An international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourses.

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: Not so ‘Hot’?

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: Not so ‘Hot’?

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11th a week after the attack took place in a piece for The Guardian, in which he depicted ‘the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty’ as ‘galvanised with malice, and wholly alien’.

Since then, he has returned to the subject of 9/11 and his ‘Islamismophobia’ again and again, in reviews (of the film United 93 as well as books such as Ed Hussain’s The Islamist), essays, and in two short stories, ‘In the Palace of the End’ and ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’.

See, for example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/10/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety

Collected together as The Second Plane, published in hardback in January 2008, these writings will reappear in paperback early next year (and with them, no doubt, the framing figure of Amis).  

But how helpful (and how damaging) are his unfailingly controversial, undoubtedly inflammatory characterisations of the Muslims he calls ‘Islamists’ as 'the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes […] jeans, tracksuits and medic’s smocks of the Islamic radical; of ‘the rank and file of the Muslim male’ as ‘violent’ and ‘irrational’; and of Muslim women as either the utterly suppressed would-be schoolgirls of Afghanistan under the Taliban, or the complicit mothers of Palestinian suicide bombers, raising their sons to death?

Voices of dissent abound, see:

http://arabist.net/archives/2006/09/15/the-friday-rant-martin-amis/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488239&in_page_id=1770

At a time when personalities like Amis seem continually to be encouraged to offer their opinions on topics that range from radical Islam to why they are backing Barack Obama (a ‘slave-president’ capable of ‘reaching out to Iran’?!), it seems important to keep such (self-styled) commentators firmly in the frame.