A More Perfect Union and the Clash of Civilizations

by Richard L. Rubenstein (November 2011)

Author’s note: On June 9, 2005, I delivered the keynote address, “A More Perfect Union and the Clash of Civilizations” at the Annual Meeting of the Public Administration Theory Network (PAT-Net), an international academic organization, meeting in Krakow, Poland.. I had initially been informed that the address would be included in September 2005 issue of PAT-Net’s quarterly journal, Administrative Theory and Praxis. Nevertheless, the editors subsequently refused publication although they published “a Forum discussion” on the address without publishing my paper. I discuss my experience in an article, “Encounter with An Angry Muslim Academic,” in a subsequent issue of the New English Review. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Bat Ye’or for many of the insights in this essay.

In view of the theme of this conference, “More Perfect Unions? Public Administration in an Era of Political and Economic Integration,” I propose to discuss some of the consequences of one of the most important historic events of our time, the mass migration of Muslims into contemporary Europe and the role of European public administration in facilitating that migration. Before doing so, however, let us take note of the proximity of O?w?eçim, known to the world as Auschwitz, to our conference here in Krakow, Poland’s ancient capital. If, as sociologist Max Weber has observed, instrumental or goal-oriented rationality (Zweckrationalität ) involves, “the methodical attainment of a definitely given and practical end by an increasingly precise calculation of adequate means” whatever those ends may be, then Auschwitz can be seen as a triumph of rational public administration seeking “political and economic integration.” Indeed, German public administration, of which the SS and the Gestapo were integral parts, sought a “more perfect union” of the German and racially kin communities through extermination and massive population transfers.

The centrality of “political and economic integration” to Germany’s war aims was explicitly stated by Adolf Hitler on October 6, 1939 when he declared in a speech to the Reichstag that “the most important task” facing wartime Germany was the creation of “a new order of ethnographic constellations, meaning a resettlement of nationalities.” He further declared that “an ordering and settlement of the Jewish problem” ought to be attempted.”[1] Hitler’s ultimate intention has been succinctly stated by the American writer Richard Rhodes:

The Final Solution-the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union-was intended to be only the first phase of a vast, megalomaniacal project of privation, enslavement, mass murder and colonization modeled after the historic colonization of North and South America and on nineteenth-century imperialism but modernized with pseudoscientific theories of eugenic restoration (italics added).[2]

There is some disagreement among reliable scholars concerning when the program of outright extermination of the Jews was initiated. There is, however, a scholarly consensus that at the beginning of the war German public administration sought the physical removal of the Jews, albeit with great brutality, from the Reich and the annexed territories rather than outright genocide. This removal was coupled with a monumental program involving the transfer of approximately 500,000 ethnic Germans from the Baltic and Eastern European countries into the newly enlarged Third Reich in a program known as Heim ins Reich (Home into the Reich). The formula was simple but deadly: Germans in; Jews out.

The programs for the “resettlement” of ethnic Germans and the expulsion of Jews were linked to a third public policy, the so-called “Euthanasia” program in which aged, infirm, and mentally ill Germans, deemed to be “life unworthy of being lived” (“lebensunwertens Lebens”) and “useless eaters” (unnütze Fresser), were gassed and cremated by German doctors and nurses assisted by SS euthanasia “specialists” in special hospitals and psychiatric institutions.[3] The first victims of the National Socialist project of creating a “more perfect union” were not Jews but Germans certified on the basis of a harsh cost-benefit analysis as “unfit” for life in Hitler’s Reich. 

The “Euthanasia” program’s ideological roots were to be found in the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to utilize what was regarded as “scientific” knowledge to weed out “undesirables” and thereby to create a “more perfect union.” Relying heavily on Darwin’s theory that the human species has evolved through a process of natural selection involving the survival of the fittest, the conviction arose among British, French, Belgian, German and American political leaders, scientists and even some clergy that the dispossession and extermination of the “lower” (and colored) races was an inevitable and desirable consequence of the evolutionary “progress” of the “higher” races. Such sentiments were especially strong among those intellectual and political leaders in Europe and America whose colonial and imperialist ventures in Africa, the New World, and Australia had had genocidal consequences for the indigenous populations.[4] Anxious to prevent “inferior” members of their own societies from dragging their communities down to the level of the “inferior” races, a number of predominantly white Protestant American physicians, businessmen, and corporate leaders concluded that it would be unwise to permit nature alone to determine the future character of their community without the guiding control of scientific intelligence.[5] They sought to direct the way Americans were bred so that those afflicted with debilitating physical or mental illness did not proliferate. Considerable racism was involved in the eugenics movement’s ideas concerning who ought to be prevented from breeding. The high incidence of disease, mental disturbance, and asocial behavior among poverty-stricken Blacks, American Indians, and Mexican-Americans was attributed to congenital defects in the way these groups had evolved. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and related Protestants of northern European stock were said to be at the apex of the world’s evolutionary hierarchy. Italians, Slavs, Asians, and Jews were regarded as considerably lower in evolutionary development.[6] The World War II decision to resettle ethnic Germans and to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, and incapacitated Germans was motivated by the same Social Darwinism, as well as by the conviction that the improvement of society could be both bureaucratically and scientifically managed. To repeat, Nazi public administration was in fact attempting to create a “more perfect union” in the heart of Europe.

Nor did the quest for publicly-administered “more perfect unions” involving massive population transfers in Europe, albeit with far less overt violence, cease with the demise of the Third Reich. On the contrary, since the end of the Second World War, Western Europe has experienced one of the most rapid and far-reaching demographic transformations in its entire history: From the time of Europe’s voyages of discovery until the early 1950s, Europe had been a net exporter of people. Since then, Europe has become a net importer on a monumental scale. In 2003 the United States Department of State Estimated that there were more than 23 million Muslims domiciled in Europe and that number has undoubtedly increased since then.[7] Some informed observers have concluded that “by the early decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims will constitute half the population of France.”[8] An even darker view of Europe’s prospects was offered by Bernard Lewis, an internationally recognized authority on the Middle East, in a widely-discussed 2004 interview in Die Welt (Hamburg) in which he stated  that “Europe will be Muslim by the end of the century”[9] Moreover, the demographic transformations that have rendered these projections plausible were not the haphazard result of an absence of public policy, but as we shall see, the consequence of decisions taken, more often than not, without public debate by the senior officials of the European Community (E.C.) and its successor, the European Union (E.U.) As with all instances of rapid mass immigration, these policies have not been without problematic consequences.

Perhaps the most serious consequence has been the introduction into Europe of a rapidly growing population, an unknown number of whose members reject integration into the receiving countries as unconditionally contrary to their religion. Nor can one divorce this phenomenon from the history of Islam itself. For over fourteen hundred years Islam has been Christianity’s most important competitor and its most dangerous adversary. Moreover, it is impossible to understand either the extraordinary rapidity of the rise and expansion of Islam in the seventh century or the relationship of Islam to Christianity apart from the concept of jihad. It was by means of jihad that Islam expanded with such speed. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the expansion was not the result of successful persuasion by Muslim missionaries but was very largely dependent on the success of Muslim arms.

Jihad, a duty incumbent upon every Muslim male, was, at least in the period of Islam’s conquests, the fundamental mode of relationship between the Muslim and the non-Muslim worlds. For many Muslims, it still is. Jihad is based on the dichotomous division of the world into dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb. The former is the realm of Muslim dominance in which justice, peace and true religion are said to prevail. The latter is the region of war, characterized by heedlessness, disorder, internal strife and unbelief. As such, dar al-Harb constitutes a threat to true religion whose inhabitants must be converted or defeated militarily.[10] Moreover, in Islamic jurisprudence, jihad must continue until the world’s only religion is that of Allah (Qur’an 2:189). Nor is there any indication that jihad and its conquering objectives have been abandoned in the contemporary era.[11]

We would, however, be mistaken to regard jihad solely as a program of violent action. Propaganda and taqiyya, or religiously-sanctioned dissimulation, are also among the legitimate strategies of jihad in accordance with Muhammad’s saying, “War is deception.” Moreover, in classical Islam, jihad does not mean holy war but is an essentially peaceful undertaking for the sake of humanity. While da’wa, or the call to Islam, is supposed to be peaceful, when non-Muslims resist that call by their failure to submit to Allah, Muslims have both the right and the obligation to use force to defend the call against unbeliever resistance. Jihad is thus seen as a righteous reaction against infidels who hinder the spread of Islam. For Muslims jihad is never regarded as aggression but an effort to spread true religion through the expansion of dar al-Islam which is identical with dar al-salam, the abode of peace.[12]

There is obviously an irreconcilable conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim understanding of jihad. No non-Muslim can accept the idea that Muslims have a divinely-sanctioned obligation to use force against the resistance of unbelievers. As the French scholar Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq observed some forty years ago, the practical result of this view is that war is the normal state of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.”[13] This does not mean that every Muslim considers himself at war with non-Muslims.  Nevertheless, from the eighth until the twenty-first centuries important Muslim religious authorities have affirmed the unchanging validity of this conception of the relations of the Muslim with the non-Muslim world.[14]

As a practical matter, Muslims are hardly likely to use force when the power equation weighs against them. Nevertheless, there is always a question of how Muslims might relate to non-believers if, as seems likely, they were to achieve a substantial demographic majority in the countries of Western Europe. We may be able to discern a possible answer in the three categories of non-believers in Muslim thought: (a) Harbis, those who use armed force and refuse to submit to Allah’s call against whom faithful Muslims are obliged to make war. (b) Infidels who belong to the countries of truce (dar al-sulh, essentially a sub-category of dar al-Harb). Muslims may accept “truce treaties” when they are either too weak to defeat unbelievers or when the latter agree to pay tribute and permit the unhindered propagation of Islam within their borders. Osama Bin Laden is reputed to have offered the governments of Europe such a truce treaty in a statement dated April 15, 2004 on the condition that they agree to withdraw their troops from Iraq.  However, such treaties are regarded as temporary and must be renewed every ten years.[15] (3) Dhimmis, those Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians who surrender without fighting and accept Muslim domination in exchange for protection and peace. Their lands are incorporated into the domain of Islam (dar al-Islam) and they are protected from jihad.

Much has been written about “Muslim tolerance,” especially in the Middle Ages, but such “tolerance” cannot be understood apart the status of dhimmis in Islamic thought and politics. “Muslim tolerance” has often been compared favorably to Christian intolerance, especially in the Middle Ages, and there have been periods when Jews, for example, were better treated in Muslim than in Christian lands.[16] When, for example, the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492 a very significant number found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, westerners, both Jewish and Christian, who write most earnestly about Muslim tolerance, seldom write that such tolerance was always conditional upon the non-believer’s dhimmi status. In the early years of Muslim expansion, it was neither possible nor prudent to convert or eliminate all of the conquered peoples. Their skills were often indispensable to the creation of the vast Islamic empire. The Muslims maintained their dominance while incorporating non-Muslims into their empire by the dhimma, the pact of submission and protection imposed upon the defeated “peoples of the Book”by which the latter were permitted to dwell in Islamic lands.[17] As is well known, the conditions of the dhimma included certain disabilities among which are payment of the jizya, a poll tax incumbent on every male, and the wearing of distinctive clothing, a ban on bearing arms, owning lands, mounting horses, or possessing or constructing buildings taller than those owned by Muslims, legal inferiority, and the refusal of a dhimmi’s testimony in any case involving a Muslim. Dhimmis do not have the right to build new religious structures or repair those that have fallen into disrepair, save by permission of Muslim authorities. The largest structures, such as Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, could never be restored to the Christian community because they had become an inalienable part of  d?r al-Isl?m.  Moreover, failure to abide by the conditions of the dhimma entailed a return to a state of war in which the dhimmi was subject to the forfeiture of all property, slavery, and even loss of life. A dhimmi’s wife and children could legitimately be enslaved and forcibly converted. Lest these conditions appear to be an outmoded relic of an earlier age, a senior aide of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, on the occasion of combat against the occupation forces in Iraq, told worshippers during a sermon on Friday May 7, 2004 that anyone capturing a female British soldier can keep her as a slave.[18]

According to Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), who remains to this day a highly influential Muslim thinker, Muslims alone have the right to possess the world’s material wealth.[19] Writing of territory conquered by Islam, he declares:

These possessions received the name of fay[20] since Allah had taken them away from the infidels in order to restore them to the Muslims. In principle, Allah has created all things of this world in order that they may contribute to serving him, since he created man only in order to be ministered to. Consequently, the infidels forfeit their persons and their belongings, which they do not use in Allah’s service, to the faithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allah returns what is theirs; thus is restored to a man the inheritance of which he was deprived, even if he had never before gained possession of it.[21]

A similar position had already been taken by the Andalusian jurist Ibn Hazm (994-1064):

God has established the infidels’ ownership of their property only for the institution of booty for Muslims.[22]

It is beyond the scope of this effort to enter into details, save to note that for strict Islamic traditionalists, unconverted infidels dwelling in the dar al-Harb have no inherent right either to life or property. Dhimmitude entailed unending degradation of status for both the individual and his or her religious tradition.[23] The dhimmi had – one could better say that the dhimmi has – no unconditional human rights and depends on the conditional protection bestowed upon him or her by the terms of the dhimma. In a sense, the dhimmi was regarded as a captive in a never-ending war. Any infraction of the conditions of the dhimma could entail the total withdrawal of protection. The dhimmi then became an outlaw with neither human rights nor protection.

From an historical perspective, radical Islam’s current assault against the West can be understood as (a) a continuation of Islam’s never-ending attempt to expand its dominion at the expense of Christianity that began in the seventh century and reached its zenith at the gates of Vienna in 1683 and (b) as a response to Christian counter-expansion in Muslim lands during the last three centuries. According to Bernard Lewis, there have been three waves of Muslim invasion of Christian Europe, the first by the Moors in the West, the second by the Turks in the East, and the third, the invasion of Muslim capital and labor that began in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike the first two, the third invasion took place without a shot being fired and with the consent of Europe’s governments.[24]

The presence of so large a number of Muslims in contemporary Europe inevitably raises serious questions concerning the viability of the European Union’s quest for ever greater economic and political integration. According to Bassam Tibi, Professor of Political Science at Germany’s Göttingen University, himself a Muslim and a leading authority on Islamic extremism, “The goal of the Islamic fundamentalists is to abolish the Western, secular order and replace it with a new Islamic divine order…The goal of the Islamists is a new imperial, absolutist Islamic power.” [25] One of the many confirmations of Tibi’s views was expressed in an interview in Le Monde (September 9, 1998) by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, a radical Muslim leader domiciled in London. Speaking as the spokesman of Osama bin Ladin’s World Islamic Front For Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, he declared that their movement intends “to make the flag of Islam fly high at No. 10 Downing Street and at the Élysée Palace.” Unfortunately, such an outcome is not unthinkable if Western leaders, both public and private, continue to be in denial concerning the utter incompatibility of Muslim and Western conceptions of “political and economic integration.” 

Views similar to those of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad have been openly and frankly expressed  by any number of other leading Muslim authorities such as Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradhawi and Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd al-Rahman al-‘Arifi, Imam of the mosque of the King Fahd Defense Academy. al-Qaradhawi’s weekly program on Al Jazeera television gives him a global audience. He has often stated that “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror.” [26] He has, however, added that “… the conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology.…”[27] What he does not say is that preaching, ideology, domestic terrorism, and “stealth jihad” may very well be more effective in undermining the contemporary West than open resort to military force.[28] The Imam of the Defense Academy mosque has written, “Don’t be sad, Allah is with us…. We will control the land of the Vatican … and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims in Kosovo – and before then in Bosnia, and before then in many places in the world – will yet pay us the Jiziya in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam…”[29]

Although these leaders speak of the Muslim “conquest” of Europe as a consequence of Islam’s message, neither they nor the late Pope John Paul II, who on November 14, 2002 pleaded before the Italian parliament for a reversal of Italy’s declining birthrate, have been unaware of the power of demographic transformations to bring about political, religious and cultural change.[30] We have noted Bernard Lewis’s view of Europe’s demographic prospects. Christopher Caldwell has pointed out that Lewis made his observation only incidentally. When asked in the Die Welt interview whether the EU could serve as a counterweight to the United States, Lewis replied that he saw only three countries as possible “global players,” China, India, and possibly a revived Russia. By contrast, he declared offhandedly that “Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb.” Moreover, Lewis spoke “as if it were something that every politically neutral and intellectually honest person would take for granted.”[31]

Because of his stature and the offhand way he described the Islamization of Europe as a foregone conclusion, Lewis’s remarks caught the attention of the European public and its EU bureaucrats including Frits Bolkestein, the outgoing European Union competition commissioner. In September 2004 at the University of Leiden, Bolkestein warned against admitting Turkey to the European Union. Citing the failure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to resolve the cultural and political conflicts of its diverse nationalities, he argued that immigration was turning the EU into “an Austro-Hungarian empire on a grand scale” in which indigenous Europeans would soon be minorities in their own great cities. He predicted that the admission of 83 million Turks to the E.U. would further the Islamization of Europe and added that if Lewis’s prediction was on target, “… the liberation of Vienna in 1683 will have been in vain.”[32]   

Writing in the German periodical Welt am Sonntag (Hamburg), Bassam Tibi offered a different view of Bernard Lewis’s forecast concerning the future of European integration: 

By means of increasing Islamic migration, the identity of Europe changes itself. But in which direction? Either Islam will be Europeanized or Europe will be Islamized. I am a Muslim immigrant and for me the problem does not consist in whether the majority of Europeans are Muslims, but which Islam, Shari’a Islam or Euro-Islam, will dominate. Not with a general suspicion against Muslim immigrants in Europe (in 1950 scarcely one million, today  17 million, 2025 presumably about 40 million), but only with a policy of the Europeanization of Islam can one turn away the danger. [33]

Save for a segment of the Muslim professional and business classes, the prospects of Islam being Europeanized, Bassam Tibi’s optimum solution, appears highly unlikely. One of the factors working against it is the explosive combination of the rapid worldwide increase in the Muslim population and the diminishing population of non-Muslim Europe.

Since the nineteen-fifties, the countries of the Middle East and the Maghreb have been exporting their redundant population to Europe in ever greater numbers. The Eurocrats who formulated the permissive immigration policies did not envision immigration by individuals who wanted to integrate into the host countries. They understood full well that they were facilitating the mass importation of homogenous ethnic communities.[34] Moreover, the economically disadvantaged were not the only immigrants to reject assimilation. Well-educated professionals are as likely, often more likely, to feel alienated from a host-culture that is not their own as are the less fortunate.

Integration in the receiving countries is also hindered by high unemployment and the living conditions of the unemployed and under paid. For example, immigrants, who arrived in English mill towns like Oldham in the 1970s and 1980s, came to work in the textile industry expecting eventually to return home. Like the early Turkish and Kurdish Gastarbeiter who came to Germany in the nineteen-fifties, most never returned. Neither did they achieve fluency in English. In time, the unskilled jobs for which they originally came largely disappeared. Lacking adequate language skills, most failed to qualify for the available jobs in the new service economy. Moreover, their children tended to do poorly in schools, many of which serve a predominantly Muslim constituency.[35] In France, the unemployment rate among young Muslim males is four times the national average and there has been a string of vicious attacks, some homicidal, by young Muslims. Jews have been a frequent target but they are not alone. As Christiane Amanpour, Senior CNN correspondent, has reported, “With little hope of making it outside the [housing] projects, many of these young men try to dominate their own neighborhoods, resorting to violence, especially against young women.”[36] More than fifty percent of the inmates in French prisons are Muslims.[37]

The consequent reluctance to employ young Muslim males compounds their alienation. With the encouragement of radical imams, many come to regard Islamic extremism as the perfect vehicle for expressing their alienation and resentment. Radical Islam also offers disaffected young men a compelling source of identity, a sense of self-respect, and a long-range plan of action in a movement that proposes to dominate far more than the local housing project or helpless women.

In the diaspora, radical Muslims are separatists, but, according to Gilles Kepel, a French authority on contemporary Islamic movements, while some separatists espouse violence and terror, most do not. Many, perhaps most, separatists are strongly influenced by salafism, a rigid version of Islam akin to Wahabi Islam, and by Saudi Arabian preachers, whose messages are readily available on satellite television and the internet.[38] In France, the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes an important non-separatist group. Unlike the separatists, the Brotherhood seeks full integration in that country’s political and cultural life, ultimately on its own terms. Its fundamental objective is to expand Islamic influence and acquire access to levers of power. An important element in the Brotherhood’s strategy is to depict Muslims as victims of “Islamophobia” in France, the Middle East, and globally, and to seek support from human rights groups, anti-racist organizations, environmentalists, anti-globalists, Trotskyites, and, on occasion, neo-Nazis, a movement that shares their detestation of America, Jews and Israel.[39]

Nevertheless, the Brotherhood’s strategy is not without difficulty. Each of these allied groups has its own agenda. All are united in hostility towards the United States and Israel. They are also at one in their alienation from significant aspects of the political and cultural mainstream, but what unites them can carry them only so far. What for some may prevent integration and “a more perfect union” could be the issue of equality of the sexes. Friendly non-Muslims can defend the wearing of the hijab or headscarf by schoolgirls on human rights grounds but the hijab has wider sociological implications. While some girls wear it as an affirmation of faith and identity, for others, especially in France’s predominantly Muslim cités or ghettos, the hijab is an instrument of control and separation from the values of secular society imposed upon women by radical Muslims.[40] Nor do the radicals rest content with persuasion. According to journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, schoolgirls in the cités who do not wear the hijab are likely to be regarded as whores and be seen as “fair targets of violence” in a social environment in which gang rapes are common.[41]

In the unassimilated cités, social and cultural norms regarded as divinely mandated trump the norms of secular society, as is evident in the interview of Sheikh Abdelkader Bouziane by Lyon Mag, a regional journal that devoted an entire issue to the subject of “Islamism: the Contaminated Suburbs of Lyon” (Islamisme: les Banlieues lyonnaises contaminées).”[42] The sheikh, a salafist, admitted having two wives and eight children with each in spite of French laws prohibiting polygamy. He defended the practice as legitimated by the Qu’ran. When asked whether he approved of the stoning of an adulterous woman, he stated that it too was in accordance with divine law. In response to the question of whether he wishes to see France become an Islamic republic, he replied “Not only France…but the entire world.”[43] These were not the views of a private individual but an influential religious leader. Similar views have been expressed by Hani Ramadan, director of the Islamic Centre of Geneva and grandson of Hassan al-Banna founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. In an essay in Le Monde, he defended the death-by-stoning sentences for adultery pronounced on two women in Nigeria.[44] His brother Tariq, the celebrity Muslim intellectual and preacher, refused to condemn the practice when asked in a prime time television debate by Nicholas Sarkozy, at the time French Minister of the Interior, where he stood on the “lapidation” (stoning) issue.[45]

There are some obvious public policy questions that Europe’s political leaders and bureaucrats might have asked before admitting so large a population firmly committed to a religion that, as noted, has for over fourteen hundred years been Christianity’s most important competitor and dangerous adversary:

(a) Could a continent that had been a net exporter of people absorb millions of immigrants of a different religion and culture in a relatively short time and what might be the political and social costs of failure?

(b) Did the Eurocrats seriously consider the difficult history of Europe’s own minorities’ problems before taking the decisions that led to large-scale Muslim immigration?

(c) Has the Islamic mainstream cast off the obligation to enlarge the domain of Islam at the expense of Christianity?[46]

(d) Would the new immigrants respect the religion and culture of their adopted land or would they seek to make their own religion dominant?

Questions such as these are political, social, cultural, as well as theological. By its very nature the triumph of Islam in any community would have revolutionary consequences for that community’s non-Islamic population.[47] And, given the decreasing Christian and the increasing Muslim birthrate, Bernard Lewis’s forecast of a Muslim Europe by the end of the twenty-first century may very well come to pass.[48]

When Europe’s political elites made the historically unprecedented decision to permit large-scale Muslim immigration, did they ask such questions or were they primarily interested in the economic and perhaps the political advantages that would follow from Muslim immigration? Bat Ye’or, a preeminent scholar on Islam’s relations with the non-Islamic world, has advanced a view that has received increasing acceptance in recent years. She argues that the original decision to seek a new relation with the Arab-Muslim world was taken by Charles De Gaulle in 1962 after the French withdrawal from Algeria.[49] That decision was consistent with De Gaulle’s earlier objections to superpower domination. Already during the Second World War, De Gaulle was angered by the failure of the Big Three, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, to accord his Free French forces co-belligerent status. The Free French were excluded from such major wartime conferences as Quebec, Cairo, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam and the sessions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. De Gaulle regarded it as inconsistent with the grandeur of France, a term of the greatest importance to him, that France had no part in the deliberations at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin planned the future of Europe.[50]

Finding superpower domination incompatible with the interests of France and, in his view, Europe, De Gaulle looked to the South to create a counterweight. The Sixth Day Israeli-Arab War of June 1967 proved to be a major turning point. During the lengthy conflict with Algeria that came to an end in 1962, France had been a major supplier of Mirage jets and other armaments to Israel, but in June 1967 De Gaulle denounced Israel and imposed a strict arms boycott against her. With the Franco-Algerian conflict resolved, France sought to strengthen its ties with the Muslim world. At a press conference on November 27, 1967, De Gaulle condemned Israel’s foreign policy and declared that France’s cooperation with the Arab world was the “fundamental basis” of her foreign policy. [51]

At the time, European mainstream sympathies were strongly pro-Israel, but a movement was underway to change those sentiments. Of particular interest to our subject was a lecture by Georges Montaron, the director of Témoignage Chrétien, a left-wing Catholic group, on the subject of “The Arab World and Western Opinion” delivered at the Dar es-Salaam Center in Cairo on November 27, 1970. Montaron took note of the pro-Zionist sentiment then prevalent in Euope and advised his Arab audience, “If you succeeded in making from authentic Oriental Arabs, authentic Frenchmen and Englishmen-what an influence you would yield [in Europe].”[52] As Bat Ye’or has commented:

European pro-Palestinian lobbies labored to create a Euro-Arab population that would fight in Europe for Arab causes against Zionism and ‘American imperialism.’ This goal also motivated the Third World solidarity movement, which arose in the 1970s among clergymen, intellectuals, and politicians in favor of massive Muslim immigration to European countries.” [53]  

Nevertheless, the movement for closer European ties with the Muslim world made little headway until Egypt and Syria’s unsuccessful Yom Kippur war against Israel from October 6-22, 1973. In the midst of that war, the Arab members of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced that they would no longer ship petroleum to the United States, the Netherlands, and Denmark, nations considered friendly to Israel. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were exempted from the boycott. Having failed to prevail militarily, the Arab states were determined to assert their strength on the world stage economically and diplomatically. As is well known, oil prices quadrupled, resulting in an energy crisis of unprecedented scale and a monumental transfer of wealth from the oil consuming to the oil producing states. The newly acquired wealth enabled Saudi Arabia to finance the worldwide growth of mosques and other Islamic institutions on an unprecedented scale. 

Even before the Yom Kippur War, there had been some preliminary discussion in 1973 by France and Libya of the possibility of a Euro-Arab dialogue. The French had sold 110 Mirage jets to Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi and had become a major arms supplier to many Arab states. The issue of Euro-Arab dialogue became urgent after the oil embargo. Far more dependent upon Middle East oil than the United States, the Europeans could not afford to ignore Arab threats massively to reduce production.[54] However, the Arabs indicated that Euro-Arab dialogue was conditional on European support of Arab political objectives against Israel, a condition the Europeans were more than willing to meet.[55] The European Community (EC), forerunner of the European Union (EU), thereupon created a structure of Cooperation and Dialogue with the Arab League (EAD) in which the EC agreed to support the Arab anti-Israel policy in exchange for extensive commercial agreements. [56]

The first official meeting at the ministerial level between the Europeans and Arabs to discuss the Dialogue took place in Paris on July 31, 1974. In addition to the foreign ministers of the nine member nations of the European Community (EC), the meeting was attended by the secretary-general of the Arab League and the foreign minister of Kuwait. This was the start of a process that has continued to the present to create institutional structures to facilitate the integration and harmonization of European and Arab policies in international affairs, culture, education, and the media. In addition to agreement on a common Middle Eastern policy, European and Arab leaders sought to create through the EAD “a global alternative to American power.”[57] The long-range political effect of the EAD has been to undermine the Atlantic alliance, so necessary to Europe during the Cold War, and to create a very real but unstated European Union-Arab partnership and the seeds of a new balance of power. The new structure is Gaullist in origin, spirit, and motivation.[58]

The felt need to counter the American superpower increased markedly with the collapse of the Soviet Union that left the United States as the sole superpower and Western Europe no longer threatened by the Soviet Union. This policy was promoted by President Jacques Chirac, heir to both the office and the policies of Charles De Gaulle.

We cannot go into detail concerning the full scope of the Euro-Arab structures. Our primary focus is on the effect of population and immigration policy on the viability of Euro-Muslim integration. Many of the EC immigration policies were first floated in Eurabia, a journal initiated in the mid-1970s by the Comité Européen de Coordination des Associations d’Amitié avec le Monde arabe.[59] In its editorials and articles the journal stressed the necessity for Europeans and Arabs to express “a joint political will” and create a “climate of opinion” favorable to the Arabs. In a July 1975 issue, Tilj Declerq, a Belgian member of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, advanced the view that “A medium and long term policy must be formulated in order to bring about economic cooperation through a combination of Arab manpower reserves and European technology and ‘management.’” Declerq saw the sharing of technology and manpower as gradually bringing about “as complete as possible an economic integration.” Before publication, Declerq’s proposals had already been unanimously approved by the Parliamentary Association meeting in Strasbourg. The Association also demanded of Europe’s governments that “the fundamental rights of immigrant workers in Europe… be equivalent to those of national citizens.”[60]

In calling for vastly increased Muslim immigration into Europe, little thought was apparently given to the changes in religious sentiment that had overtaken the Muslim world during the nineteen-seventies. Neither Western capitalism nor Marxist socialism had proven capable of fulfilling the promise of a better life for the increasingly urbanized Muslim population. Only Islam was deemed capable of meeting the spiritual, if not the material, needs of the masses. And, the Islam that took hold emphatically rejected the modern Western secular world. As Muslim elites and the masses gained cultural self-consciousness, they largely rejected the Western world’s project of universal secular, cultural hegemony.

The permanence of the Muslim settlement in Europe was assured when Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister of France, signed a decree on April 23, 1976 permitting the family reunion of hitherto temporary migrant workers. A similar development later took place in Germany when new laws were enacted on January 1, 2000 that made it possible for Germany’s largely Turkish and Kurd immigrant population to acquire citizenship as a result of being born in Germany or through naturalization.[61]

One consequence, perhaps unintentional, of European secularism or laicité was that the immigrants were permitted to enter Europe as permanent residents without any consideration of their attitudes toward the culture and civilization of the host countries or the screening of radicals determined upon jihad. While “Europeanizing” the immigrants does not appear to have been a significant concern of the European participants in the Euro-Arab Dialogue, the teaching of Arabic language and civilization has been a major concern of both sides from the start. These programs were motivated both by a desire to accommodate the religio-cultural needs of the immigrants and to facilitate the creation of a common Euro-Arab civilization. An early exploration of the latter issue took place at the Euro-Arab Seminar on “Means and Forms of Cooperation for the Diffusion in Europe of the Knowledge of Arabic Language and Literary Civilization” held at the University of Venice March 28-30, 1977. This high-level seminar was under the joint auspices of the European Community and the Arab League. The participants recommended that centers for the diffusion of Arab language and culture be established in Europe’s capital cities in coordination with the Arab countries that were party to the Dialogue. They further recommended that Arab scholars skilled in teaching Europeans be appointed to European universities and institutes, a demand repeated several times in the recommendations. Yet another recommendation was that European and Arab specialists were to cooperate “in order to present an objective picture of Arab-Islamic civilization and contemporary Arab issues” In effect, this recommendation was tantamount to ceding control of the teaching of Arab and Muslim issues in European academic institutions, including international affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Arabs, hardly a recipe for a balanced exploration of issues. It also limited the exploration and study of Islam to what was deemed acceptable to Muslims. The Venice seminar paved the way for large scale Muslim immigration and envisioned the creation of a common culture on both shores of the Mediterranean.[62] Moreover, every subsequent meeting of the Euro-Arab Dialogue passed resolutions in support of Arab immigration to and employment in Europe. 

An important argument in support of the immigration policy was that Europe needs the immigrants for its labor force. UN projections suggested that the median age of the 15 European Union countries, currently 38, will rise in 2050 to 49. Apart from all other considerations, a decreasing work force will have the burden of maintaining social security and health care systems whose beneficiaries are primarily the elderly. Raising the retirement age and reducing benefits can make a contribution to alleviation, but these measures hardly constitute an adequate response to the problems that beset the social security and health care systems of Europe and the United States. Both Europe and North America have turned to immigration as a partial solution although the United States, historically an importer of people, has had fewer problems resulting from immigration than does Europe whose experience with mass immigration is relatively new. Moreover, most immigrants to the United States are currently Caribbean Blacks or Hispanics from Central and South America, with the Hispanics predominating. Both groups are predominantly Christian. At present, Europe has passed beyond the point of no return on the issue of immigration. Even if all immigration were stopped today, the Muslim population will continue to increase, perhaps at a slower rate, as the indigenous population decreases.

The decisions that led to Muslim immigration were taken by political leaders and high level bureaucrats acting without a public mandate. Insofar as there was opposition, it usually came from right-wing movements whose protests could easily be dismissed as “racism” or “Islamophobia.” A possible source of future conflict resides in the fact that the immigration was never the subject of a popular referendum in any EU country.

No one can predict how this unprecedented mixing of peoples, religions and civilizations will play out, but the possible scenarios are hardly encouraging. Gilles Kepel concludes his recent book, The War for Muslim Minds, by taking note of “the quest for ‘lost Andalusia’ that pervades Muslim consciousness.” This motive was at least as much an element in the Madrid bombings as was influencing the Spanish elections to remove Spanish troops from the American-led coalition in Iraq. Like many of the participants in the Euro-Arab Dialogue, Kepel looks forward to a “new Andalusia, but he would conceive it very differently than do the Islamic militants:”

Rather than representing a bastion of jihad on European soil, as the militants who organized the bombing of Madrid intended, Andalusia must come to symbolize a place where the hybridizaton and flowering of two distinct cultures can produce extraordinary progress in civilization. [63]

Positing a moral equivalence, Kepel argues that the advent of a new Andalusia offers “the only way out of the passions and impediments that Osama bin Laden’s jihad and George W. Bush’s war on terror produced.” [64] He claims that “today’s new Andalusia is in gestation in Europe’s outer cities, inhabited by young people of Muslim background…” He bases his optimistic assessment on Euro-Muslim participation in grassroots political activity independent of religious influence and claims that “the democratic political system that emerged from the European enlightenment is starting to absorb men and women born in a Muslim tradition, for the first time in history.”[65] Kepel acknowledges that forces within the Euro-Muslim community are working hard to prevent such an outcome. Nevertheless, he is convinced that “full democratic participation” through institutions of “education and culture” will present “a new face of Islam,” to the larger world, one that is “reconciled with modernity.”

Kepel’s guarded optimism is hardly surprising. He is chair of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po, France’s elite institution for the training of political leaders and senior bureaucrats as well as an advisor to the French government, Given his knowledge of developments in modern Islam both in the Muslim heartland and the European diaspora, his views deserve serious consideration. Nevertheless, he appears to underestimate the degree to which religion is both a source of and a quest for power and domination. The flaw in Kepel’s belief that the democratic political system can enlist a substantial proportion of Europe’s Muslims is that democracy, as we know it, is a system based upon power-sharing rather than domination and, as Nietzsche understood, the will to power is exceptionally strong component in all religions, arguably the most important component. [66] The shifting boundaries of Christendom and Islam were more often settled by force of arms than by negotiation. It took a series of bloody wars before the principle of cuius regio eius religio was confirmed in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia and the power relations between European Catholicism and Protestantism more or less settled. Nor can nearby Auschwitz be entirely divorced from the unwillingness of the European churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to accept the emancipation of Jews and Judaism that was a consequence of the very Enlightenment to which Kepel looks so hopefully.

Implicit in Nietzsche’s analysis of the triumph of the priestly class and its values is the insight that the strategies of those who have yet to acquire power are very different than those with assured power.

Islam has never been a power-sharing religion. The history of both its expansion and its domination of subject peoples illustrates the degree to which Islam has been a superb instrument for defeating its adversaries and, through the institution of dhimmitude, of enlisting their talents in its service. Radical Muslims have made it absolutely clear that they believe they have a divinely certified warrant for their detestation of their enemies and a mandate to overcome them in God’s name. About this there can be no compromise and all talk of Muslim tolerance cannot disguise the fact that there is a critical mass in diaspora Islam that is intent on doing what they have explicitly promised, overthrow the Western secular order and replace it with a new imperial, absolutist Islamic divine order.

Western Europe’s real crisis will come when Islam begins to approach majority status. Bernard Lewis has written concerning that moment: “For Islamists, democracy, expressing the will of the people, is the road to power, but it is a one-way road, on which there is no return, no rejection of the sovereignty of God, as exercised through His chosen representatives. Their electoral policy has been classically summarized as ‘One man (men only), one vote, once.’”[67] Nothing in its history offers reason to believe that a dominant or potentially dominant Islam will share power with non-Muslims. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the union and coordination of Western technology and Muslim manpower that the Euro-Arab Dialogue has worked so earnestly to achieve will be put to work in the service of a very different integration than that envisioned by the Eurocrats and their political superiors, namely, a newly dominant Islamic order.

 

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[1] See Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans. Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (New York: Arnold, 1999), p. 34; Aly, “Jewish Resettlement” in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist ExterminationPolitics:  Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Bergahn Books, 2000), p. 59.

[2] Rhodes, Masters of Death (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2002),  p. 240.

[3] On the Nazi so-called “Euthanasia program” see Götz Aly, et. al., Cleansing the Fatherland:Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

[4] For a succinct but devastating overview of the movement see Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All Brutes,” trans. Joan Tate (New York: The New Press, 1996).

[5] See Stephan L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977) pp. 30?55. For a discussion of how biologists, geneticists, and physicians contributed to the Holocaust is Robert Jay Lipton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Pyschology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

[6] See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 170?201

[7] Timothy M. Savage, “Europe and Islam: Crescent Waxing, Culture Clashing,” The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2004, p. 26, http://www.twq.com/04summer/docs/04summer_savage.pdf .

[8] Writing in the section on Islam in the latest edition (2002) of the widely used textbook, World Religions: Western Traditions, Mahmoud M. Ayoub of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA., makes that assertion. See Willard G. Oxtoby,, ed., World Religions: Western Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 449.

[9] See Wolfgang Schwanitz, “Europa wird am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein,” Die Welt, July 28, 2004, http://www.welt.de/data/2004/07/28/310913.html.

[10] See John Kelsay, Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) pp. 34-35.

[11] According to an important Muslim authority, the late Professor Ismail al-Faruqi (d. 1986), who taught at Chicago, Syracuse, and Temple University, “The doctrine of Jihad or Holy War is valid in Islam.”Ismail R. al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths, ed. Ataullah Siddiqui (Herndon, VA: The Islamic Foundation, 1998) p. 100.

[12] The sources on jihad are voluminous. I have found the insights of Bassam Tibi especially helpful. See Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 54-55. See also Tibi, “War and Peace in Islam,” in Terry Nardin, ed. The Ethics of War and Peace: Secular and Religious Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 128-45.

[13] In the same text Dufourq also commented that “It was not war that was proclaimed [against nonMuslims] but peace.” See Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, “A Propos de l’Espagne catalane et le Maghreb aux XIII^e  et XIV^e   siècles, Revue de l’Histoire et de Civilisation du Maghreb (2) (1962),  pp. 44-45. For this citation, I am indebted to Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The EuroArab Axis (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 2005), p. 326,n. 10.

[14] For a compendium of sermons, essays, and speeches affirming the continuing validity of jihad by contemporary Muslim authorities, see MEMRI, http://www.memri.org/bin/search/search.cgi?nocpp=1&p%3Ats_udav=0&sort-method=1&Match=1&Terms=jihad&Realm=Special+Reports.

[15] MEMRI, “Osama Bin Laden Speech Offers Peace Treaty with Europe, Says Al-Qa’ida ‘Will Persist in Fighting’ the U.S.,” April 15, 2004, Special Dispatch Series, No. 695.http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP69504 .

[16] For an overview of the most recent scholarship on the myth of Islamic tolerance, see Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). See also Robert Spencer, ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005).

[17] The dhimma is modeled after the first such treaty granted by the Prophet Muhammad to the conquered Peoples of the Book. See Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002), pp.37-38. In addition to Islam and Dhimmitude, the treatment of minorities in Islam has been authoritatively investigated by Bat Ye’or in The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, with a preface by Jacques Ellul (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 1985); The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude Islam and Dhimmitude: (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 1996). The dhimma resembled the b’rith or covenant treaty prevalent in the ancient Near East, used by the Hittites and other peoples, to define the relationship between a stronger power and its weaker client states. As a suzerainty treaty, the covenant was a pact imposed by the more powerful suzerain upon a vassal king. It was, in essence, an asymmetrical power relationship in which the sovereign lord spelled out the conditions under which weaker client and his successors could receive his protection. The weaker party had the choice of accepting the conditions or of attempting to reverse the power relations militarily. In reality, the imposition of a covenant was usually consequent upon the defeat of the weaker party. On the idea of the covenant in ancient times, see George Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: Biblical Colloquium, 1955); Walter Eichrodt, “Covenant and Law,” trans. L. Gaston, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 20, (July 1966), 302-321; Edward M. Gaffney, “Of covenants ancient and new: the influence of secular law on biblical religion, The Journal of Law and Religion 2, no. 1117 (1984), 144; Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969): Dennis McCarthy, S.J., Old Testament Covenant (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1972; Article “Covenant,” Encyclopaedia Judaica,  Vol. 5, pp. 1012-22; Dave Lowe, “The Old Testament Covenant as a Form of Treaty,” http://pweb.jps.net/-davejen/covenantastreaty.htm.    

[18] “Al-Sadr aide says female soldiers can be kept as slaves,” Associated Press Dispatch, Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 7, 2004.

[19] Ibn Taymiya’s thought is regarded as the source of the Wahhabism, the strictly traditionalist movement founded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and strongly supported by the Saudi monarchy.

[20] Fay was booty taken in war from infidels that became the property of the umma and administered by the caliph.

[21] Ibn Taymiya in Henri Laoust, Le Traité de droit public d’Ibn Taimya. Traduction annotée de la ‘Siyasa ?ar’iya’ (Beirut: Institut Français de Damas, 1948), pp. 35-36. For this citation, I am indebted to Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 429, n. 32.

[22] Ibn Hazm cited by Roger Arnaldez, “La Guerre sainte selon Ibm Hazm de Cordoue,” in Etudes d’Orientalisme dédiées à la mémoire de Lévi-Provençal (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1962), p. 457.

[23] The subject is authoritatively explored in the works by Bat Ye’or cited in this essay.

[24] On the idea of a third Muslim invasion, see Lewis, Islam and the West, pp. 41-42.

[25] Cited by Lisbeth Lindeborg, “Osama’s Library,” Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden, Oct. 25, 2001, reprinted in World Press Review< January 2002, (VOL. 49, No. 1).

[26] The text and documentation of  the statements on the subject of the forthcoming victory of Islam in Europe by Al-Qaradhawi and other religious leaders can be found at “Leading Sunni Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi and Other Sheikhs Herald the Coming Conquest of Rome,” MEMRI, Special Dispatch Sries No. 447,  December 2, 2002, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=jihad&ID=SP44702.

[27] The sheikh Al-Qaradhawi wrote of the “signs of the victory of Islam,” citing a well-known Hadith (Islamic tradition): “The Prophet Muhammad was asked: ‘What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?’ He answered: ‘The city of Heracles will be conquered first’ – that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the capital of Italy. The city of Heracles [later to become Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice – once from the South, from Andalusia (Spain), and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.”

 http://www.islamonline.net/fatwa/arabic/FatwaDisplay.asp?hFatwaID=2042. Al-Qaradhawi has often made similar statements. For example, in his weekly religious program on Al-Jazeera, the Arab-language satellite network, the Sheikh declared: “The Hadith says that the city of Constantinople, the city of Heracles, will be conquered first. We conquered Constantinople and the second part of the prophecy remains – the conquest of Romiyya. The conquest of Romiyya means that Islam will return to Europe. In one of my previous programs, I said that I think that this conquest would not be by the sword or armies, but by preaching and ideology. Europe will see that it suffers from materialistic culture, and will seek an alternative, it will seek a way out, it will seek a lifeboat. It will find no lifesaver but the message of Islam the message of the muezzin who gives it religion but does not deny it this world, brings it to Heaven, but does not uproot it from Earth. Allah willing, Islam will return to Europe and the Europeans will convert to Islam. Then they themselves will be able to be the ones to disseminate Islam in the world, more than we ancient Muslims. This is within Allah’s capabilities.” Al-Jazeera Television (Qatar), November 30, 2000,
http://www.aljazeera.net/programs/shareea/articles/2000/11/1si1-30-3.htm

[28] On “stealth jihad, see Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Suberting America without Guns or Bombs (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2008).

[29] See  http://www.ghran.com/mandobiah/tazkiat7.htm  and  http://www.kalemat.org/sections.php?so=va&aid=93 .

[30] The speech was delivered on November 14, 2002. The English translation is available on the Vatican we site, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2002/november/documents/hf_jp  .

[31] Christopher Caldwell, “Islamic Europe?” The Weekly Standard, October 4, 2004, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/685ozxcq.asp?pg=1 .

[32] Kieron Wood,”An Islamic Europe?” The Sunday Business Post (Irish Republic), October 3, 2004, http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2004/10/03/story305659027.asp .

[33] “Durch zunehmende islamische Migration wandelt sich die Identität Europas. Aber in welche Richtung? Entweder wird der Islam europäisiert, oder Europa wird islamisiert… Ich selbst als islamischer Migrant meine, dass das Problem nicht darin besteht, ob die Mehrheit der Europäer islamisch sein, sondern welcher Islam, Scharia-Islam oder Euro-Islam, in Europa dominieren wird. Nicht mit einem Generalverdacht gegen islamische Migranten in Europa (1950 knapp eine Million, heute 17 Millionen, 2025 voraussichtlich etwa 40 Millionen), sondern nur mit einer Politik der Europäisierung des Islam kann man die Gefahr abwenden.” Bassam Tibi, “Grenzen der Toleranz,” Welt am Sonntag (Hamburg), September 5, 2004, http://www.wams.de/data/2004/09/05/328478.html .

[34] See Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, p. 95.

[35] See “Muslims in the West: Dim Drums throbbing in the hills half heard,” The Economist, August 8, 2002, http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1270416.

[36] “The New French Revolution,” a report by Christiane Amanpour on the CBS News Program “60 Minutes,” May 16, 2004 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/13/60minutes/main617270.shtml .

[37] See Farhad Khosrokhavar , “L’Islam Carcéral, Le Nouvel Observateur, March 25, 2004      http://www.nouvelobs.com/articles/p2055/a235982.html

[38] The term  salafism refers to “the pious ancestors –al-salaf al-salih-who were deemed to embody the purity of Islam’s fundamental doctrines.” Kepel, op.cit., pp.30-31. It is based on a fundamental idea in Islam, that Muslims ought to follow the precedent of the Prophet and his companions of the first two generations. See Khaled Abou El Fadl (UCLA Law School), “Islam and the Theology of Power,” http://www.islamfortoday.com/elfadl01.htm .

[39] Kepel, op. cit., p. 264.

[40] Kepel, op. cit., p. 283.

[41] Marie Brenner,”Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah,” Vanity Fair, August 2004, http://www.mariebrenner.com/articles/daughters/df1.html .

[42] “Les Imprécations du Cheikh de Vénissieux,” Lyon Mag, April 2004,
http://www.proche-orient.info/xjournal_pol_int.php3?id_article=23768 .

[43] In a prime time debate with Nicholas Sarkozy, French Minister of the Interior, Tariq Ramadan, arguably Europe’s celebrity Muslim intellectual, refused to condemn the stoning of adulterous woman.mmit himself when queried on a French television show concerning

[44] Hani Ramadan, “La Charia Incomprise,” Le Monde, September 10, 2002.

[45] On Tariq Ramadan, see Caroline Fourest, Frère Tariq: discourse, strategie, et methode de Tariq Ramadan (Paris: Grasset, 2004).

[46] For a defense of the idea that Islam is compatible with “democratic pluralism,” see Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[47] The American Catholic thinker George Weigel has cited some of the possible negative consequences of a Muslim majority in western Europe: “Europe’s current demographic trendlines could eventually produce a Europe in which Sobieski’s victory at Vienna in 1683 is reversed, such that the Europe of the twenty-second century, or even the late twenty-first, is a Europe increasingly influenced, and perhaps even dominated, by radicalized Islamic populations, convinced that their long-delayed triumph in the European heartland is at hand.” First Things, February 2004, http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0402/articles/weigel.html.

[48] Population figures for France vary from 5 million to 10 million. While the exact figure is not known is that Islam is France’s second largest religion. See Jim Hoagland, “Europe’s Gray Future,” Washington Post, May 2, 2004.

[49] See Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, pp. 39-41.

[50] Walter Johnson – editor, Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949), p. 56.  See also Arthur Layton Funk, Charles De Gaulle: The Crucial Years (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 298.

[51] Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, p. 44.

[52] “Le directeur de ‘Témoignage Chrétien’ denounce la propaganda sioniste, Informations Arabes, No. 15, November 30, 1970, Geneva, no. 6. For this citation, I am indebted to Bat Ye’or, op. cit., p. 46.

[53] Bat Ye’or, op. cit., pp. 46-47.

[54] Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, is reported to have said that the oil-producing countries could reduce production by 80% and to have asked the Europeans, “How could you survive with that?” Bat Ye’or, op. cit., p. 48.

[55] Bat Ye’or, op. cit., pp. 52-53; John Waterbury, “Les Implications politiques et diplomatiques du dialogue international,” in Jacques Bourrinet, Le Dialogue euro-arabe (Paris: Economica, 1979), p. 25. I am indebted to Bat Ye’or, loc. cit., for this reference.

[56] Bat Ye’or, “Eurabia: The Road to Munich,” National Review Online, October 9, 2002.

[57] Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, p. 63.

[58] For an American discussion of the balance-of-power issues between the United States and the European  Union, see Jeffrey L. Cimbalo, « Saving NATO From Europe, » Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004,  Vol. 83, No. 6.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Bat  Ye’or, op. cit., p. 65.

[61] Until January 1, 2000, German citizenship was based on blood kinship (ius sanguinis) rather than place of birth (ius soli), as in the United States, Britain and France. Under Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, new laws were enacted that made it possible to acquire German citizenship as the result of being born in Germany or through naturalization. For details of the citizenship reform, “Reform of Germany’s Citizenship and Nationality Law,” are posted on the web page of the German Embassy to the United Kingdom. [This page has been removed.]
See instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationality_law

[62] See Derek Hopgood, Euro-Arab Dialogue: The Relations between the two cultures: acts of the Hamburg symposium, April 11th to 15th, 1983 (Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 317-23.

[63] Gilles Kepel, The War for the Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 294.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956).

[67] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, pp. 111-112.

 

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