Martin Amis’ Islam - I
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
‘The Second Plane’ is a collection of previously published pieces (12 politically provocative pieces and two short stories) by Amis who is mainly a novelist, not a political analyst. These pieces written after the 9/11 attacks, cover Islamic extremist fundamentalism behind this horrible violence and the Western response to it, Iraq war, problems with Iran, with some of his reviews on related books and films (‘The Looming Tower to United 93’ by Paul Greengrass). In, for instance, ‘Terror and Boredom’, core-part of the title, he presents a no-holds-barred, gloves-off analysis of Islamic radicalism/extremism/fundamentalism. There are two short stories – one on “The Last Days of Muhammed Atta,” and the other “In the Palace of the End,” about a Middle Eastern tyrant. In 'The Voice of the Lonely Crowd', he describes how his own ‘literary imagination’ as well as other others was “one of the first casualties” after 9/11. Last week, The New York Times reviewed the book and included a glimpse of controversy on it in England.
The controversy goes back to August 2006 (a few weeks after an alleged terrorist plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airlines was squelched by the British), when, in an interview Martin Amis gave to Ginny Dougary of The Times of London, he made the following comment which was published on-line: "There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation, further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."
That comment by a novelist such as Amis (who was to later make a strange confession: “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is.” More on that later.) would normally have remained mired only in the literary world and ignored by the rest. It was cited in The London Review of Books in January 2007, and then picked up by Terry Eagleton, a Professor at University of Manchester (where Amis had started teaching) in Introduction to a revision of his 1991 book "Ideology: An Introduction." On these comments by Amis, Eagleton, a Marxist academic, wrote: These "barbaric" comments were "not the ramblings of a British National Party thug, but the reflections of the novelist Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world." By this, he accused that Amis was advocating for "the calculated harassment of a whole population" as a way of "humiliating and insulting certain kinds of men and women at random, so that they will return home and teach their children to be nice to the White Man." When Tim Adams of The Observer asked Eagleton if Amis’ comments should be taken seriously, he replied: “I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners.” Obviously, that was enough for Amis to characterize his fellow faculty member as a "a marooned ideologue."
The British press, never a polite observer, began pounding Amis, accusing him of “lazy thinking and Muslim bashing.” Last November, The Guardian published with a highly critical "Martin Amis and the New Racism,” by the novelist-screen writer, Ronan Bennett, who, tearing up Amis’ argument, said: "Amis's views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness," adding that Amis "got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time."
Yasmin AliBhai-Brown, a columnist for The Independent, has once been a supporter but later acknowledged that Amis’ position was a "threat to the kind of society I stand up for. He is with the beasts pounding the back door, the Muslim-baiters and haters."
Stung by being characterized as “racist,” Amis has been trying to explaining his views, putting them in the context he claimed to have had in mind, and saying things like “I really am not racist, and I just don't feel it…. You have to look at the timing of the thing. The third jihadist conspiracy in 13 months [to blow up a series of jumbo jets over the Atlantic] had just been exposed. My children were taking transatlantic flights all that summer.” He was not denying he felt that way, for a moment – but told a reporter, it was just a "thought experiment", and it wasn't "racist", just "retaliatory". He also said he assumes “that 95 per cent at least of Muslims are longing to get their house in order, and hate this extremism.”
In the process, however, he has managed to expose how conflicted his thought process has been, stung by the ‘racist’ criticism -- from trying to apologize for the choice of words to rationalizing his original comments and making some more controversial comments. (To be continued)
