching the Lion King with his baby daughter. ('They call me the Lion,' he says.) We see him campaigning outside Holborn tube station. ('Be careful from homosexuality! It is not good for your tummy!') We see Ronson driving him to the cash and carry to pick up some novelty collection boxes for use in raising money for Hamas. Throughout all this, Ronson does what he is so good at and takes the reader through a comic deflation of the popular view of the notable figure before reviving the sense of unease right in the midst of the ordinariness he has described.

About two thirds of the way through the chapter Ronson tracks Omar Bakri down to a country house in the midlands where he and 'all of Britain's Islamic fundamentalist leaders' are attending 'a secret weekend social get-together' with the aim of healing some rifts within the movement. There is a fishpond there: 'It was a lovely rustic sight. A cluster of Islamic militants was gathered around fishing rods. For bait they were using sweet corn.' Omar Bakri is delighted to learn that his rival, the leader of Hizb-ut-Tahrir has not caught any fish and is triumphant when he pulls one out of the water. But once he has the fish, he doesn't know what to do with it:

'Pass me the green knife,' said a man to Omar's right, 'Quick! The green knife!'
In a panic, Omar reached for a tin opener.
'Not the tin opener! The knife! Hold the fish, Omar Bakri. Just hold the fish.'
'No,' said Omar, quietly, 'I cannot hold the fish.'
There was a silence.
'Hold the fish!'
'No. I cannot hold the fish. What do I do with a fish?'
'Oh, give it to me!'
'OK,' said Omar. 'You hold the fish.'
The other leaders glanced despairingly at Omar. And then one of them sighed, reached for the fish, and said, 'How do you expect to fight the Jihad, Omar Bakri, if you cannot hold a fish?'

Strangely enough, it's the kind of question that came up in Plutarch's life of Antony - how can you rule Rome if you have to employ divers to put fish on your hooks? Cleopatra's interpretation is that fishing and politics are not related - the one is simply a break from the other. But fishing can alternatively be seen as the microcosm in which the entire character is laid bare. And the incident is important for Ronson's story because of the uneasy quality of the comic moment. Omar Bakri, he says, didn't return his calls for some days afterwards.