Anti-Muslim feeling in Amis and McEwan is rooted in aesthetics as much as politics

Evidence

One of its earliest post-9/11 formulations comes in Martin Amis’s volume of essays The Second Plane, where he describes followers of militant Islam as “misologists” (haters of reason) and religious minds as irretrievably “dependent.” If, as Asad concludes, Islamophobia is rooted in paranoia, denoting “a range of affective states, including horror, loathing and nausea,” and if paranoia is a condition particularly associated with modernist aesthetics, we can perhaps see the anti-Muslim paranoia that sometimes appears to surface, directly or indirectly, in Amis and McEwan as rooted in aesthetics as much as in politics. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 94

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘misologist’ as haters of reason, and links paranoia in modernist aesthetics — terminology for diagnosing aesthetic-rooted Islamophobia in fiction.
• XREF: Directly useful for reading the literary technique of Amis/McEwan-style ‘literary Islamophobia’ versus the aesthetic choices in Hamid and Naqvi — the reader’s hinge.