In Bangladesh this week, a million Muslims prayed for “victory” in Bosnia. The latest edition of its weekly Al-Ahd carries a remarkably restrained and largely objective accountof the battle for Grozny – perhaps because the Hizbollah’s Iranian paymasters have just signed a $800m deal with the Russians for the completion of their war-damaged nuclear facilities on the Gulf. Nabil Khoury, a columnist in the Lebanese daily An-Naher, caught this disturbing spirit of popular reaction when he wrote last week of the example that the Chechen people were setting with their courage; “they” did not believe, he said, that wars could be won by being interviewed on CNN. Onlydays earlier, Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, the most eloquent of the Hizbollah clerics in Lebanon, condemned the “atrocities” being committed against the Muslims in Grozny.It would be easy to exaggerate the effects of the Chechen and Bosnian wars.

Officially, the Hizbollah’s response to the Chechen conflict has been muted. “You won’t even acknowledge that Chechnya is a war against `us’,” he said.Perhaps the pain that Arabs increasingly feel at the way in which the Middle East “peace process” is being meekly accepted by their governments lies behind the feelings of humiliation being expressed in the region. “You people never learn, do you?” a Lebanese Shia Muslim told me angrily after I returned from Bosnia at Christmas. He was once a guerrilla fighter in southern Lebanon, so he took a professional interest in the battle for Bosnia and Chechnya.

In Russia, and even in the West, Chechnya is an illegal breakaway state threatening the cohesion of Yeltsin’s regime; in the Middle East, the Chechens are seen as a Muslim people fighting for survival – with the same power to attract Arab sympathy as the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan once had.
The Islamic side of the Chechen struggle – a Muslim community fighting soldiers of the Christian Orthodox faith, just as Muslims are fighting Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia – has gone largely unrecognised, as if the religion of most of the Chechens is a coincidence, as if their repeated claims to have God on their side are merely the by-product of some rural upbringing. But pick up a newspaper in Beirut or Cairo and the photographs are of Chechen men wearing Islamic headbands with “God is great” inked on to them in Arabic, of scarved women, of old Muslim men praying, of wooden grave posts with a crescent moon on them. In the West, our perception of the Chechen conflict has been focused on the dangers to the Russian Federation, the internal struggle in Moscow, the his- tory of the quaint “warrior people” who humbled the Tsar in the last century and have been doing the same to the troops of the old Red Army. The Russian battle for Chechnya is creeping into the editorials, even into the sermons and Friday prayers, just as Afghanistan did almost a decade and a half ago, just as Bosnia did two years ago Only the perspectives are a little different out here. You don’t have to guess which story dominates the front pages of the Arab press these days, nor which pictures grip television viewers across the Middle East. Without it, Wisley’s projected new scientific centre will be a showcase without any jewels.

With it, though, the magnificent Lindley runs the risk of becoming a library without any readers.. They may even wonder why the society dismisses it as “too expensive” before there are any costings to be compared with the Wisley option.It is clear that Wisley needs the Lindley Library rather more than the library needs Wisley. Option, possibility, hobby-horse – it depends on your point of view. Since Dr Brent Elliott is the society’s own distinguished librarian, membersof the society may feel his hobby-horse might at least be accorded the status of a possibility. Now fate has delivered up a building in the shape of the former police station in Rochester Row, close by the RHS headquarters. It is the right shape for a library, a generous ground floor with not too many storeys above needing expensive reinforcement.

It will be on the market as soon as the police have found new stables.Sir Simon Hornby, the new president of the RHS, dismisses the Rochester Row option as “Brent’s hobby-horse”. As it happens, this has been quite a lively area over the past couple of years in terms of properties coming on to the market. But then, none of the costs quoted in the Harvey report appear in the report that the society has made available to its members.That leaves the third option – another site in London, close to Vincent Square. And the costs of staffing and servicing a reading room do not appear in the balance sheet for the Wisley option. The Wisley option begins to look like a rather costly way of storing books that most people will prefer to have brought to them in London.