The novelist Martin Amis recently asked a British audience to raise their hands if they felt ‘morally superior to the Taliban’. When two-thirds of them failed to follow his cue, he chided them for succumbing to a ‘pious paralysis’. After all, the Taliban outlawed employment for Afghan women and locked them away in houses with darkened rooms; they executed adulterers in public and could not decide whether it was better to push suspected homosexuals off the top of tall buildings, or to bury them alive under collapsed walls. If you don’t feel morally superior to that, haven’t you abdicated any claims to morality whatsoever? ‘There are no Switzerland positions here,’ Amis continued, you stand against this barbarity, or silently condone it.
That sounds uncomfortably close to the idea that in the War on Terror you are either with America or the terrorists, but surely it isn’t close at all. The Taliban are part of a long history of oppressive religious movements – like the Spanish Inquisition – which have attacked fundamental human freedoms, they are not simply the immediate targets of a political idea like the war on terror. Confusing these contexts does cause a ‘pious paralysis’. Hesitating over Taliban morality is a bit like wondering whether burning heretics or drowning ‘witches’ mightn’t be such a bad idea. And it shows a false respect towards religious faith. Radical Islamism generally has as much in common with modern Islam as medieval Christianity has with the Second Vatican Council. Educated people in a developed country should be able to appreciate that distinction. If they cannot, political correctness has gone horribly wrong. Surely Amis is right to say so.
Unfortunately, several of his other observations on these matters have been much less circumspect. Last year, he told an interviewer, “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan
