‘Islam is in no sense Europe’s religion’
With post-Christian Europe facing demographic disaster, Ed West speaks to the unlikely American prophet of our doom
11 September 2009
There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of empty maternity wards and closed-down schools. Europe is dying - its people have lost confidence in themselves and choose a life of pleasure-seeking over procreation.
And for four decades they have bought the good life, with five-week holidays and retirement at 60, by hiring low-paid, invisible immigrants to do the dirty, dangerous and demeaning jobs, each generation of migrants then joining this giant pyramid scheme once they are granted citizenship. Now Europe is paying the price.
Ignore the exaggerated scare stories about Islamic growth in Europe - the raw statistics are disturbing enough. France and Holland are already 10 per cent Islamic, but that ignores the age gap between native and migrant - Britain is only four per cent Muslim but among new-borns that figure is 11 per cent; the top seven boys' names in Brussels are all Islamic; at current trends Germany and Austria could be majority Muslim by mid-century.
Like with global warming, these fears used to be the preserve of the eccentric and unpleasant, but they are now entering the mainstream - and the James Lovelock of Islamisation is American Financial Times journalist Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, published this summer with little fanfare, but with a potent and powerful message that European liberals needs to listen to.
Caldwell is not Oriana Fallaci or Robert Spencer. He is not hostile to what others mockingly call "the religion of peace". As he writes in the book: "Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe's religion and it is in no sense Europe's culture."
It says much that the book has received rave reviews from the New York Times, Observer and Guardian, all staunch supporters of immigration and multi-culturalism. This is undoubtedly due to Caldwell's subtle and persuasive style of writing, and his obvious decency and lack of racism.
This unlikely prophet hails from Essex County, just outside Boston, Massachusetts, a traditionally very Protestant area - "Salem is the next town over" - with a strong English heritage: the surroundings towns are called Beverley, Ipswich, Gloucester, Manchester, Reading, Newbury.
Caldwell himself has an English/Scotttish surname - the Caldwells were originally a border clan, one of those ferocious tribes of cattle-rustlers who tamed first Ulster and then the American wilderness - but he comes from Canadian and New England Wasp stock on his father's side, and Irish Catholic and Jewish on his mother's.
"I was brought up Irish Catholic," he says: "But most Irish Catholics in Boston are extremely Irish. I am not."
Reflections often refers to the example of 19th-century Boston as a situation where migrations have not been beneficial to the native population; faced with massive immigration from Ireland, and a subsequent increase in violence and other social problems, the majority of the native Protestant Anglo-Americans fled the city within only a few years. Immigration did not "enrich" Boston's Anglo-American culture, to use the current euphemism - it ended it. Current demographic trends in Britain do not suggest this is a historic one-off.
"Whatever happens in Europe 50 years from now, it will be called a success in 100 years because everyone will be a product of that success, by definition. If these Irish people hadn't come to Boston I wouldn't be here, but if I put myself in the shoes of the Bostonians of the 1850s, and ask whether it was a good thing for them and the future they envisaged, I have to say 'no'."
He read history at Harvard, and after a couple of years living in England started writing about Latin America. "I really got rolling in journalism when I was in my mid-20s, at the end of the Eighties, and just as I really started to get interested in foreign corresponding, the Berlin Wall fell. American papers and magazines lost interest in foreign news everywhere. So I started writing about Latin American immigration, about Mexicans and Salvadoreans in Los Angeles and Washington."
Immigration, he says, is a less toxic subject in America than it is in Europe. "One, we're a little bit more used to it. Another is that the challenges of our immigration are much less than the challenges of yours." Funny that he uses that word - in the book he suggests that "challenge" is just a liberal euphemism for "problem".
Europe's challenges became more acute eight years ago today, but 9/11 did have some upsides - for foreign correspondents, at least.
"After 9/11 everyone wanted articles. I was going over to Europe sometimes 15 times a year, not just to write about immigration, but every time I would go to an immigrant neighbourhood." His conclusion, after years of studying and meeting both migrant and native, is devastating - essentially, multi-racial, multicultural societies do not work.
For one, it makes life more "crummy", taking away the comfort and stability of communities. "Diversity may be one of the causes of the isolation and atomisation of modern man," he says, quoting sociologist Robert Putmann, author of Bowling Alone, the famous study which revealed that people in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods were unhappier than those in less diverse areas.
Mass immigration was originally motivated by economics and throughout the ongoing debate of the last 40 years advocates have argued that immigrants are good for the economy. Certainly they drive down wages and inflation, but with long-term costs.
"The social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory." Besides which, apart from Indians and east Asians, most immigrant groups in Europe consistently take out more than they pay in.
He also destroys the argument about "diversity", another mantra repeated to keep the ports open. Europe's cities are not "diverse", they are divided.
"The immigrant populations are from pretty concentrated parts of the world - Turkish in Germany, North African in France, Pakistani and Bangladeshi in Britain; in the capital it is diverse, but outside you just get people from one country concentrated in one area."
What aggravates the situation is that 90 per cent of immigrants into Europe are of one faith - Islam, a religion that has undergone a dramatic radicalisation in the past three decades. And in Britain second-generation Muslim immigrants are often less "British" in their attitudes than their parents.
These disturbing trends could have been handled by a confident culture that ruthlessly turned immigrants into Englishmen, Dutchmen or Germans, but not by post-war Europe, which has overthrown its centuries-old Judeo-Christian moral code in favour of a novel, pleasure-based modern "rights" morality - especially the right to sleep around. All our searching around for what makes "Britishness" is fruitless, Caldwell says, because our entire culture was centred around Christianity. So instead we get what he calls the "thin gruel" of political platitudes about British culture being about "tolerance" and "fair play".
"The loss of confidence in European culture by Europeans is crucial. It's one thing when you're new to a country, or even off to university, any social structure that is hostile and you need to figure out whether you're wanted, you're constantly looking out for signals. The signal they're getting is 'these people don't believe in their culture, so why should I?'
"I was interviewing a radical imam in Copenhagen, involved in the cartoon business. He said: 'We recognise the Danes have their culture too.' Then his wife turned around and said: 'No they don't!' She'd been there for two decades. It was a very interesting moment." The most glaring symptom is Europe's birth rate. Every country on the continent has a fertility rate below replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, but some, like Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic are, at 1.3, in suicide mode.
Caldwell is not a moralist or a campaigner for "Christian values", and sits at the neo-liberal wing of conservative thought. But, as he sees it, at the heart of the problem is the collapse in religious faith. In Austria, the only country where births by religion are registered, the fertility rate for atheists is 0.85 per woman, which suggests that atheists are an endangered species.
The problem is that conservative campaigners who realise this, and who campaign for "Christian values", are not going to make any difference unless they actually believe. As Caldwell himself says: "Europe wasn't built by men who believed in 'Christian values', it was built by men who believed in Christ."
So what about his own religion? He is an enormous admirer of Pope Benedict XVI, and mentions his latest encyclical approvingly, but when I asked him in the pre-interview email whether he was Catholic he said it was "complicated".
"My own religious - phew - feelings. I hate to sound like one of these Dutch people, but I wouldn't be able to give you a content of my beliefs in a clear way. There is also the fact that I had a divorce, so the answer to the question am I Catholic is, 'yes, but it's a complicated state'." I explain the reason I thought he might be one - on top of his regular kind words about the Pope, he also has five kids (four with his current wife, the daughter of the late conservative journalist Robert Novak) and white Protestants don't tend to have big families.
He laughs and says that's generally true, then adds: "It's great. I've never heard anyone say they ever regret having so many children."
August 2, 2009
Strangers in the Land
By FOUAD AJAMI
NY TimesBook Review
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE
Immigration, Islam, and the West
By Christopher Caldwell
422 pp. Doubleday. $30
A departure and a return: In the legend of Moorish Spain, Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, is said to have paused on a ridge for a final glimpse of the realm he had just surrendered to the Castilians. Henceforth, the occasion, and the place, would be known as El Último Suspiro del Moro, The Moor’s Last Sigh. The date was Jan. 2, 1492.
More than five centuries later, on March 11, 2004, there would be a “Moorish” return. In the morning rush hour, 10 bombs tore through four commuter trains in Madrid, killing more than 200 people and wounding some 1,500, in the deadliest terror attack in Europe since World War II. This was not quite a Muslim reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, but a circle was closed, and Islam was, once again, a matter of Western Europe.
In his “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” Christopher Caldwell, a meticulous journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, gives this subject its most sustained and thoughtful treatment to date. The question of Islam in Europe has occasioned calls of alarm about “Eurabia,” as well as works of evasion and apology by those who insist Islam is making its peace with European norms. Caldwell’s account is subtle, but quite honest and forthright in its reading of this history. “Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture,” he writes.
It hadn’t taken long for Islam to make its new claim on Europe. Caldwell’s numbers give away the problem: “In the middle of the 20th century,” he tells us, “there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe.” Now there are more than 15 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain.
The native populations in Western Europe hadn’t voted to have the Turks and the Moroccans in Amsterdam, the Kurds in Sweden, the Arabs in London and the Pakistanis and Indians in Bradford and West Yorkshire. The post-World War II economic boom, and labor shortages, brought the immigrants, and they put down roots in their surroundings. In time, labor immigration “gave way to refugee immigration and to immigration aimed at reunifying (and forming) families. . . . Admitting immigrants changed from an economic program to a moral duty.”
A fault line opened in European society. On one side were those keen to keep their world whole and theirs; on the other was elite opinion, insisting on the inevitability and legitimacy of the new immigration. For their part, the new arrivals, timid at first, grew expansive in the claims they made. This was odd: they had fled the fire, and the failure, of their ancestral lands, but they brought the fire with them. Political Islam had risen on its home turf in the Middle East and North Africa, in South Asia, but a young generation in Europe gave its allegiance to the new Islamist radicalism. Emancipated women had shed the veil in Egypt and Turkey and Iran in the 1920s; there are Muslim women now asserting their right to wear the burqa in Paris.
The European welfare state tempted and aided the new Islamism. Two-thirds of the French imams are on welfare. It was hard for Europeans, Caldwell writes, to know whether these bold immigrants were desperate wards or determined invaders, keen on imposing their will on societies given to moral relativism and tolerance. In Caldwell’s apt summation, the flood of migration brought with it “militants, freeloaders and opportunists.”
The militants took the liberties of Europe as a sign of moral and political abdication. They included “activists” now dreaming of imposing the Shariah on Denmark and Britain. There were also warriors of the faith, in storefront mosques in Amsterdam and London, openly sympathizing with the enemies of the West. And there were second-generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe.
A study by Britain’s House of Commons of the July 7, 2005, bombings against London’s Underground caught the hostility of the new Islamism to the idea of assimilation, to the principle of nationality itself. Three of the four bombers were second-generation British citizens born in West Yorkshire. The fourth, who was born in Jamaica and brought to England as an infant, was a convert to Islam. Mohammad Sidique Khan, age 30, was the oldest of the group. He “appeared to others,” the report notes, “as a role model to young people.” Shehzad Tanweer, age 22, was said to have led a “balanced life.” He owned a red Mercedes, and enjoyed fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. The evening before the bombings, he had played cricket in a local park.
Years earlier, the legendary theorist of the Islamists, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, had written of the primacy of Islam: we may carry their nationalities, he observed, but we belong to our religion. The assailants from West Yorkshire, and the radical Muslims from Denmark who, after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, traveled through Islamic lands agitating against the country that had given them home and asylum, were witnesses to the truth of Qutb’s dictum.
“The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes in a set of remarks that Caldwell cites with approval. Many of Europe’s “guests” have overstayed their welcome. They live on the seam: the old world of Islam is irretrievable and can no longer contain their lives; the new world of modernity is not fully theirs. They agitate against the secular civilization of the West, but they are drawn to its glamour and its success.
In the way of exiles, once on safe ground they tell stories about the old lands. The telling speaks of Damascus as bathed with light, and the sea by Tunis and Algiers and Agadir as a piece of singular beauty. In its original habitat, there could be an honest reckoning with Islam. Men and women could wrestle with the limits it places on them; they would weigh, in that timeless manner, the balance between fidelity to the faith and the yearning for freedom. But it isn’t easy in Amsterdam or Stockholm. There, the faith is identity, and the faith is complete and sharpened like a weapon.
It wasn’t always so. Little more than four decades ago, when I left Lebanon for the United States, I, and others like me, accepted the rupture in our lives. I knew there would be no imams and no mosques awaiting me in the New World. I was not traveling in quest of all that. I was in my late teens, I accepted the “differentness” of the new country. News of Lebanon rarely reached me, air travel was infrequent and costly, I lost years of my family’s life. I needed no tales of the old country.
Nowadays, air travel is commonplace, satellite television channels from Dubai and Qatar reach the immigrants in their new countries, preachers and prayer leaders are on the move, carrying a portable version of the faith. We are to celebrate this new movement of peoples, even as it strips nations of what is unique to them. It goes by the name of globalization. It makes those who oppose it seem like nativists at odds with the new order of things.
It is a tribute to Caldwell that he has not oversold this story, that he does not see the Muslim immigrants conquering the old continent and running away with it. There is poignancy enough in what he tells us. It is neither wholly pretty, nor banal, this new tale of Islam in the West.
Fouad Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift.”
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 443 } Location: Île-de-France
Posted: Sun 01 Nov 2009 12:26 Post subject:
From where I sit, in my apartment in a Paris suburb, these concerns seem overblown. First, some caveats. The statistic I found on France's current birth rate is 2.02 children per women. There really seems to be a baby boom here. You see pregnant women and small children everywhere. Secondly, I am basically a zero growth advocate. I like open spaces and wild areas. So, with that, my observations.
In France, the majority-I would say 70-80 percent-of women of north african descent do not wear head scarves, men are clean shaven, and they are basically secular people who don't practice strict Islam-they may eat halal-which is quite easy because halal food is everywhere here, but they don't pray 5 times a day, don't fast for Ramadan, and don't go to the mosque, just like most French of local christian descent don't go to church but celebrate Christmas. Their out marriage rate seems to be less than that of subsaharan African immigrants, but greater than that of non-Muslim south asian immigrants. The recent debate about banning the burka seemed kind of silly to me, because in the year and a half I have been here, I have seen a total of 1 woman wearing one, the exact same number of women I saw wearing one in the midwestern city I used to live in. Many specifically embrace a Berber identity and reject an arab or islamic one. You even see the pan-berber flag occasionally. Many also maintain a mixed French-Berber identity. They have prominent secular role models like Zidane or Rachida Dati.
I can't really speak to the situation outside of France, but I imagine that there is more of a culture clash in countries that do not have a historical connection with their immigrants. France has historical ties to the Maghreb-where most of the Muslim immigrants came from, and most spoke French when they arrived. Muslim north Africans have been in France for a long time, in fact, when the Germans invaded in world war two, the grand mosque of Paris issued certificates of Muslim identity to north African Jews to protect them from the Nazis (relations have changed somewhat since the creation of Israel...).
Frankly, I think the author of the first article has his or her own motives and prejudices. Devout Christians deplore the secular culture that has developed in Europe. As a result, they paint doomsday scenarios of what is going to happen as a result of their countrymen abandoning that which they hold dear. Also, I can imagine much greater culture clashes in Denmark and Stockholm, where you are pitting Scandinavian culture against Iraqi or Syrian culture, or even England, where you are pitting Pashtun or Punjabi Muslim culture against british culture, than in France, where you can catch an overnight ferry from Marseilles to Algiers.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Sun 01 Nov 2009 13:31 Post subject:
MisterLawyer;
Who is having children? That would be my question. What is the birth rate of Muslims compared to Christians? Since Muslims are 10-12% well, it could be like America. Here we have constant growth due to birth rate and immigration but if you look at the "white" American birthrate it is not at replacement level last time I checked.
Anyway, thanks for the update on France. In the end I don't care, you reap what you so. I have a good friend in Zurich and she complains all the time about "the Muslims", last time I was there, about 4 years ago, she was complaining about "the Muslims" however I'm certain I saw less possible Muslims per capita than I see in the Washington D.C. area. LOL In fact I can only recall seeing "Muslims" (or potential ones) about three times during my 8 days there. Zurich and especially the surrounding areas (i.e. Saint Gallen) are very very white.
In the UK, I 've never been to the North but I have a friend from Manchester who is my age, he said he sees a handful of "Pakistanis" there but most of the "foreigners" are Chinese actually (or what he believes to be Chinese). He said you rarely see blacks up there and when he was in high school in the 1990's he only remembers one half black kid, that was it, no other non-white folks, but I have read that midland cities like Birmingham or in the Southern Counties there are far more, but I'm not sure what that means, by American standards. From the numbers I've seen, outside of London, the UK is very very white, as white as Indiana. I think the UK is like 90%+ white. France being the most diverse country in France is about as white as the state of Ohio in the U.S.
Japan doesn't have an immigrant problem per se, besides a handful of Chinese gang break ins (most of them are illegals). Maybe because Japan did not colonize other nations for decades to hundreds of years.
If larger nations in Western Europe did not colonize various nations around them and have former colonials they might not have an immigration problem today, there were always poor backward Eastern Europeans to draw from, if not for the Cold War it would have been a great source of labor...obviously there is less cultural distance, in most cases.
Europeans got quite wealthy off of resources taken from colonies and in the French case, they won wars with colonial soldiers against Germany. These capital resources aided their development (even in nations like Switzerland that did not have colonies they benefited off of France, Italy, and Germany) wealth and created niche industries to provide products for these larger nations.
So deal with the result of that.
One could say that Sweden never had colonies outside of Europe. True. However they should have thought about this before they brought in a lot of Muslims for humanitarian purposes or they were negotiating the Schengen Agreement.
When Vietnam had the boat people after the Vietcog began forcefully trying to repatriate ethnic-Chinese (who had been in Vietnam for centuries) or just get rid of capitalist Viet, most of the folks went to Hong Kong, Australia, and the U.S. Japan, the wealthiest nation in the region by far (already at that time the 3rd wealthiest nation one earth) took in less than 5 for medical reasons, I believe all but 2 were eventually sent elsewhere. Obviously, Japan there is less cultural distance between Japanese and Vietnamese than Iraqis and Swedes, however the Japanese were not interested in diversity and "enriching" their lives. Diversity was not responsible for their nations economic growth and did not stop their companies from selling in Western nations, or help their kids learn better.
Where I sit, Europeans should take some "national responsibility" for their polices (past and present) and live with the fallout. This situation did not happen by accident.
So yes, I agree with you, a lot of this is paranoia.
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 443 } Location: Île-de-France
Posted: Sun 01 Nov 2009 14:14 Post subject:
Quote:
Who is having children? That would be my question.
The most recent statistics I was able to find are from 2004, when the total birth rate in France was 1.9. Perhaps this is why people speak of a baby boom. Anyways, there are no ethnic, racial, or religious statistics, these are unconstitutional in France. So, in 2004, the rate among native born French was 1.8, and among immigrants it was 2.6. You can't know where those immigrants came from though, nor the background of the parents of the native born French, nor whether the children of the immigrant were fathered by an immigrant or a native born French man, nor his parent's background, nor vice-versa.
Just based on my observations, it seems to be pretty equal, but you can't always tell who is who based on looks.
One could say that Sweden never had colonies outside of Europe. True. However they should have thought about this before they brought in a lot of Muslims for humanitarian purposes or they were negotiating the Schengen Agreement............................................................................
Where I sit, Europeans should take some "national responsibility" for their polices (past and present) and live with the fallout. This situation did not happen by accident.
Actually, "they" aren't responsible for their countries' immigration policies. Political elites are. It's the population that has to reap what political elites have sown.
Quote:
If larger nations in Western Europe did not colonize various nations around them and have former colonials they might not have an immigration problem today, there were always poor backward Eastern Europeans to draw from, if not for the Cold War it would have been a great source of labor...obviously there is less cultural distance, in most cases.
This would be true of Britain and France, but is it true of Holland, Belgium, and Germany? Their more troublesome immigrants aren't from their former colonies.
For additional reading, I'd highly recommend God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis by Philip Jenkins. He puts the "Muslim problem" in many European countries in proper perspective by showing that the issue is less about religious behavior and more about crime and other pathologies emanating from Muslim communities whose members may not be all that religious (for now). Though I'm a godless heathen, I enjoy Jenkins' books immensely.
Philip Jenkins' God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis is a very good book. In fact, I recommend anyone interested in Islam & Europe to buy it and read it! It is dense on data and citation, and the narrative benefits from the author's multi-faceted understanding of the history and development of religions and religious institutions. While Jenkins' previous two books, The Next Christendom & The New Faces of Christianity, painted a vibrant & fresh portrait of Christianity across the world, from Africa to Latin America and Asia, God's Continent is geographically more narrow-focused, though thematically broader. Unlike many academics Jenkins has the ability to be sympathetic toward his subjects without seeming patronizing or turning into an advocate (though on occasion he does verge upon the latter). Importantly, as an Episcopalian he does not necessarily view all religions as fundamentally outmoded and primitive, allowing contempt to cloud the narrative. Though his sympathies and potential biases are pretty obvious, the data are so abundant that it takes little effort to arrive at conclusions at variance with the author's.
Despite the occasional lapses from objectivity, God's Continent is not a work of rhetoric steeped in anecdote and reliant upon shared norms to render it credible scholarship, its empirical bent is central, the narrative is an extended argument awash in data. The Next Christendom was a tightly presented brief that the future of the Christian religion lay the Third World, specifically, in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In it Jenkins' made the case that the Secularization Hypothesis is false, that it applies primarily to Europe, and that the United States is not an exceptional nation in its religiosity, rather, it is reflective of the worldwide vitality of organized religion. In large measure The Next Christendom and The New Faces of Christianity were aimed at a secular and progressive Western audience out of touch with the realities of religious expression, but whose own lives might soon be impacted by the changes being wrought by demography. After all, it is entirely plausible that within the next generation the Pope is more likely to be an African prince of the Church than a conservative German theologian. This is a very different book with a different audience. Though Jenkins does spend a fair amount of time engaging secular liberals and their confusions regarding the nature of the religion of the masses of "Europeans," his most biting rebuttals seem to be aimed at American conservatives who glory in visions of Eurabia. There are numerous quotations of Front Page Magazine, Mark Steyn and Claire Berlinski, mostly to emphasize the exaggerations and substantive weakness of the claims. God's Continent relays clearly the message that the reports of Christendom's demise are greatly exaggerated.
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Obviously, Japan there is less cultural distance between Japanese and Vietnamese than Iraqis and Swedes, however the Japanese were not interested in diversity and "enriching" their lives. Diversity was not responsible for their nations economic growth and did not stop their companies from selling in Western nations, or help their kids learn better. 