Martin Amis, the influential British novelist who began his career as the bad boy of British letters, has more recently taken on the controversial subject of the politics of terror. In advance of his Donner Canadian Foundation Lecture in Toronto next Wednesday, the author spoke to the National Post's Stewart Bell about the struggle between feminism and multiculturalism.

Q The title of your lecture is "Feminism and al-Qaeda." Where are you going with this?

A Well, al-Qaeda is used faute de mieux really, because there doesn't seem to be any good name for what we mean, in that "Islamism" is too close to Islam, "Islamofacism" has the letters I-S-L-A-M in it and to certain clockwork minds this is always identified as an attack on Islam. Which it isn't, the slogan being, "We respect Muhammad, we do not respect Mohamed Atta." And there are various other candidates like "jihadism" and "takfirism" for what we're talking about.

Q Qutbism is another, after Sayyid Qutb.

A Ya, there are various candidates but the one that seems to be at least unambiguous is al-Qaeda. There's no one who has a multicultural fondness for Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. So it's as neutral a way as possible of referring to the thing we all know is Islamic extremism. And what I hope to do is not go through all the usual marshalling of heavy paragraphs, but talk personally about my relations with, in fact, Islamic girls when I was young and talk about the divide in terms of what we can all understand. And as I see it, we should reprocess the argument about al-Qaedaism in purely feminist terms and then, in my view, it all becomes much clearer and there are things we can agree on from all over the spectrum.

Q You've described the champions of militant Islam as woman haters.

A I want to move slightly beyond that and just say that, you know, you could take the most politically correct person in North America or indeed Europe and say, what are your views on the following subjects: female circumcision; forced marriages of nine-year-old brides, not to nine-year-old boys but old men, as in Iran and Yemen; what do you think of honour killing? And what seemed to go wrong about 10 years ago was that feminism relegated itself beneath multiculturalism. So you had Germaine Greer saying to object to female circumcision is cultural imperialism. But I do object to female circumcision and so does President Obama and presumably there are many feminists who would not agree with him but I agree with him when he said that female circumcision can have no place in our society. What these things I've mentioned have in common is violence towards women, which is a universal tendency. In England, the most common form of death for women between the ages of 16 and 45 is murder by male partner. And it's possible to see the history of civilization as the history of mastering this prehistoric urge to control women, which relies on sheer masculine bulk. We are bigger and stronger, and always have been. And the tendency to give in to that and just assert male physical supremacy is part of all our histories -- Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism. It is the same fight and surely this is common ground. Women are not a minority. Surely the gender question trumps all the others and not the other way around, which is the way that we've been looking at it so far.

Q These are topical issues for Canadians right now. The government just released a new citizenship guide that specifies that honour killings are not tolerated in Canada, and moderate Canadian Muslims have called for a ban on the niqab head covering.

A The trouble with all this is that people think what you're really talking about is immigration and that what you're het up about is sort of putting up barriers around your country and all the rest of it, but immigration is something that I love. People assume that if you have one view that a collection of other views comes along with it because we're used to thinking in blocks. And it's not true. I'm a passionate multi-racialist and a society couldn't be varied enough for me. I mean, I think that's true of all novelists. Variety is their food and drink. But I'm not a multiculturalist and I think multiculturalism is a fraud, and surely there are basic questions we can agree on. And we should be able to realign the debate with the rights of women taking a much higher position in our way of thinking about it.

Q You once wrote about the "global confrontation with the dependent mind." Is that what you're talking about?

A No, I want to get away from all that, this terrible sort of antsy discussion that we have, with everyone poised on the panic button and wanting to shout out "racist." We've been infantilized and stupefied by a generation of this kind of thought and I just want to readjust it as a feminist issue and nothing else.

Q Is that why you chose to write about the sexual revolution in your new book, The Pregnant Widow?

A Yes, because I want to talk about that and I was right in the middle of it and had been thinking about it for years. What actually was it, the sexual revolution? And I think that there are conclusions that can be drawn. In the book, too, there is an Islamic scene. I can't really go into it now but it's actually a harmonial rather than a confrontational scene although it, of course, will be misunderstood. There always were Muslims in our lives and we had no idea of this millennium-old hostility that was brewing that was made apparent to us on September the 11th, 2001. I'm just going back before that to see what relations were like between Muslims and Christians, and there wasn't any inherent hostility as far as I could see.

Q You've taken on subjects like 9/11, al-Qaeda and feminism. Do you think writers are tackling the big topics of our time?

A There's absolutely no reason why they should, I don't think, unless they feel a writerly urge to do so. There are some writers like Nabokov who disdain any kind of involvement of the creative writer with what he calls the bloated topicality. But I don't think this is a bloated topicality. I think it's a tremendously central issue and it's an issue where women should be saying all this. I'm saying it because women aren't. Feminism should have kept its eye on the ball of feminism and not diluted itself by being sentimental about cultural practices.

Q I understand your title, The Pregnant Widow, refers to that time between the death of the old order and the birth of the new one. Is that where you see feminism right now?

A I think it's what Trotsky would have called a permanent revolution. You could say semi-facetiously that it's probably now coming to the end of its first trimester, the pregnancy. But it does in fact turn out to be extraordinarily difficult to get a decent deal between men and women, and we're certainly not there yet. Although it was a marvellous thing, the sexual revolution. It was almost a bloodless revolution, a velvet revolution in at least two or three senses. But it's a work in progress and probably always will be.

sbell@nationalpost.com