Amis casts Islam as a medieval stage the West must forcibly drag forward
Evidence
In The Second Plane, an uncompromising tone with a threatening edge intrudes more than once across the essays, assuming a necessitarian, one-size-fits-all view of history wherein Islam must be forced to tread the same path as the modern enlightened West. Islam must be required to leave its “convulsed,” “medieval” stage and evolve as the West did after the wars of religion. But Amis fears that this won’t happen voluntarily: “We would have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation and then await an Enlightenment. And we are not going to do that,” he states firmly in the first essay (9). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 95
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: This is the teleological civilizational-stage model that contesting novels reject; connects to the reader’s need for a vocabulary distinguishing reinforcement from contestation.
Related
- Denying any need to understand terrorists collapses the crucial separation of Islamists from Muslims (similarity 0.85)
- Amis frames the novel as rational and individualist against religion’s monological irrationality (similarity 0.81)
- Islamophobia in Amis and McEwan is rooted in aesthetics as much as politics. (similarity 0.78)