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What if 1916 had never happened?

This alternative history was written at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which had led ultimately to both Irish independence, and partition.

It was published in the 16th April 2006 edition of the Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, where I was a staff journalist. I expect they might hold the copyright, but I wrote it and I think it’s fair of me to reproduce it here as I suspect they’re unlikely to reprint it anytime soon.

Easter Rising - Wikipedia

THE TRIALS of the trenches seemed a long time ago now. On Sackville Street, in glorious June sunshine, Prime Minister John Dillon and his guest, David Lloyd George, led the cheering thousands who saluted the returning Irish troops who had defended their nation and empire so valiantly against the Germans. It was a time of celebration, even if the seditious activities of the once-respected lawyer, Edward Carson, were beginning to cause unrest in the north of the island.

And for the joyous crowd, their Union Jacks held proudly aloft, it was the achievement of the soldiers in the trenches that had helped bring about Home Rule. There might always be the odd crank for whom self-determination was never enough, like the wild-eyed MP for East Clare, Mr de Valera. But the vast majority of the Irish citizenry as the recent landslide election victory for Dillon’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had indicated were delighted to have their own parliament and saw no need to reject the monarchy or sever the brotherly bond with Britain.

Of course, things could have been so different, as one Rathgar schoolteacher noted sullenly. Had the Irish Volunteers’ chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, not learned of their plans to strike for Irish independence three years earlier and immediately countermanded them, then PH Pearse and his comrades in the Irish Republican Brotherhood might well have obtained complete independence for Ireland while England was embroiled in a foreign war.

Or so he believed. But the arrest of the former diplomat, Roger Casement, and the scuttling of the shipful of arms he was bringing to Ireland had made their plans for an uprising pointless, as Mr MacNeill had argued. The rising had evaporated before it had even begun.

By 1919, Mr MacNeill was prominent on the opposition benches in the House of Commons on College Green. Sinn Féin, led by the irascible Arthur Griffith, still argued for absolute independence but its minority status in parliament proved that desire was not shared by the people in general. Casement still languished in Kilmainham, and the IRB had withered away to an irrelevant handful of dissidents. With Home Rule now a fact, their role seemed increasingly defunct.

After decades of trying, the late John Redmond had finally secured Home Rule from Britain as a reward for sending the National Volunteers to the trenches. The humourless poet, Pearse, had returned to teaching Irish to sour-faced lads and dreaming of fomenting revolution. The radical Scot, James Connolly, was still preaching the gospel of socialism from his trade union headquarters in Liberty Hall. But few listened to them.

Instead, the general election held in late December 1918, while many of Dublin’s tenement poor were wracked with Spanish flu, was heavily influenced by two factors. One was David Lloyd George’s firm commitment to Irish Home Rule, made in his Armistice speech only weeks earlier. ‘This is no time for words,’ he had declared. ‘Our hearts are too full of gratitude to which no tongue can give adequate expression. We especially pay tribute to our Irish brethren, in return for whose valiance long-promised Home Rule is the least reward we may grant them.’

The other factor that swung the election so forcefully in the IPP’s favour was the introduction of universal suffrage. The radical Countess Markievicz was elected to represent Sinn Féin but most Irish women who voted for the first time were much more conservative and rallied to Dillon’s paternal leadership. A State visit in 1921 by King George V helped to shore up the popularity of the monarchy but, throughout the ’20s, the popularity of Sinn Féin seemed inexorably to rise.

Sinn Féin, led by a younger generation than the increasingly tired IPP, by now renamed the Irish National Party (INP), were making huge inroads into the working class vote. Sinn Féin’s charismatic young leader, the Corkonian Michael Collins, made a series of angry speeches in Dublin’s House of Commons calling on the government to deal with the increased sectarian rioting in Belfast.

Unionist Party leader Edward Carson, by now deputy prime minister in the ruling coalition with the INP, denounced the activities of his former colleague, James Craig, a stockbroker turned terrorist. In 1926, under pressure from Sinn Féin, the INP pressed to have Ireland included in the declaration made by the Earl of Balfour at that year’s Imperial Conference. Prime Minister Kevin O’Higgins triumphantly returned from London to an Ireland now officially considered independent within the British Empire, sharing only a monarchy with Britain.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, left wing governments swept to power in Britain and Ireland. With the support of Jim Larkin’s Labour Party, Sinn Féin at last made it into power, despite the recent split in their ranks (Eamon de Valera had formed his own party, named Fianna Fáil, after a bitter row with Michael Collins over devolution for Ulster).

The following decade was a dark one for the nation. While membership of the British Commonwealth continued to encourage trade and helped to grow Ireland’s economy, the dark spectre of fascism was spreading across Europe. General Eoin O’Duffy attracted many disaffected soldiers to his quasi-fascist National Guard movement quickly named the Blueshirts in recognition of the traits they shared with Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain.

By 1933, the fascist salute could be seen in every town and village in the royal dominion of Ireland. Clashes between O’Duffy’s paramilitary organisation and the RIC became a weekly, almost daily occurrence. O’Duffy announced a major rally for Dublin in August 1933, to be held in the Phoenix Park. Fearing a coup, since O’Duffy carried much support in the Irish battalions, Prime Minister Collins banned it and announced martial law. The Irish civil war had begun.

Troops loyal to the House of Commons moved to secure the capital, while O’Duffy’s men marched through Cork, Belfast, Londonderry and Limerick. James Craig’s Ulster Volunteer Force, a heavily armed terrorist organisation responsible for sporadic bombings and murders in the north of Ireland, declared its own ‘war’ for independence in Ulster.

Collins moved quickly against O’Duffy and Craig. With the help of troops provided by Ramsay McDonald’s national government in Britain, both rebellions were quickly suppressed and their leaderships interned in The Curragh army camp. Before restoring democratic government, Collins approved the executions of O’Duffy and Craig. He told Deputy Prime Minister Jim Larkin later that day: ‘Early this morning, I signed my own death warrant.’

However, Collins’s decisiveness contrasted with Britain’s dithering. Westminster moved to ban the fascist Blackshirts only in 1937 but, by then, the world was lurching towards another world war. The first had brought Ireland Home Rule; the second would prove devastating. Accused of dictatorship by the leader of the opposition, Eamon de Valera, Collins formed a government of national unity on the eve of German hostilities breaking out. Only William Cosgrave’s Irish National Party, where many former blueshirts had found a political home, refused to take part, arguing instead for peace at any price.

Once again, British troops flooded into Ireland, and were stationed on the Allies’ westernmost border. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Collins used Radio Eireann to inform the people that little Ireland was at war with Nazi Germany. The western seaboard was prowled by ‘ wolfpacks’ of U-boats and patrolled by the Royal Irish Air Force. German nationals were interred in The Curragh camp recently vacated by O’Duffy’s and Craig’s followers. Rationing began. Dublin and Belfast were devastated in the Blitz. Carpet bombing reduced many historical buildings to rubble. The key ports of Derry and Queenstown, where convoys from the United States came to dock, were blockaded by U-boats.

In 1941, as the dogfights of the Battle of the British Isles raged, a plot was uncovered. William Joyce, like his party leader, Eamon De Valera, was an American of Irish heritage. It soon emerged that he was in secret negotiations with the Nazi regime to provide a ‘backdoor to the British Isles’. Together with some extremist republicans, who espoused an independent Eire free from the monarchy, he planned to smuggle Nazi troops into the largely unguarded southwest of the country.

De Valera, who personally espoused neutrality in the war though he sat in Cabinet, was appalled at the treachery and exposed it to Collins. Not for the first time, Prime Minister Collins was forced to sign execution orders. Hundreds of thousands of Irish troops fought valiantly on the African front under Allied General Richard Mulcahy, who later played a major role in the D-Day landings. For many Irishmen who had been conflicted by their republican sentiment, the discovery of the Nazi death camps seemed to vindicate the decision by de Valera to expose Joyce’s treachery.

In the post-war elections, Fianna Fáil swept to power, backed in coalition by William O’Brien’s Irish Labour Party. Collins’s Sinn Féin was reduced to a fraction of its former power. Basil Brooke’s Unionist Party boycotted the Commons in protest and again called for a regional parliament for Ulster. Returning soldiers in the North were dismayed by this lurch towards republicanism, and the Ulster Volunteer Force attracted many of them into its fold.

The assassination of Collins by an unknown UVF man while driving through remote north Antrim in 1952 is believed by many to have sparked the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Ulster. Collins had never been forgiven for ordering the execution of William Craig. Collins’s State funeral was the biggest ever seen in Ireland. It was attended by dignitaries from around the world including US President Harry Truman and the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Prime Minister de Valera gave a valedictory speech, in which he said: ‘History will record the greatness of Michael Collins.’

By the late 1950s, an economic revival was under way. As the population edged towards seven million, Ireland joined other European countries in inviting foreign workers to its shores. The first wave of ethnic immigrants, from the Caribbean, docked in Queenstown in 1958, and black faces were soon commonplace in Ireland’s major cities. The call also went out to Irish descendants in Australia, North America and even Argentina to return to help build up the economy of the motherland.

By the mid-60s, the so-called ‘Celtic Boom’ economy was in full swing. Ireland and Britain were invited to join the EEC. But Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was appalled by the loose morals and drug-taking of young Irish people in the swinging ’60s. In 1969, firebrand Ulster preacher Ian Paisley, whose fringe political party, the DUP, had been linked by some to the ongoing UVF terror campaign, helped to negotiate a Unionist ceasefire and the ‘Troubles’ finally came to an end.

Se·n Lemass’s Sinn Féin government agreed to devolved government for the nine counties of Ulster, within a federal Ireland. The oil crisis of the following decade led to years of stagnation, and Sinn Féin finance minister Charles Haughey famously warned the people to tighten their belts. The ’80s was a period of unstable coalitions. Haughey-led Sinn Féin twice entered coalition with Gerry Adams’s Fianna Fáil. In between came the so-called ‘rainbow government’, in which INP Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald led four parties, including Dick Spring’s Labour Party and David Trimble’s Unionists.

But in 1996, following the election of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin again, the radical government called for a referendum on an Irish republic within the British commonwealth. The proposal was passed by a narrow margin and, in the subsequent presidential election, INP veteran John Hume became the Irish Republic’s first president, 80 years after an abortive rebellion in Dublin now almost forgotten by the history books.

Timeline:

1926: Irish PM Kevin O’Higgins gains Dominion status

1933: Michael Collins tells Jim Larkin ‘I’ve signed my death warrant’

1945: U-boats fight the Royal Irish Air Force off Queenstown

1958: first shipload of Caribbean migrant workers arrives in Ireland

1969: Ian Paisley helps end ‘The Troubles’

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A Statue for Anthony

Dublin has a statue of James Joyce.

Edinburgh has an entire monument to Walter Scott.

Cardiff even has an entire square dedicated to Roald Dahl.

But Manchester to date has not recognised its greatest author. Manchester City Council has launched a new consultation exercise on the future of statues and monuments in the city. You can see the questionnaire by clicking here.

There is an opportunity to propose new subjects for monuments. Perhaps you might consider filling it in and proposing that they rectify their egregious lack of an Anthony Burgess statue?

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Messels about the Molodoy

While researching my forthcoming book on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, I came across mention of Molodoy, a shortlived Sheffield punk band of quasi-fascist tendencies whose schtick was that they appeared in full droog regalia on stage.

Molodoy is the Nadsat term for young, though it is barely used in the novel. Burgess did however use it extensively in one of his many revisits to the world of Alex, when he conducted an interview with his own creation entitled “A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy” in 1987, which can be found in the 2012 Corrected Edition of the novel as edited by Professor Andrew Biswell, or online here for now.

Judging by the information in this article on Dangerous Minds, the band Molodoy sound like they were right charmers. Some members later went on to form the disturbingly named Dachau Choir. Anyhow, their cover of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ does strike one as a note of sour and deranged genius.

Molodoy were far from the only band to derive inspiration from Burgess’s novel. In fact a large host of musical artists have either named themselves after aspects of the novel, or else written songs inspired by it.

But for Burgess, we might never have had Moloko, Moloko Knives, The Devotchkas, The Droogs, Campag Vellocet or Korova (which refers to both a band and a record label). And of the ten fictional bands mentioned within the work, at least five have had their names appropriated by real-life groups: Heaven 17, Johnny Zhivago, The Humpers, The Sparks and The Legend.

Molodoy may have been mentioned at the Kingston University conference on A Clockwork Orange a couple of years back, I seem to remember. Perhaps they’ll also feature in the forthcoming essay collection being edited by Matt Melia.

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As Never Before

I was watching football yesterday, and chatting with friends remotely during the match, as so many of us do in these pandemic lockdown socially atomised days. It occurred to me that the narrative arc of a particular player, struggling for form, hitting the post, his anguish and despair, then eventually relief and the breakthrough of scoring, would make an interesting visual focus.

I was, in short, reminded of the 2006 documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, in which some seventeen cameras were directed solely upon the mercurial Real Madrid player during a match against Villareal. It’s an intriguing piece of cinema. On the one hand, it’s hypnotic, with its somnolent score by Scottish band Mogwai. On another, it’s the juxtaposition of Zidane’s concentration, and isolation, against that of the various groups of fans around the world, who appear in the half-time segment of the movie.

Zidane-movie.jpg

Of course, this was too good an experimental film idea to be original. There is nothing new and good under the sun. The original version of this idea was, astonishingly, made in 1970 and released the following year. Entitled Fussball Wie Noch Nie, or Football as Never Before in English, it was directed by the relatively obscure German new wave director, Hellmuth Costard, who is probably best known, or most notorious, nowadays for his early short in which an ejaculating penis recites the German morality law relating to movies.

Hellmuth Costard
Hellmuth Costard

Costard’s version follows George Best of Manchester United in his 1970 pomp, playing against Coventry City. Like the Zidane movie which emulates it, it isolates and focuses upon the individual genius in a team sport, generating a flowing image which is simultaneously utterly alienating, because so distanced from how we ordinarily spectate upon sport, and also so utterly familiar, because it is how we live life, as individuals performing our role as part of a greater, more complex whole, of which we only witness our corner.

Football As Never Before (1971) directed by Hellmuth Costard
Football As Never Before (1971)

This both is and is not the George Best we are familiar with, in other words. It is not, obviously, the Miss World dating George, the Carnaby Street fashion George, the drunk George on Wogan’s sofa, the alcoholic George, the wifebeating George. These Georges are real and true and fragments of a larger life, but are not the focus of why Best is an international icon.

This is football George, the subject of the witticism: Maradona good, Pele better, George Best. Allegedly the most talented player ever, or asserted so in some quarters at least. This is George doing what the world loved him for, playing soccer. But it is not how we are used to seeing him play. This is tightly focused on him alone. We see how much he shambles about, turning this way and that, occasionally perplexed, strolling, then breaking into a brief run, then stopping. The game, in other words, is elsewhere, or rather, it mostly takes place beyond our focus. He is only intermittently part of it. Here is a five minute clip, complete with a soundtrack, Football, by Manchester band Arficeden, to give you a sense of Costard’s vision.

It is perhaps too much to extrapolate out from this unusual and now obscure documentary to derive wider conclusions. Yet this is refreshing and familiar. Gone are the implicit negative narratives which always seem to hover in the background like a dropdown menu about George, the drinking, the womanising, the sad squandering of talent and ultimately life. We know they are there, but they are not here.

Instead we are treated to George doing what he did best, if you’ll pardon the pun. George the footballer. George on the pitch. But it’s not what we thought it was. It’s George on the pitch almost from his own point of view, how it feels to BE George on the pitch. And it’s a confusing wander back and forth, seemingly aimless, speeding up and slowing down, mostly a bystander in his own narrative.

In some ways, this is the real experience of George as footballer. But it’s not the one we’re familiar with, and perhaps not one we’re comfortable with either. As I said, it’s too much to extrapolate from this, but it seems a metaphor for life is in there, waiting for us to see it.

At the very least, Costard’s documentary, his way of presenting football as never before, is a reminder that narrative frame underpins all the stories we tell ourselves about reality. And in this era of fake news, alternative facts and ideological echo chambers, it’s good to be reminded of that from time to time.

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Double Vision Politics

A week on from the US Presidential election of 2020, and with still much controversy and confusion involved, though a consensus among the media and global leaders that Joe Biden of the Democrats is the President-Elect, I think it might be opportune to give my 2c on the matter.

A succinct metaphor which has been suggested from time to time relating in particular to American politics, and its divisive two-party system, is “one screen, two movies.” The metaphor works because it proposes the idea that there is a set of events, what we might call reality, upon which two separate narratives are projected.

We can see this happening in America, and indeed in quite a few other places, if we choose to look. Partly this is a product of binary thinking, our (often false) predeliction arising from having hemispheric brains that there are two things to choose from in any scenario. There is black and white, up and down, left and right. But there is also brown, yellow, blue, green, opaque or transparent. There is sideways. There is in short always perpendicular options to the binary. There is, in short, nuance.

But let us return to ‘one screen, two movies.’ What happens if you try to watch BOTH movies at once, in real time? Or even simply flick back and forth between the two, like a magic eye picture? It’s obviously disorientating. A bigot Nazi righteously thrown out of office becomes an isolated victim of mass electoral fraud. A fifty year career political veteran becomes a senile old coot with a druggie son who’s been compromised by China. And so on. In short, there is such distance between the narratives that they almost cannot be comprehended simultaneously.

Critically, it seems almost impossible to reconcile them. There is no possible Hegelian synthesis here. These perspectives are oil and water, all the more unmixable for being all the more fundamentally rooted in a sense of tribal identities. The wailing despair which greeted Trump’s election four years ago, a gutteral howl from genteel middle-aged women captured on camera, is matched only by the outcry of relief and triumphalism of Biden’s supporters, a cohort who only a few years back were meming about how he was the dumbass idiot foil to a wise and weary Barack Obama.

Once practised a little, it becomes a parlour game of whimsy. Pick any topic and try to guess at the polarised views. Immigration controls are either a racist rejection of non-white humanity, or else a belated attempt to shore up jobs for Americans. Transgender storytime in libraries is an act of education and acceptance or a sign of enforced degeneracy and an attempt to destroy families and identity. And so on. But it goes beyond whimsical games of course. These viewpoints are not reconcilable and no amount of calls for unity will make them so.

The biggest tragedy is that there is no attempt at empathy from either side to the other. Both feel under fundamental attack from friends, neighbours, even family. This is tearing natural human relationships apart, inside and outside America. People don’t want to watch two movies on one screen. They can’t tolerate the cognitive dissonance. Instead, they are forced to demonise those who are watching the other movie.

One wonders therefore how it will end. Half the US electorate will feel inevitably disenfranchised no matter what, as has been the case for Trump’s entire term of office. America is, of course, an empire in slow decline and has been for quite some time. But, not unlike the bankrupcy of Mike in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, empires tend to fail very slowly, then all at once. And the power vacuum a collapsed America would create is highly concerning. No wonder Russia and China look on with interest.

I of course am no expert on the matter, having only a couple of years as a political correspondent for an Irish newspaper, and a lifetime’s passion for the sport of elections, to fuel my speculations. But if journalism taught me anything, it taught me the importance of being able to speak to people you do not agree with, to be able to genuinely listen to them and what they think and why they might think it, no matter how bizarre or repellant or even threatening it may seem. However, I am tiring too of watching two movies. The double vision is not conducive to clarity. For the next while, I will instead focus my attention on just one thing, and as a literary critic and academic scholar…

Dystopia seems like a good choice.

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Robert Fisk and Islamofuturism

Only two weeks after this wonderful documentary about the work of Robert Fisk was released, the man himself is dead.

TIFF 2019: Documentary on Robert Fisk highlights how the foreign correspondent manages complex, grim realities - The Globe and Mail

He was a paragon of journalism, whose doorstop book, The Great War for Civilisation, based on his PhD taken at Trinity College Dublin, is the single best explanation for why we find ourselves in the world we are in. You really should read the book, but for a taster, here’s Fisk speaking at his alma mater about his experiences in the Middle East.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East: Amazon.it: Fisk, Robert: Libri in altre lingue

Fisk was a journalist of the old school, by which I mean he believed in travelling to the site of an event to explore it in person, in examining the evidence for himself, in speaking to people (directly and in their own languages ideally) to get a rounded perspective on events, and in doing careful research and taking copious notes to augment his own prodigious knowledge and memory.

In this age when the old gatekeeper media are dying out, being replaced by both the amateur hordes of opinion mongers and influencers on the one hand, and by AI algorithm reportage and platform curation on the other, Robert Fisk’s methods seem like the craftsmanship of a lost age.

His decades of reporting on the affairs of the Middle East – its conflicts, their origins and of course Western interference – stands as a testimony to how proper, factual, neutral journalism was once the norm, or at least the aspiration, before the onset of web 2.0, clickbait, alternative facts and post-truth.

Of course, all journalism is ultimately ephemeral, at best the first draft of history. Fisk however had accrued a depth of knowledge, not only of Middle Eastern cultures and politics, but of the long history which had led to the current affairs he reported on. In order to gather this information together in one place, he wrote a doctoral thesis which eventually became his magnum opus – The Great War for Civilisation.

One often feels as if one needs a doctorate in the fraught and complex history of the Middle East to comprehend why things there happen as they do. Fisk had one, and it showed in his writing. He was fully able to account for his own Westernness in his writing about Islam, Arabs and the Middle East in general, as he had spent many decades imbibing the rich, sour and often bitter history of the West’s engagement with all three. And only a Westerner of his ilk, an Englishman with a military heritage and of ultimately Norse extraction, could have been the credible voice within the West that he was.

It is a tragic sign of the times that the fraught relationship between Islam and the West has entered a deadly new phase, just as the carefully researched journalism that Fisk embodied has been jettisoned almost entirely by news outlets motivated to generate sensationalism for clickbait income. What comes next is likely to be ugly, and I’m sorry we will not have Robert Fisk to help explain it for us.

Fortunately we do have many great creators, artists, writers and filmmakers from Muslim backgrounds who are already hard at work attempting to imagine into being better futures not only for the Middle East, or for Islam, but for the world and indeed all worlds. (Allah, after all, is called God of All Worlds in the Qu’ran.) Many of these – it sometimes feels impossibly like all – are featured in a new text about Islamofuturism.

Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World has been written by Jörg Matthias Determann, and was recently published by Bloomsbury. I have written a full review which will run in Foundation in the fullness of time. But for now, and without wishing to preview that review, I would like to note that Islamofuturism may well be the ultimate resolution for the many problems between Islam and the West which Fisk spent his life exploring and reporting about.

Media of Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life

This is, of course, a somewhat utopian position to take, and I am an ardent anti-utopian. (Too many utopian visions result in gulags, thought police and death camps for my liking, no matter how well-intentioned they commence.) Nevertheless, what struck me while reading Determann’s fascinating survey of Islamofuturisms from Indonesia to Syria was the pervasive presence of two things in the multifaceted iterations of this rapidly proliferating genre and movement.

Firstly, the omnipresence of the shadow of The Thousand and One Nights. We have an ongoing origin debte among Western SF about when SF originated. Was it, as I’d argue, in the late 19th century alongside the development of professional science and industrialisation? Many, most prominently Brian Aldiss, argue for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as an origin text, and this is somewhat persuasive. Others see SF in earlier eras and texts – the voyages extraordinaires of the Age of Expansion; the lunar visitation texts of Rome, even in the automata described by Homer in the Iliad, or the “alien spaceships” of the Book of Ezekiel. But these are all from the Western tradition. From an Islamic, Middle Eastern tradition, it makes perfect sense to identify The Thousand and One Nights as a seminal SF text.

The Thousand and One Nights - Literature 114 (Spring 2014-2015) - Harvard Wiki

Secondly, Islamofuturist cultural outputs almost entirely derive some of their animus from Western SF, according to Determann. Western forms, narrative devices and even sometimes direct lifts of scenes or characters are repurposed by Islamofuturism. Star Wars and Star Trek are huge influences, no less so than the indigenous cultures of Cairo, Istanbul or Jakarta.

What struck me, reading Determann’s book, is the sheer proliferation of Islamofuturism. His text is timely. In only a few years, the kind of survey he has conducted will no longer be possible in a single volume. Instead we will have to talk about Turkish cinematic visions of the future, Egyptian pulp SF novels, Indonesian feminist futurisms, and so on. In all of these environments and genres, Muslim dreamers are creating futures that contain Islam, centre Islam, challenge Islam, modernise Islam and most significantly, find modes of rapprochement between Islam and the West (yes, including revenge myths of total annihilation and takeover, but this is far from the norm.)

Robert Fisk and Islamofuturism thus function as two sides of one coin, or rather, as a Janus statue with one head looking back to the complex origins and sad histories of Western engagement with Islam and the Middle East, while the other looks forward, more in hope than expectation admittedly, to the future.

I hope that the Robert Fisk of a century from now has a happier narrative to write than The Great War for Civilisation. I hope he, or she, Western or Muslim or both or neither, can tell a tale of Islamofuturism and it’s reshaping of Islam and the West.