British novelist Ian McEwan, whose tenth novel On Chesil Beach was published by Anchor Books earlier this month, has drawn sharp criticism from the Muslim Council of Britain for comments he made recently in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. The sixty-year-old author said that he "despises Islamism" because of its views on women and homosexuality and that it is "logically asburd and morally unacceptable" that writers who speak out against militant Islam are considered racist.
McEwan, who has been shortlisted several times for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and won the award for his novel Amsterdam (Nan A. Talese, 1999), made the comments by way of defending his friend and fellow author Martin Amis, who has been frequently charged with racism. In "The Age of Horrorism," an essay published in the Guardian newspaper on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Amis wrote that people who look like they're from the Middle East should be strip-searched and prevented from travelling.
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, told the Telegraph in London that anyone should be allowed to criticise religious tenets, but that Amis's comments went too far. "Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too."
