Martin Amis: The Age of Horrorism
Nobody loves Martin Amis like Martin Amis does. And that's on display here.
But that's beside the point.
I'm not absolutely sure that sane people need to be reminded how evil Islamism is, but I suspect many do. Liberals, in particular, have an inclination to excuse error and evil, especially in those most different from us. That's a mistake that has some of its roots in something laudable...but it's still a mistake.
Amis wanders around a lot in this long piece. He gets stuff wrong. He lavishes attention on himself. But he gets a lot right, too. Far more right than wrong, and that's all any of us can hope for. I'm not sure what, if anything, here is new. But I've long believed that old truths often need to be repeated as much as new truths need to be discovered. Even things I know well drift into the background of my mind and life if I don't actively think about them.
So I link. The piece is long and it isn't perfect, but there's a lot that's right in it, I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it to you, even though with some reservations.
Nobody loves Martin Amis like Martin Amis does. And that's on display here.
But that's beside the point.
I'm not absolutely sure that sane people need to be reminded how evil Islamism is, but I suspect many do. Liberals, in particular, have an inclination to excuse error and evil, especially in those most different from us. That's a mistake that has some of its roots in something laudable...but it's still a mistake.
Amis wanders around a lot in this long piece. He gets stuff wrong. He lavishes attention on himself. But he gets a lot right, too. Far more right than wrong, and that's all any of us can hope for. I'm not sure what, if anything, here is new. But I've long believed that old truths often need to be repeated as much as new truths need to be discovered. Even things I know well drift into the background of my mind and life if I don't actively think about them.
So I link. The piece is long and it isn't perfect, but there's a lot that's right in it, I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it to you, even though with some reservations.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:41 PM
7 Comments:
"Islamism"? Surely you mean something like "Radical Islamism"..
Ok, I read more in the article - even though the author says "the rise of extreme Islamism" in his subtitle up top, he just uses "Islamism" later, so I guess you're not wrong to use that terminology, but it's sort of misleading to one who hasn't read the article.
So there's way more than needed to be said about a semantic issue.
Mystic,
I'm not sure that the 'radical' is a necessary qualifier here. I'm not a fan of any kind of totalitarian ideology, whether based on religion or otherwise. Islamism is totalitarian Islam, just as Reconstructionism is totalitarian Christianity (aka Christanism.)
Both involve shoving your beliefs down other peoples throats because it's 'good for them.' Neither is anything that needs to be encouraged.
-mac
Yeah, I was just missing the definition of "Islamism" and considering it to entail all of Islam. My bad.
I think mac's right, and that's the way the term is usually used. 'Radical Islamism,' like 'Radical Stalinism,' is pleonastic.
It may be a distinction without a difference (which is not a good thing). Amis writes:
"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."
Further, altho the theology of suicide bombing seems to be a creature of the past 50 years, I'm not sure that what Amis terms "Islamism" is solely a post-Qutb phenomenon.
Where the West left the Dark Ages with its embrace of reason, namely Plato and Aristotle (as well as their Islamic followers like Avicenna and Averroes), the Islamic world entered them (and left its own Golden Age) by rejecting them.
Al-Ghazali, with his "The Incoherence of the Philosophers," became the mainstream of Islamic thought in the 11th century.
The problem may be far deeper than colonialism and Qutb.
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