A Book To Read

This book: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell, Doubleday

From the NYTimes Review:

Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book...[of]... arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists.

Primary among them are these: Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”

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

...Mr. Caldwell is not anti-immigration. He traces the historical movements of various peoples across continents and nationalities and notes both successes and failures. But there has been nothing, he suggests, quite like the recent influx of Muslims into Europe — he refers to it as “a rupture in its history.”

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

These immigrants are further swamping Europe demographically, he adds...

The problem, in Mr. Caldwell’s view, is less about sheer numbers than cultural divergence. What’s happening in Europe is not the creation of an American-style melting pot, he writes, because Muslims are not melting in. They are instead forming what he calls “a parallel society.”

...Worse, these immigrants are bringing anti-Semitism back to Europe.

...The most chilling observation in Mr. Caldwell’s book may be that the debate over Muslim immigration in Europe is one that the continent can’t openly have, because anyone remotely critical of Islam is branded as Islamophobic.

...“The Islamic world is an economic and intellectual basket case, the part of the potentially civilized world most left behind by progress,” he writes.

...Mr. Caldwell’s book is well researched, fervently argued and morally serious. It may serve as a dense, footnoted wake-up call...For Mr. Caldwell, the fundamental issue is also, more centrally, about irrevocable societal transformation. It is hard to argue with his ultimate observation about Europe today: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture” (Europe’s) “meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines” (Islam’s), “it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”