Recent talk about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and how to best characterise the relationship between Islam and the West has inevitably got me thinking about a book which I first read a few years back by one Christopher Caldwell, entitled Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. It is primarily about how demographic shifts in post-WWII Europe have wrought concomitant shifts in European culture over time, as successive generations have come to identify more strongly with Islamic rather than Enlightenment values. The demographic shift comes first:
In the middle of the twentieth century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe. At the turn of the twenty-first, 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.
This would be no problem whatsoever, of course, unless and until Muslims begin to change the culture of these nations in harmful ways. Caldwell argues that this is a genuine risk, because Europe has failed to assimilate immigrants to shared European values such as free expression, secularism, and women’s equality. He believes that this is because Islam views itself as strong and ideologically coherent, whereas European multiculturalism takes a radically different view.
When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.
Caldwell also believes that Islamic doctrines should have to withstand the same criticism and ridicule that unbelievers and skeptics freely dish out upon the Christian faith:
A main weapon in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s attacks on Christianity was ridicule. But while hoping that Muslims will learn the lessons of Voltaire, Europeans have gone to great lengths to insulate Islam from Voltaire’s methods. Ridiculing Islam has been confused with xenophobia and racism. Those with questions about Islam are expected to content themselves with kicking the dead horse of Christianity in hopes that Muslims will, by inductive reasoning, come to see that the general laws so established apply to their religion, too.
Finally, Caldwell makes some fascinating and nuanced observations on specific social issues, such the relationship between feminism and sex work:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made the case for the superiority of the Western conception of women’s rights over the Muslim one. It is not lost on Muslims, however, that she has done so from Amsterdam, a city that, whatever its other glories, is known to the world as a place where young women sit naked in shop windows waiting for men to pay them for sex. Whether an anything-goes sex industry is caused by feminism or simply correlated with it, it has traditionally been considered a more serious kind of exploitation than choosing to wear—or even being made to wear—a scrap of cloth. “Liberation” can place its own constraints on women’s freedom.
While I do not fully share in Caldwell’s pessimism about Europe, I would commend at least the first chapter of his book to your reading. Share and enjoy!
