Ronan Bennett on Martin Amis’s threatening remarks about Muslims | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
Ronan Bennett takes apart the attacks made by Martin Amis on the Muslim community, including that in the Ginny Dougary interview which were the subject of his dispute with Terry Eagleton. Among the issues discussed is the similarity of Amis’s remarks about Muslims outbreeding people of other religions and of none with earlier expressions of bigotry, the fallacy of the facile claims that Islamophobia is not racist, the attempt by Amis to excuse his prejudices by admitting “little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then”, apparently signalling to his audience that he might share them, and the reason why Muslims express anger and distress at undiscriminating (if disguised) attacks on us and our religion.
I find Amis’s “adumbrations” remark interesting, because it seems to be an attempt to impress the public with his literary prowess by using long words on them. I’ve always thought myself a well-read type and people at school used to suggest that I had a “doctorate in English” when I was 13, but I’ve never heard this term - Merriam-Webster (you have to pay to search the OED) defines “adumbrate” as “to foreshadow vaguely” or “to suggest, disclose, or outline partially”, so there you go.
Anyway, other expressions of bigotry would not be excused with these explanations. If someone had been mugged by a black man in the street and thereafter delivered a tirade about how f***ing n***ers are ruining the whole place and that the police should come down on them like a tonne of bricks until they stop robbing people, most people would rebuke him for it and some would dismiss him as a racist who showed what he really thought about Black people as soon as he was under pressure, regardless of how many Black friends he had. There is not much difference between this and Amis’s remarks on Muslims and it’s disturbing that the British intelligentisia did not see this.
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- Rod Liddle and the Independent
Don’t feel too bad; no matter there are many vital islamic terms you know and Martin Amis doesn’t.
The interesting thing about this spat is the fact that the two ideology-admirers- Messrs Eagleton and Bennett- completely disregard the difference between islam and f***ing n***erism: that islam is an ideology that claims its followers are the best of mankind and that teaches that they ought to establish a society based on that ideology which ought to rule the world and that will allow very limited toleration for followers of a few other ideologies as long as they accept- with humiliation- their inferior status. Followers of other ideologies will be given the choice of conversion or death. A bit like marxism, in fact, which may explain Eagleton and Bennett’s enthusiasm. In this glorious state all the edicts of islam will be imposed, including such facets as killing people who abandon that ideology and people whose sexual tastes or habits islam disapproves of. Reading Bennett and Eagleton, you’d think that the only difference between muslims and everyone else was a taste for circumcision and dressing up in funny clothes, whereas Amis takes islam serioously enough to think that muslims know what islam is and means and follow it sincerely and that they actually want and work to just such a society.