'The old enemy': Anthony Burgess and Islam

‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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IN 1978, the novelist Anthony Burgess gave an interview on the subject of the future. To say that Burgess created rather than gave the interview would be more accurate, as the conversation concerned never actually took place. The interview and the interviewer - an eager and thoughtful young American - were both invented by Burgess as part of a piece of fiction, the epilogue to his novel of an imagined futuristic Britain, 1985. Supposedly recorded in London, the entire interview was in fact invented in Monaco, where the tax-exiled Burgess was living at the time, and where 1985 was written.

In the Britain of 1985, freedom and individuality are crushed between over-mighty trade unions on one side (the country is ironically dubbed ‘Tucland’ in honour of the Trades Union Congress) and the power of Islam (based on Arab control of oil supplies and mass Muslim immigration) on the other. ‘Do you really think this is going to happen?’ asks the interviewer. ‘Take it that I merely melodramatize certain tendencies’ is Burgess’s reply.[1] Consciously fabricated as it is, this double-voiced, single-authored interview has an authentic feel of immediacy and is revealing about the contemporary preoccupations which found their way into 1985: industrial strife, excessive union power, political instability, mass immigration, Islamic oil, Islamic wealth, Islamic influence. When viewed with the benefit of early twenty-first-century hindsight some of Burgess’s concerns about the near future, rooted though they are in the late 1970s, appear strikingly prescient. When asked by his interviewer what sort of news the audiences of the early twenty-first century will see on their wide screen televisions, Burgess replies:

Kidnapping and skyjacking by dissident groups. Microbombs of immense destructiveness placed in public buildings. More thorough frisking at airports and at cinema entrances and on railroad stations - indeed, everywhere: restrictions on human dignity in the name of human safety. New oil strikes, but the bulk of the oil in the hands of the Arabs. More and more Islamic propaganda. Islamic religion taught in schools as a condition for getting oil.[2]

In this epilogue Burgess makes many predictions, some wide of the mark (‘jet travel on super Concordes’, men discarding their trousers as ‘Yves St Laurent makes kilts cheap and popular’), others more on target (governments ‘telling us what words we may not use’, the price of drink and tobacco becoming ‘prohibitive, to save us from ourselves’), but it is this vision of a world characterized by terrorism, the security state, and the rise of Islam which arguably has the greatest resonance for our own time.

Islam was a recurrent rather than a constant preoccupation of Anthony Burgess’s forty-year career as a writer[3], but a very significant one, and an understanding of his attitude to the Islamic religion and the Islamic world is essential to any balanced assessment of his work. 1985 is the only one of Burgess’s novels in which it is a central theme, but it occupies an important place in many others: Time for a Tiger (1956), The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), Beds in the East (1959), Devil of a State (1961), Napoleon Symphony (1974) and Earthly Powers (1980) are the most notable. Islam offers a stimulating and sometimes provocative field of enquiry through which Burgess can explore his characteristic themes of good and evil, right and wrong, human free will, and the relationship between the individual and authority; as well as being, as it clearly is for Burgess, a subject of great intrinsic fascination. Islam was an object of cultural, political and historical interest for Burgess, as well as a subject of intellectual curiosity and, at times, aesthetic attraction.[4] In particular the question of the relationship between Islam and the West is one to which he repeatedly returns in his fiction and non-fiction writing throughout his career.

Burgess’s early experience of a Muslim society during his period of living and working as a teacher in Malaya and Brunei between 1954 and 1959 was of great importance in shaping his attitudes to Islam and influencing the place it came to occupy in his writing. Malaya fascinated, enthralled, exasperated and repelled him,[5] and a similar ambivalence was always to characterize his responses to Islam. He was drawn to the religion to the extent that while teaching in the Malayan state of Kelantan he learned to write and read Arabic script and began studying the Koran, and considered becoming Muslim himself. Malayan Muslims, he noted thirty years later in the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, took an easy-going attitude to their religious duties, drinking beer or brandy and eating ham and eggs: ‘This was a gentle and permissive Islam, and there were times when I thought of being converted to it’.[6] Burgess’s use of the passive form, ‘I thought of being converted to it’, rather than the active ‘I thought of converting to it’, suggests strongly that deep religious commitments played little part in his notion of conversion, and also serves to distance him from direct personal responsibility for this putative conversion. Burgess becoming a Muslim, had it happened, would have been something Malaya did to him, rather than something he did for himself, a point he reinforces by stressing the role of a friend, Haji Latiff, in urging that he accept Islam: ‘He had my Islamic name ready for me: Yahya (which means John) with the patronymic bin Haji Latiff, to announce to the world who had recommended the conversion’.[7]

Burgess gives two reasons for considering converting. One was practical: ‘If I wished to stay on in Malaya after independence, which I thought sometimes I did, conversion was essential’. The other was motivated by Burgess’s difficult relationship with his own native Catholicism: ‘Perhaps, I thought, if I worshipped Allah the God of the Catholics would leave me alone’.[8] Becoming Muslim thus seemed to offer Burgess a means of short-circuiting his inner spiritual struggles. Neither reason has much to do with the teachings of Islam itself, a position consistent with his view of Malayan Islam as a matter of outward observance rather than inward intellectual or spiritual conviction: ‘Islam is mainly custom, mainly observance. There is very little real doctrine in it’.[9]

In the end, Burgess did not become a Muslim. The explanation he gives for this in Little Wilson and Big God involves the story of a local French Catholic priest, Father Laforgue who, he tells us, was ‘barely tolerated by the Islamic leaders, despite the counselling of religious tolerance in the Koran’. Burgess rebuffed Laforgue’s spiritual counselling with talk of his wish to enter Islam. The priest’s response: ‘He prayed for me: Islam was the old enemy, not to be compared with watery substitutes for the true Catholic faith’. More significant than anything Father Laforgue himself did in influencing Burgess’s attitude to Islam, however, was the priest’s eviction from his parish by the local Islamic authorities:

A Chinese Catholic had become Muslim on marrying a Malay wife but, dying, repented of his apostasy and called in Father Laforgue to give him Extreme Unction. The Islamic authorities found out. Though the Chinese died in peace, Father Laforgue suffered summary eviction from his parish and lived in the neighbouring state of Trengganu with a poor Chinese family until the money came through for his repatriation. This turned me against Islam.[10]

The suggestion here is that what finally made Burgess reject Islam was a realization that the picture he had of the religion, at least in its Malayan variety, as ‘gentle and permissive’ was false. The religious practice of the ordinary people of the country may have taken this form, but Islam’s true character, as enforced by the ‘Islamic authorities’, was very different: intolerant, vindictive, cruel, and hypocritical. Burgess could accept, even feel affectionate towards, the minor hypocrisies of Malayan Muslims drinking alcohol and eating bacon, but the hypocrisy of the authorities of a religion that professed tolerance practising its opposite repelled him. When he moved on to teach, briefly, in Brunei he found an even more hypocritical form of Islam practised there, which he duly depicted (transferred to an African setting) in his 1961 novel Devil of a State;[11] and the charge of hypocrisy becomes a constant in Burgess’s depiction of Islam henceforward.

During this period of considering and rejecting conversion, Burgess was putting his study of the Koran to good use by provoking his Muslim students with the contradictions between what they believed Islam to teach and what the Koran actually said. ‘When a Muslim man marries a non-Muslim woman, must she convert?’ he would ask, and when they affirmed that yes, she must, he would respond by quoting chapter and verse from the Koran in which it was made clear that she need not, and that her husband must allow her to worship in her own faith. ‘This did not go down well with certain people in Kelantan’,[12] is the dry observation of the former teaching colleague of Burgess from whom this account comes. Once again the charge being levelled at Islam is hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of a faith that teaches but does not practise tolerance, the hypocrisy of Muslims who are ignorant of what their own holy book says, and do not care to have it pointed out to them that it says the opposite of what they claim.

Other classroom encounters contributed to Burgess’s increasing conviction that there could be no real meeting of cultures between East and West. He attempted to teach Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter to ‘a mixed class of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians’. When they were confronted with the central tragedy of Greene’s novel, a man in love with two women who is driven to suicide, the students responded with amusement. ‘It was my Muslim students who were chiefly amused’, recalled Burgess in 1990: ‘why, they wanted to know, could he not marry both women - and two more if he wished? I saw then the fallacy of the notion of international culture’.[13]

What Burgess is talking about here is a loss of faith. He came to Malaya ‘with a firm belief in the liberal educational ideals which he felt it was his duty to disseminate’,[14] but exposure to the realities of this predominantly Islamic society undermined his belief in the universal nature of those ideals. It seemed that the Malays were not interested in this liberal western culture, even if it had been possible to communicate it to them. Not least, Burgess became aware of the significance of Islam in undermining the possibilities for the creation of a common culture linking East and West. When presented in Burgess’s literature classes with one universal cultural ideal, his students not only rejected it but imposed their own in its place: the universal ideal of Islam.

When Burgess published his first novel, Time for a Tiger, in 1956 (the book that became the first volume of his Malayan Trilogy), this colliding of cultures in a maze of incomprehension was its central theme, and remained ‘the consistent and unifying theme of the trilogy as a whole’.[15] The opening sequence encapsulates the chaotic intermingling of cultures that Burgess found in Malaya, the incomprehension that characterized the relationship between the various cultures of the East and between East and West, and over all, the aspirations of Islam to universal meaning and unity. The book begins with the muezzin giving the dawn call to prayer from the mosque in Burgess’s fictional Malayan town: ‘La ilaha illa’lah. La Ilaha illa’lah. There is no God but God, but what did anybody care?’ The muezzin looks down and despises ‘his superstitious fellow-countrymen who, ostensibly Muslim, yet clung to their animist beliefs’, and furtively ate bacon and drank brandy. As a haji himself, one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he feels superior to such weak hypocrites. Yet he too is compromised by hypocrisy, for his pilgrimage was partly funded by ‘judicious bets on tipped horses and a very good advice about rubber given by a Chinese business-man’, in defiance of the Islamic prohibition of gambling: ‘Gambling indeed was forbidden, haram, but he had wanted to go to Mecca and become a haji’.[16]

In the second volume of the Malayan Trilogy, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), Burgess’s abortive conversion to Islam is rehearsed in the character of Rupert Hardman - except that Hardman has a concrete aim in view in considering converting, in the form of a rich Muslim widow, and unlike his creator does go through with the conversion. The Catholic priest Father Laforgue also appears, counselling Hardman against converting (hotly urged upon him by his friend Haiji Zainal Abidin: ‘It is the true religion, you Christian bastard. It is the only one. The rest are mere imitations’[17]) but also observing that that Catholicism and Islam have a particular historical relationship: ‘I feel less hurt about your entering Islam than I would if you were to become a Protestant. That is wrong, for Protestantism is a disreputable younger brother but still of the family. Whereas Islam is the old enemy’.[18] Hardman enlarges on the point in his reply, arguing that Catholicism and Islam have more to say to each other than do Catholicism and Protestantism:

It was a quarrel between men when all is said and done, and there was a healthy mutual respect [between Catholicism and Islam] … you can’t take Luther or Calvin or Wesley very seriously, and hence they don’t count. But you can take Islam very seriously and you can compare wounds and swap photographs, and you can say: ‘We’re old enemies, and old enemies are more than new friends.’[19]

Whatever Burgess’s difficulties with his own native faith of Catholicism, he had little time for Protestantism, which he called ‘a logical absurdity … You can’t justify it in any way’.[20] Yet the claims of an all-embracing ‘Christendom’ were important to his world-view, and the necessary opposition between a Catholic-centred Christendom and Islam is a theme to which he frequently returned. The sense of an interdependence in the relationship between Christendom and Islam is also a question he grappled with repeatedly. The two faiths, the two cultures, are clearly in opposition, but their history of conflict has created a form of partnership between the two, and has acted culturally and spiritually as a source of energy and vitality.

This placing of Christendom and Islam in interdependent opposition reflects the centrality of oppositional pairings, of dialectical confrontations, in Burgess’s work.[21] Such confrontations are essential to Burgess’s view of civilization: ‘It is important to remember that Burgess sees conflict as creative; it is in the clash of the eternal opposites that vitality is generated and man is invested with a sense of his full humanity’.[22] The conflict between Islam and Christendom is inevitable in itself, and such conflict is essential to the vigour of Western civilization. Burgess returns to this point in Earthly Powers (1980), when the Bishop of Gibraltar - Anglican prelate of an English enclave on the tip of Catholic Spain that is also a Christian stronghold on the edge of the Muslim world - muses on ‘Islam … A desert faith, sworn enemy of Christendom … Once the Christians fought the Muslims, and then the Christians fought each other. Faith is hard to sustain unless it is either beleaguered or dreams the imperial dream’.[23] In the modern world, Burgess knows that Christianity no longer dreams the imperial dream, but nor does it gain sustenance from being beleaguered, taking refuge instead in neutrality, compromise and indifference. In the face of an Islam that is strong and that does dream the imperial dream, the lesson of history is clear: this is a folly akin to surrender.

Burgess’s historical consciousness prevented him from being comfortable with Islam. He could never see it as something irrelevant because remote and exotic, or harmless because nearby and neighbourly. Rather, it was a part of Europe’s past, something Europe had in large part defined itself through fighting against. This unique place held by Islam in Europe’s past history and present identity means that Burgess accords it a respect and status he denies to other faiths remoter from that historical experience. ‘I cannot go along with Hinduism at all, nor with Buddhism’, he observed in 1978, ‘but I can go along with Islam, because it’s pretty close to us’. By ‘pretty close to us’ he meant both geographically and historically close. In the past the Muslim world had not merely lapped the shores of Europe but had taken in vast areas of the continent. Europe, he pointed out, could easily have been part of the Islamic world: ‘the whole of Europe could have been Islamicized - the whole of Spain certainly was’.[24]

The source of Islam’s expansionist energy and potency is, Burgess argues, its austerity and rigour: ‘if you’re living in the East, if you’re living under hot skies and desert sands and camels, you can see the attraction of this very austere religion’.[25] The desert is a world of absolutes, and the implication is that such an environment produces clarity, resolution and conviction in religious belief and practice, creating in Islam a religion both essentialized and universal. In 1985 Burgess has a (Muslim) character speak of understanding that Islam ‘contained everything and yet was as simple and sharp as a sword’,[26] and in Earthly Powers another (Christian) character describes the attraction of ‘the scimitarlike simplicity of Christendom’s ancient enemy’.[27] These weapon-images are not chosen at random: Islam offers the simplicity of the blade, the sharp edge that cuts through confusion and complexity. From austerity comes Islam’s strength, contrasted throughout 1985 with the ‘muddle and the mess’[28] of contemporary Britain, the weakness and irresolution of a society that has reached its point of crisis through ‘sheer drift’.[29] The Islam of 1985 is imperialistic and aggressive, its economic power based on oil and its ideological power based on religious conviction. The West, mired in moral and religious relativism, irresolution and weakness, becomes a passive witness to the cycle of history that inexorably produces Islamic domination:

And where does the power lie? The literal power that drives the machines sleeps in Islamic oil … Islam is one of the genuine superstates, with a powerful religious ideology whose mailed fist punched Christendom in the Dark Ages and may yet reimpose itself on a West drained, thanks to the Second Vatican Council, of solid and belligerent belief.[30]

Burgess’s own response to this power is characterized by ambivalence: he both admires Islam and fears it. He admires Islam’s strength and rigour, and contrasts it with the West’s feebleness and incoherence, epitomized in the reforms to the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council (which he despised with all the zeal of the lapsed Catholic).[31] At the same time he sees Islam as a threat. It is not simply a religion but a ‘powerful religious ideology’, a faith with mailed fists, imposing itself by force. Innately aggressive, Islam has ‘punched’ the West before and, taking advantage of Western weakness, will readily do so again. With the collapse of Christianity in the West and the decline in the West’s self-confidence and self-belief, a spiritual and cultural vacuum is being created. Looking into the near future, Burgess argues that the power of Islam is poised to fill that emptiness with meaning:

The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism. The young will still be after the bizarre and mystical, with new cults and impossible Moon-type leaders. But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour … Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.[32]

As Christianity destroys itself from within, it leaves the West defenceless against the rising power of Islam: a power that constitutes, through Muslim immigration, insidious Islamic propaganda and indoctrination, Islamic oil wealth and the stranglehold of Islamic states upon the West’s energy supplies, both an internal and an external threat.

Authority and strength arise in large measure, Burgess suggests, from a resistance to compromise, a refusal to give way to laxness. The forms of Islam that he found most attractive himself were precisely the compromised, relaxed forms he had encountered in Malaya, where ‘Most of the Muslims I knew … had been corrupted or influenced by the British way of life’ and kissed women, drank alcohol and ate bacon, and engaged in animistic and syncretic religious practices. To live in such a way, Burgess knew, was not to take Islam seriously:

You couldn’t find this in Saudi Arabia, obviously. The news about people whipped publicly, being beheaded, I mean they take it really seriously there. But there’s a charm about Islam in a country like Malaya or Borneo, where it has to stand on its own and jostle up against other religions. See how it gets on … But when it becomes monolithic and a genuine state religion, as in Saudi Arabia, then it’s rather repulsive. It’s very much like Calvinism in Geneva, very similar.[33]

The comparison with the authoritarian Protestantism of Calvin is also made by Father Laforgue in The Enemy in the Blanket: ‘One could make many converts here … But Islam is so repressive. There is no freedom of conscience. It is very like Calvinism’. When Islam possesses a monopoly backed by state power, when it is authoritarian and rigorous, it becomes ‘rather repulsive’. Yet it is precisely the strength associated with ‘tak[ing] it really seriously’, that makes Islam a force to be reckoned with in the world in a way that Christianity is not.[34]

In early 1989 Burgess was caught up in an event that saw literature, politics and authoritarian Islam came dramatically together: the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The approach to Islam taken in this book provoked a hostile reaction among Muslims. In a number of Muslim countries, and in others with vocal and influential Muslim populations, The Satanic Verses was banned, and protests took place across the Islamic world, many of which became violent, with some ending in deaths. Bookshops were threatened and some physically attacked; Muslim protestors in Western countries, as well as in the Middle East and South Asia, burned copies of the book and called publicly for the killing of Rushdie.[35] On 14 February 1989, after six months of protest and turmoil, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or formal Muslim judicial ruling, condemning The Satanic Verses as blasphemously insulting to Islam.

The message of the fatwa was very simple: it solicited murder in the name of Islam. The Satanic Verses, Khomeini declared, ‘has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qu’ran’, and its author and everyone else involved in the production of the book who was aware of its content ‘are sentenced to death’. Furthermore, Khomeini encouraged ‘zealous Muslims to execute them quickly’ and stated that ‘God willing’ the murderers, if themselves killed while carrying out the sentence, would be accorded the status of martyrs.[36] In case the lure of such spiritual rewards was insufficient, large sums of money were subsequently offered by Muslim organizations within Iran and elsewhere as an incentive for zealous Muslims to shed Rushdie’s blood.

Anthony Burgess was not slow in his response to this development. Just two days after the fatwa was issued, on 16 February 1989, he published an article under the headline ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’ in The Independent newspaper.[37] In Britain, Rushdie’s adopted home country, much of the response to the fatwa was highly equivocal and even (as in the case of some prominent members of the British Government) cravenly appeasing, blaming Rushdie for having brought his plight upon himself and accepting at face value the claims of book-burning, murder-inciting Muslims that they were the victims of an outrage rather than the perpetrators of one.[38] Burgess, however, was forthright and uncompromising in his opposition to the fatwa, his championing of free speech and his rejection of any Islam-inspired attempt to impose thought-control upon a non-Islamic country: ‘What a secular society thinks of the prophet Mohamed is its own affair’. He condemned Khomeini’s fatwa as ‘a declaration of war on the citizens of a free country’ motivated by ‘political opportunism’, and dismissed Muslim anti-Rushdie protests as ‘unjustified by argument, thought or anything more intellectual than the throwing of stones and the striking of matches’. He was clear about the vital importance of the Western values of free speech and tolerance which were under attack, and unambiguously labelled Muslim reaction to Rushdie’s book as the product of ignorance, intolerance and unreason:

I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forget what the Nazis did to books - or perhaps they do not: after all, some of their co-religionists approved of the Holocaust - and they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires.[39]

This is, by any standards, an unflattering image of Islam (at least, of Islam as it chose to present itself during the Rushdie affair). As a result, Burgess’s article has been depicted as an ignorant and prejudiced anti-Muslim diatribe, articulating a caricatured view of Islam and an arrogant insensitivity to Muslim offence at Rushdie’s book, and he has been criticized for taking a simplistic view of freedom of expression - for reacting to the book-burnings and death-threats with, deplorably, ‘an automatic defence of liberty and free speech’.[40]

If that is indeed a criticism, it is surely one Burgess would have been happy to accept. He had no more sympathy for those prepared to compromise with the intellectual totalitarianism the fatwa represented than he did for the edict itself. His response to Khomeini’s declaration reflected his conviction, informed by more than thirty years of thinking and writing about Islam, that such an edict represented something profoundly dangerous to any society in which freedom was valued. Khomeini, he argued, was drawing on the most repressive traditions within Islam in this attempt to extend the reach of Islamic authority across the non-Islamic world, and to impose a narrowly totalitarian interpretation of Islam upon Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Islam once did intellectual battle. Now it prefers to draw blood. It seems to have lost its major strength only to resort to the tactics of the gangster. This is unworthy of a major religion. … I would much prefer that Khomeini argued rationally with the infidel West in the manner of the great medieval Arabs. But, instead of arguing, he declared a holy war against argument. His insolence is an insult to Islam.[41]

In taking this position, Burgess is setting Muslim response to The Satanic Verses against the background of twelve centuries of complex interaction between Islam and the West. It is upon this that he bases his claim to the authority to judge Khomeini’s action, and find it wanting in terms of Islamic civilization and culture itself. Burgess sees the fatwa and anti-Rushdie protests as representing an Islam that has lost the self-confident strength he admires and adopted instead the gangster’s tactics of threats and intimidation: ‘There is something not very likeable about a faith that is so quick to order assassination’.[42]

For Burgess the Rushdie affair represented not just a controversy over a particular book but a conflict of cultures, and the interaction of different cultures - particularly in a context of misunderstanding, incomprehension and conflict - continued to be one of his most central concerns. In April 1990 Burgess explored these issues in a talk entitled ‘European culture: does it exist?’ on BBC radio. His answer to that question was that a unified European culture certainly had existed in the past, but that its contemporary reality was far more problematic. Significantly, he related the past reality of European culture to the unifying agency of Christendom, in which the liberal humanism in which he saw the essence of the modern culture of Europe has its roots:

The culture of our continent was certainly unified when Europe was known as Christendom. It suffered its first fracture with the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Zwinglian reforms. Still, it remained Christian. … The secular liberalism of the Europe we know stems from Christianity.[43]

Writing at a tumultuous time in European history, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the post-war East-West division of Europe in the process of peaceful dissolution, Burgess argues for a new vision of the continent that reflects this old notion of ‘Christendom’ in its catholic unity. With the 1945 division of Europe into democratic West and totalitarian East, he writes, the modern concept of Europe became essentially political rather than cultural, a narrower form than the old concept of Christendom. The influence of that ‘rather narrow concept that ends where the Berlin Wall once stood’, he argues, remains, although we may aspire to ‘a continental concept that restores the old unity - not Christian but at least liberal and humanistic’.[44] The unity of Europe, he seems to be suggesting, is essentially cultural, not ideological, political or economic, for cultural unity recognizes and is enriched by differences rather than seeking to eliminate them.

As I’ve despaired of finding a culture - other than that of Barbara Cartland, Batman, Indiana Jones, and the Coca-Cola can - which should bring Europe and Asia closer together, so I accept, with no sense of despair at all, a Europe united only in its substructure. I’m thinking of a symbiosis sustained through recognition of differences, a stability confirmed by centrifugal forces.[45]

This notion of Europe as a ‘stability confirmed by centrifugal forces’ is a more abstract form of the vision of a European continuum overcoming divisive, polarizing categories which can be found in Burgess’s 1964 novel Honey for the Bears: ‘I am tired of categories, of divisions, of opposites … That they interpenetrate is no real palliative, no ointment for the cut. What I seek is the continuum, the merging, Europe is all Manichees’.[46]

The ‘merging’ Burgess wishes to see does not mean ‘submerging’ beneath the forces of uniformity, in cultural any more than in political terms. Burgess rejects the totalitarianism of the internationalization or Americanization of culture - ‘American equals international. Or vice versa’[47] - just as firmly as he does the totalitarianism of authoritarian politics or religion. Such internationalization threatens to impose a uniformity of banality and ‘the elimination of the various subtleties and ambiguities which make up a national culture’.[48] Burgess’s vision of Europe involves those ‘subtleties and ambiguities’ existing within a larger, all-embracing cultural framework. In the European context that all-embracing culture can be seen as, in both senses of the world, catholic, and Burgess maintains that it is certainly culturally Christian. He held to this position despite his own rejection of both the Catholicism within which he was brought up and that of the modern, post-Vatican II church: ‘I think the only future for the West, the secular future for the West, lies in some kind of Christianity’.[49] Burgess’s emphasis on the centrality of Christendom returns him to the inevitability of conflict with its ancient adversary, Islam.

Burgess writes that modern Europe ‘is a Europe which has to admit the presence of the old enemy, Islam, as one of the constituent structures. This I am old-fashioned enough to regret’.[50] As we have seen, the notion of Islam as ‘the old enemy’ is deeply rooted in Burgess’s work. For Burgess a lack of historical sense is at the root of many of the world’s ills, and a historical understanding of the significance of European Christendom - in which, as we have seen, Burgess believes modern Europe has its roots - demands a recognition that, historically, Islam has been its (that is, Europe’s and Christendom’s) ‘inveterate foe’. The implication is that the relationship between the European culture Burgess defends and Islam, an ambivalent and complex relationship hallowed by history, will always be in the end an antagonistic one: ‘Islam will not be absorbed into Western culture, and the West has never been able to come to terms with it’.[51]

His awareness of this history of rivalry and conflict left Anthony Burgess unable sincerely to believe in the peaceful co-existence of Islamic civilization and the West. For him the warrior Islam of aggression and expansionism was never something distinct from the Islam of the modern world - it was an intrinsic part of its nature, as relevant in the twentieth century as when its ‘mailed fist punched Christendom’ in past centuries. ‘Do you think the Holy War ended in the Middle Ages?’ he has a Muslim paramilitary leader ask as the Islamic takeover of Britain reaches its climax in 1985.[52] For Burgess, Islam was always at its heart the faith of ‘scimitared marauders’.[53] How valid that perception may be, whether as a means of understanding Burgess’s own time or the post-9/11 world, is open to debate; but the actions of some of Islam’s own adherents have ensured that is not a point of view that can simply be disregarded. A world still dealing with the legacy of that day in September 2001 when the marauders came armed, not with scimitars but with hijacked airliners, does not have the luxury of ignoring what Anthony Burgess has to say.

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Notes

1. Anthony Burgess, 1985 (1978; pbk. edn. London: Arrow, 1980), p. 227.

2. Burgess, 1985, p. 233.

3. For Burgess’s life see Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005).

4. Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979), pp. 9-11, 43, 48.

5. Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 160.

6. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 407.

7. Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 407. Burgess’s real name was John Burgess Wilson: hence ‘Yhaya’ for ‘John’. Haji Latiff was originally from Afghanistan: Biswell, Anthony Burgess, pp. 174, 181.

8. Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 408.

9. Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), in The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964; pbk. edn. 1992), p. 214.

10. Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 408.

11. Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, pp. 433-5. At the end of 1958 Burgess wrote and performed some scurrilous Christmas carols for Radio Brunei, including one attacking local Muslim hypocrisy: ‘Muslims awake, salute another day / Of gin, whisky, stout / And B.G.A. / Great is the law, the law the Prophet taught - / Don’t give the bloody thing another thought’. He hoped that these sentiments, and an insulting version of ‘Oh Come, All ye Faithful’ directed at the Brunei Government minister responsible for education, would lead to a termination of his contract to teach there. His satires, however, were laughed off and his contract remained in place (ibid., p. 435; Biswell, Anthony Burgess, pp. 203-4

12. Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 173. Burgess did not think much of the Koran, although his reservations appear to have been primarily literary: ‘unfortunately the Koran is a very bad book. There’s nothing much to read in the Koran’: Samuel Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981), p. 438. His character Rupert Hardman in The Enemy in the Blanket is even more dismissive, calling the Koran ‘the work of an illiterate’ and ‘a repetitive farrago of platitudes’: Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, pp. 281, 324.

13. Anthony Burgess, ‘European culture: does it exist?’, Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3 (October 1991), p. 300. This article is the text of a BBC Radio 3 talk Burgess gave on 4 April 1990.

14. Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 162.

15. Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 186.

16. Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (1956), in The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964; pbk. edn. 1992), p. 17.

17. Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, p. 194.

18. Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, pp. 216-7. The fictional Laforgue suffers the same fate as the real one, driven out by the local Islamic authorities for encouraging apostasy. It is not clear whether Burgess used the real priest’s name for his fictional counterpart, or applied the fictional name to an actual priest when he came to write of the ‘real’ Father Laforgue’s experiences in his autobiography.

19. Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, p. 217.

20. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 437.

21. Thomas LeClair, ‘Essential opposition: the novels of Anthony Burgess’, Critique, vol. 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1971), especially pp. 77, 79-81, 93.

22. John J. Stinson, ‘Better to be hot or cold: 1985 and the dynamic of the Manichean duoverse’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981), p. 513.

23. Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), p. 209.

24. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 438. Coale notes that the interviews for this article took place in 1978..

25. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 438.

26. Burgess, 1985, p. 197.

27. Burgess, Earthly Powers, p. 476.

28. Burgess, 1985, p. 19.

29. Stinson, ‘Better to be hot or cold’, pp. 508-9, 516.

30. Burgess, 1985, p. 61.

31. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 439.

32. Burgess, 1985, p. 234.

33. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, pp. 458-9.

34. Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, p. 279.

35. Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003), pp. 19-36.

36. The text of the fatwa quoted here comes from Pipes, The Rushdie Affair, p. 27.

37. Anthony Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’, The Independent, 16 February 1989, p. 27.

38. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London: Gibson Square, 2006), pp. 45-8. A polemical but factually accurate account.

39. Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

40. James Piscatori, ‘The Rushdie affair and the politics of ambiguity’, International Affairs, vol. 66, no. 4 (October 1990), pp. 779-80; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘Liberalism and its limits’, Prospect Magazine, no. 30 (May 1998), http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=4167; Richard Webster, ‘Reconsidering the Rushdie affair: freedom, censorship, and American foreign policy’ (unpublished essay, 1992), http://www.richardwebster.net/therushdieaffairreconsidered.html. The dismissive reference to ‘an automatic defence of liberty and free speech’ comes from Piscatori, p. 780.

41. Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

42. Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

43. Burgess, ‘European culture’, pp. 300-301.

44. Burgess, ‘European culture’, pp. 300-301.

45. Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 305.

46. Anthony Burgess, Honey for the Bears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), p. 190. On Manicheeism in Burgess, see John J. Stinson, ‘The Manichee world of Anthony Burgess’, Renascence, vol. 26, no. 1 (Autumn 1973).

47. Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.

48. Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.

49. Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 450.

50. Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.

51. Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 300.

52. Burgess, 1985, p. 197.

53. Anthony Burgess, ‘Living for sex and danger’, New York Times, 20 May 1990, Book Review section, p. 1.

Bibliography

Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1979).

Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (London: Picador, 2005).

Anthony Burgess, Time for a Tiger (1956), in The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964; pbk. edn. 1992).

Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958), in The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964; pbk. edn. 1992).

Anthony Burgess, Honey for the Bears (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964).

Anthony Burgess, 1985 (1978; pbk. edn. London: Arrow, 1980).

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994).

Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (London: Heinemann, 1987).

Anthony Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’, The Independent, 16 February 1989.

Anthony Burgess, ‘European culture: does it exist?’, Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3 (October 1991).

Anthony Burgess, ‘Living for sex and danger’, New York Times, 20 May 1990.

Samuel Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981).

Thomas LeClair, ‘Essential opposition: the novels of Anthony Burgess’, Critique, vol. 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1971).

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London: Gibson Square, 2006).

Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003).

James Piscatori, ‘The Rushdie affair and the politics of ambiguity’, International Affairs, vol. 66, no. 4 (October 1990).

John J. Stinson, ‘The Manichee world of Anthony Burgess’, Renascence, vol. 26, no. 1 (Autumn 1973).

John J. Stinson, ‘Better to be hot or cold: 1985 and the dynamic of the Manichean duoverse’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981).