Your narrator was based on Sayid Qutb, the ideological father of radical Islamists. He came to America in the 1940s and wrote about how disgusting American sexual licentiousness was. I love his writing and how it relates to Islam and women and sexuality — those passages are almost like Harlequin romance novels. How much do you think the origin of radical Islam is based in this kind of sexual repression? I know you've said you think repressed women in Islamic society are the key to change.
I do think that's true. I think that Islamism is revanchist; it's trying to get back what's been lost. What they hate most about the West is sexual equality. A devout Muslim sees a woman driving a car, guess what he feels? Dishonor. He feels humiliated. It's their last fief. It's ferociously patriarchal.
I've heard Iran hires censors to go through individual magazines by hand and black out any skin.
And women can't go to football matches because they'll see the men's legs. The suggestion is that Muslim women are so unbelievably attractive, and Muslim men are such incredible studs and jocks and so horny that the sight of a strand of hair would send them absolutely crazy. And you're not supposed to have eye contact with a woman. If you interviewed a woman for a teaching job, you wouldn't look in her eyes. The whole predicate is that [the men are] so virile.
There's a lot about the West that you seem to think is lurid and pornographic.
It's very unlovely, modernity, and it's very messy, but everything I love is in that. I read some conversation between two Pakistanis in Karichi. One said, "We need some Taliban in Karachi." The other one said, "No, they're crazy!" And the first said, "Not much. Just a little bit of Taliban." So we need a little bit of Taliban. You take the unlovely aspects of it as just a part of what human beings are like.
The narrator of House of Meetings talks about how the midlife crisis is a purely Western phenomenon. How was yours?
I did have one. Sorry to inform you that you're going to get one every decade after you're forty, and it's a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won't prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death. You know that feeling when you look in the mirror and you think, This is really odd, because everyone else is getting old, but you, you lucky cheeky boy, it's not happening to you! That feeling goes away. You feel your years. You hardly notice a pretty girl. It's a great melancholy.
Now, with modern medicine, you're expected to remain virile into old age.
Until your death. Viagra — no one's said an honest thing about Viagra. It goes right to the heart of masculinity. Sexual failure, fiasco, what Christopher Hitchens and I call the "no-show" of the hardon — what's that there for in masculinity? It's there to keep you honest, to keep you humble. Any swagger and macho stuff can be horribly undercut by the no-show. And if the no-show is no longer possible because of chemical assistance, I don't think it'll have a good effect. The no-show is a moderating thing, where your anxieties and your nerves and your insecurities express themselves in this horrible way. The potential to fail, if that's chemically removed, it won't be there to keep you honest, to keep you humble. Everyone will swagger around thinking they've got a big cock.
I can't think of any taboos you haven't tackled in your books. In Yellow Dog, there's this odd — not incest, but . . .
Child molestation, yeah. Incest.
Why broach these subjects?
I like extreme things. I like the subjects that get people's alarm bells ringing, but I don't do it for that reason. I'm excited by transgression, I suppose. It's a delayed rebelliousness. I didn't need to be a rebel when I was young, because I got on so well with my parents. My friends tended to have a great battle, particularly with their fathers, and I never did. I didn't need to. And that was all about sex, actually — the fathers felt the sexual revolution came when we were all about twenty. I think many a father clashed with his son in that generation because [of the father's] sexual envy, disguised as high-mindedness and morality and scruple. He probably married the second or third woman he'd ever gone out with, and had been more or less faithful to her. Full of unexplored sexual drives. And when they see their sons pulling women out of their hair, they clash. My father never put any obstacle in my way about that. He took my brother and me out to lunch when we were about fourteen or fifteen and bought us a gross of condoms each. If you had a girl that went into the wrong room in the middle of the night, you'd find a note outside your door saying, "If your friend would like to stay for breakfast, be discreet with the cleaning lady."
