'Is this the dawning of the Age of Eurabia?'

My mother wrote a memoir forty years ago. This was a woman who had been sucker punched on the streets of Shanghai by a Japanese soldier wielding a rifle butt; who had survived five years in a concentration camp while trying to keep her young son alive on buffalo stew and mouldy bread; who had emerged from that privation to find that she'd been abandoned by her naval officer husband; and then emigrated, aged forty-two, to build a new life in Africa.

But I digress. I simply mention my mother because in the closing paragraph of her memoir - despite her own hazardous life - she lamented 'the frightening future' faced by the world - in 1975.

Four decades later, some of us are still asking 'is the future as frightening as it seems?' Well, let's say I'm glad to be in the foothills of old age. One possible future I see for my  grandchildren is the prospect of them being subsumed in a different kind of civilisation. Some geo-political philosophers, like Frenchman Michel Houellebecq, give this phenomenon the name of a country. He calls it 'Eurabia'.

Houellebecq sets his political satire, 'Submission'* in France in 2022. The book became an instant best-seller, being published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo killings, The writer - whose dissolute protagonist confesses to being 'as political as a towel' - posits a political system re-ordered by the growing number of Muslims coming into Europe. While numerically small in France - 4.7m/7.5% of the population - Muslims are eight years younger than the average European and tend to procreate faster. As one wit has observed of this demographic difference 'they don't have to keep fighting; they just have to keep fucking'. In the next fifteen years almost one in ten Europeans will be Muslim. Not frightening, but...

The novel is a 'what if?' scenario. What if a moderate version of the Muslim Brotherhood established itself and, through various political intrigues (for which the French are famous), was able to form a government through a coalition with the Islamo-Leftist Socialist Party. By steering away from fundamentalism and using a blend of family values and traditional morality within a patriarchal framework, there could be much about such a version of 'Muslim-lite' (my coining) that might appeal to the inherent male chauvinism of the average Frenchman.

Muslim-lite's chief attack would be on education. Like Catholicism, Islam knows that the way to perpetuate a philosophy is to instil it in the young and to promote the idea of large families. So Houellebecq uses his novel to suggest a two-track system of education: a traditional French syllabus in one group of schools and another set of Islamic schools that would not be co-educational. In the Islamic schools Muslim men would be the only teachers; a few girls might go on to study art and literature but the majority of young women would graduate at high school level and be encouraged to marry and have babies. Saudi petro-monarchs would invest heavily in the Muslim schools and it would only be a matter of time before French families realised they were in the Cinderella system, and switch.

Another of the many surprises in 'Submission' is the idea that moderate Islam has no issue with 'the people of the Book'; that is, people like Christians and Jews who believe in a transcendent being. Islamists see the real enemy as atheistic materialism and the decay and depravity it has brought to the West . Whereas Muslim extremists see all non-Muslims as 'infidels', the Brotherhood - in this satire - believes that Christians and Jews can co-exist. At least until the latter see the merits of embracing a Muslim way of life. A way of life perhaps more productive of happiness than the current celebrity-and-sex zeitgeist.  

As Houellebecq wryly observes, such a society has a particular appeal to men. And, I would add, especially those with quasi-conservative leanings. 

I have to confess that it's the only book that, when I finished it, I started to read again. You might want to try it (available on Kindle).

*'SUBMISSION' © by Michel Houellebecq, English translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.


BCJ
Cape Town
February 2016.