Amis reduces Muhammad Atta to a sexually repressed killer while claiming terrorists are un-understandable

Evidence

The most notable of these works is his attempt to imagine “the last days of Muhammad Atta,” in which the terrorist ringleader is depicted as a constipated, sexually repressed nihilist with no special interest in either Islam or politics but is instead excited by “all the killing—all the putting to death” (122). The idea of an uptight renunciate driven to atrocity because he is not getting enough sex is somewhat limited both as social critique and as psychological profile; elsewhere in The Second Plane Amis cites “serious commentators” to the effect that “suicide mass-murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend” (67). However, if we take at face value his opening assertion that it is not worth trying to understand the terrorist mindset because it cannot be apprehended through reason, then Amis’s own spectacular failure to create a plausible terrorist could perhaps be read as a badge of honor—a sign of his own unflinching reason. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 98

Categorization

• QUESTION: Contrast to Hamid’s Changez, whose motives are rendered legible and familiar — is psychological plausibility itself what separates contesting from reinforcing fiction?
• SEED: The ‘sexually repressed terrorist’ trope — a survey of literary treatments of Atta as projection vs. character.