Adrian Hamilton: McEwan's attack on Islam reveals only his ignorance

It was no doubt a noble gesture on Ian McEwan's part last weekend to leap to the defence of his friend, Martin Amis, over the charges of racism against Muslims. And it was perhaps even bolder of McEwan to add his own total contempt for "Islamism".

The resort to the accusation of "racism" has become too facile a response to anyone coming out against Islamic beliefs. And a novelist no less than a taxi driver has every right to proclaim, as McEwan did (in pretty ferocious terms, mind you), that "I myself despise Islamism because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well."

We do indeed know it well, because we keep being told by those such as McEwan, Amis, Christopher Hitchens and the rest of the clash-of-civilisations literary brigade that it is so. Indeed, as a catalogue of the failings of Islamism, and by extension of all Islam, McEwan's enunciation of the despicable are pretty much the received wisdom of our time.

It is not that which I object to. What is objectionable is not the triteness of their views but the way that they present them as if they were somehow brave and outspoken, a courageous gesture against the norms of political correctness. In reality they are simply the mirror image of the views propagated by the worst of the mullahs, and playing directly into their hands.

There is nothing more that the "preachers of hate", as they are called, could wish for than for Western celebrities to come out with vituperative condemnation of their faith, in cartoons, on the screens, across the airwaves or in the press. It feeds their strongest assertion that Islam is under attack from a secular West that rejects every tenet not just of their belief but of their way of life. There are none who subscribe to the theory of the "clash of civilisations" as fully as the Wahhabi mullahs.

It is a question for theologians to debate how far Islam's views of homosexuality, the place of women, the punishment for adultery are the products of the revelation in the Koran itself and how far they stem from the sayings of the Hadith, subject to reinterpretation in the light of our understanding of their times and our own. It's the same issue with fundamental Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and most religions relying on texts written down second hand; an area of endless argument but not one the outsider is wise to enter.

But you don't have to go very far in the world to see that the suppression of women, the dire punishments for sexual misconduct and the orthodoxy of practice are very far from being exclusive to Islam. The practice of suttee in India and female circumcision in Africa were not invented by Mohamad. Nor do you have to go very far to find the direst threats against those who would disobey the cultural norms. Only on Monday a bishop at the meeting of conservative Anglican clerics in Jerusalem was arguing (with rather too much relish, I thought) that "the punishment for homosexuality in the Bible is death".

Nor do you have to go very far to understand that religion is, and has always been, a political weapon, a means of identification and discrimination that has very little to do with the spiritual quest of the believer. If Islam is so aggressive and so associated with particular anti-Western feeling, it is because of the politics of our day, not religion. And if, as is the case, the exercise of intolerance is intensifying in much of the Muslim world, it is equally because of the play of power in the region and the effect of Western policies on that power play.

Dig a little deeper and you will find that the greatest force for change in the Middle East does indeed come from women redefining their role. But it is not secularism that is driving them (far from it) but the desire for social reform, just as it is in the calls for modernisation in the developing regions.

The more that the West demands change from outside, the more it makes such issues as women's rights the litmus test of reform, the more difficult it makes the task of those pushing for change from within. The more it resorts to terms such as "Islamofacism" and "mediaevalism", the greater its ignorance of the pressures and the possibilities of societies in flux today. There are no generalities, just particulars, specific to place, person and moment.

You would have thought that the novelist of all artists would understand this. Apparently not. But at least McEwan, Amis and the rest are showing one thing: that the condemnation of that which you have no wish to understand is as much the prerogative of the secularists as it is of the religious.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

Interesting? Click here to explore further