Why Updike delved into suicide killers’ psyches

Witt: You have said the West doesn’t understand the Islamic hatred for Western civilization.  What do you think is happening between the two worlds?

Updike: I think that we are bewildered by it. Not all of us don’t understand it; there are experts, but not too many [of them] seem to have predicted the actual results in Iraq. From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, we look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. So we are probably resented by a lot of people who are not actually terrorists and not playing an active part in the insurgency to get us to leave. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It’s not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.

Witt: What is it about terrorists that you want the readers to become aware of, or at least think about?

Updike: I hope that they would think of terrorists as other human beings that have a case on their side, and I was hoping to present a terrorist who attracts our sympathy, and, in his way, is likeable. A boy who is trying to be good and trying to make sense of his life in an American environment, which doesn’t make much sense to him. He sees the rather hedonistic, materialistic, pleasure-now side of America, which strikes him as worthy of condemnation, and is certainly evil in his mind. I’m trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

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Witt: It’s interesting, in your book he has his gripes, or his rants, against America — the junk food, the consumerism, the loose sexual mores, and yet many of the characters in your book also criticize the country. Were you trying to show different perspectives of how people are looking at what’s going on in our society?

Updike: They all live in the same America. Jack Levy, a much older man, who’s been around and doesn’t have a fervent religious belief, but is nevertheless disgusted by overpopulation, over exploitation of limited resources, of certain greediness, of the dumbing-down of popular culture, of celebrity worship and fad diets producing obesity. All of that is visible to Jack as well as Ahmad. But Ahmad had the positive thing of a God that he believes in and that he even feels at his side. There’s a verse in the Quran that God is as close as the vein in your neck. In his youth, [Ahmad] feels that vein very much. So it’s not only complaints, but a sense of a better life, a better standard than is illustrated around him.

Witt: You have said that you re-read the Quran to do research for this book. Was there other research you did on terrorists or radicals?

Updike: I read a book called the jihadis — no, shahid is the word for martyr, suicide bomber. I read around in it, I’m not sure I read it through. A lot of it told me stuff that wasn’t too helpful or illuminating. But there’s a kind of Islamic tradition going back to the assassins in India and it came to a grisly bloom in the Iran-Iraq War, with the use of young people — quite young, 11, 12, 13 — as minesweepers. So it’s a long history, it is more congenial to their religion than it would be to a Christian one, which takes a strong stand against suicide, although [Christianity] does encourage self-sacrifice in battle. The one thing that I try to keep in mind is that from their side, it is a war, they are on the side of God; we are the godless, we are the great Satan, as the Ayatollah Khomeini said. And so a lot of actions which seem to us gratuitous or merely crazy, make more sense seen in the context of a war. Even Americans in a war are capable of self-sacrifice and dramatic action.

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