“Do we want the River of Islam to enter the riverbed of
secularism?” France’s prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said in
September, alluding to the prospect of Turkey joining the European
Union. Raffarin’s question is a little late. The river of Islam is
already gushing through Europe — and secular France, home to over
5 million Muslims, released the floodgates.
The question now is: When will the river of Islam swamp secular
Europe? Historian Bernard Lewis predicts that Muslims will dominate
Europe before the end of this century, turning Europe into an
appendage of North Africa and the Middle East.
“Europe will be a part of the Arab West,” he said in an
interview with the German newspaper Die Welt during the
summer. “Europeans marry late and have few or no children. But
there’s strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and
Pakistanis in England. At the latest, following current trends,
Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population at the end of
the 21st century.”
As Raffarin should know, France steered the river of Islam into
Europe’s riverbed of secularism, arrogantly assuming it would come
out secular on the other side. It hasn’t. France is not changing
Islam; Islam is changing France. France’s desperate project to
spread a “French Islam” is an admission of this crisis, not a
solution to it.
France’s ban on Islamic headscarves in public schools is a
clumsy and last-ditch attempt to control an ascendant religion that
threatens French secularism. So far it has produced a dramatic
backfire in the kidnapping of French journalists Christian Chesnot
and George Malbrunot by Muslim terrorists who demand that the ban
be rescinded. The terrorists succeeded in driving Jacques Chirac
into the arms of Hezbollah, Hamas, Yasser Arafat, and Egypt’s
Muslim Brotherhood as he asked them for help in rescuing the
journalists. This was itself a measure of Islam’s hold on France
and a sign that the terrorists had already won.
Muslims aren’t fooled by “French Islam.” They know that
Frenchifying Islam means removing Islam from Islam, and they are
resisting it. Some have taken to the streets to protest the ban on
headscarves; others are simply turning to global Islam for money to
finance private schools.
France established the “French Council for the Muslim Religion”
in 2003. Its stated purpose was to bring Islam into line with
“French values.” In other words, secularize it. Former Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said no Imams who held views “contrary to
the values of the Republic” could serve on the council.
Consequently, most Muslims regard the council as a stooge-ridden
joke. Very few of them vote in the council’s elections, and those
who do tend to favor the extremists, which has led Time to
conclude the “council could present as many problems as it
solves.”
That is, France formed the council to take Islam out of the
“cellars and garages,” and it has. Now radical Islam can operate
out of the French government. After the Union of Islamic
Organizations in France (UOIF), which is associated with terrorist
groups, picked up a sizable number of seats on the council in 2003,
French officials were left sputtering that they didn’t like the
election results. Sarkozy “reaped jeers and whistles,” according to
Time, when he “used a speech before more than 10,000
Muslims at an UOIF convention… to vow that women must remove
their veils for the photographs on their French identity cards.”
The UOIF, said Malek Chebel, a Muslim anthropologist, to
Time, “has endless money, great numbers of the faithful on
their side, and they have time… The fundamentalists are
working toward a shock, one that is dangerous for the equilibrium
of the state.”
French rationalism is justly famous for producing irrational
outcomes. The thinkers of the French Revolution thought that they
could rearrange class according to “reason.” They only caused
bloodshed. Modern France carries the same attitude to Islam,
imagining Parisian muftis issuing Voltairean fatwas and Muslims
replacing their headscarves with berets, and when they don’t,
tolerance gives way to force. Bringing millions of Muslims into the
country (against conservative criticism deemed “intolerant”), then
criminalizing Islamic headscarves fits the pattern of French
history since its Revolution: “Reason” produces chaos, the chaos
then justifies the suspension of reason in favor of Napoleonic
force.
RAFFARIN CAN PLAY DUMB AND ACT like secular France didn’t flood
Europe with Islam. But historians will record that it was French
secularism that created the conditions for secular Europe’s demise
by insisting that Europe embrace millions of Muslims who had no
intention of embracing secularism. As mosques spread and Gothic
cathedrals emptied, French secularists fined authors who warned of
the coming crisis and consigned to cultural oblivion the
traditional protector of Europe — the Catholic Church.
The religion that inspired Charles Martel to protect France
against the Islamic invasion of the eighth century at the Battle of
Tours was denied by Jacques Chirac even one historical mention in
the founding documents of the European Union. When Pope John Paul
II mildly suggested to him and other European leaders that the
European Union constitution should acknowledge Europe’s Christian
roots if only as a matter of history, Chirac haughtily responded,
“There has never been that kind of reference in the treaties. As
the representative of a secular state, I am not in favor of
religious references.” The final text contains only the most
oblique reference to religion. It was slipped into a phrase about
Europe’s “cultural, religious and humanist heritage.”
Europe’s secular decadence is so advanced and comic that its
only real objection to Turkey entering the European Union is that
it might raise the continent’s moral standards. The fear among
European diplomats is not that an Islamic country of 70 million
people might hasten the Islamization of Europe but that Turkey
might criminalize adultery. No joke. “Turkey Moves Closer to EU
After Retreat on Adultery Law” and “A Tough Adultery Law Could
Block Turkey’s Entry to EU” were a few of the non-satirical
September headlines in European newspapers. The “Copenhagen
criteria” is the EU’s non-satirical measure for determining whether
Turkey possesses the cultural qualifications to enter Europe.
Vatican Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has warned that Turkey’s
entrance into the EU could supply one of the final nails in
Christian Europe’s coffin. Turkey, he said, “has always represented
another continent in the course of its history, in permanent
contrast with Europe.” But Chris Patten, the European Union’s
external affairs commissioner, says that Christian Europe is
already dead. So how can Europe object to Turkey joining it? “I
certainly don’t think we can say no to Turkey on the grounds that
we are a Christian club,” he has said.
Frits Bolkestein, a Dutch European Union official, said in
September that Turkey’s joining the EU would mean a Europe
“Islamized” and likely to “implode.” Bolkestein noted that in 1683
at the battle of Vienna Europeans defeated the Ottoman Turks. If
Bernard Lewis is right about Islamic demography, he said, lifting
the Islamic siege of Vienna will “have been in vain.” To which the
European left responded: So what? One European editorial savaging
Bolkestein for this speech was titled, “Open the Gates of
Vienna.”
Ratzinger calls this “self-hatred.” It is certainly
self-delusion. The European secularists like Chirac who think that
they can ride the tiger of Islam will be eaten by it.
