LA HELL EPOQUE
What happens to the Western world if no one stands up for our values in the face of Islam?
THE most recent issue of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French newspaper attacked by Islamic terrorists, featured a caricature of the novelist Michel Houellebecq.
“In 2015, I lose my teeth,” he says. “In 2022, I will fast in Ramadan!” The reference is to his latest book,
“Soumission” (“Submission”), which imagines a future where the French version of the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power through presidential and parliamentary elections.
Initial reviews of the novel, often produced by thosewho hadn’t read it or, at best, surfed through it, labeled it as another piece of Islamophobia. But it seems tome that “Soumission” isn’t mockery at all — it’s a chilling vision of an all too possible scenario.
THE central character in the novel is an unnamed professor of literature in Sorbonne who specializes in the writings of J.K. Huysmans, a novelist who lived during the socalled Belle Epoque, when France was at the zenith of power and prosperity, a period thatwas to come to a close with the First World War and theworst carnage in European history.
Huysmans was a pessimist-realist in an age of optimistic idealism. He had a sense that the Titanic was going to hit the iceberg but didn’t know what to do about it. All he could do was to express his love and admiration for every part of the doomed European Titanic, including the glitzy bordellos of Brussels.
Though he emulates Huysmans’ pessimism, the “hero” of “Soumission” does not share the 19thcentury novelist’s passionate love of an imperfect Europe, which, despite shortcomings, remains the best option for all those who cherish human freedom.
Houellebecq’s professor does not regard the death of European civilization as a tragedy. In fact, he insists that Europe has already committed suicide. He notes that the French, and Europeans in general, have abandoned their Christian heritage and turned themselves into robotic consumers.
Patriotism, the professor notes, is gone because the elites are dissolving France into an amorphous European mass. Democracy itself is but a sham, a scheme that allows two powerhungry camps of Right had Left to rule in alternance. At times, democracy is used as an excuse for invading other nations.
So, what is to be done? Houellebecq depicts Islam as a plausible, if not necessarily ideal, alternative.
In any case, the little that is left of European traditions of deference for the sacred is now reserved only for Islam, which must be exempted from critical scrutiny in the name of “tolerance” and “respect.” Even when Muslims do something intolerable, Europeans have to tolerate it in atonement of past colonial and imperialist misdeeds. Victimhood is an inexhaustible capital that Muslims in Europe could dig into for generations.
The fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo staff had never even visited Algeria did not deprive them of their ancestral capital of victimhood because of French colonial presence there decades before the two killers were born in Paris.
Even acts that are clearly not worthy of respect, such as female genital mutilation, must be respected in the name of “cultural otherness.”
Houellebecq’s hero admires the erotic fable “L’Histoire d’O,” inwhich the heroine achieves “absolute happiness” through absolute sexual submission to men. Houellebecq’s narrator thinks that Islam is capable of offering the same “absolute happiness” in political terms.
Far from portraying the seizure of power by the French Muslim Brotherhood as a catastrophe, as many Egyptians did in their country last year, Houellebecq’s narrator sees it as an opportunity for a new departure for Europe.
Mohammed ben Abbes, the Obama like Muslim politician who becomes president, is a graduate of Polytechnique, France’s most prestigious school, and “a moderate” with a vision to revive the Roman Empire under the banner of Islam.
All who covert to Islam, even if they don’t mean it, are given full opportunity for advancement, plus higher salaries. Male professors are helped to take up to four wives, many of them recruited from among their female students.
THE novel is, you’d think, meant to be read as satire.
The trouble is that the selfloathing it portrays is very real. Many Frenchmen see their society as drifting in uncertain waters without an anchor. They are concerned by increasingly powerless elected governments, distant bureaucrats who intervene in every aspect of
people’s lives, and an economic systemthat promises much but delivers little.
The advocates of Western decline claim that Europeans no longer believe in anything and are thus doomed to lose the fight against homegrown Islamists who passionately believe in the little they know of Islam.
Anote of comedy is injected into this tragedy by people like President François Hollande who keep repeating that the terror attacks had “nothing to do with Islam.” Is Hollande an authority on what is and what is not Islam? Talking heads repeat ad nauseam that France is not atwar against Islam. OK. However, part of Islam is certainly at war against France, and the rest of the civilized world, including a majority of Muslims across the globe.
One’s enemy is not whom one wants him to be but whom he wants to be. The Charlie killers saw themselves as jihadis, and it is only in seeing them as such that one could start dealing with them in an effective way. In designating them as Islamists, one is not “at war against Islam.”
Millions of French are expected to take part in marches across the country today to pay respect to the 17 people, including 10 journalists, who were killed in the attacks.
There is going to be just one slogan: “We are all Charlie.” Do they believe it?
The French would do well to remember that, once all is said and done, they still live in one of the few countries in the world where they can think and say what they like, a state of bliss a majority of Muslims across the globe could only dream of.
And, the prophets of decline notwithstanding, that is something worth living and fighting for.