Iam McEwan selects a number of books which have helped shape his novels. One of them, perhaps surprisingly, is Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium:
Always distrust utopian thinkers. People who believe they can deliver us to happiness for ever are bound to think, rationally enough, that the means will justify the ends. If it will bring the peaceable kingdom to pass, then break the eggs to make that everlasting omelette! And I think utopian radical Islamism or jihadism is a smaller and more scattered version of what so powerfully dominated the 20th century. The jihadi preference for instant rage, slaughter and martyrdom repels everyone, including nearly all Muslims. And the list of radical Islamist dislikes is too long, too much against the grain of human aspiration for their cause to have much appeal in the long run – sexuality, free thought, music, gays, evolutionary biology, unveiled independent women, pluralism, democracy, curiosity, fun, tolerance, fashion, humour…
I saw a demonstration along the Euston Road in London the other day – about a hundred chanting fellows in beards, with the women well to the rear, as you’d expect, head to toe in burqas, and many carrying banners demanding ‘Sharia law now’. The rush-hour traffic was edging round them; no one was paying much attention. They were a minor nuisance, like a failed traffic light. They didn’t look threatening so much as comically hopeless. How marvellous: no one was shouting or throwing stones at them, no one was much bothered. They were exercising their well-protected (I hope) right to demonstrate. A right they would surely never grant to others, if they had their way. They seemed not only puny but politically illiterate – some of their banners said ‘Hands off Gaddafi’. Well, he’s been a scourge to Islamists in his own country, so how on earth they thought he was someone they would want to support, I don’t know.
I wish I could be as sure as McEwan about "nearly all Muslims" being repelled by the jihadists. I suppose it's a necessary formulation now for a novelist entering these turbulent waters if you don't want to be accused by the likes of Terry Eagleton of being a BNP thug. But still, yes, that's surely right: in the long run radical Islam is "too much against the grain of human aspiration" to have any chance of success. It's the short term that's a worry, though.
This, from last month, may be the demonstration he's talking about (though it's Oxford Street, not Euston Road), with the women in black sacks marching separately behind. "Comically hopeless", yes. But slightly chilling, too.
Mick Hartley 
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