McEwan joins Amis in condemning Islam

All has been quiet on the Martin Amis/Militant Islam front for a while – the author caused a furore last year after saying that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order". But now his friend and fellow writer, Ian McEwan (pictured), has decided to stir up the pot again. In an interview in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, McEwan has damned those who interpreted Amis's remarks as racist and, for good measure, added that he "despises Islamism" himself because of its views on women and homosexuality.

Says McEwan: "As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist. This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well."

McEwan, 60, who won the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam, recognised that similar views were held by some Christian hardliners in America. "I find them equally absurd," he said. "I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."

Predictably, McEwan's comments have not gone down well with the Muslim Council of Britain. Said a spokesman: "Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis's remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that. He was advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer 'until it gets its own house in order'. And what sort of suffering did Amis have in mind? In his own words: 'Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'"

He added: "Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too."