McEwan and Islam

Here’s the Dead Island’s version of a conservative, the atheist novelist Ian McEwan, who, defending Martin Amis against the charge of racism for harsh statements he made about Muslims, tells the Telegraph, “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on.”

Leaving aside McEwan’s self-referential, contemporary way of stating his position in terms of personal feelings (“I despise,” “I detest”) instead of in terms of fact, truth, and principle, the question arises, if Muslims were to remove the second class status of women, remove the strictures against homosexuality, remove their belief in a deity, and remove the terrorism, would McEwan have any problem left with the kind of society Islam would create? In other words, if he were living not in the modern liberal West, but in the non-liberal, Christian West of past centuries, would he have any problem with the prospect of Islam taking over Europe?

Let us grant that McEwan is at least being a consistent liberal (and there are far too few of those), meaning that he recognizes that Islam is a threat to liberalism. However, he thinks that American Christianity is equally a threat to liberalism, though not, he adds, a threat to life and limb, since “those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.” (Note again his reduction of the issue of civilizational survival to the merely personal, “my city.”) Further, he only recognizes that “Islamism,” not Islam itself, is a threat. So he really doesn’t get it at all, does he?

Finally, besides stating that he personally “despises” Islamism, because it’s a threat to “his” city, what does he want Britain—you know, HIS country—to DO about it?

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Erich writes:

You are quite right in picking up on the mealy-mouthed suffixation “Islamist” in McEwan. We can glean more about what this entails from an article his friend Martin Amis wrote in The Observer (part of the online version of the UK paper The Guardian):

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad—a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, ‘with a Koran in one hand’, as Bagehot imagined him, ‘and a sword in the other’. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

From this statement (and from other things in the article) we can see that Martin Amis makes the elementary—and all too common—mistake of thinking that the problem and pathology we see in Islam is only recent and is not in fact rooted in mainstream Islamic culture, tradition, history and religious texts. Being only a recent phenomenon, it is easy to diagnose the problem as an “-ism” that has little to do with Islam, and the diagnosis (and cure) then logically moves to extraneous factors like geopolitics and economics, with the inexorable result of somehow, some way pinning most of the blame on the West.

LA replies:

This is perfect. Amis gets in trouble, as a “racist,” for saying Muslim extremists must be treated harshly. Meanwhile he completely, extravagantly, unconditionally embraces the religion of Islam and its founder!

Such is the “racist right” in the Dead Island.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 26, 2008 12:39 PM | Send