Martin Amis.
The Observer runs a brilliant and lengthy essay by Martin Amis on Islamic extremism, or”Islamism.” Here are a few pearls:
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.
And:
The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to ‘a tolerable level’ (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ‘ism’. It is independence of mind–that’s all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.
On Bush and Rumsfeld, and the wrong turn in the Iraq War:
The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (’Mission Accomplished’)–every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge. … Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. ‘Stuff happens,’ he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad–the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power.
And:
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.
