The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy saw the publishing of a range of articles in the British press reflecting on the progress (or the lack of it) to date of the war on terror.
Perhaps the most discussed in the blogosphere has been Martin Amis's 12,000 word essay the "age of horrorism" published last Sunday in The Observer.
Writers like Amis are envied for their ability to create fictional worlds with a cast of believable characters. These writers often delight in inhabiting their world and being able to see the same event from the differing perspectives of their various characters.
A couple of years ago in the New Statesman, John Pilger, berated those talented writers of prose who refuse to apply those same gifts to examine real-life events. Writers are well placed to strip away the many layers of deceit emanating from our politicians who trumpet the results of their military adventures overseas, all the while hiding from us their true motives and the terrible price paid in destroyed lives by those at the receiving end of our largesse.
Amis starts out reasonably enough in his essay by proclaiming that not all Muslims are his target. Like all other men, they are his brothers, he says. It is only those who deny rights to his sisters that he does not regard as his brothers.
You can't really argue with that. It is a sensible and compassionate stance. A problem arises very quickly, however, when Amis strangely fails to follow through the logic of his position.
Are those who, say, engage in deception to engineer regime change overseas (the US in Iraq 2003 and in Iran 1953), also to be regarded as his brothers? Amis is oddly silent here. What impact might such actions have on the perceptions and attitudes among ordinary Muslims across the world towards us? In an essay purportedly looking at the roots of the hatred we are witnessing today, Amis's apparent blind spot is puzzling.
A lengthy segment of his essay is devoted to trying to deconstruct and ridicule the influential Egyptian writer and thinker, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb's later impact on the spread of extremist ideas cannot be overstated and his designation of what he viewed as insufficiently devout Muslim governments as being "jahili" (pre-Islamic) rightly attracted much criticism from mainstream Islamic scholars who recognised the danger of following that line of thinking which called for rebellion rather than reform. Sure enough, some later groups, claiming to be inspired by Qutb, would go on to declare the peaceful citizens who lived under those very same "jahili' governments to be in a state of jahiliyyah too and therefore a legitimate target for their attacks.
Amis chooses to focus extensively on the bewilderment and revulsion that Qutb reportedly experienced during a visit to the United States in 1949 at the comparatively relaxed sexual attitudes among American women. We are left to conclude that Qutb's anti-Americanism was intimately linked to his alleged sexual insecurity. Astonishingly, a mere solitary sentence is allocated to the impact on Qutb of the event referred to this day by the Arabs as "the Catastrophe" - the creation of the state of Israel the previous year in 1948 and the accompanying displacement of the Palestinians.
As well as neglecting the impact of the Iraq war and delivering a tendentious account of Qutb's radicalisation, Amis also indulges in a display of casual prejudice:
No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.
No doubt.
