The Most Religious Race: Islam in Europe

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell has written a very bad book. His argument is internally inconsistent, his history is distressingly selective, and his terminology is uncritically general. Unsurprisingly, the book is Islamophobic. More unexpectedly, he has presented something anti-Semitic; the book’s passion for Israel is of a kind with the bigot who is very much in favor of other cultures, so long as he does not have to bump into them anywhere in “his” country.

But in full, his Reflections most reminded me of those imperial British bureaucrats who could not reconcile their contempt for Islam with their envious admiration of its alleged qualities: brute and irrational, yet sensual and virile. It is sufficiently telling that Caldwell cites Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, “describing the waves of cultural anxiety and sexual insecurity” felt by a white European teacher whose intellectual achievements mean nothing to his classes; his crush on a female student is unreturned, because she prefers the attention of a “a macho African student,” a “baboon.”

Christopher Caldwell has also written a disquieting book, which anyone interested in Islam or Europe simply must read. As a columnist for the Financial Times, writer for the New York Times Magazine and senior editor at the Weekly Standard, Caldwell’s reactions to the global processes that have provoked massive population flows and undermined the hegemony of the nationalist narrative are fascinating.

That he prefers argument by culture, metaphysics, and identity reveals a deep anxiety among even the most privileged, a sign that capital and its inherent desire to destabilize have unmoored and unsteadied every part of the world. We should take any such argument seriously, especially for the almost existential helplessness it admits. Caldwell fears the dilution of an ideal Europe, whose countries had and should have distinct yet interchangeable cultures, all equally incompatible with a Muslim culture that should have never been allowed into Europe. Hence his book; warning Europe of the threat posed by mass Muslim immigration, legitimated by elites who never consulted their populations on whether they wanted so many foreigners among them in the first place. Caldwell believes that Islam has now established itself, like a persistent, radioactive sludge, in every nook and cranny of an aging, brittle Europe, and cannot be erased. (Islam, apparently, has a very long half-life.)

What we are to do with this information, I do not know. I suspect Caldwell hasn’t the least idea, either: “When an insecure… culture meets a culture that is anchored… it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.” Missing something “hard to define,” Europeans, insufficiently committed to any value system as a result of their own unchecked individualism, are ripe for conquest. The conquerors-in-waiting are Europe’s marginalized Muslims. That is not the only thing that is “hard to define,” let alone hard to believe. Caldwell never explains the terms and concepts on which his alarm depends. How does Islam have the power to infiltrate Europe when it is not even an agent? Why should we believe that underperforming minorities could dominate countries with the world’s highest standards of living? What is Europe, anyway? Is it the European Union, or, as his title also suggests, the West? When was Europe a happy land of monotony, free of pesky minorities, indulging in its unchanging cultural preferences, such as—I kid not—pea soup? Why is this essentialized Europe incapable of growing to accept Muslims, and why do Muslims have neither the right nor the ability to integrate?

As an American, I have every right to ask, for his assumption that Muslims cannot be Westerners assumes my commitments are fraudulent. He is in effect calling me, and millions like me, liars.

The “Disaster” of Muslim Immigration

Caldwell makes numerous basic errors throughout his book; it would be unfair to allow his mistakes to pass uncorrected. Caldwell describes the Muslim world as a “basket case,” and to prove his point, he recycles numerous statistics about Arab backwardness. A writer for the Financial Times, Caldwell should understand that if fewer than one in five Muslims is Arab then, ipso facto, Islam is not isomorphic with Arabness.

He describes the “vanquished enemy” of World War II as racist, although many of the vanquishers were structurally racist themselves. When describing large-scale Algerian immigration into France, he blames the violence of the “Algerian revolution,” though who or what Algeria was revolting against is evidently immaterial. Reinhard Schulze clarifies: the French military visited a comparable level of death and destruction on Algeria as affected Germany in World War II. This fact could explain why so many Algerians were so eager to get out of Algeria, if Caldwell only bothered to share it. But in the service of communicating a deep cultural unease with rapid social change, Caldwell has attempted to provide a veneer of neutral correctness (he has, in effect, internalized the multiculturalism he professes to so detest.)

When it comes to immigration, Caldwell is at his shoddiest—and, unfortunately for us, that is his theme. Over and over, we are told that Muslim immigration to Europe is different. While immigration between European countries is healthy and positive, Muslim immigration to Europe is disastrous. Unbelievably, Caldwell argues that there is no difference between Europeans (read: white Christian Europeans) moving between EU member-states and New Yorkers heading out for California. Except, of course, that New York and California never fielded armies against one another.

Then again, if Europe could leave historic animosities behind—and it did—Caldwell’s argument has little weight. Caldwell anxiously digs himself a deeper hole: He distinguishes Hispanic immigration to America from Muslim immigration to Europe, arguing that the former does not represent the intrusion of an alien culture. (Tell that to the right-winger for whom the Hispanic promises to implode America.) Since Hispanics correspond to a more culturally conservative West from a few decades back, it will not be hard for Hispanics (mere antiquated Westerners) to be assimilated. Islam, on the other hand, “is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture.” Halfway through the book, however, he tells us that Turkish attitudes to marriage are deeply similar to European attitudes from just “a very few decades ago.” Surely the stuff great arguments are made of.

Ultimately, Muslims are a danger because, all insistence aside, Caldwell is a racist who has translated religion into a set of unchangeable and interchangeable believers. He believes there are no meaningful differences among Muslims; at one point, he even underlines the point by noting that although Volvos are not Volkswagens, both are still cars (and of European manufacture, I might add)—another example of Caldwell’s argumentative impotence.

Not only are Muslims indistinguishable, which is the religious equivalent of the racist assumption that all colored folk look (or talk, or think, or dream, or smell) alike, these Muslims are all opposed to the West, incapable of change, and opposed to democracy. Let us consider these three points sequentially.

That Muslims are all opposed to the West is nonsense: America’s Muslim community is culturally Western, politically active, and socially dynamic. Two of our Congressmen are African-American Muslims—are they opposed to the West? I have met numerous European Muslims committed to their countries of residence and deeply shaped by those cultures. (One such acquaintance, a candidate for British Parliament from Glasgow, represents the Scottish National Party.) That Muslims are incapable of change is similarly inaccurate. I will let Caldwell disprove himself on this point. He observes that Turkey has democratized over the past decades, and this partway explains the more confident role Islam plays in Turkish culture. Is that not a change?

That Muslims are all opposed to democracy, absolutely central to Caldwell’s polemic, is belied by the unhelpful fact that the majority of the world’s Muslims live in democracies: Mali, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other countries, with 700 million Muslims; more than half the planetary total.