Respected literary figures publicly endorsed discriminatory state measures against Muslims

Evidence

“The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan.… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.” This is not a policy statement from one of those right-wing populist politicians who seem to have multiplied in recent years. These words come from the distinguished British novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in 2006 about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims. The unliterary lack of measured reflection in this comment is symptomatic of the heated debate about Islam and Muslims as it occurs today. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to both Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy — the Amis quote models the literary establishment’s hostility that those novels respond to.
• SEED: An essay angle: literary celebrity as amplifier of Islamophobic rhetoric — how Amis’s prestige lent cover to views normally reserved for far-right populists.