Anti-Muslim rant sparks a literary spat

Hasan Suroor
The Hindu, October 17

Islamophobia in Britain is for real and the virus is spreading openly.

Like all prejudices, Islamophobia had been largely covert, so far — expressed through winks and nudges; and assertions dressed up as arguments about free speech and tolerance. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the July 7 London bombings, when anti-Muslim sentiment was at its height, nobody actually called for hangin’-and-floggin’ of Muslims. At least, there was a pretence of civility, especially in the more genteel circles such as writers and ac ademics.

But that era of civility appears to be fading. Islamophobic views (in the garb of criticising Islamist extremism) are becoming, increasingly, more common and in-your-face. And those who try to challenge them are likely to be dismissed as woolly “lefties” with no qualms about sleeping with the enemy.

Read this: “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 letting them travel. Deportation — 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.’”

High-profile novelist’s view

This is not the racist rant of a skinhead. But the considered view of high-profile British novelist Martin Amis. Joseph McCarthy would have been proud of him. For, like him, Mr. Amis is effectively advocating a political witch-hunt. McCarthy’s was against suspected Communists. His is against “people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.” The once-liberal Mr. Amis’ conversion to the neo-cons’ anti-terror agenda is no secret, but this is slightly over-the-top even by his own anti-Muslim standards.

The curious bit is (and it says something about the prevailing climate in Britain) that while Mr. Amis has been allowed to get away with it, the only man who took him on is under attack. For more than a year nobody cared to take note of Mr. Amis’ remarks made in an interview to The Times.

Then a few weeks ago, Terry Eagleton, one of Britain’s most respected left-wing academics, dared to question the idea of “hounding” an entire people in order to force them to get their “house in order.” In a new preface to his seminal 1991 work Ideology: An Introduction, Professor Eagleton, currently professor of cultural theory at Manchester University which Mr. Amis recently joined as professor of creative writing, likened his new colleague’s “obnoxious” views to the “ramblings of a British National Party thug.”

Later, writing in The Guardian, Professor Eagleton agreed that suicide bombers “must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent” but said there was “something stomach-churning” at the sight of Mr. Amis and his political allies “shrieking for illegal measures” against a whole sector of the population.

Media reaction

But this is not how much of the British media, including “liberal” academics, saw it. Instead, they attacked Professor Eagleton describing him as a crusty Marxist “lost” in a time warp. A columnist in The Independent called him a “great dinosaur of Marxism” who, apparently, didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. And Mr. Amis, instead of responding to Professor Eagleton’s criticism, let loose a string of vituperative abuses saying he was a “disgrace to his profession,” “slovenly,” a “combination of ill-will and laziness” and an “ideological relic, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx.”

Mr. Amis denies he is Islamophobic and claims that he made those remarks in the heat of the moment — out of a “retaliatory urge” in the aftermath of a foiled terror plot in the summer of 2006 which, if it had succeeded, would “have resulted in the deaths of another 3,000 random Westerners.”

“Anyway, the mood, the retaliatory urge soon evaporated and I went back to feeling that we must, of course, build all the bridges we can between ourselves and the Muslim majority, which we know to be moderate,” he wrote in an open letter to writer and broadcaster Yasmin Alibhai Brown after she came out in support of Professor Eagleton.

But those who have followed his post-9/11 trajectory and, especially, read an essay he wrote in The Observer in September 2006 — the same time as his Times interview — may be forgiven if they find all this a bit disingenuous. Building bridges with “moderate” Muslims? Really, Mr. Amis?

If anything, his consistent theme — also reflected in his Observer essay, The Age of Horrorism — has been that there is no such thing as a “moderate” Muslim and that moderate Islam doesn’t exist outside the “op-ed page.” Far from building “bridges” with Islam, he has in fact been arguing for a jackboot policy as a way of reining in Muslims — exactly what he said in his Times interview in a “retaliatory” mood.

The truth is that like all prejudices, Islamophobia is for real. Indeed, after days of stonewalling and self-righteous defence, Mr. Amis has finally admitted that he does “get little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then,” though he blamed them on his grandfather who, he said, was a “racist.”

“My grandfather was a racist. My father [novelist Kingsley Amis] was a bit dodgy. I think I’m pretty free of racism, but I get little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then,” he said at Cheltenham Festival.

The trouble is that he is not the only one to get these “little impulses.” The virus is spreading, and openly.