The new anti-Islamist intelligentsia

Wednesday, 24th January 2007

The positions taken by Hitchens, Cohen and others in the press have, more recently, been reinforced by the bravery of other writers who have risked placing themselves outside literary London’s comfort zone by being brave enough to reject the moral relativism of so many on the left. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and, of course, Salman Rushdie have all argued, in different ways, that Islamism is a totalitarian ideology, like fascism and communism before it, which seeks to deny human freedom. McEwan has denounced the way in which the Left is ‘morally selective’ in its outrage, denouncing America with greater fervour than it can ever muster for criticising the record of Saddam or the Taleban. Amis has been typically fearless in attacking those ‘people of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, who have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist and genocidal’.

What marks all these writers out, apart from their courage and their literary stature, is their heritage as authors of the broad Left. They are figures of intellectual weight whom the Left cannot plausibly paint as blinkered reactionaries, and whose critique, therefore, demands to be taken seriously.

But will it be? There are signs that the intellectual challenge to left-liberal appeasement of Islamism is gathering growing support. The range of voices who have signed up to the muscularly liberal Euston Manifesto is one indication that the Pilger/Chomsky/Guardian comment pages consensus is much less representative of progressive opinion than it pretends. And, more recently, both Gordon Brown and Ed Balls have called for an intellectual response to the challenge of Islamism which stands comparison with the cultural resistance to communism developed by Western intellectuals during the Cold War.

But victory in the Cold War depended not just on the voices of Western intellectuals, crucially it depended on Western governments giving support to those dissident voices which were struggling to be heard in the Eastern bloc. Where are the political leaders now who will defend liberal and progressive voices in the Islamic world in the way in which Reagan and Thatcher championed the Sharanskys and Sakharovs? The real heroes of the anti-Islamist intelligentsia are Arab thinkers like Shaker al-Nabulsi who are challenging totalitarianism within the Islamic world. If the West is really serious about winning hearts and minds in this generational struggle, then it needs to show its support for those who, in the least propitious circumstances, still have the bravery to cry freedom.

This is an edited extract from Michael Gove’s talk ‘Are we seeing the emergence of a new anti-Islamist intelligentsia?’ given to the New Culture Forum this week. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way is published by Fourth Estate, £12.99.