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During this reading group on Islamophobia, we focused on three pieces: ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ by Martin Amis (2002), ‘The Protestant Aesthetic and Islamophobia’ by Jo Carruthers (2011), and ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular Criticism’ by Talal Assad (2013).
Peter Morey began the reading group with some contextualisation of these three pieces, which have influenced his upcoming book Islamophobia and the Novel. As participants in a long heritage of theological, phenomenological, and historical analysis of Islam, each piece was intended to provide us with insight into the place of Islamophobia within the Western philosophical tradition, the cultural disposition of Englishness, and what this specifically means in a post-9/11 world. Peter proposed that Islamophobia has often been utilised as a way of screening out various political crises, whereby the freighted conception of Muslim people and Islamic practices emerge as the defining factor of what is politically salient, which simultaneously eliding the significance of events or circumstances that do not relate directly to terrorism, or indirectly to terrorism via ideas of immigration or multiculturalism. He linked Islamophobia to the novel’s limitations as a classically liberal medium, and particularly to the ways in which it can be received and celebrated by liberal Western consumers, especially those works by Muslim writers. He proposed that the liberal literary scene nearly always celebrates texts written by Muslims through an anthropological lens whereby what is positive in these books is usually the ways in which Western readers are informed about an outside exotic cultural experience that is distinct from our own Englishness. These readings propagate the externality of Islam from England in ways that are othering. These ideas are brought up in Carruther’s text, where she discusses Englishness in terms of simplicity, and as a sedimentation of a history of protestant aesthetics which emerged from their opposition to conflicting religions. Thus, she proposes that Islamophobia is not only a prejudice but is also an aesthetic sensibility.
Peter also briefly introduced our two other texts: Martin Amis’s article for The Guardian, in which he frames ideas of islamophobia in terms of an opposition between the rational and irrational, the modern and the anachronistic, as well as presenting a pragmatic vision for literature as an auspicious replacement for religion. The piece by Assad examines ideas of secularism and practises of critique, and looks at how our current concept of criticism that we assume to be our own objectively secular sets of practices and processes remain inflected by the religious language that we have inherited through a critical tradition dating back to ancient Greece. Peter introduced the idea of ‘postsecularism’ that, whilst bringing in possibilities of thought outside of religion, continues to interrogate the disenchantment thesis that underlies much cynicism of anti-religious rationality and reasoning.
After the introductory contextualisation and summaries, the group moved on to a discussion of the current climate of debate surrounding free speech at university, and the involvement of new atheism and its backlash against what its practitioners see as censorship of religious criticism. Amis is exemplary of the anti-PC pushback against radicalism, which fosters a rather reductive idea of ‘Islamism’ as an extreme attempt on Western lives towards which a phobic reaction seems only logical. Amis’s article, although less than favourably received by several readers, nonetheless brought out a discussion of some of the issues PC might pose, particularly the tensions within the left regarding the prevalence of identity politics and the potentially over-narrowness of its terms.
Other topics included the role of educational history, looking at Amis’s deferral to the importance of schooling, as well as the role that PC culture can have in lower education and his concerns with the indoctrination of children into ideology. This is one of his strands of reasoning that lie behind his vision of literature as a powerful tool for challenging inherited habitual assumptions, although it was suggested that his argument leaned too much on a descriptive and personally anecdotal line of reasoning. This was linked to the types of argument made by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy on account of the ways in which Islam and its cultural productions are held as oppositional to English arts and aesthetics and are tied to anxieties over the dissolution of an authentic English culture, and even the destruction of Western civilisation entirely. This led us into a discussion of the Leavisite canon that Amis brings up in his article, and how the language of critique Amis uses towards Leavis’s ideas is redolent of the religious heritage of critique that he attempts to eschew through his opposition to religion – to Islam, but also within his own biographical rejection of ‘chapel’.
Next, we looked further into Carruther’s criticism of Amis, focusing on her argument that he treats Muslim people as a text to be read – as ‘surface, not rational people’, as aesthetic practices that are ostentatiously opposed to English simplicity. Hence, the way we read texts in the West involves an investment in protestant tradition, especially in its conceptualisation of an external Islam not only for Islamophobic Westerners but also for the anthropological readers within the liberal sphere of multiculturalism. We found that this linked back to concerns raised earlier regarding critical reception of Muslim novelists, with Peter citing as an example the novel Minaret by Leila Aboulela, which received pushback from secular critics on account of how its narrative satisfaction does not emerge out of Western ideas of liberation or self-actualisation. Intellectual conditions within the West afford a foothold for anti-Islamic prejudices because of this secular bias that has become synonymous with the logical or scientific reasoning assumed to underpin modern and progressive civilisation. The readings suggested to some members of the group that the way in which we categorise writing is, therefore, defined by narrow secular terms, and that this is related to the anxiety over legitimisation – of the canon, of what makes ‘good’ or ‘useful’ writing – that troubles Amis and Leavis, amongst others.
Carruthers was criticised for an inadequate representation of Medieval people’s interpretations of Islam and their attitudes towards Islamic people, which in reality was far more nuanced and complex than she assumes. The piece was also criticised over her reading of the opening anecdote relating an Islamophobic joke told by a naval officer in a submarine. It was asked in the group whether her own reading of Islam and Englishness took part in the same othering process she criticises Amis for, and whether we in the West can ever escape the rendering of the other as a text to be read when they become an object of our academic study. Other issues related to her use of ‘aesthetic’ as a term to describe Islamophobia, with discussion focusing on whether this drew on ideas of surface and visual content, or if the term was drawing on the philosophical history of art and beauty.
When reflecting on the history of Islam in the United Kingdom, there were points made about how the narrative heritage of Persian literature has repeatedly failed to be acknowledged, and how this links in to a wider whitewashing of British culture. This was linked to arguments made by Assad, which claimed that the disenchantment model of much atheistic or secular criticism utilises a misreading of Islamic texts that emphasises an incompatibility with Western secularism.
We ended the reading group asking what might arise from a freedom to criticise? If, as Amis argues, literature is meant to impart rational critique so as to improve the world after 9/11, then literature and art become pragmatic tools, the value of which emerges out of whether they are able to make people useful. The closing questions asked what this idea means, both in terms of the pressures put on capitalist Western systems of education to produce utility, and how much this would link back to the rejection of ostentatiousness that seemingly underpins secular bias and anti-Islamic prejudice.
