Terror and loathing

Martin Amis may not know much about Islam and 9/11, but he knows what he hates.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Terrorism, Laura Miller, Christopher Hitchens, Afghanistan, Islam, Reviews, Muslim, Martin Amis, Book reviews, September 11th , Iraq War

April 2, 2008 | Here is how Martin Amis, in the long essay "Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind," at the center of his new collection of writings on Sept. 11, describes Donald Rumsfeld's demeanor on television during the early days of the Iraq invasion: "He looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad -- the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarized by power." And here is how Amis experienced Tony Blair's visit to the Bush White House: "The whole place fizzes with zero tolerance, with the prideful tension and frigidity of high protocol. Its peculiarly American flavor is evident in the sustained choreography and the dread of the spontaneous. This does remind you of something: a film set."

In Amis' work, lines like these are the franchise. They're the reason you buy a ticket and get on the ride. Amis himself admits as much; discussing his fiction in an interview with the Paris Review, he dismissed "story, plot, characterization, psychological insight and form" as merely "secondary interests" compared to a novelist's prose, little more than the apparatus on which to hang some bitchin' sentences. So it hardly seems an insult to say that his specialty is not substance, but style.

Nevertheless, Amis has never been content with the boundaries of his own aptitudes. Earlier in his career, when seeking subject matter with which to demonstrate his seriousness, he often settled on the topic of nuclear weapons. Lately, for obvious reasons, he has switched to Islamist terrorism. Clearly, his taste in issues runs toward the apocalyptic.

The pieces collected in "The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom" ruminate on a few aspects of the current conflict between East and West, but Amis' main interest is Islamism, the militant ideology that motivated the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and, in 2005, the London transit system, among other targets. His pronouncements on Islamism have gotten him into trouble in his native England, when he chummily confided, in an interview with the Times of London, that he sometimes feels the urge to impose various civil harassments on "the Muslim community" -- strip searches, deportation, "discriminatory stuff" -- until they "get their house in order" by "getting tough with their children."

It was a stupid remark -- beyond the manifest stereotyping, why should Muslim parents be any more effective in "getting tough" with their young adult children than Western ones? -- as Amis himself soon conceded. Still, he was excoriated in the press by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton and various other leftist commentators. He's been called a racist and an Islamophobe, to which he's retorted that he is instead an "Islamismophobe," hating and fearing only the politically militant manifestation of the religion. Fair enough, and as Amis has pointed out, the left ought to be sensitive to the distinction, since Islamism itself is an ideology that is "racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist and genocidal."

In the last essay in this collection Amis tells of an appearance he made on the BBC's "interactive discussion show" "Question Time," in which he argued that instead of galumphing into the debacle of the Iraq war, "the West should have spent the last five years in the construction of a democratic and pluralistic model in Afghanistan." His point was reasonable, if naively unrealistic. (The world's great powers have never been interested enough in Afghanistan -- whose only geopolitical significance is its location -- to invest that much time, attention and money in it.) A young woman in the audience stood up, speaking "in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness, saying that it was the Americans who had armed the Islamists in Afghanistan, and that therefore the U.S., in its response to Sept. 11, 'should be dropping bombs on themselves!'"

Perhaps there's a little comfort in knowing that the geopolitical conversation broadcast on British television is nearly as idiotic as that in the U.S., albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum. It might also explain why Amis feels that his own contributions to the discussion, an assortment of articles, Op-Eds and stories previously published in various newspapers and magazines, merit publication as a book. If "They ought to be bombing themselves" passes for a trenchant critique of American foreign policy in the U.K., then the essays and fiction in "The Second Plane" probably do seem brilliant by comparison.

In truth, though, there's not much insight or thoughtfulness in this book, which makes it a pretty fair example of the myopic Western attitudes that helped create the problem it describes. There's lots of fulmination, though, fulmination of the very highest order. Islamism is "an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse." Sayyid Qutb, one of the ideology's founding theorists, writes with "a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonized by a vast entanglement of bitternesses." The possibility of Qutb's target audience recognizing this is slim because "no doubt the impulse toward rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male."

You might have noticed a little slippage there in the targeting of Amis' invective. I am sure that even Terry Eagleton -- no slouch in the hysterical denunciation department himself -- would refuse to defend the Taliban. The argument raised by Amis' more reasonable critics, the fact he can't seem to hold onto despite his talk of "Islamismophobia," is that Islamism and Islam are not one and the same.Islamism is a fringe movement in the Muslim world, one that holds little real appeal for the vast majority of shopkeepers and small-businessmen who make up the stable political classes of Arab and Muslim nations. Depending on how disgusted any of them might be with the West at a given moment, they might claim to approve of, say, the suicide bombing that blew a hole in the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. But you can also find plenty of Americans who, with a few beers in them, will announce that we ought to "nuke the whole Middle East." That doesn't mean the U.S. is in serious danger of adopting such a course. Even the young woman who stood up to denounce Amis on "Question Time" doesn't really want to see the U.S. bomb itself.

It's true that the world that Islamist terrorists say they want to create -- the restoration of "the Caliphate" under a system of sharia law and the eventual (willing or forced) conversion of the entire planet to fundamentalist Islam -- is a ghastly one, "a world with no games, no arts, and no women, where the sole entertainment is the public execution," as Amis intones. But this vision is even less viable than a pipe dream. The threat these terrorists pose is not that they'll succeed -- as Gilles Kepel has pointed out, close study of the recent political history of the Middle East reveals that Islamists have never been able to command substantive and lasting support outside of Iran, and even there it gets wobbly. The danger is that in their failure they will lash out at their enemies with ever more lethal ingenuity.

Next page: How do Islamic terrorists resemble characters from an Amis novel?