Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance Fadela Amara's Breaking the Silence, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept, Bat Ye'or's Eurabia, and Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason
Hari, Johann
0VER THE LAST few years, the world has watched jihadist assassinations on the streets of Amsterdam, civilian slaughter in Madrid and on the London Underground, France's car-and-vanities bonfire,...
...But she knew she was living in a free, democratic society where she could challenge these stifling norms...
...They believe this is a civil war within the Muslim world, between Islamic fundamentalists and the Muslim moderates who despise them...
...Fallaci grew up as a resistant, and as she came to the end of her life, she seemed to feel the need to imagine herself back in the Italy of her youth, fighting a purely evil fascism engulfing her country...
...In short, the France of liberty, equality and fraternity...
...She could not see why she was forced to do housework while her brothers lazed, or reduced to begging her father for the smallest of freedoms...
...What sentient being, I wondered, wouldn't want to live there...
...What are Fallaci and Ye'or offering but the Protocols of the Elders of Muhammad...
...Amara knew she had to act—in the name of Islam...
...Yet most of the time, she believes the solution is to craft a less literalist reading of the Koran, "structurally driv[ing] religion back to the places where it belongs: the mosque and the home...
...What are von Irving to say...
...Bin Laden, Fallaci says, is "the heir of the Prophet Mohammed, the new leader of the Muslims"—and if you are one of the millions of Muslims who disagrees, then you must be a particularly cunning carrier of the sharia project...
...THE AMERICAN WRITER Bruce Bawer's book, While Europe Slept, is an interesting entry point to this debate, because Bawer veers, almost at random, between the two schools of thought...
...The only "proof" Ye'or offers is a bit of boilerplate rhetoric issued at intergovernmental conferences...
...This led in a clear line to the literalism and psychosis of Bin Ladenism...
...Or was he killed because he had sided with moderate Muslims by making a film about the epidemic of domestic violence against immigrant women...
...TO UNDERSTAND HOW wrong it is for Fallaci to claim that "moderate Islam does not exist," we must turn to the dissident strains of Islam that are sprouting across Europe...
...The potential prize is extraordinary...
...It must," Bawer notes, "become impossible for children growing up in Western Europe to be raised to see their religious affiliation as the be-all and end-all of their identity...
...Let me help veil...
...The plot, it turns out, is being driven by an obscure group of minor politicians called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), whose "occult machinery" is everywhere, "engineer[ing] Europe's irreversible transformation through hidden channels...
...Islamic fundamentalism did not only end her world...
...it will end the whole world, and soon...
...Caging women in order to guard their virginity leads not only to frustration and violence for the individuals directly involved, but also to socio-economic backwardness for the entire community" When she was elected as a Labor Party member of Parliament and began to speak out against the seventh-century sexual morality that treats women as chattel, a thousand fatwas rained onto her head...
...Indeed, the "eternal invaders rule us already," and "we'll soon reach the status that the Comanches and Apaches and Cherokees . . . reached when we stole their continent...
...Even Blankley, whose flimsy book, The West's Last Chance, is built on the same premise, admits that "the phrase 'if current trends continue' is one of the most misleading guides to the future...
...They began to articulate a feminist Islam compatible with Enlightenment values...
...They fall, broadly, into two schools...
...This is not only an error, it is a weapon in the jihadists' hands, as one can see when Ye'or attacks moderate Muslims who try to redefine jihad in a peaceful way for "lying...
...Expressing a romantic or sexual interest in their imprisoned sisters would be a greater crime than cursing Muhammad...
...This mind-set is (at best) a distraction from the real fight: across the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularized by the mullahs...
...Some are fairly painless...
...Kaffiyas and headscarves contrast with makeup and wonderbras in a bewildering Islamic cacophony...
...In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration...
...She does not engage with even the obvious refutations of her argument...
...Amara and the tens of thousands of Muslim women who support her loathe the fundamentalist vision of a "fascist-like society that has nothing to do with democracy"—and unlike many "Clash of Civilizations" blowhards, she and her friends fight against it on the ground, every day...
...To prevent this, Denmark has banned any citizen from importing a spouse until he or she is twenty-four years old...
...His work can be read at www.johannhari.com . DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 129...
...Across Europe, Muslim women who become too fond of democratic values are often "disciplined" by their families by bringing in a stern spouse from the traditional homeland...
...She grew up smuggling dynamite as part of the resistance against Mussolini's fascism, and in The Force of Reason she argues that Europe today faces an even greater threat...
...She writes, "My own France—a view shared by a great number of people from immigrant families—is the France of the Enlightenment, the France of the republic, the France of Marianne, of the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus, of the Paris Commune, of the Resistance...
...Here is the development of a strain of Islam fiercely committed to democratic values...
...Now that Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach places European states closer to the reactionaries than to the feminists and liberals...
...These criticisms, offered in a fizzing firecracker polemic, fit into an intriguing pattern, whereby some of the most vociferous critics of the swelling jihadism in Europe—from Pim Fortuyn to Peter Tatchell—have been gay men, well attuned to the rise of fanatical faith...
...She insists that "the most effective way for European Union governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders...
...The applicants with Anglo-Saxon names were twice as likely to be invited to an interview as those with Muslim names...
...If Europe is run by "Islam's lackeys," why did all Europe participate in the invasion of Afghanistan, half of it join in the invasion of Iraq, and one of its largest countries ban the hijab in its schools...
...Their "feminist Islam" is the fiercest enemy of what Amara dubs "basement Islam"—a fanaticism of the shadows and backrooms that "offered young men a theoretical framework and tools with which to oppress young women...
...As she grew up, she realized it was not enough to challenge jihadists in her own home...
...The more aggressive—and high profile—of this pair is Oriana Fallaci, the Italian war correspondent, who died just a few months ago...
...Liberal Muslims are also hobbled across Europe by the fact that the continent's mosques are almost all funded by foreign fundamentalist powers—mostly Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan...
...In my own reporting from the Finsbury Park mosque in London—one of the most radical mosques in Europe—I have witnessed how these young jihadis derive their brittle dignity from their ability to rule the women in their families according to their whims...
...In 2002 an eighteen-year-old girl from the banlieues named Sohane Benziane was burned to death by fundamentalists for being "loose...
...It is only by making some wild extrapolations that Bawer can sustain his idea that Europe will have a Muslim majority fairly soon...
...With her friends, she launched a group called Ni Putains, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Doormats...
...By the time Bawer touched down in Amsterdam, this approach had created perverse alliances across the continent, with European liberals fostering some of the antiliberal, misogynist, and homophobic parts of immigrant communities...
...In July 2004, the BBC conducted an experiment: it sent out job applications to more than fifty British employers...
...She knows that "the God of the Jews and Christians has been tamed by reasonable people and largely moved to the believer's private conscience," and that the regressive passages of the Koran are matched by equally regressive passages in the Bible that have been overcome by abandoning literalism...
...Unlike Amara, she has renounced Islam (and indeed all religion), and even says at one point, "Mohammed is a despicable individual," primarily because he married a nine-year-old girl...
...Muslims are "invading and conquering and subjugating" the continent, and their weapons are immigration, fertility, and "the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created...
...But as his book progresses, Bawer's polemic shifts from being a carefully reasoned work in the civil-war school into a sloppy, shrill work in the clash-of-civilizations school...
...0 HOST AN Islamic civil war—one where the liberals win—Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism...
...Look at the nearbeheading of Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker and controversialist, by crazed fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri as he begged—in classic Dutch fashion—"Don't do it...
...This means the native populations will decline considerably over the next generation . . . and the number of Muslims will increase dramatically...
...0VER THE LAST few years, the world has watched jihadist assassinations on the streets of Amsterdam, civilian slaughter in Madrid and on the London Underground, France's car-and-vanities bonfire, and the global assault on Denmark after one of its newspapers dared to depict the Prophet Muhammad in a derogatory cartoon...
...He begins to doubt that there are any moderate Muslims at all, except for a few shimmering exceptions: "if that silent majority existed at all, it had to be one of the most silent majorities ever...
...Ye'or's world was brought to an end 126 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 by Islamic fundamentalism, so she is projecting that annihilation out onto Europe...
...128 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 Some solutions will come from the conventional antiracist approach of the past thirty years, which outlaws discrimination...
...If Muslims BOOKS cannot engage in the economy or politics, they will be far more likely to go underground But the trickier solutions will require Europeans to reconsider a central plank of our conventional antiracist approach: multiculturalism...
...The applications were identical except for the names on them...
...For almost every Western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025," Blankley confesses...
...As Bawer puts it, "The disease of integration is prevented by injecting into the European branch of the family a powerful booster shot of "traditional values...
...Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative...
...A third of French imams cannot speak any French at all, and barely a third are fluent in the language...
...Do not allow foreign husbands to be imported by Muslim families to "discipline" their Westernizing daughters...
...Some even predict—as Ronald Reagan's former staffer Tony Blankley puts it—that "as hypertolerant, or even self-loathing, Europeans are confronted by intelligent, hyper-aggressive Muslims, a Darwinian life-or-death struggle will result in the death of European culture...
...It is fascinating to watch her mind in flux: there are passages where she seems to think the only solution is abandonment of Islam...
...In France, it's 12 percent...
...Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn't issue fatwas," he writes...
...Western Europeans had yet to acknowledge they had a religious right . . . Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me gay marriage...
...End the soft racism of holding Muslims to different standards, and seek genuine equality rather than its multicultural parody...
...But she was appalled to discover that even in free societies, many Muslim men had built a system of "gender apartheid," where women have "virtually no right of self-determination" and the much-fetishized virginity of girls is preserved by keeping them under house arrest...
...Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one "pure" Islam, represented by elderly mullahs...
...He has reported from Iraq, Congo, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, and Northern Ireland...
...When he studied what some mullahs were preaching in the Muslim ghettoes scattered across Europe, Bawer found something worse than the Falwellian fanaticism he had fled...
...She discovered that this system is "a double cage...
...Within five months, they had thirty thousand people marching with them in the streets of Paris...
...Amid the sound of suicide-murders on European streets, it is possible to hear the slow creaking of those gates—and the low rumble of the Islamic Enlightenment...
...If the gates of ijtihad open once again, it will be in Europe...
...In the thirteenth century, Muslims stopped using the principle of ijtihad—the application of reason and reinterpretation to pull their religious texts into a modern context—when reading the Koran...
...Surely we can talk about this...
...The Ni Putains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for "no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads...
...From the moment imams settled into the projects, some of the BOOKS young men began to apply radical codes of behaviour to young women, in particular by forcing them back into their homes...
...Yet those who suggest that the birth of every new European Muslim is a problem—another tick from the timebomb— treat Amara as akin to Osama...
...Far from being the shrill provocation her enemies claim, Hirsi Ali's book is a cool clear guide, filled with practical suggestions for wrenching open Islam...
...We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics...
...And if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself...
...There is often a similar exclusion from politics, because huge chunks of Europe's Muslims are disenfranchised, literally...
...If one therefore turns to Ye'or's latest book, Eurabia: The EuroArab Axis, you indeed discover assertions that there has been a secret "war of political and cultural subversion, undertaken by [Europe's] own politicians, media, and intellectuals" to hand the continent to Muslims...
...She believes "its influence is much more important than is recognized...
...The first presents Europe's fight as a Huntingtonian "Clash of Civilizations," a war between democratic Europe and the fifteen million indigestible Muslims it has, they believe, foolishly imported from undemocratic countries...
...One of ten children born to Algerian immigrant parents, she grew up chafing at the constraints of Islamic fundamentalism...
...Fallaci says that "almost all of it comes from the extraordinary research [of] Bat Ye'or," a Jewish writer ethnically cleansed from Egypt in 1956 and condemned to life as a European exile...
...The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about fifty years from now...
...He arrived in Europe just as jihadi smoke was beginning to hang over our streets: "I first traveled to the Netherlands in 1997 and thought I'd found the closest thing to heaven on earth...
...A glance at the relative rates of reproduction suggests this percentage will rise precipitously over the coming generation...
...Similar results have been found in France...
...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 127 BOOKS At times, Hirsi Ali's writing could offer succor to the "Clash of Civilizations" school...
...But where is the research that Fallaci promised us...
...This is a recipe for losing the Islamic civil war...
...She can only maintain her argument by repeatedly resorting to rhetorical inflation...
...BUT AN ENTIRE shelf-full of literature has been built on the hyperbolic premise that demographic trends will remain exactly the same for the next fifty years, and that all European Muslims will by then be jihadists clamoring for sharia...
...For ordinary Europeans who pride ourselves on our multiculturalism and tolerance, the continent seems stranger and sadder...
...American liberals had been fighting the religious right for decades...
...These bursts of paranoia inevitably treat European Islam as an inert, unchanging mass whose true essence is revealed only in the statements of jihadists...
...By far the most frequent demand among European Muslims is for an employment law banning discrimination on religious grounds—hardly a separatist or jihadi agenda...
...Where is the evidence for these fantastical claims, so contrary to the everyday experience of ordinary Europeans...
...With Mandelalike courage, she began to call for a "third feminist wave" to rip through the Muslim world...
...But many are larger: they reject the head scarf as "nothing more than a means of oppression emanating from a patriarchal society...
...Rather than encourage them, she cuts them off at the knees...
...She claims Muslims "have orders to breed like rats" and even suggests the French riots were organized by alQaeda, a charge not even Jean Marie Le Pen has made...
...The claims of these two writers are so hallucinatory that it is hard to resist the temptation to look for a psychological explanation...
...The second school believes that this conservative analysis is a betrayal of democratic Muslim immigrants, a rebuke to the millions who have become Europeans and cannot be casually counted in the camp of jihad...
...She came to Europe seeking a society built on Enlightenment values (and somehow missed the directive Fallaci warns about to breed like a rat...
...In Italy, fewer than 10 percent of Muslims are eligible, and in Germany only 500,000 of the 3.2 million resident Muslims can vote...
...Fund battered-women's shelters...
...He begins to present Europe's Muslims as a homogenous herd slowly trying to conquer the BOOKS continent...
...Was Van Gogh murdered because he was an "infidel" who had dared defame Islam...
...On the streets and in the mosques outside, jihadi young men distributing "death to democracy" leaflets subtly clash with young Muslim feminists who want an open, liberal Islam...
...But "Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism" It hit him—literally—when he and his boyfriend were beaten up by a Muslim hate mob one sunny afternoon...
...Eva Kjer Hansern, Denmark's minister for gender equality, responded to a fundamentalist imam who said women were asking to be raped if they showed too much flesh by calling for an "open debate...
...She fled to the Netherlands in 1990, running from her Islamist family in Somalia that wanted to force her into a marriage that would have reduced her to being her husband's slave and "a production plant for sons...
...So because millions of Europeans marched against the invasion of Iraq, she says there were "mass demonstrations in European streets in favour of Saddam Hussein," part of the "coordinated Euro-Arab policy...
...She wrote the script for the film Submission that led to Van Gogh's assassination, and the note pinned to his corpse warned that she would be next...
...Britishbased Australian feminist Germaine Greer defended the widespread butchery of young Muslim girls' genitals—the removal of the labia and clitoris to destroy the possibility of sexual pleasure— as a legitimate cultural practice...
...Islamic fundamentalists were, he discovered, attacking Amsterdam's gay men with such frequency that this pro-gay Shangri-La was unraveling: gay men could no longer hold hands or kiss in public...
...As Bawer demands, an open debate about what...
...Around half of Denmark's Muslim population cannot vote because they are "long-term non-national residents"—second-class citizens...
...France, she argues, has been plotting "the creation of a common culture encompassing the North and South shores of the Mediterranean" and the "secret schadenfreude fulfillment of an interrupted Holocaust" since 1962...
...So because some European politicians have offered rote praise for how Muslims and Christians lived together in medieval Andalusia, she says they have "the firm belief that Andalusia provides an exemplary model for DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 125 BOOKS the construction of Eurabia in the twenty-first century...
...Ah, but if you disagree that Falacci is (as she modestly claims) the Winston Churchill of our times, then you are a "moron," "phony," "fraudulent," and "lobotomized...
...Onto Ye'or's fantasies, Fallaci slathers her nuclear-strength hyperbole...
...The French government has tried to develop imam training programs to supply homegrown preachers, and the Dutch government now requires all imams to undergo an assimilation program...
...At last, books have appeared to try to fit these changed streets, scattered battles, and stray bombs into a broader intellectual context...
...In Switzerland, it's an astonishing 20 percent...
...Why aren't all European states following them...
...James Dobson's parenting advice was appalling, but it didn't tell people to mur124 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 der their daughters...
...yET MORE CREATIVE solutions are Scattered throughout this literature...
...He writes, as so many of the American writers on this subject do, of a demographic time bomb sitting underneath Europe: Today, in Western Europe, the Muslim share of the population is somewhere between 2 and 10 percent...
...Bawer had belly-flopped into the continent's paradox: Europe's warm and capacious tolerance was being extended to some of the most fanatically intolerant people on earth...
...Travel on the tube as it leaves the Muslim East End, and you will see girls peeling off their hijabs and applying makeup with heart-pounding pleasure...
...Ensure regular doctors' checks of Muslim girls to check that their genitals have not been mutilated...
...Most of the events that have ravaged Europe lately can be understood, at least superficially, through either prism...
...But in practice, it evolved into something else: immigrants were encouraged to retain their original culture—no matter how reactionary— as a matter of state policy...
...The windows of my apartment in London stare out toward the scene of a recent suicide-murder, and when they are open on a summer morning, the low wailing of a muezzin can be heard clearing the air...
...Indeed, two European darlings of the American right go even further and claim "the Islamic invasion of Europe" has already occurred, and "Europe is by now a province of Islam or rather a colony...
...He had, he believed, finally escaped the Protestant fundamentalism of his homeland and ambled into a secular society where he could marry his male partner and walk hand in hand down the canal lanes...
...Some of their fights are small everyday acts of defiance: "Make-up has become war paint, a sign of resistance...
...Fadela Amara's raw, vivid book, Breaking the Silence, is the story of how an ordinary Muslim girl from the banlieues—the concrete blocks of Muslim poverty that ring France's cities—started a movement to reform Islam...
...Remember Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" argument, which "proved" that rising populations and dwindling food supplies would cause five million Americans to starve by 1985...
...Women and girls are locked up in the inner cage, but surrounding this is a larger cage in which the entire Islamic culture has been imprisoned...
...Ayaan Hirsi Ali has dedicated her life—and risked it, too—scrambling for answers to this question...
...It is a long, slow process, but it has already begun...
...The continent had inhaled immigrants from our former colonies to skivvy and scrub for us, and the most hassle-free approach seemed to be multiculturalism: let them do their own thing...
...It is not an exaggeration to see in these wild conspiracy theories a mutation of Europe's old, toxic anti-Semitism...
...JOHANN HARI is a columnist for the Independent newspaper based in London...
...The assumption behind the rule," Bawer writes, "is that by the time a young person reaches 24, he or she is more capable of resisting parental pressure—and more likely to have met and fallen in love with someone in Denmark...
...How can she claim to speak in the name of human rights while comparing human beings to vermin...
...The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen," even here...
...In a third world context, it might more accurately be dubbed first-wave feminism...
...Indeed, he shunts aside the examples of heroic moderate Muslims he has listed and proceeds to present the growth of the Muslim population—moderate or jihadist, who cares?—as a problem in itself...
...Is it OK to rape a woman if her dress is above the knee, but not if it's below...
...With spine-chilling incidental music, he reveals the fact that the most popular name for baby boys in Amsterdam is no longer Jan but Mohammed...
...Here is an authentic Islamic Reformation on the streets of Europe...
...Among native Western Europeans, the fertility rate ranges from 1.2 to 1.8 percent—well below the "replacement rate" of 2.1...
...SO HOW DO WE guarantee there are Amaras in every mosque...
...the imams wanted to drop a wall on me...
...The DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 123 BOOKS most optimistic of us even believe that hosting this fight is an extraordinary opportunity for Europe, because—if we manage it right— we can decisively tip Islam away from jihadism and trigger the long-awaited, long-delayed Islamic Enlightenment...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
