Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Racist clown Martin Amis hits a new low in trying to diminish and dismiss the suffering of Palestinian people, but what is more concerning is the eager rush of many in UK to provide platform to bigots of his stripe. Here Pankaj Mishra looks at this new paranoid, abhorrent obsession. (Thanks Osama)

Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called “Britain’s biggest brains – politicians, editors, academics”. She told them that they were “actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself”. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive “to establish Sharia law”. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is “totalist”: “There is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.”

Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims. Within the past decade an Islamic movement has led Indonesia towards democracy, while market reforms in Turkey have created a new and religious middle class that now challenges the power of a secular elite.

Each one of the national realities Muslims inhabit is prodigiously complex and ceaselessly evolving, shaped as much by geopolitics – imperial conquest, the cold war, the war on terror – as by internal conflicts of class, religion and ethnicity. Closely examined, Muslim societies briskly dissolve our complacent, parochial notions about religion, democracy, secularism and capitalism. They expose, too, the notion of a monolithic Islam pressing down uniformly on all believers everywhere as a crude caricature.

It is true that, as John Banville wrote in the New York Review of Books recently, “the post-millennium world is baffling and dangerous and we are all eager for reassurance”. But what kind of reassurance do we derive from the denunciations of Islam that liberal-left commentators as well as tabloid headline writers routinely indulge in?

The most recent paranoid obsession with Muslims, which has a long history in Europe, dates back to 2001, when the violence once unleashed on places such as Afghanistan and Pakistan on behalf of the “free world” began to penetrate even the highly protected societies of the west. Almost every day newspaper columnists berate Islam, often couching their prejudice in the highly moral language of women’s rights: it is not due to oversight that Indian women murdered for failing to bring sufficient dowry – a staggering 6,787 in 2005 – occupy a fraction of the print acreage devoted to the tiny minority of veiled Muslim women. Rather than engage deeply with the imperial and postimperial histories of societies hardly ever discussed in the mainstream western media, many respectable writers and intellectuals seem to have decided that selectively reading the Qur’an, along with the conveniently pithy exegeses of Hirsi Ali and other neocon pugilists, is the easiest and quickest way to figure it all out.

Serenely, they offer their hastily assembled knowledge to the public, assured that no one will call their bluff. Luckily for them, many of their readers – people who are, after all, trying to get on with their own complicated lives – do not have the time or energy to master the nuances of unfamiliar religions and cultures, or to cut through gross stereotypes that acquire, in moments of crisis, a sinister persuasive power.

Martin Amis, who confided a revenge fantasy about Muslims to an interviewer from the Times, has been known to blurt out raw ideas and unexamined prejudices about communities even bigger than the umma. Blaming Vladimir Putin for Alexander Litvinenko’s murder on the BBC’s Question Time earlier this year, he claimed that the Russian state murdering dissidents in cold blood was being true to its “Asiatic” rather than its European side.

Last week in this newspaper Amis professed his attachment to the “beautiful idea” of a multiracial society. But before we could admire this lofty sentiment, Amis was off defending Mark Steyn (rightwing journalist and author of a book claiming Muslims are outbreeding Europeans) against self-righteous liberal relativists who apparently render “undiscussable” the urgent subject of “continental demographics”. Actually, population shifts are neither so arcane nor so menacing, as a recent Financial Times report on Muslims in Europe shows.

At least part of the trouble lies with Amis’s default mode of ironic exaggeration. This Nabokovian jauntiness co-exists uneasily with the world-historical seriousness Amis adopted from Saul Bellow that, when combined with a patchy knowledge of world history and some primordial anxiety about cultural otherness, results in some pretty incoherent political postures.

The question “Why take Martin Amis seriously?” has kept many dissenters uneasily passive. But Amis’s generalisations are amplified from one of the tallest soap boxes erected in the wake of 9/11, and he has a bigger audience than some of the other commentators in the British press who claim melodramatically to be apostate liberals. Whether Amis or any other individual is racist is barely relevant. We should be more concerned about this fact: that ideas regarded as intellectually null and morally abhorrent in any other context are not only accepted and condoned but also celebrated as bold truth-telling.

Declaring an ideological war on jihadists, Amis exhorts us to uphold “liberal democracy”. However, it remains unclear why holding up this tattered banner would deter them. Most people in liberal democracies do not have the vaguest idea about liberalism as an ideology. It doesn’t stop them, or indeed the rest of us who haven’t enjoyed the liberal-democratic privilege of electing Tony Blair and George Bush, from incarnating, in daily life, the liberal virtues of civility, fair-mindedness and tolerance.

The instant pundits on Islam make it seem as if the presence in our midst of people who want to kill or wound us is an unprecedented event in human history. The fervour of the ideologue manqué makes no room for the sober fact that almost every nation-state harbours a disaffected and volatile minority, whose size varies constantly in inverse relation to the alertness, tact and wisdom of the majority population.

MI5 tells us that there may be 2,000 jihadists in Britain today. This is a rise of 400 since November 2006, and it is likely the overall number was closer to 10 before the catastrophically foolish war on terror gave zealots and malcontents everywhere an energising cause.

Such is the innate resilience, decency and good sense of ordinary British people – exemplified this week by Gillian Gibbons after her brush with Sudan’s ministry of justice – that we can confidently look forward to the time when the number of jihadists falls to a more manageable number. This reduction would doubtless be achieved by responsible citizenship, and the steady work of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, rather than by shouting in the Times and the BBC that western civilisation is endangered by Asiatic hordes.

It is a depressing spectacle – talented writers nibbling on cliches picked to the bone by tabloid hacks. But, as Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, the “men of culture”, with their developed faculty of reasoning, tend to “give the hysterias of war and the imbecilities of national politics more plausible excuses than the average man is capable of inventing”. The “public conversation” about Islam proposed by Amis should not be avoided. Its terms have already been set low, and the bigger danger is that it will be dominated by an isolated and vain chattering class that, rattled by a changing world, seeks to reassure us by digging an unbridgeable trench around our minds and hearts.

· Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
kannauj@gmail.com