Mick Hartley

Well there you go. Martin Amis writes a piece in the Guardian about Iran, which pretty much echoes the standard line, that we may just be seeing the beginning of the end of the Khomeinist revolution. He's obviously done his homework, and while I wouldn't want to defend all of his arguments, it's not a bad piece – certainly not the worst I've read (try, for instance, Slavoj Žižek in the LRB, where the Slovenian sage makes the obvious connection, with, um, Silvio Berlusconi, via Kung Fu Panda). 

[M]ore troubling than the follies of a novelist turned pundit is that Amis's hyperbole represents the sad way in which the liberal intellectual tradition reacts to the challenge of a viable alternative to its secular humanist hegemony. In that vein, Amis's comments on Iran must be seen as part of a growing intellectual reaction that in the face of decades of rising Muslim political power seems capable only of producing stomach-churning multicultural apologists or Islamophobic ideologues.

Finding the real explanations to the events in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, where political-religious experiments unfold in dozens of contexts daily, requires first interrogating our own myths and superstitions. Reason, democracy, independent thinking, and human rights – timeless universals or complex socio-historical constructions? Only then one might proceed to understand the ways in which secularism and religion, reason and insanity, modernity and Islam have all been partners locked in step on the road to the present day. There is no mystery as to why secular fundamentalists like Amis look at Islamism through the lens of the Protestant reformation – the sight of a religiously-inspired alternative to secular materialism would make a mockery of the last few hundred years of European history….

That Amis shares the paranoid alarmism of Netanyahu and his foreign minister and is one of many suppliers of the discursive fodder needed for 21st century Euro-American imperialism is not the truly disturbing issue here. Nor is the fact that Amis has given us nothing more than false consciousness with which to understand the truly frightening world around us. More troublesome is that at this profound juncture in human history, one of liberalism's greatest sons can do no better than to respond in this fearful, superficial way.

It's depressing enough that the Guardian should publish these apologetics for Iran, replete with all the familiar glib student clichés about hegemony, interrogating our own myths, false consciousness, and Euro-American imperialism. What's worse are the comments. Need I say which side of this debate the overwhelming majority come down on? It's not so much that they like what Barzegar has to say; it's more that they just hate Martin Amis. Admittedly I've not read them all: there are limits to my endurance….