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From "Wogs" to "Islamists" - Martin Amis Does a Coulter
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Tim Murphy - activ-l
CounterPunch - Nv 27, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/bennett11272007.html
From "Wogs" to "Islamists" - Martin Amis Does a Coulter
By Ronan Bennett
What do you make of the following statement: "Asians are gaining on us
demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025
they'll be a third. Italy's down to 1.1 child per woman. We're just
going to be outnumbered." While we're at it, what do you think of this,
incidentally from the same speaker: "The Black community will have to
suffer until it gets its house in order." Or this, the same speaker
again: "I just don't hear from moderate Judaism, do you?" And (yes,
same speaker): "Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff,
until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough
with their children."
The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified,
with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism
for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only
amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at
Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently
quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book Ideology: An
Introduction. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than
the "hounding and humiliation" of Muslims so "they would return home
and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law".
The heated exchanges that followed were trivialized in the mainstream
media as "a nasty literary punch-up", "the talk of the literary world",
"a spat" between "two warring professors", and the silence that
followed seemed to confirm it as a passing tiff between two
high-ranking members of the chattering class.
I see it differently. Amis's views are symptomatic of a much wider and
deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness. Only last week,
the London Evening Standard felt able to sponsor a debate entitled: Is
Islam good for London? Do another substitution here and imagine the
reaction had Judaism been the subject. As Rabbi Pete Tobias noted on
Comment is Free, the so-called debate was sinisterly reminiscent of the
paper's campaign a century ago to alert its readers to the "problem of
the alien", namely the eastern European Jews fleeing persecution who
had found refuge in the capital. In this context, Rod Liddle's
contribution to the proceedings - "Islamophobia? Count me in" - sounds
neither brave, brash nor provocatively outrageous, merely racist. Those
who claim that Islamophobia can't be racist, because Islam is a
religion not a race, are fooling themselves: religion is not only about
faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are
overwhelmingly non-white. Islamophobia is racist, and so is
antisemitism.
And it is different for another reason. The views quoted by Eagleton
first appeared last year, in an interview Amis gave to Ginny Dougary of
the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says
a great deal about the depoliticized state of intellectual debate in
Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent
discussing the latest translation of War and Peace or the artwork in
the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable
exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as
critical as expressing sup****t for an increasingly demonized minority
in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers
for his views. He was not.
This is all the more remarkable when you look closely at what Amis has
been saying about Muslims and Islam. To the Dougary interview first.
Eagleton drew particular attention to a passage that argued for
collective punishment: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until
it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them
travel. De****tation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms.
Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or
from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole
community and they start getting tough with their children."
Amis sought to excuse the passage quoted above by pointing out that it
was prefaced by the words "There's a definite urge - don't you have it?
- - to say, 'The Muslim community ... (etc)'." And he repeatedly
highlighted the fact that the comments were spoken, not written, as
Eagleton wrongly claimed (which, in some degree, allowed Amis to dodge
the central charge of Islamophobia). In a letter to the Independent
columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, he explained, "It was a thought
experiment, or a mood experiment." He had not "advocated" anti-Muslim
measures, "merely adumbrated" them.
If, for some, the distinction was not quite clear, Amis expanded his
defense in a live interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. He
maintained that the target of his attack was Islamism, "an extreme
ideology within a religion". He was not, he stressed, attacking Islam
itself or Muslims in general, though he ran into some difficulty when
Snow reminded him of his observation on the alleged "extreme
incuriosity of Islamic culture", and of his reaction on seeing his
six-year-old daughter's toys being searched by air****t security: "Oh
yeah, and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle
East" (itself further proof, if such were needed, of the racist nature
of Islamophobia). Taken along with his assertion that "there are great
problems in Islam", did not these statements, Snow proposed, indicate
that he was taking "scattergun" aim at all Muslims? Amis retorted: "I
do not believe in any persecution of the Muslim community. I think that
would be counterproductive."
At which point, the question becomes unavoidable: is efficacy now to be
the benchmark for persecutors? He also confessed to "little impulses,
urges and atavisms now and then", which was uncomfortably like a
collusive wink to the audience: we all have our little prejudices,
don't we? Though he was forced to squirm a little, Amis refused to
recant or apologize. His demeanor throughout was the ostentatious
weariness of the unfairly traduced, and he called for an end to the
whole dull business. "Can I ask him [Eagleton], in a collegial spirit,
to shut up about it?" he wrote in a letter to this newspaper.
Do we let the homophobe off the hook just because he tells his critics
to shut up? Do we pass over the rantings of the antisemite just because
he did not commit the poison to the page? To judge from the response of
most liberal commentators, the defence seemed to work, and Amis's wish
to have a line drawn under the affair was granted. While Eagleton was
attacked as a clapped-out marxist, Amis was commended, by a writer in
the Observer, for "owning up - bravely, as it turned out - to what
amounted to a revenge fantasy". His "thought experiment" was the
incautious but challenging musing of one of the most vivid and verbally
energetic modern writers in English. In the Guardian, one writer
concluded that although he was often irritating, Amis had raised
im****tant questions, while among the rhetorical questions asked by
Professor John Sutherland was whether Eagleton's - Eagleton's -
position at Manchester University was tenable after labelling a
colleague a bigot and a racist.
We can dispense with Amis's polite fiction that he is talking about
"Islamism"; there are just too many generalisations ("The impulse
towards rational inquiry," Amis wrote elsewhere, "is by now very weak
in the rank and file of the Muslim male"), too many references to
"them" and "us". When he says, for example, "they" are gaining on "us"
demographically, he is demonstrably not talking about "Islamists". The
danger of being overrun, outnumbered, outbred is a repugnant trope
beloved of supremacists everywhere (it was used by the Evening Standard
about "aliens" 100 years ago). It is, for example, horribly familiar to
Arab Israelis, and to Irish Catholics (from whom Eagleton is
descended). When Amis voices his fears of being overrun, he is, and he
knows he is, perpetuating and enhancing the spectre of the other, and
loading it with the potent imagery of swarming poverty, violence and
ignorance.
At the Cheltenham literary festival, Amis treated his audience to a
discussion on the relative value of Muslim and western states, the
former being, in his estimation, less evolved than the latter. "I am
just saying that some societies are more evolved than others," he said.
(Evolved is an interesting choice of word. In the Belgian Congo, the
colonisers used to employ a system of rewarding colonized people who
alienated themselves from indigenous society: they were raised to an
officially designated category of ivoluis.) "There is no inoffensive
way to put this," Amis continued provocatively. "By evolved, I mean
more civilized. We have more respect for civil society."
This is not the time or place to debate the proposition or the
definitions Amis employs, though I would say, in a general response to
the generalized argument, that I have seen, at times, rather more
respect for civil society, from how they treat their families and the
elderly to strangers in the street, in Damascus, Ramallah and east
Jerusalem than I have seen, at times, in London, New York and Paris.
Equally, when he says, "Here in the west we have the most evolved
society in the world and we are not blowing people up", it is hard not
to think of the ghosts of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of
thousands, of Muslim dead from Iraq to Afghanistan who might take issue
with him. No, here the salient point is that Amis, contrary to his
assertions, is talking about Islam, not Islamism, Muslims, not
Islamists.
It is one thing - and the right thing - to challenge at every turn
antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, incitement to violence and hatred
where it exists among Muslims, just as we should where it exists in the
police, the church, the political parties, newspapers or anywhere else.
But British Muslims I have spoken to now talk about feeling "deluged"
by hostile comment. Hardly a day goes past when they are not lectured
and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism.
Muslims who argue for Muslim schools are criticized by journalists who
send their children to Christian or Jewish faith schools. Muslim women
who choose to wear the niqab are upbraided by powerful politicians who
claim to feel "intimidated". Those who point to the illegality of
Israeli occupation are antisemites. Those who protest against the war
in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists. Muslims are
under siege. Worried that if they speak out they will be accused of
being quasi-Islamist, many have given up trying to engage in the debate
over what Amis calls "the problems of Islam" (our old friend the
"problem of the alien" again).
This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every
official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have
increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a
minority - although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to
death than they were ten years ago - but what the majority experience
in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded
rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright
expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of
control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention
without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the
Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the
infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation - including 28
days' detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA
were active - of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims.
Muslims bridle at the broad strokes by which they are depicted. Every
time a writer or politician or policeman begins a sentence by saying
"Muslims must ..", there is little recognition of the sheer variety of
belief within Islam, or of the cultural diversity among Muslims, or of
the everyday pragmatic reality of what it means in a secular age to
believe in God and to try to live by that belief. In this respect
Muslims are like anyone else. Some are devout, some are not at all,
some are not very much, and some are devout sometimes. Some are
sinners; they fall down and try to get up again. Some are hypocrites
who fall down and pretend to be still on their feet. Many fail to live
up to their religion's, and their own, high expectations of themselves.
Many have *** outside marriage, as many Catholics do. Some Muslims
drink alcohol, as some Jews eat ****k. A few, in common with a few
Christians, think gay people should be murdered. Observant Muslims
contest, dispute, accept and reject points of doctrine exactly as those
from other faiths do. The Qur'an, as one Muslim put it to me, is not a
program to be loaded and Muslims are not computers.
But almost worse than the ignoramus is the self-styled expert. After the
attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers, Tony Blair liked to be seen
carrying his copy of the Qur'an, as though this were evidence of a deep
understanding. (Not that his Qur'an was much help when he was writing to
Pakistan's General Musharraf, at least according to Peter Stothard,
observing him at work in Downing Street: "'Dear Pervez ...' says the
prime minister, as his pen glides along the top of a letter. 'I'm never
quite sure what name to use with Muslims,' he says, looking up at his
staff and down dubiously at his handiwork so far." His staff suggested
"General".) I can remember a presenter on the Today programme begin her
challenge to a Muslim activist with the words, "But the Qur'an
says ..." To which her interviewee retorted impatiently, "I'm sick of
you people telling me what's Islamic or not. This is my religion and
you don't know anything about it."
Reading Amis's letter to Alibhai-Brown hardly gives the impression that
the author is an authority. Recalling that they once spent a convivial
evening together, he said, "That night you revealed ... that you were
****a and, as far as I understand it, the ****a minority speaks for the
more dreamy and poetic face of Islam." Is he perhaps confusing ****as
with Sufis? The letter itself was a staggering exercise in
condescension, its recipient praised as one of the good Muslims in the
same way the Belgians kindly patted their ivoluis on the head. In a
separate interview about his fictional reimagining of Mohammed Atta,
who piloted the hijacked plane into the first of the twin towers, Amis
acknowledged that he took "an enormous liberty in that I made him an
apostate, rather than a religious maniac". He said, "It would have
bored me blind to look into the mind of someone who was fanatically
religious. I make him a cynic who is there just for the killing, and I
wanted to emphasize that, that's it's a secret no longer well-kept,
that killing people is tremendously empowering and exciting."
As a novelist, Amis is free to do whatever he wants with his
characters, but the hijackers' steps on the road to 9/11 repay
investigation. Reducing the motivation of the enemy to bloodlust leads
nowhere, as the experience of the British in Ireland proved. The result
will be wrong and it will be cliche. It may be, given Amis's powers,
flamboyant, but that will only make it flamboyant cliche. Horrorism.
Death cult. Thanatoid. Striking words but poor substitutes for
understanding, reason and real knowledge. Go back to the start of this
article. Look at the substitutions and then ask yourself what you are
reading. An im****tant question from a leading literary figure? A brave
revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing
prejudice against Muslims.
Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the
Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis's
strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where
are the others? Four days after the Pentagon and the twin towers were
attacked, the novelist Ian McEwan wrote in The Guardian: "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." As an expression of outraged, anguished humanism, McEwan's
formulation was truthful, moving and humbling, and can hardly be
bettered. But it seems to me the compassion is flowing in one
direction, the anger in another. I can't help feeling that Amis's
remarks, his defense of them, and the reaction to them were a test.
They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative
sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and
beliefs run along different lines.
And I can't help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He
got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public
figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for
saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.
[Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of The Hamburg Cell, a film about
the 9/11 hijackers. His is latest novel is Zugzwang. This piece ran
in The Guardian on November 19. ]
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