A Poisonous Argument

From the Telegraph - Ian McEwan insists that criticising Islam is not racist:

The Booker Prize winner said those who claimed judging Muslims was "de facto" racism were playing a "poisonous argument".

McEwan, 61, the best-selling author of novels including Amsterdam, Atonement and Saturday, thought many in the left wrongly took this position because they had an anti-Americanism shared with Islamists.

In an interview with today's Telegraph Magazine, McEwan said: "Chunks of left-of-centre opinion have tried to close down the debate by saying that if you were to criticise Islam as a thought system you are a de facto racist. That is a poisonous argument.

"They do it on the basis that they see an ally in their particular forms of anti-Americanism," he said.

"So these radical Muslims are the shock-troops for the armchair Left who don't want to examine too closely the rest of the package – the homophobia, the misogyny and so on."  

Unfortunately the Telegraph then go on to misrepresent an earlier argument:

McEwan first entered the fray in 2007 to defend his friend Martin Amis against charges of racism.

Amis had been accused of Islamophobia after writing an essay criticising the "extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture"; arguing that Islam had "proved responsive" to the influence of Hitler and Stalin; and labelling Islamism a "cult of death".

The essay itself attracted little attention, but in a subsequent interview Amis made the incendiary comment: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order."

Muslims would have to undergo "discriminatory stuff" like stopping them from travelling, he said.

Well, yes and no. That remark, "The Muslim community wiil have to suffer", delivered just after another airline bomb plot was uncovered, was prefaced with "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, The Muslim community wiil have to suffer..." So, he was suggesting that he felt an urge - not a praiseworthy urge by any means, but an urge nonetheless - to impose suffering on Muslims till they clean up their act. A fairly - no, a very - stupid remark to make in an interview; but then Amis has a habit of throwing off odd ideas which people then take a great deal too seriously, like his latest contribution on euthanasia booths on street corners. He's a novelist, not a politician.

No doubt Terry Eagleton will see this latest comment of McEwan's as directed at him. And he may not be wrong.

Comments

[Noga]

Eagleton's justification of nostalgia is telling. It's as if he has reached the limit of his ability to appeal to the intellect and finds that in order to persuade he has to draw on reserves that have to do with the subjective sentiments rather than rationality or common sense. It's a frightening slide, one might say, into a proto-fascist state of mind: romantic sentiment to a bygone time when things were somehow simpler, more pristine, nobler, or whatever. In order to justify relying on nostalgia one has to re-write the past to a certain extent.

[Mick H]

I think you're right. He's someone whose thinking formed in the Seventies, and he's been stuck there ever since.

[John C]

Could someone tell me why anyone takes Eagleton seriously or why he has achieved such a prominent position in the UK commentariat? He's always come over as Reg from the People's Front of Judaea (or was it the Judaean People's Front? - Monty Python really nailed the essence of far left 70s politics in that film). From what I've read of him, he's a pretty cruddy literary critic, judging authors by how closely they conform to his own political views. In his books on "culture" he tries to dazzle the reader by bombarding them with a bunch of references to the most fashionable thinkers and writers of European civilisation (or at least those readily available in English paperback translation), throwing in some cheap jokes and avoiding anything like hard empirical evidence or concrete examples. You could have fun playing a drinking game based on how many logical fallacies he commits per page and how many times he uses the word "bourgeois" but that's about it.

Isn't/wasn't Eagleton some sort of Trotskyite? If so he's spent a lifetime indulging in nostalgia for something that never was, romanticising a dictatorial thug who, to judge by what he actually did and wrote during the years when he had a share in power, would have rivalled Stalin for brutality had he become leader of the USSR. I couldn't find any mention of Trotsky's Communism and Terrorism in Tel's book Holy Terror. Funny that.

[Dom]

"Money" is the novel that makes me rank Amis as a favorite novelist, but then he wrote this too to Alibhai Brown when the controversy with Eagleton started: "...how I longed, Yasmin, for your soothing hand on my brow!" Bleh!