Martin Amis’s “adumbrations” deconstructed

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.