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September 10, 2006
Martin Amis: Notes
Martin Amis has written an essay (23 typed pages roughly) for the Guardian on Islamism. It is worth reading as an example of the intellectual contortions that are taking place as writers and artists—in the space of five years— develop a response to the fifty year radicalization of Islam
The essay, as expected, is a mess. It reads as if he started and stopped and started again and was forced to meet deadlines that prevented him from scrapping at least a third of the material. It is a study in indirectness that wraps popular analysis of Islam (notably Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong”) with a personal narrative regarding a novella that he wrote almost to completion before abandoning. The novella is there to provide context for the small, personal Islam of a jihadi while the writings of Mr. Lewis and others are there to provide the ‘bigger picture.’ Mr. Amis adds his own material to a third part that winnows its way through the text, having no point but making sharp observations on sex, Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns,” and the war in Iraq until the end, when he presents solutions that negate—implicitly if not explicitly- many of his former points.
His points:
- Islamism has won over moderate Islam
- Islamism has an unhealthy obsession with sex and women’s roles and this has screwed the social form of the religion
- The west had no idea that Islam was in a state of convulsion until six years ago
- The west cannot— institutionally— understand suicide bombing because of its mixed elements of social training and approbation from birth, sense of personal religious submission fostered by Islam, and potential (as happens with suicide in the west) for emotional conflagration among teenagers who are wrestling with love, sexuality, and socialization
- Admiration and the search for understanding was an understandable first reaction to suicide bombing on the part of western intellectuals, first because the western mind automatically equated the extremity of the action with the presumably extreme conditions placed on a ‘people’ by colonial and neo colonial powers. I’d like to add a second point here: suicide bombing, from a distance, fit too comfortably into a modern western aesthetic most visible in the arts, where contemporary artists had spent years searching for brutal and extreme (within the confines of their safe, mutually respectful environments) ways of giving voice to visceral emotion.
- Our pragmatic attitude toward religion, our sense of multiculturalism, makes us weak and unable to respond to the driving sense of purpose that imbues those who are really practicing religion
- George W. Bush and Tony Blair made a woeful mistake in approaching this threat with a ‘bring it on’ attitude— as if they were really stepping directly into a ring and dragging America and Britain along with them
- We can win against Islam by championing women’s rights and by investing money in international programs that promote the rights of women
- We can win against Islam by fighting tooth and nail against all religion
Nine points then. This essay covers a great deal of ground. Points number one to six reflect common attitudes on the right in the United States, point seven reflects a middle of the road set of concerns while omitting the conspiracy theories of the left, and points eight and nine swing leftward. The idea that you can fund ingrained cultural behavior out of existence— as he wants to do with prevailing Islamic attitudes toward women— reflects a popular strain of academic thought. The idea that we should mount a war on all religion because it is all violent and dangerous can also be characterized as a trope of the left.
The arc makes me feel bad for George Bush. It is easy to see how his attempt to force along an intellectual process that will require ten years to sort out instead of six months will only inflame academics who have been trained since birth never to make a non-utopian bet that involves other people’s lives. In addition, he is dealing with a tendency to mask vague emotion with talking points that make no sense. In this essay, Amis states that Islamists are totally irrational by western standards. At the same time, GW has made the problem worse by using language that is—as the academics see it—inflammatory. Thirdly, we should solve this problem not by engaging in wars but by somehow going into each and every Islamist household and affecting radical change at the single most contentious pivot point between the lock on the front door and the last wall behind the master bed.
To summarize, the focus goes from major 'big picture' social problems to academic problems of sematics and language (evidence: the overwhelming focus on GW's language gaffes) and then to the interpersonal, where academics feel most comfortable and where finely wrought language practices have allowed us to feel secure with each other.
Make no mistake, even marginal progress in equality was one of the great outcomes in Afghanistan. At the same time, the idea that this can take place without at least the threat of real violence on the part of the West is a bit ridiculous. GW is right in his observation that the soccer field executions and the stoning and the beating and lynching of women who are often underage and often the victims of rape happens in the context of state and local law. He is further right that the first step in addressing this should require us to change the political structures that enable or enforce these laws. That said, even GW is not willing to suggest that we attempt to change institutionalized conservative Islam either by storming the houses and placing everyone in retraining camps or by setting up small assertiveness training schools in each town. In the same vein, even GW is not couching his solution as an attack on all religion.
Martin Amis clearly needs to try his hand at a solution again. His opening observations are a great start but his mid range notes and conclusions are weak and nonsensical. While I doubt that many at the Whitehouse read the Guardian (you can only read so much hate mail in one day), GW should take some assurance from this. I suspect that many outside the fever swamps of the left and right have less of a chip on their shoulder than he might think. Instead, he is seeing friction between two timelines: the timeline of those who are seeking means to kill us in batches and the longer timeline of those who are attempting to develop a solution that is not in conflict with longstanding academic values of open inquiry and personal freedom.
Some quotes from the article:
On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse… we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million.
Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. …Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.
This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete',… And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago…Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'
It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.
In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'
I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms.
'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".
Other sources for commentary on this essay (from Technorati):
Jeff Jarvis
Michelle Malkin
Pointless Pontificatin | By jb | 06:15 PM