Amis Again

Apologies for going on about Martin Amis' new book yet again, but here's another review by David Aaronovitch that's more sympathetic, more considered, and, as such, definitely worth reading: "Through Qutb and others Amis came to the realisation, chronicled in The Second Plane, that Islamism itself was a problem, since what it loathed about the West was, as Amis puts it, not our active seductiveness, but our passive attraction. 'We should understand,' he writes, 'that Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it.' Amis connects this existential envy to the political failure of Islam and attributes this in turn to the suppression of women in many Muslim countries."