Martin Amis’ Islam - II
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
In a recent telephone conversation with the New York Times reporter, Rachel Donadio, Amis conceded that his original comments “were ill-considered… When I made this rather stupid suggestion, or talked about the urge to make the stupid suggestion to make Muslims put their house in order, I was at the peak of my anger [about the aborted plot to blow up airliners]. Everyone else's anger gets respected all over the place but not that of a normally very peaceful British novelist."
He insists he is not Islamophobic, but, ever a semanticist, "Islamismophobic" [opposed to militant Islam], and that "My slogan on that distinction is, `We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Mohamed Atta.'” Jihadism, he said, is "racist, homophobic, totalitarian, genocidal, inquisitorial and imperialistic. Surely there should be no difficulty in announcing one's hostility to that, but there is."
He admits to being furious when his little daughter and her fluffy duck were searched at the airport, and wanted to snap, he said to Johann Hari of the The Observer: "Stick to young men who look like they're from the Middle East," which seemed to be an effort on his part to favor and defend collective punishment. He says he is against racial profiling: "I'm not... I've never advocated it… Well, some people say it's ineffective, which is very counterintuitive, I would have thought.”
In a confessional, Amis lets Hari know his love for multiracialism this way: "At that time [in his early twenties, or in 1960s], I had a Pakistani girlfriend, I had an Iranian girlfriend, I had a South African girlfriend, all of whom were Muslim. It's interesting. The Iranian one – this is 1969 – was into mini skirts and discos because she was not an inhabitant of an Islamic republic but of a decadent monarchy 10 years before the revolution. The Pakistani girl was just beginning to kind of Westernize…. She couldn't go out with me in public. I could go to her house, and I could be left alone in her room, a big house in High Street Kensington, but we absolutely couldn't be seen in public."
According to William Dalrymple, Amis thinks that 9/11 was caused, at least partly, by mass Islamic sexual frustration: “It has been suggested . . . that suicide mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching too for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is in death no shortage of either.”
To the Observer reporter, he also admits to his admiration of Canadian former disc jockey, Mark Steyn (author of “America Alone” about a continent called Eurabia in the year 2020), and thinks he is "a great sayer of the unsayable". Martin agrees with Steyn that “Muslims are indeed reproducing at a faster rate than the rest of us, and they will eventually outbreed us and become a majority.” With 3% of Europe’s population being Muslim, he says: "They're also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. ... We're just going to be outnumbered.”
He believes in England, and admits "we've infantilized ourselves, stupefied ourselves, through a kind of sentimental multiculturalism," and called for open discussion "without self-righteous cries of racism. It's not about race, it's about ideology."
To Amis, 11 September 2001 was "a day of de-Enlightenment," the beginning of a global "moral crash", one that we still suffer from, but his critics remind him it is his suggestion of collective punishment of all Muslims that is the "moral crash."
Amis was not as sympathetic to the US on 9/11 originally, but has managed to since evolve. He had opposed the Iraq war and has been fairly critical of US as a super-power. Immediately after 9/11, he blamed American foreign policy for its role “in smelting jihadism,” and rubbing salt in, he adds, "It will be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly… How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5 per cent of the Iraqi population [through sanctions]?” and says that US population suffered from "a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away", and would have to go through "a revolution in consciousness [and] adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation." Now, however, he ridicules that view as "rationalist naivete." Now, to him, “jihadism is an irrational psychosis emerging in the void, an emanation of our most base instincts and nothing more. … It's pathological, it's always there – the subterranean world, where fantasies and violent urges, every now and again come to the surface disguised as ideas.”
Some of his detractors think “he is devolving into his father [Kingsley], the scowling, spitting misanthrope who somehow distilled the spirit of the 1950s into his novel Lucky Jim.”
Kingsley, who died in 1995, is often described as “a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals. Toward the end of his life, he was “ a militant defender of the Vietnam War and a harrumphing foe of feminism, and said of apartheid South Africa: You should shoot as many blacks as possible." Kingsley’s second wife and Amis’ step-mother, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, defended her former husband against such charges, and for her stepson, said, "What worries me is that I don't think he's quite interested enough in human nature."
Apart from Eagleton, Bennett, Pankaj Mishra, an Indian novelist and essayist, has also disemboweled Amis's strange essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
Amis has his supporters too, among them, the novelist, Ian McEwan, who also made an endearing comment, four days after the 9/11 attacks [“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality"], and Christopher Hutchins, the controversial columnist and author of the 2007 book, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”
His past novels have been about major disasters: concentration camps (‘Time's Arrow’), environmental destruction (‘London Fields’), nuclear weapons (‘Einstein's Monsters’) and the Gulags (‘House of Meetings’). Now, he comes to 9/11.
Martin Amis is an elegant writer, but not a ‘geopolitical expert’ by any means. Let’s see how his book with a strange history does in the US and its Muslim community.
