A Turning Tide in Europe as Islam Gains Ground

Published: July 29, 2009

Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit.

But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists. Primary among them are these: Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”

Mr. Caldwell is a vivid writer, and like an action-movie hero he walks calmly away from his own detonations while fire swirls behind him. “Imagine that the West, at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported,” he writes. “Something similar is taking place now.”

Muslim cultures “have historically been Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings,” he deposes. “Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager.”

These kinds of ideas have been articulated before, of course, by writers including the Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis — who has said that, by the end of this century, “Europe will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb” — the Somali-born Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (“Infidel”), Lee Harris (“The Suicide of Reason”), Bruce Bawer (“While Europe Slept”) and the combustible journalist Oriana Fallaci. But Mr. Caldwell’s book is the most rigorous and plainspoken examination of Muslim immigration in Europe to date, a sobering book that walks right up to, if never quite crossing, the line between being alarming and being alarmist.

There are many strains to Mr. Caldwell’s argument, too many to fully tease out here. Suffice it to say, up front, that Mr. Caldwell is not anti-immigration. He traces the historical movements of various peoples across continents and nationalities and notes both successes and failures. But there has been nothing, he suggests, quite like the recent influx of Muslims into Europe — he refers to it as “a rupture in its history.”

“In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe,” Mr. Caldwell writes. “At the turn of the 21st, (As of the year 2000) there were between 15 and 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain.”

These immigrants are further swamping Europe demographically, he adds, because of their high fertility rates. He points to small facts as well as large ones. In Brussels in 2006, the seven most common given boys’ names “were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine, and Hamza.” (In 2007 Mohammed was the #1 birth name with a mere 2 million Muslims vs 40 million British)

The problem, in Mr. Caldwell’s view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural divergence. What’s happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style melting pot, he writes, because Muslims are not melting in. They are instead forming what he calls “a parallel society.” Newcomers to England now listen to Al Jazeera, not the BBC. They are hesitant to serve in their adopted country’s militaries. (As of 2007, Mr. Caldwell notes, there were only 330 Muslims in Britain’s armed forces.) Worse, these immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe.

Mr. Caldwell carefully observes the riots that spread in ethnic neighborhoods across France in 2005, during which thousands of cars were burned. “Who were these rioters?” he asks. “Were they admirers of France’s majority culture, frustrated at not being able to join it on equal terms? Or did they simply aspire to burn to the ground a society they despised, whether for its exclusivity, its hypocrisy, or its weakness?”

(Article Continues at NYTIMES ONLINE)