Friday, May 04, 2007

Eurabia, or Not?

Is Europe on the road to turning Islamic?  Some fairly knowledgeable individuals - Bernard Lewis, Bat Y’eor, George Weigel, Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, to name a few - have postulated that it is clearly so.

I’ve read many pieces from each of the above listed individuals, and each one has layed out some rather persuasive arguments in support of the theory of a future Eurabia.

One individual who disagrees with a the possibility of a coming Eurabia is Philip Jenkins, and he lays out his theories against a coming Eurabia in his newest tome, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, which is not available via Amazon.com.

Writing at FirstThings.com, Richard John Neuhaus provides a review of Jenkins arguments which is worth a read, long though it is at 5,084 words.

An excerpt from Neuhaus’ piece.

There was also the desperate economic need for workers. “The forces driving Muslim immigration were so overwhelming that there is no reason to imagine the conspiracy theory devised by Bat Y’eor and since popularized by Oriana Fallaci and others, which suggests that European elites collaborated with Arab states to create a Eurabian federation spanning the Mediterranean. Given the economic forces demanding labor and the political factors conditioning supply, it would be difficult to imagine any outcome much different from what actually occurred. In the United States, similarly, any significant relaxation of immigration laws would inevitably have drawn in millions of Mexican workers, regardless of what any government or private cabal planned or desired.” (One notes in passing that the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico is not a hypothetical about what might have happened but a massive fact on the ground.)

Neuhaus ends his piece this way, though.

At a recent dinner party with European intellectuals, I put to an influential French archbishop Daniel Pipes’ projection: Either assimilation or expulsion or Islamic takeover. That, he said, puts the possibilities much too starkly. “We hope for the first,” he said, “while we work at reducing immigration and prepare ourselves for soft Islamization.” Soft Islamization. It is a wan expression. Whether soft or hard, the prospect is that, in the not-so-distant future, someone will publish a book titled Allah’s Continent. In fact, several Muslim authors have already published books with very similar titles, anticipating the future of the Europe that was. Needless to say, and historical contingencies being as contingent as they are, I very much hope that they turn out to be wrong. As I very much wish Philip Jenkins’ God’s Continent provided better reasons for believing they are wrong.

Neuhaus’ piece is titled The Much Exaggerated Death of Europe.

Posted by John Venlet on 05/04 at 10:53 AM
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