The age of horrorism part three An exclusive essay by Martin Amis continued Click here to read part one and here to read part two Martin Amis The Observer Sunday 10 September 2006 Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity Islam is totalist That is to say it makes a total claim on the individual Indeed there is no individual there is only the umma the community of believers Ayatollah Khomeini in his copious writings often returns to this theme He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that so long as they observe all the formal pieties then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please Islam as he frequently reminds us isn t like that Islam follows you everywhere into the kitchen into the bedroom into the bathroom and beyond death into eternity Islam means submission the surrender of independence of mind That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations and 14 centuries The stout self sufficiency or if you prefer the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked Present day Spain translates as many books into Spanish annually as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1 100 years And the late medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations including incredibly the wheel The wheel as we know makes things easier to roll Bernard Lewis in What Went Wrong sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world with partial exceptions had been subjugated by the European empires And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence that of Germany This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium the Ottoman for decades a helpless hulk Hobsbawm which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War a war that was made in Berlin Undeterred Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration When the Nazi experiment ended in 1945 sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere It had no choice geopolitically there was nowhere else to turn And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR So Islam in the end proved responsive to European influence the influence of Hitler and Stalin And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century Anti semitic antiliberal anti individualist anti democratic and most crucially anti rational they too were cults of death death driven and death fuelled The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis pagan and the Bolsheviks atheist sought to bring about was an earthly one raised from the mulch of millions of corpses For them death was creative right enough but death was still death For the Islamists death is a consummation and a sacrament death is a beginning Sam Harris is right Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise Pathological mass movements are sustained by dreams of omnipotence and sadism in Robert Jay Lifton s phrase That is usually enough Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death For close to a millennium Islam could afford to be autarkic Its rise is one of the wonders of world history a chain reaction of conquest and conversion an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West Culturally too Islam was the more evolved Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance of which alas it did not partake Throughout its ascendancy Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven in A Fury for God calls the argument from manifest success The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven And now for the past 300 or 400 years observable reality has propounded a rebuttal the argument from manifest failure As one understands it in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied but it is subliminally present and accounts perhaps for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist Over the past five years what we have been witnessing apart from a moral slump or bust is a death agony the death agony of imperial Islam Islamism is the last wave the last convulsion Until 2003 one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation Nothing so insanely dionysian so impossibly poisonous could expect to hold itself together over time In the 20th century outside Africa the only comparable eruptions of death hunger of death oestrus were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea the one lasting 12 years the other three and a half Hitler Pol Pot Osama such men only ask to be the last to die But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong psychologically with the Iraq War The fatal turn the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam s weapons of mass destruction the intelligence agencies of every country on earth Iraq included believed that he had them The fatal turn was the American President s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power His walk his voice his idiom right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln Mission Accomplished every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too with a difference In old Europe as Rumsfeld insolently called it the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances of psychic surge breakers to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains It was not a matter of mental hygiene everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten