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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3024729.ece
The Independent (UK)
October 4, 2007

Eagleton stirs up the campus with attack on 'racist'
Amis and son

By Ciar Byrne, Arts and Media Correspondent

If Martin Amis, who has just taken up a teaching post
at the University of Manchester, should happen to bump
into the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton on
campus, it could be an uncomfortable meeting.

In the new introduction to the 2007 edition of his
classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Eagleton
launches an impassioned attack on the views of "Amis
and his ilk" who argue that the West needs to clamp
down on Islam.

Eagleton also attacks Amis's father Kingsley as "a
racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating
reviler of women, gays and liberals". He adds that he
believes that "Amis fils has clearly learnt more from
him than how to turn a shapely phrase".

The spur for Eagleton's criticism is Amis's assertion
that, as the Islamic population swells, "the Muslim
community will have to suffer until it gets its house
in order". On 10 September 2006, the day before the
fifth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade
Centre in New York, Amis published a controversial
essay entitled "The Age of Horrorism", in which he
argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between
Islam and Islamism.

Amis has suggested "strip-searching people who look
like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan",
preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down
the road, deportation. "Not the ramblings of a British
National Party thug," writes Eagleton, "but the
reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the
English metropolitan literary world."

He adds that 16 years ago when Ideology was first
published, Amis would have recognised "the folly and
ignorance of believing that authoritarianism and
injustice can secure the defence of liberty". The
reason for Amis's change of heart, he believes, was the
"so-called War Against Terror". "It is this which has
inspired a cluster of liberals and leftists in his
circle ... to defend Western freedom by actively
undermining it."

Instead of pitting two sets of values against one
another - Westernism and Islam - Eagleton argues that
the "fundamental material critique" which he has
pioneered throughout his career was more relevant than
ever.

Eagleton has been professor of cultural theory at
Manchester University since 2001. Born in Salford in
1943, a third-generation Irish immigrant, into a Roman
Catholic family, he was educated at a grammar school
run by the De La Salle brotherhood, before attending
Trinity College, Cambridge.

He remained a Catholic until 1970, when his religion
was replaced by Marxism. He began his academic career
as a Victorianist and taught for many years at Oxford
University, becoming one of the pre-eminent literary
theorists of the age, writing critiques of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson and the Brontës among
others. He has more recently become interested in
comparative literature as well as the culture of
Ireland. He lives in Dublin with his second wife and
their son. Ideology was first published by Verso in
1991.

Amis, the author of The Rachel Papers, Money and London
Fields, whose next novel, The Pregnant Widow, has an
Islamic theme, last month took up the post as professor
of creative writing at Manchester. Applications for the
master of arts course which he is teaching were boosted
from 100 to 150 by the news of his arrival. He is
teaching two subjects - the novella and the works of
Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, two of his favourite
authors.

When his appointment was announced, Amis gave an
insight into what he would be teaching students. "If
all this does turn out to have a theme, it'll be,
'Don't go with the crowd, don't do anything for the
crowd, don't be of the crowd or with the crowd," he
said.

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