Miles Kington: Bin Laden? He's elementary, dear Watson

'If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Britain does not keep him in order'

I have just been reading a rather exciting novel about Islamic fundamentalism by one of our best-known crime writers.

In the book, a group of British and American tourists are going up the Nile on a cruise when, while ashore for a day of sight-seeing, they are captured by a group of armed Muslims. Unfortunately, a couple of tourists are killed during the operation, and the Islamic fundamentalists seem undecided about what to do with the rest of their prisoners – whether just to kill them or to keep them for ransom. Or – an interesting third option – whether to spare them if they agree to convert to Islam. And that's where the story really begins...

A tale for our times, don't you think? What's more, the leader of the group, although in the book called Ali Wad Ibrahim, sounds unnervingly like Osama bin Laden.

"He was a taller man than the others, with a black beard which came down over his chest and a pair of hard, cold eyes, which gleamed like glass from under his thick, black brow."

Yes, it's all wonderfully topical. Which is rather odd when you consider that the book was written before Osama bin Laden was born. In fact, before any of us were born. It was written in 1898, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and it is titled The Tragedy of The Korosko.

I would never have come across this obscure, out-of-print and long-forgotten work by the great man if I had not once so fallen in love with his Sherlock Holmes stories that I determined to read everything else he had written and so finally stumbled across this neglected yarn. It was written after Doyle had gone on a Nile cruise not so very long after Gordon's death at Khartoum, and he wondered, as writers are wont to do, as to what would happen if a group of tourists got caught up in a raid by a party of fanatical desert tribesmen. He then, as writers are wont to do, turned it into a book, a book that has all sorts of unnerving echoes for our time.

He harps, for one thing, on the intolerant side of Islam. The lone Frenchman in the group of tourists tells Ali Wad Ibrahim (the gang leader) via the interpreter that he is not British and has no quarrel with the Muslims.

"The chief asks what religion you call your own," says the interpreter.

"Tell him that in France we look upon all religions as good."

"The chief says that none but a blaspheming dog and the son of a dog would say that all religions are one as good as the other. He says that if you are indeed a friend of the Khalifa, you will accept the Koran and become a believer on the spot..."

No compromise there, then. But some things were a little different back in 1898. America was not yet the policeman of the world, as the American tourist Headingly points out. In those days it was us.

"Well, certainly, to us Americans, who live all in our own land, it does seem strange how you European nations are forever slopping over into some country which was not meant for you... What do you get out of it? "

"There are a good many Englishmen who are asking themselves that question," remarks a young Englishman in the party. "It's my opinion that we have been the policeman of the world long enough. We policed the seas for pirates and slaves. Now we we police the land for dervishes and brigands and every sort of danger to cilivisation. There is never a mad priest or a witch doctor or a firebrand of any sort on this planet, who does not report his appearance by sniping the nearest British officer. One tires of it at last.

"If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order, If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a Jehad in the Soudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks and why should we do it? Let Europe do its own dirty work."

Substitute "America" for "Great Britain", and it's a speech that many an American could utter almost unchanged today. Yes, every time that trouble flares up along the West/Islam faultline, I think I should raise a few million dollars and turn "The Tragedy of The Korosko" into a timely and relevant blockbuster, but I never seem to get round to it. If anyone else wants to, they have my blessing. In return for a small slice of the gross.