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September 26, 2006

In his recent essay The age of horrorism, Martin Amis explains how and why Islam-ism (and not Islam per se, which he respects) has become the scourge that it has, taking man back to his primitive beginnings, in which the supernatural takes precedence over reality, ultimately denying man all his possibilities. I have personally not read a more revealing essay on this sickness of our age—more specifically the infant years of the 21st century. It is a tour de force in every sense of that clichéd phrase. I offer here two closing passages, in which Amis quotes the poet, Philip Larkin and Joseph Conrad. (My comments follow these selections)—JD

from The age of horrorism

(The Observer, Sept 10, 2006)

by Martin Amis

All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer's response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat's cradle of glands. I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew then that the phrase 'deeply religious' was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn't deep just because it's all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion - illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.

In Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' (1977), the poet, on waking, contemplates 'unresting death, a whole day nearer now':

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die...

Much earlier, in 'Church Going' (1954), examining his habit of visiting country churches and the feelings they arouse in him (chiefly bafflement and boredom), he was able to frame a more expansive response:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

This is beautifully arrived at. It contains everything that can be decently and rationally said.

... continued ...

... continued ...

We allow that, in the case of religion, or the belief in supernatural beings, the past weighs in, not at 2,000 years, but at approximately five million. Even so, the time has come for a measure of impatience in our dealings with those who would take an innocent personal pronoun, which was just minding its own business, and exalt it with a capital letter. Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too. We should be with Joseph Conrad:

"The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

"Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness."

('Author's Note' to The Shadow-Line, 1920.)

My comments:

And yet one has to also look at the other side, which aims to explain the reason for 'jihadi' terrorism in the first place, leaving aside the obscurantism in Islamic countries that prevents the social awakening and progress Amis talks about. He further points out that Islam is in a time warp, unlike the culture of, say, China, which reformed itself. M.D. Nalapat, an astute Indian analyst, looks into the causes of terrorism by Muslims. He links it to the Wahhabi sect (mujahideen) that was primed to launch attacks on the Russians in Afghanistan during the Cold War; clearly a creation of the West: primarily the U.S. and Britain. They created and nurtured these fanatics as they were easy prey for Western designs on the region. Nalapat emphasizes that it wasn't Islam or Muslims per se who gave rise to this Al Qaeda brand of terrorism, but Western powers who used it to fight their battles. My guess is that Amis would find it hard to refute the West's role in creating the monster that jihadi terrorism has become. Don't blame Islam, Nalapat says, whatever its shortcomings may be in terms of faith over reason, and force over freedom. Islam didn't write this prescription for the death of innocents by suicidal mass murder; after all, the very idea of suicide bombing was first put into practice by the militant Hindu organization, LTTE in Sri Lanka! Amis thinks that Islam-ism makes a virtue of obscurantism, the spread of the faith and intolerance to the point of using terror as a means of revenge and persuasion. But Nalapat would argue that terror tactics, nurtured by the West in their pursuit of hegemony, are being used by these Muslim extremists only to drive out foreign occupiers of their land: infidels, as they call them; not a means sanctioned by Islam, but one adopted by fanatics hellbent on spreading terror far and wide. The question to ask is this: How tolerant are pious and moderate Muslims, even as their co-religionists become victims? Is terror--especially mass murder by suicide--as a tactic infecting otherwise innocent and peace-loving Muslims as well? The current civil strife in Iraq seems to confirm this fact. Why else would suicide attacks be identified by many as a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon? And here again, the majority of Muslims are likely to point fingers at the British and American governments, the original instigators, as though the Wahhabi/Al Qaeda virus they planted has multiplied beyond control due to their continuing presence on Arab soil. This evil has two faces, and both share the burden of ending it.

Jayant Deshpande

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