Updike’s Anatomy of a Terrorist

9-11-attacks

Last Thursday night I had an overbooked schedule.  I was moderating a book club at the local public library on John Updike’s 2006 novel Terrorist (at 7 p.m.).  I was in charge of a talkback following a college production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (at 8 p.m.).  And I was screening Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver for my American Film class (also at 8 p.m.). 

A fourth event, our on-going salon for my cancer-stricken friend Alan Paskow, was also scheduled for that evening but then postponed.

(For the record, I left the first event early to get to the second and arranged for someone else to show the film.)

Sometimes it is possible to find an interesting theme running through unrelated events, and that proved to be the case here.  The Terrorist is about an American high school student, a convert to Islam, who is seduced into becoming a suicide bomber.  Taxi Driver is the film that John Hinckley watched before shooting Ronald Reagan.  Arms and the Man, as I wrote in my last post, is a play that pokes fun at people’s heightened images of themselves.  Taken together, the three provide an important lesson for America today.

First, Terrorist  (spoiler alert).  Ahmad Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an immigrant Egyptian father who has abandoned the family (Ahmad never knew him) is looking for something to believe in and falls under the influence of a radical imam.  His mother is a permissive artist type who doesn’t believe in trying to control him.  Ahmad is groomed to be a truck driver but doesn’t know at first that the plan is for him to convey a truckload full of explosives into the Lincoln Tunnel.  In other action, he is attracted to an African American Baptist teenager (who goes on to become a prostitute), and he finds a job at a Lebanese American furniture store that is (unbeknownst to him) a front for terrorists.

He also has long conversations with his high school guidance counselor, a secular and cynical Jew (Jacob Levy) who goes out of his way to work with him.  In the end Jacob, while sitting in the truck in the Lincoln Tunnel, talks him out of setting off the bomb.

Updike has a keen eye for Americana and he uses the vantage point of a young fervent Muslim as a lens.  It’s almost as if Updike is asking what about America (the ironically named New Prospect, New Jersey in this instance) is so distasteful to Islamic extremists.   The author has steeped himself in the Koran to figure out how a terrorist might draw upon the work.

To demonstrate that Islamic extremism is not an entirely foreign implant, Updike finds similarities with evangelical Christianity.  Ahmad’s critique of American materialism and his longing for transcendence is familiar to the black Baptists in the community.

While religious belief appears problematic, a secular worldview doesn’t seem to offer young people anything better.  Neither Ahmad’s mother nor his counselor are able to speak to Ahmad’s longings.  At best, Levy is able to talk him down from his planned terrorist act, in part by getting in the truck and showing him that he is willing to die himself.  It’s not entirely clear why this works. 

Maybe it’s because Levy has planted of doubt in this sensitive and intelligent adolescent.  He has certainly exposed the flawed ways of adults, including of the imam who has manipulated Ahmad. At the end, when Ahmad emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel into the sunlight of Manhattan, he feels his god has been taken from him.

The Terrorist got our group thinking about Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings.  I had to leave at that point (to attend the play) so I don’t know what the group concluded.   Despite the readiness by some to label Hasan a terrorist, my own view is that he is a terrorist only if he was part of a conspiracy.  Merely being inspired by Islamic extremism isn’t enough.

To put it another way, if he’s a Muslim terrorist, then the man who shot abortion clinic doctor George Tiller is a Christian terrorist and those websites, organizations, Congressmen and television hosts that irresponsibly threw around phrases like “Tiller the baby killer” (including George O’Reilly) were terrorist enablers. My larger point (why I bring this up) is that irresponsible speech in the country seems to have spiraled out of control, whether from imams, pastors, politicians, pundits, or whoever else, with no one acknowledging responsibility when some weak-minded listener grabs a gun and starts shooting people.  The left and right are both guilty although at the moment the right has the edge in extremist rhetoric.

In Updike’s book, the Jewish atheist prevails at last, a voice for an exhausted humanism that at the least has the virtue of doing no harm, even if it doesn’t get the blood pumping.  Let’s call it common-level caring for others.  But can it prevail against the adrenaline rush of fear and hate?  More on this tomorrow.

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