Discussions of Islam

Alright, so I succeeded in reading about half of the article by Mark Steyn until he started talking about “Injuns” and then I had enough. Complete with everything from racial and sexist stereotypes of Italians, Greeks, Native Americans, Germans and Muslims, to pandering faux-scientific formulas of age and youth, and every clichéd little trick in between, Steyn’s piece served to annoy the hell out of me and not really convince me of anything. He meanders from nation to nation, spinning half-fleshed out theories and wandering far from his core point: that, presumably, “The Future Belongs to Islam”.

The first paragraph did bode well for him in my opinion. He took a phrase indoctrinated into the mythos of September 11, 2001, “The day everything changed”, and in fact close-read it. The end of this passage sparked my annoyance, when he personified the metaphor of an iceberg, and had used that inhuman abstraction to “topple the Twin Towers.” Oh that’s cute, some alliteration as well. Toppled, like a children’s tower of blocks. Why doesn’t he write about Hitler’s Horrible Holocaust as well? The dead metaphors reviled by Orville appear, such as “dead as the dinosaurs”. Perhaps Steyn uses these for their comic, sarcastic effect; however, this detracts from his efforts to appear scientific in his methods and arguments.

Stephen Holmes’ review of “Infidel” By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and “Murder in Amsterdam”, by Ian Buruma, is targeted towards an audience familiar with high style as well as political complexities. At least a portion of this audience is also able to buy and read two books on the same subject- a niche demographic who are interested in these specific events and debates, or the immaculately educated. Hirsi Ali, though presented as complex and questionable, is nevertheless compelling, and Holmes gives us her background in a narrative as dramatic as the plots of the books that Ali credits with inspiring her decision to run away.

Holmes basically presents three viewpoints here: Hirsi Ali’s, Buruma’s, and his own. In sentences such as, “Indeed, he worries, not unreasonably, that her version of the Enlightenment has been brazenly converted into a weapon of the racist right, which opportunistically paints its xenophobia with a veneer of universalism”, he represents all three, with his own snuck skillfully into the two words of “not unreasonably”. As a good critic, he stands out of the direct spotlight, but in closely examining his subjects the light must reflect onto him.