Denying any need to understand terrorists collapses the crucial separation of Islamists from Muslims

Evidence

These interests shape The Second Plane from its eponymous first essay onward. In the “Author’s Note,” Amis insists he is not an Islamophobe but rather an “Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.” Nonetheless, in his dismissal of any attempt to understand terrorists as fatuous “moral equivalence” (ix), it might be that he asks us to give up at the door, so to speak, the only chance we have both of understanding the causes of terror and of effectively distinguishing between Islamists and other Muslims. So it proves in a volume that seldom observes categorical niceties. 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. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 95

Categorization

• XREF: This is exactly the contesting-vs-reinforcing hinge: Amis’s ‘Islamismophobe’ posture fails to distinguish Islamist from Muslim, which is the core distinction to test against Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels.
• DEFINE: ‘Islamismophobe’ — Amis’s coinage distinguishing fear of Islamism from fear of Islam — is a defining move Morey dissects and finds unsustainable.