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‘The old enemy’:

Anthony Burgess and Islam

RALPH HARRINGTON

I. Introduction: looking forward

‘There’s no need, really, to write about the future’, suggested Anthony Burgess in an
interview he gave in 1973 to the journal Studies in the Novel. ‘You just look at the
present and extend into a minimal world of fantasy the tendencies of the present
and you get a so-called futuristic novel’.1 In 1978, in another interview, Burgess
returned to the theme of visions of the future being rooted in the present, with
specific reference to his new ‘futuristic novel’, 1985, which was published in that year.
In the Britain of 1985 freedom and individuality are crushed between over-mighty
trade unions on one side (the country is ironically called ‘Tucland’ in honour of the
Trades Union Congress) and the power of Islam (based on Arab control of oil sup-
plies 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 tenden-
cies’ is Burgess’s careful reply.2 In Burgess’s futuristic writings the present is the key
to the imagined future, and continuities and recurring patterns underpin visions of
futurity that gain extra resonance as much through their familiarity as through their
strangeness.3
There is an important distinction between the interview Burgess gave in 1973
and the one that took place in 1978, for the latter conversation never actually
occurred. In an exhibition of typically Burgessian playfulness, the interview and the
supposed interviewer – an eager and thoughtful young American – were both inven-

1 Charles T. Bunting, ‘An interview in New York with Anthony Burgess’, Studies in the Novel, vol. 5,
no. 4 (Winter 1973), p. 511.
2 Anthony Burgess, 1985 (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 227.
3 George Kateb illuminates this point in a 1971 discussion of Burgess’s dystopian 1962 novel The
Wanting Seed: ‘I think that by paying attention to this book, we can come to a measure of clarity
about possible patterns of future experience. But also about human experience as it has always
been: we distort our discussion of modernity by omitting continuities completely’. George Kateb,
‘Politics and modernity: the strategies of desperation’, New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn
1971), pp. 98-9.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

ted by Burgess as part of the very piece of fiction that the ‘interview’ discussed. This
fabricated interview forms the epilogue to the novel 1985: supposedly recorded in
London, the conversation was actually invented in Monaco, where the tax-exiled
Burgess was living at the time, and where 1985 was written. Consciously contrived as
it is, this double-voiced but single-authored interview has an authentic feel of imme-
diacy, and given Burgess’s views on the dependence of our views of the future upon
our experience of the present it is no surprise to find that his words are very reveal -
ing about the contemporary preoccupations which found their way into his new
book: industrial strife, political instability, excessive union power, 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 mid- to late-
1970s, appear strikingly prescient. When asked by his ‘interviewer’ what sort of
events will fill the news bulletins that audiences of the near future will watch on their
wide screen televisions, Burgess replies:

Kidnapping and skyjacking by dissident groups. Microbombs of

immense destructiveness place in public buildings. More thorough
frisking at airports and at cinema entrances and on railroad sta-
tions – 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.4

Some of the predictions Burgess makes in this epilogue are wide of the mark (‘jet
travel on super Concordes’, men abandoning trousers as ‘Yves St Laurent makes kilts
cheap and popular’), others have turned out to be more on target (governments
‘telling us what words we may not use’, the price of drink and tobacco being made
‘prohibitive, to save us from ourselves’), but it is this vision of a world characterized
by terrorism, the security state, and the rise of an assertive, even an aggressive Islam
which arguably has the greatest resonance for our own time.
Islam was a recurrent rather than a constant preoccupation of Anthony Burgess
during his forty-year writing career, 5 but it was a very significant preoccupation, and
an understanding of Burgess’s attitude to the Islamic religion and the Islamic world is

4 Burgess, 1985, p. 233.

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

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

essential to any balanced assessment of his work. 1985 is the only one of Burgess’s
novels in which Islam 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 was clearly an subject of great intrinsic fascination for Burgess,
and offered a stimulating and sometimes provocative field of enquiry through which
he could explore his characteristic themes of good and evil, right and wrong, the
limits and nature of human free will, and the relationship between the individual and
authority. In addition Islam served as an object of cultural, political and historical
interest for Burgess and a focus for him of intellectual curiosity and, at times, aes-
thetic attraction. 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.

II. Malaya: ‘a gentle and permissive islam’

Between 1954 and 1959 Burgess lived and worked as a teacher in Malaya and Brunei.
This experience was of fundamental importance in shaping his attitudes to Islam and
influencing the place Islam came to occupy in his writing. Malaya fascinated, repelled,
exasperated and enthralled him,6 and a similar mixture of responses 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 to study the Koran – indeed, he seems to have given some consider-
ation to becoming Muslim himself.
Malayan Muslims, he noted thirty years later in the first volume of his autobio-
graphy, 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’.7 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 commitment 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 that Malaya did to him, rather than some-
thing he actively did for himself, a point he reinforces by stressing the role of a

6 Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 160.

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

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

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’.8
Burgess gives two reasons for considering conversion to Islam. One was prac-
tical: ‘If I wished to stay on in Malaya after independence, which I thought some-
times I did, conversion was essential’. The other related to Burgess’s difficult relation-
ship with his own native Catholicism: ‘Perhaps, I thought, if I worshipped Allah the
God of the Catholics would leave me alone’.9 Becoming Muslim thus seemed to
offer Burgess, according to his own account, a means of short-circuiting his inner
spiritual struggles. Neither of his reasons has much to do with the teachings of Islam
itself, a position consistent with his view of the Islamic religion (at least in its Malay-
an form) as a matter of outward observance rather than inward intellectual or spir-
itual conviction. ‘Islam is mainly custom, mainly observance’, is a comment found in
his 1958 novel The Enemy in the Blanket: ‘There is very little doctrine in it’.10
In the end, Burgess did not convert to Islam. The explanation he gives for this
in Little Wilson and Big God involves the story of a local French Catholic priest, Father
Laforgue, who, Burgess tells us, was ‘barely tolerated by the Islamic leaders, despite
the counselling of religious tolerance in the Koran’. Burgess rebuffed Laforgue’s spir-
itual advances by speaking of his wish to convert to Islam. The priest’s response: ‘He
prayed for me: Islam was the old enemy, not be compared with watery substitutes for
the true Catholic faith’. More significant than anything Father Laforgue did himself
in influencing Burgess’s attitude to Islam, however, was the way the priest was treated
by the local Islamic authorities when it was discovered that he had ministered to a
Chinese Catholic who had become Muslim on marrying a Malay woman but had
repented his conversion on his deathbed: ‘Father Laforgue suffered summary evic-
tion 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’.11
The suggestion here is that what finally made Burgess reject Islam was a realiz-
ation that the picture he had of the religion, if only in Malaya, as ‘gentle and per -
missive’ was, in the end, false. The religious practice of the ordinary people of the

8 Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 407. Burgess’s real name was John Burgess Wilson, hence
‘Yahya’ for ‘John’. Haji Latiff was not a Malay, being originally from Afghanistan: Biswell, Anthony
Burgess, pp. 174, 181.
9 Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 408.
10 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.
11 Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, p. 408.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam
RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘So jarred were all my nerves’

country may have taken a permissive form, but Islam’s true character, as enforced by
the ‘Islamic authorities’, was very different: intolerant, vindictive, cruel and hypo-
critical. 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 what he saw as 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;12 and the charge of double
standards becomes a constant in Burgess’s depiction of Islam henceforward.
During this period when Burgess was considering and rejecting conversion, he
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 marries a non-Muslim woman, must she con-
vert?’ 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’,13 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 proclaims but
does not practice 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

12 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 hypo-
crisy: ‘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 these sen-
timents, and an insulting version of ‘Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful’ directed at the Brunei Govern-
ment minister responsible for education, would lead to the termination of his contract to teach
there. His satires, however, were laughed off and his contract remained in place See Little Wilson
and Big God, p. 435, and Biswell, Anthony Burgess, pp. 203-4.
13 Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 173. Burgess did not think much of the Koran, although his reser-
vations 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 far-
rago of platitudes’: Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, pp. 281, 324.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

Greene’s novel, a man in love with two women who is driven to suicide, the students
were uncomprehending and responded with amusement. ‘It was my Muslim students
who were chiefly amused’, recalled Burgess in 1990: ‘why, they wished 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’.14
This comment by Burgess is a reflection on what amounted to a personal 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’, 15 but his exposure to the realities of this predom-
inantly Islamic society undermined his belief in the universal validity of those ideals.
It seemed that the Malays were not interested in this liberal western culture, even if it
had been possible (as Burgess became convinced it was not) 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 a cultural ideal that was urged upon
them as universal, 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’.16 The opening sequence encapsulates the chaotic
intermingling of cultures that Burgess found in Malaya, the incomprehension that
characterized the relationships between the various cultures of the East and between
East and West, and over all, the aspirations of Islam to universal meaning and unity
(an aspiration itself constantly undermined by human pride, mendacity and weak-
ness). 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, looking down both lit-
erally and figuratively upon the supposedly Muslim town, despises ‘his superstitious
fellow-countrymen who, ostensibly Muslim, yet clung to their animist beliefs’. As a
haji himself, one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he feels superior to the
hypocrites who worship local gods and spirits, indulge fleshly appetites and furtively
eat bacon and drink brandy. Yet the muezzin too is compromised by hypocrisy, for
his pilgrimage was partly funded by ‘judicious bets on tipped horses and very good

14 Anthony Burgess, ‘European culture: does it exist?’, Theatre Journal, vol. 43, no. 3 (October 1991),
p. 300. This article is the text of a talk Burgess gave on BBC Radio 3 on 4 April 1990.
15 Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 162.
16 Biswell, Anthony Burgess, p. 186.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

advice about rubber given by a Chinese business-man’. He has bought the coveted
and elite status of a haji with the proceeds of betting and speculative investment, in
direct contradiction of the Islamic prohibition of gambling: ‘Gambling indeed was
forbidden, haram, but he had wanted to go to Mecca and become a haji’.17
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 Hard-
man. Unlike Burgess, Hardman has a material aim in view when he considers conver-
sion, in the form of marriage to a rich Muslim widow – and also unlike Burgess, he
does go through with his conversion, which is 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’.18 The Catholic priest Father Laforgue appears in the
narrative, counselling Hardman against converting, but also reflecting that Catholi-
cism and Islam have a particular historical relationship, in which the notion of the
‘old enemy’ features strongly: ‘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 disreput-
able younger brother but still of the family. Whereas Islam is the old enemy’.19 Hard-
man, responding, takes up and enlarges on Laforgue’s point, arguing that as old
enemies 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 old wounds and swap photographs, and you can say:
‘We’re old enemies, and old enemies are more than new friends’.20

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

17 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.
18 Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, p. 194.
19 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 later came to write of the ‘real’ Father Laforgue’s experiences in his autobio-
graphy.
20 Burgess, Enemy in the Blanket, p. 217.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

any way’.21 Yet the claims of an all-embracing ‘Christendom’ were important to his
world-view, and the necessary opposition between a Catholic-centred Christendom
on one hand and Islam on the other is a theme to which he frequently returned. The
sense of 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.

III. Inevitable conflict: Islam’s ‘mailed fist’

This placing of Christendom and Islam in interdependent opposition reflects the
importance of oppositional pairings, of dialectical confrontations, in Burgess’s
work.22 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’.23 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 Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar – Protestant
prelate of a British 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’.24 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, for Christianity and for the Western civilization of which
Christianity is the foundation, 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 part of Europe’s past, some-
thing Europe had in large part defined itself through fighting against. This unique

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

22 Thomas LeClair, ‘Essential opposition: the novels of Anthony Burgess’, Critique, vol. 12, no. 3
(Autumn 1971), especially pp. 77, 79-81, 93.
23 John J. Stinson, ‘Better to be hot or cold: 1985 and the dynamic of the Manichean duoverse’, Mod-
ern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981), p. 513.
24 Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), p. 209.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

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’.25 By
‘pretty close to us’ he meant close both geographically and historically. Modern
Europeans may chose to forget the fact, but in the past the Muslim world had not
merely lapped the shores of Europe but had extended its authority over vast areas of
the continent. Europe, he pointed out, could easily have been incorporated lastingly
into the Islamic world: ‘the whole of Europe could have been Islamicized – the
whole of Spain certainly was’.26
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’.27
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. As 1985 moves towards violent con-
frontation Burgess has a (Muslim) character speak of his realization that Islam ‘con-
tained everything and yet was as simple and sharp as a sword’, 28 and in Earthly Powers
he has a (Christian) character expound on the attractions of ‘the scimitarlike simpli -
city of Christendom’s ancient enemy’.29 These weapon-images are not chosen at ran-
dom: Islam offers the simplicity of the blade, the sharp edge that cuts through con-
fusion and complexity. From austerity comes Islam’s strength, contrasted throughout
1985 with the ‘muddle and the mess’ 30 of contemporary Britain, the weakness and
irresolution of a society that has reached its point of crisis through ‘sheer drift’.31
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, indecisiveness and feebleness, becomes a passive witness to
the cycles of history which inexorably produce Islamic dominion:

25 Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 438. This article was published in 1981, but Coale
notes that the interviews on which it was based took place (in Monaco) in July 1978.
26 Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 438.
27 Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 438.
28 Burgess, 1985, p. 197.
29 Burgess, Earthly Powers, p. 476.
30 Burgess, 1985, p. 19.
31 Stinson, ‘Better to be hot or cold’, pp. 508-9, 516.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

And where does the power lie? The literal power that drives the
machines sleeps in Islamic oil … Islam is one of the genuine su-
perstates, 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.32

Burgess’s own response to this power is characterized by ambivalence: he both ad-

mires Islam and fears it. He admires Islam’s strength and rigour, and contrasts it with
the West’s weakness, incoherence and lack of conviction, epitomized in the reforms
to the Catholic Church brought about by the Second Vatican Council (which he des-
pised with all the zeal of the lapsed Catholic).33 At the same time he sees Islam as,
innately and inevitably, a threat to Christendom and to the West. More than a reli-
gion, it is a ‘powerful religious ideology’, a faith with mailed fists, imposing itself by
force. Dynamic and aggressive, Islam has ‘punched’ the West before and, taking
advantage of Western weakness, will readily do so again. With the collapse of Chris-
tianity in the West and the decline in the West’s self-confidence and self-belief, a spir-
itual 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 the mystical, with new cults and impossible Moon-type
leaders. But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour … Super-
nature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional
Christianity will come the spread of Islam.34

Burgess sees Christianity destroying itself from within, leaving the West increasingly
vulnerable to the rising power of Islam. That power constitutes both an internal and
an external threat, through Muslim immigration, insidious Islamic propaganda and
indoctrination, the oil wealth of the Middle East and the stranglehold of Islamic
states upon the West’s energy supplies.

32 Burgess, 1985, p. 61.

33 Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 439.
34 Burgess, 1985, p. 234.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

Authority and strength arise in large measure, Burgess suggests, from 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 en-
countered in Malaya, where ‘Most of the Muslims I knew … had been corrupted or
influenced by the British way of life’, drinking alcohol and eating bacon, behaving
with a degree of sexual freedom, and practising a syncretic form of Islam which
eclectically blended animism, folk religion and elements from non-Islamic traditions
with the outward observances that Islam required. To live in such a way, Burgess
understood, 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.35

The comparison with the authoritarian Protestantism associated with John 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’.36 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 in which Christianity is not.

IV. The Rushdie Affair: Islam’s ‘gangster tactics’

In early 1989 Anthony Burgess was caught up in an event that saw literature, politics
and authoritarian Islam come dramatically together: the controversy surrounding the
novel The Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie. The approach to Islam
which Rushdie chose to take in this novel provoked a hostile reaction among many
Muslims. In a number of Muslim countries, and in others with vocal and influential
Muslim populations, The Satanic Verses was banned. Protests took place across the
Islamic world, many of which became violent, with some ending in the deaths of

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

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

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

protesters and others. Bookshops were threatened and some physically attacked;
Muslim protesters 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.37 On 14
February 1989, after six months of protest and turmoil, the Iranian leader Ayatollah
Khomeini issued a fatwa, or formal Muslim judicial ruling, which condemned 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 pub-
lished in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qu’ran’, and its author and every-
one 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.38 In
case the lure of such spiritual rewards was insufficient, the rather more worldly
incentive of hard cash was also on offer: large sums of money were promised by
Islamic organizations within Iran and elsewhere to the zealous Muslims who suc-
ceeded in their holy task of murder.
Anthony Burgess was not slow in his response to these developments. 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.39 In Britain, Rush-
die’s adopted home country, much of the response to the fatwa was highly equivocal,
or even (as in the case of some prominent members of the British Government and
the academic establishment) cravenly appeasing, with university professors and Mem-
bers of Parliament blaming Rushdie for having brought his plight upon himself and
accepting sympathetically and at face value the claims of book-burning, murder-
inciting Muslims that they were the victims of an outrage rather than the perpetrat-
ors of one.40 Burgess, however, was forthright and uncompromising in his expres-
sions of disgust with and opposition to the fatwa, in his championing of free speech
and in his rejection of any Islam-inspired attempt to impose thought-control upon
the people of a non-Islamic country: ‘What a secular society thinks of the prophet
Mohamed’, he declared, ‘is its own affair’.41

37 Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990; New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 2003), pp. 19-36.
38 The text of the fatwa as quoted here comes from Pipes, The Rushdie Affair, p. 27.
39 Anthony Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’, The Independent, 16 February 1989, p. 27.
40 Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (London: Gibson Square,
2006), pp. 45-8: a polemical but factually accurate account.
41 Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

Burgess condemned Khomeini’s fatwa as ‘a declaration of war on the citizens of

a free country’ motivated by ‘political opportunism’, and dismissed Muslims’ 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 un-
der 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 wolf-
like aggression. They forget what the Nazis did to books – or per-
haps 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.42

Burgess’s words present, by any standards, an unflattering image of Islam (at least, of
Islam as a significant number of its adherents chose to express or enact it during the
Rushdie affair), and might have been expected to provoke resentment among anti-
Rushdie Muslims, as well as among other Muslims who may have felt that he was
generalizing unfairly and insultingly; but it was also greeted with hostility by those in
the West whose attitude towards Islamic extremism and totalitarianism tended, even
in the face of violent protests and incitements to murder, towards indulgence,
excuses and appeasement. Burgess’s article was roundly attacked as an ignorant and
prejudiced anti-Muslim diatribe, articulating a caricatured view of Islam and taking
an arrogantly insensitive attitude towards Muslims who sincerely felt Rushdie’s book
to be a deep insult to Islam. He was harshly criticized for taking a simplistic view of
freedom of expression and for reacting to the book-burnings and death-threats with,
deplorably, ‘an automatic defence of liberty and free speech’.43
If that is indeed a criticism, it is surely one Anthony Burgess would have been
happy to accept. He had no more sympathy for those prepared to compromise with

42 Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

43 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); Richard Webster, ‘Reconsidering the Rushdie affair: freedom, censorship, and
American foreign policy’ (unpublished essay, 1992). The dismissive reference to ‘an automatic
defence of liberty and free speech’ comes from Piscatori, p. 780.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

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 what the fatwa represented
was 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.44

In taking this position, Burgess is setting Muslim response to The Satanic Verses
against the background of twelve centuries of complicated, conflictual but always
fertile and mutually invigorating rivalry and interaction between Islam and the West.
It is upon this that he bases his claim to possessing the authority to judge Khomeini’s
action, and to find it wanting in terms of Islamic civilization and culture itself.
Burgess sees the fatwa and the anti-Rushdie protests as signifying an Islam that has
lost the self-confident strength he admires, adopting instead the gangster’s tactics of
threats, intimidation and violence: ‘There is something not very likeable about a faith
that is so quick to order assassination’.45

V. Europe and ‘the presence of the old enemy’

For Burgess the Rushdie affair was more than just a controversy over a particular
book: it represented, at a fundamental level, a conflict of cultures. The complex
interaction of different cultures – particularly in a context of misunderstanding,
incomprehension, tension and conflict – continued to be among his foremost con-
cerns. In April 1990 Burgess explored these issues in a BBC radio talk entitled
‘European culture: does it exist?’ His answer was a qualified ‘yes’: a unified European

44 Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

45 Burgess, ‘Islam’s gangster tactics’.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

culture certainly had existed in the past, but the question of its contemporary reality
was far more problematic. Significantly, he ascribed much of the responsibility for
the emergence of that culture in the past to the unifying agency of Christendom, in
which the liberal humanism which he saw as the essence of the modern culture of
Europe had 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.46

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 and draws
upon 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, taking a narrower form than
that embodied in the old concept of Christendom. The influence of that ‘rather nar-
row concept that ends where the Berlin Wall once stood’, he argues, remains, al-
though we may aspire to ‘a continental concept that restores the old unity – not
Christian but at least liberal and humanistic’. 47 The logic of Burgess’s position is that
the unity of Europe is essentially cultural, not ideological, political or economic, for
cultural unity recognizes and is enriched by differences rather than seeking to
disregard or 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 dif-
ferences, a stability confirmed by centrifugal forces.48

46 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 300, 301.

47 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 300-1.
48 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 305.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

This notion of Europe as a ‘stability confirmed by centrifugal forces’ is a new ver-

sion, in more abstract form, of the vision of a European continuum overcoming
divisive, polarizing categories which Burgess had articulated in his 1964 novel Honey
for the Bears. In this novel Burgess reflected on the oppositions and divisions of Cold
War Europe: ‘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 a
continuum, the merging, Europe is all Manichees’.49
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’ 50) just as firmly as he does the totalitarianism of
authoritarian politics or religion. Such internationalization threatens to impose a uni-
formity of banality and to bring about ‘the elimination of the various subtleties and
ambiguities which make up a national culture’.51 Burgess’s vision of Europe involves
those ‘subtleties and ambiguities’ existing within a larger, all-encompassing cultural
framework. In the European context that all-embracing culture can be seen as, in
both senses of the word, catholic, and Burgess maintains that it is certainly a Chris -
tian or at least Christianized culture. He held to this position despite his own rejec-
tion of both the Catholicism within which he was brought up and that of the mod-
ern post-Vatican II Church: ‘I think the only future for the West, the secular future
for the West, lies in some kind of Christianity’.52 Burgess’s emphasis on the centrality
of Christendom returns him to the inevitability of conflict with Christianity’s ancient
adversary, Islam.
Burgess writes that modern Europe ‘is a Europe which has to admit the pres-
ence of the old enemy, Islam, as one of the constituent structures. This I am old-
fashioned enough to regret’.53 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 signi-
ficance 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

49 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), pp. 37-47.
50 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.
51 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.
52 Coale, ‘An interview with Anthony Burgess’, p. 450.
53 Burgess, ‘European culture’, p. 301.

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 RALPH HARRINGTON · ‘The old enemy’: Anthony Burgess and Islam

the relationship between the European culture Burgess defends and Islam, an ambi-
valent and complex relationship hallowed by history, will always be in the end an ant-
agonistic one: ‘Islam will not be absorbed into Western culture, and the West has
never been able to come to terms with it’.54

VI. Conclusion: a faith of ‘scimitared marauders’

His awareness of this history of rivalry and conflict left Anthony Burgess unable sin-
cerely 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 relev-
ant in the twentieth century as when its ‘mailed fist first 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
1985.55 For Burgess, Islam was always at its heart a faith of ‘scimitared marauders’.56
How valid that perception may be, whether as a means of understanding Burgess’s
own time or our own, is open to debate; but the actions of some of Islam’s own
adherents have ensured that it 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.

© Ralph Harrington 2008.

All rights reserved. This essay can be reproduced for

individual research and for educational purposes only. No
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http://www.artificialhorizon.org

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

55 Burgess, 1985, p. 197. The speaker is a British convert to Islam: Burgess understood very well that
those who freely join a religion through conversion will often be numbered among its most zeal-
ous and intolerant adherents.
56 Anthony Burgess, ‘Living for sex and danger’, New York Times, 20 May 1990, Book Review section,
p. 1.

17