Terry Eagleton, one of Britain's most abrasive public intellectuals, has added to that reputation of late through his ongoing feud with Martin Amis over Islam. And now he has written a book that sees Jesus as a Palestinian insurgent. But, after a lifetime of baiting the establishment, the academic world has had enough of him. Why would that be, asks Tim Adams

'Let me make one thing clear before we start,' Terry Eagleton says. 'I did not do this book about Jesus just to piss off Martin Amis.' I guess he wouldn't mind too much if it did, though. The book about Jesus is a new reading of the Gospels, out in time for Christmas, in which Eagleton asks the question, 'Was Christ a revolutionary?' and answers it mostly in the affirmative. It is a typical Eagleton stocking-filler: short, iconoclastic, fiercely clever; it places Jesus on the fringe of Palestinian insurgents against Rome, in the political wing of the anti-imperialist Zealots. The essay takes Eagleton back to his earliest intellectual outings at Cambridge in the Sixties, where he made a name for himself contributing to a curious Marxist Christian magazine called Slant. It is also the latest offensive in his argument with what he likes to call 'smug, liberal, rationalist' opinion, of which his ongoing war of words with Amis is the most visible engagement.

Eagleton - that endangered species in Britain, a public intellectual; formerly Warton Professor of English at Oxford, currently John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester - has always looked to 'rough up the edges of the mainstream', as he calls it. Having been fashionably Marxist for much of his career, he is now unfashionably so. Approaching 65, he has spent four decades squaring up to establishments, whether religious, academic, literary or metropolitan. The Amis feud is good gossip-column fodder because both protagonists are long used to believing themselves the smartest men in the room, but it also gets somewhere near the heart of the current schism in the liberal left over the response to Islamist terrorism.

The feud began when Eagleton took issue with Amis's now infamous remark, made in an interview, that after the failed plot to blow up transatlantic planes in August 2006 he felt 'a definite urge' to argue that British Muslims in general 'must suffer' for the actions of suicide bombers 'until they got their house in order'. By suffering he meant 'strip searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan', 'not letting them [Muslims] travel', and 'further down the road', deportation. These comments, Eagleton wrote, sounded not unlike the 'the ramblings of a British National Party thug' and he cemented his insult by suggesting that Amis had inherited this racism from his late father Kingsley, 'an anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals'. The invective was given added edge by the fact that it coincided with Amis's contract to start teaching alongside Eagleton at Manchester.

Eagleton's attack has subsequently been rehashed by the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and the novelist Ronan Bennett, interventions which have drawn vehement defence of Amis from his old friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis has distanced himself from his original remarks ('a thought experiment, or a mood experiment'), called Eagleton a 'disgrace to his profession' and 'a deluded flailer and stirrer', stood up for his father, and expressed the wish 'in a collegial spirit, that Eagleton would now shut up about it'.

If he knew anything about Eagleton, that wish was never likely to be granted. I'd gone to meet him in Derry, where his second wife lectures at the university and where they have a house (they have another in Dublin, which they share with their three children, including a baby of six months). He suggests we sit in the old Unionist Guildhall on the edge of the garrison walls, just down the road from the Bloody Sunday memorial, a place not unused to sectarian debate. Eagleton is an engaging presence, softly spoken, quick to laugh, and chooses his words with care. It seems to me that 'the great feud' masks a more telling argument; I wonder whether he sees Amis as a worthy opponent?

'Well,' he says, coming out fighting, 'I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners. I don't know where their status comes from. When someone like Ian McEwan stands up and says, "I believe in individual freedom," you know, it's like: "Hallelujah, put up your hands all those that don't," but such words do not respect a much larger problem.'

And that problem is?

'The implication from Amis and McEwan - and from Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - is that civilisation and atheist rationalism go together, and I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. The debate over God - Muslim or Christian - is for them increasingly becoming code for a debate on civilisation versus barbarism. I think one needs to intervene and show the limitations of that.'

To understand Eagleton's sense of such limitations it is necessary to know a little of his past. He was brought up in Salford, Manchester, the middle child of a working-class Irish Catholic family with aspirations (he was the only boy he knew who owned a coat). His early years were shaped by fundamentalist religion: he named his recent, darkly comic memoir The Gatekeeper after the formative time he spent as the altar boy in a Carmelite nunnery, witnessing the moments when young girls took the veil and said goodbye to their families for ever. He went to a grammar school run by the De La Salle brotherhood, toyed with the idea of becoming a priest but instead won a place at Cambridge, fell under the influence of Raymond Williams and became a different kind of cultish guru: a Marxist literary critic.

Eagleton is fond of saying 'what you are in the end is what you cannot walk away from'. One of the things he has been unwilling to discard is his Catholicism, though he has found a revolutionary strain to suit him. As a result he not only attacks 'muscular' liberals like Amis and Hitchens from the left, but also from a position that is not so much religious as anti-atheist. His current truculence began with an entertaining dismantling of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in the London Review of Books that kicked off: 'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it is to read Richard Dawkins on theology.'

Eagleton believes that growing up steeped in the Church gives him an edge over his metropolitan foes, and that whatever the sins of Catholicism, it has never been opposed to rigorous self-analysis.

'They buy their atheism on the cheap,' he says, of Dawkins and Hitchens in particular, 'because they have never been presented with an interesting version of faith. One of the impulses of my writing - and the new book - has been to try to differentiate a version of Christianity worth having. With people like Dawkins there is a kind of inverted evangelism; I find it extraordinary that not once does he question the terms of his science.'

Would Eagleton call himself a Christian? 'I am a lapsed Catholic; the Church is cunning in that you can never really leave it. I have deep objections to the way it has screwed up people's lives, though I have gone to Mass occasionally right through my life. It's like keeping a foot in a culture that I value.'

He suggests that the question 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster. Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God 'if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap', whereas even in the simplest sense, 'for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is... He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.'

Eagleton is not convinced this God exists, but believes that anyone who holds that He does is to be respected, while Dawkins and his acolytes, he argues, 'consider that no religious belief, any time or anywhere is worthy of any respect whatsoever'.

It is from this position that Eagleton derives his attack on the 'liberal arrogance', underpinned by Godlessness, of Amis and his friends. But how does this relate to the current fundamentalism - when a belief in God leads to a belief in jihad, how can you respect that?

'One has to understand fundamentalism as a kind of fear,' Eagleton says. 'A theologian friend of mine maintains that the opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. The image of Jesus in the Gospels is of someone who is fearless. People clutching on to their region or sect are very fearful of what lies beyond, and therefore very dangerous.' He puts some of this fear down to the fallout from 'transnational capitalism' that destroys regional and religious identity.

I wonder where he stands on the pointed question that Amis recently put to his impeccably liberal audience at the ICA: 'Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?' (Only about a third raised a hand to say they did, a nice demonstration of relativist liberal guilt.)

Eagleton lets out a sharp laugh. 'I certainly hope I am morally superior to people who believe in slaughtering innocents. But what I object to is the dangerous fudging of the line between the Muslim world and the Taliban, and the easy moral superiority that leaves us blind to our own crimes, or the crimes done in our names. It is an obvious point, but one still worth making, that it was our own barbarism and colonialism in the Middle East that has helped to create these situations in the first place. Amis and Hitchens have become perversely silent on the crimes of Western civilisation. Western civilisation has produced enormous advances, but not to see the darker side of that, not to see the barbarism of the West, and not to see that at a time when we are killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems extraordinarily naive.'

Eagleton has a practised ability to change the terms of a question, a product of the years when he used to excuse himself from High Table at Oxford in order to debate the progress of the struggle with comrades from the Workers' Socialist League and shop floor activists from the car plant at Cowley. The caricature has always been that of the armchair revolutionary, singing rebel songs in Irish pubs, before slipping back to the dreaming spires. He liked to romanticise himself in his Oxford days as 'the barbarian in the citadel', spreading sedition to the sons and daughters of privilege. Though his detractors charged him with intellectual bandwagon-jumping, he has stayed stubbornly faithful to his teenage socialism, a fact which has given him revered status among two generations of dissenting undergraduates.

It has also caused him, on occasion, to shape the world to fit his argument. The most notable example of this in recent years is his 2005 book Holy Terror, which attempts to confront the current global conflicts through the prism of history, in particular the problem that 'the left is at home with imperial power and guerrilla warfare but embarrassed on the whole by the thought of death, evil, sacrifice or the sublime'. Eagleton struggles to contain the idea of an Islamist suicide bomber into an ideological vision of political martyrdom. 'Suicide bombers die so that others may die so that others may live' is the formulation he comes up with at one point, which comes dangerously close to seeing bus bombers as freedom fighters for a distant cause, the charge Amis makes against left-wing 'appeasers'. Did Eagleton really see Hasib Hussain and the rest in that way?

'No, no, I utterly repudiate that idea,' he says, quickly. 'That kind of terrorism must be utterly and absolutely condemned.'

When asked about the suicidal insurgents in Baghdad, however, he apparently favours the line of John Pilger and others that equates the coalition invasion with the Third Reich. 'Well,' he says, 'I believe one has a right to fight against occupation. It is a right that would have been exercised by the British in the Second World War, and which was exercised by the French...'

But what if those fighting against occupation want not to liberate their state from oppression but to return it to the Middle Ages through terror? 'Support,' he says, 'must always be critical of aims. I think it is perfectly possible to say: in as much as you are fighting for a democratic self-governing society, we are with you.'

But isn't that a fudge too: how many committed democrats are there among the militias?

'I think,' he says, answering a different question, 'the whole Iraq folly is a good demonstration of the fact that you cannot impose democracy by force. We always like to think that where there is a problem there is a solution. The situation we have created in Iraq may well prove the opposite, that there now is no adequate solution. We have painted ourselves into a corner, and whichever way we turn may well make things worse.'

Eagleton concedes that one of the reasons that he has not shifted his views over the years is that a drift toward the right is 'such a terrible cliche'. He has always been uncommonly wary of being assimilated by what he sees as the establishment; he had the shock of his life when the Daily Mail called him 'a national treasure'. He is relishing the current spat partly because it allows him to believe that he has not mellowed.

His Catholicism does not extend so far as an interest in confessionals; his memoir was constructed to give as little of his interior life away as possible. If there was a defining event in his life it was the timing of the death of his father: Eagleton was informed of it while he was in the middle of his Cambridge entrance exam, and his immediate reaction was that it had ruined his chances. He won a place anyway, but at Oxbridge claims he was always socially insecure: 'In those days Cambridge was much more patrician,' he says. 'I felt a deep sense of alienation, which is really just a posh way of saying that I did not fit in. My response to that was to go out of my way to prove myself intellectually.'

That effort could be said to have informed Eagleton's life right up to the point that he gave up his chair at Oxford in 2001; he is uncomfortable with the fact that he did not leave earlier, in particular that he turned down a role at the fledgling Open University, saying now: 'I have often regretted that,' before adding that 'one of the least creditable reasons I stayed within Oxbridge was to prove to the bastards that I could'.

Contemporaries have suggested that for a Marxist, Eagleton was always an extremely effective careerist. It would be uncharitable to suggest that this trait might also inform a small part of his current animosity. Still, just before we end our interview, he lets slip the news that he has recently been told that Manchester will be terminating his contract early in the new year. 'They are throwing me out on the grounds of age,' he says, bleakly. 'Along with two other distinguished professors. We're 65, but it is a discretionary decision. There is some financial crisis going on apparently. It's not as though they pay me a fortune but I suppose they will save something. The students are getting rather het up about it.'

Maybe, I suggest, they need the money to pay Martin Amis to run his creative writing classes. 'Well,' he says, smiling and bristling just a little, 'it is certainly profoundly odd that during this financial crisis they can afford to hire someone like him...'



Life story



Early life

1943 Born on 22 Februaryin Salford. Educated at De La Salle College, Manchester, and Trinity College, Cambridge.



Career

1964 Appointed Fellow in English, Jesus College, Cambridge.



1969 Becomes Tutorial Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford.



1983 Publishes best-known work, Literary Theory: An Introduction



2001 Professor of Cultural Theory, Manchester University.



Personal life:

1966 Marries Rosemary Galpin, a state-registered nurse.



1997 Marries Willa Murphy, an academic.



He says: 'Catholicism combined rigorous thought with sensuous symbolism... so it was probably no accident that I was to later become a literary theorist.'



They say: 'He was one of the lads in the pub with the comrades but then he'd go off and be a cult literary theorist. To his credit, he has always tried to bring his worlds together.' Tariq Ali



Diary of a spat: Eagleton versus Amis



9 September 2006

Martin Amis is quoted in the Times magazine, in the wake of the failed plot to blow up planes, as saying he feels a 'definite urge' to argue that the British Muslim community should suffer 'until they got their house in order'.



1 August 2007

The second edition of Terry Eagleton's Ideology: An Introduction is published. In the introduction, the author likens Amis's comments to 'the ramblings of a British National Party thug'.



8 October

Columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown describes Amis in The Independent as being 'with... the Muslim-baiters and haters', and says that his pronouncements sound like those of Osama bin Laden.



10 October

Eagleton criticises the press for making personal attacks on him and for largely ignoring Amis's remarks.



11 October

In an open letter to Alibhai-Brown, Amis insists that Eagleton has distorted his comments.



19 November

Novelist Ronan Bennett writes a feature for the Guardian in which he calls Amis's views 'as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time'.



21 November

Christopher Hitchens mounts a defence of Amis in the Guardian, writing that Amis has been pilloried for 'honestly attempting to ventilate the question [of Islamism and reactions to it] and to clarify it'.



1 December

Amis rejects Bennett's accusations of racism, writing in The Guardian that he has never advocated the discriminatory treatment of Muslims. He also criticises Eagleton for starting 'this ragged furore'.



· Jesus Christ: The Gospels, introduction by Terry Eagleton, is published by Verso at £7.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885