Reading Martin Amis' v. fine, chilling monograph Koba the Dread this week, I ran across a note that diagnoses the humorlessness of radical Islam as exactly as I've seen. Amis is writing on Stalin, and his weapons in the Great Terror:
He had darkness: the Bolshevik sequestration, the shockingly bitter and unappeasable self-exclusion from the planet, with its fear of comparison, its fear of ridicule, its fear of truth.**The word for this is agonism: the permanent struggle of the self-appointed martyr. Militant Islam is obviously and proclaimedly agonistic.
It is impossible to to live as a religious zealot when everyone around you is laughing at your absurdities and lies. You can be a fundamentalist scholar, maybe; an ascetic, probably; a mystic, definitely. But not a zealot, and not a violent proselytizer of any ideological stripe. Which is why all the people laughing have got to die.
Chris Hitchens comments much to this effect in a recent Slate column on the Danish cartoon flap. His secularist screed is mildly exhausting, but it fuels a much-needed dedication to free speech. The right to offend must be sacrosanct.
Posted by mesh at February 9, 2006 03:18 PM | TrackBack