by Mark Steyn
Maybe you don’t know the alarm’s ringing because it’s hard to hear over the Muslim call to prayer. Halfway through America Alone, I cite a famous passage of Gibbon:
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but, if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was “an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.”
Thirteen hundred years after Poitiers, plans were announced by the Central Mosque in Oxford to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer across the eastern part of the city three times a day. “The deeply English, deeply Christian city of Oxford, one of the homes of free thought,” wrote The Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens, “is now being asked to accept the Islamic call to prayer wafting from mosque loudspeakers over its spires and domes. If that is not a threat to our ‘way of life,’ then I don’t know what is. Allowing the regular electronic proclamation of Allah’s supremacy in a British city is not tolerance, but a surrender of the sky to a wholly different culture.”
Like most parts of the proudly secular Eutopia, Oxford is not “deeply Christian” in any meaningful sense, nor, come to that, “deeply English.” Islam may be a “wholly different culture,” but unlike the spires of those empty Anglican churches it represents the demographic energy of today’s England.
Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidised polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on September 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It’s hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft, fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another ten years. The folks who call my book “alarmist” accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada’s Muslim population has doubled in the last ten years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honor killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to “hold the line”? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: Look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. The idea that the West’s multicultural establishment can hold the line would be more plausible if it were clear they had any idea where the line is, or even gave any indication of believing in one.
In calling for the introduction of sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority. The Archbishop justifies implementing sharia on the grounds that, without this kind of accommodation, western Muslims will be “faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” In formulating it that explicitly, he gives the game away. In a healthy society, “cultural loyalty” has to align to one degree or another with “state loyalty.” Yet His Grace is conceding that loyalty to Islam (not merely as a faith but in a politico-cultural sense) is in conflict with loyalty to the Crown—and supersedes it. And he’s right. A sufficiently strong “cultural loyalty” will always outweigh the nominal citizenship one happens to hold, especially if it’s something as weedy and undernourished as the modern multicultural post-national identity promoted by most developed societies. When “state loyalty” is a British or Canadian or Dutch passport, bet on “cultural loyalty.”
IT’S THE STUPIDITY, ECONOMISTS
As for those who pin their hopes on assimilation and some unspecified but inevitable Islamic “reform,” they’re overlooking two things: first, the reform has already taken place, and second, as a consequence, we have reverse assimilation. Not so long ago, at dinner in New York, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you’re with Muslim women who were at college in the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on “women’s issues,” of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the “moderate Muslim” chair of the meeting: “authentic women”—by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their twenties they were the “authentic women:” The covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees—that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal and Detroit. If you had said to her in 1968 that westernized Muslim women working in British hospitals in the early twenty-first century would reject modern hygiene because it required them to bare their arms, she would have scoffed with the certainty of one who assumes that history moves in only one direction.
Listening to American economists frame the illegal immigration question in purely economic terms, I’m reminded of the British and European political class a generation or two back. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when the anti-immigration working class of northern England fretted that they would lose their cities to the “Pakis,” the sophisticates mocked them as paranoid racists. Racist they may well have been, but they weren’t paranoid: In little more than a generation, Oldham and Blackburn and Batley went from mills to mosques. Yorkshire and Lancashire have adopted Mirpuri practice on arranged cousin marriage and can now boast among their native sons the July 7 Tube bombers.
This isn’t to say every Hispanic lawn boy in Beverly Hills is a jihadist in waiting, but to make a more basic point. Those ignorant, grunting, knuckle-dragging English masses understood something that the technocrat experts either miss or glide smoothly over—that there is something wrong and reductionist in seeing human beings only as economic entities. Fine, we need bus drivers, or auto workers, or seasonal fruit pickers, or whatever it is. But if the price of a cheap pool of bus drivers is the transformation of Yorkshire into something that would be unrecognizable to any Yorkshireman of the mid-twentieth century, then the smart set should at least be smart enough to address the larger cultural questions.
In 2008, in another of those non-alarmist, nothing-to-see-here stories, a British government minister tentatively raised the matter of severe birth defects among the children of Pakistani Muslims. Some 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, and this places their progeny at increased risk of certain health problems. This is the only way a culturally relativist West can even raise some of these topics: Nothing against cousin marriage, old boy, but it places a bit of a strain on the old health care budget.
But this is being penny-wise and pound-blasé. What does it mean when 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins and 70 percent are married to relatives? At the very least, it tells you that this community is strongly resistant to traditional immigrant assimilation patterns. Even in New York, the hottest spot in America’s melting pot, in 80 percent of Pakistani families, the parents determine whom and when you marry. Which is why it will be a long time before you see Abie’s Pakistani Rose on
Broadway. Of course, in any society, certain groups are self-segregating: the Amish, the Mennonites, and similar types. But when that group is not merely a curiosity you point out as you’re driving through Intercourse, Pennsylvania, but the principal source of population growth in all your major cities, the challenge posed by that self-segregation is of a different order. In northern England, Pakistanis aren’t assimilating with “the host community;” the host community has assimilated with Pakistan. Again, if you had told a Yorkshireman in 1970 that by the early twenty-first century it would be entirely normal for half the kindergarten class to be the children of first cousins, he would have found it preposterous.
But it happened. By “alarmist,” The Economist and company really mean “raising the subject.” The British novelist Martin Amis raised the subject of my book with Tony Blair and asked him if, when he got together with his fellow prime ministers, the Continental demographic picture was part of the “European conversation.” Mr. Blair replied, with disarming honesty, “It’s a subterranean conversation.” “We know what that means,” wrote Amis. “The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.” The “multiculturist ideologue,” he added, “cannot engage with the fact that a) the indigenous populations of Spain and Italy are due to halve every thirty-five years, and b) this entails certain consequences.”
Is it “alarmist” to ponder what those consequences might be? Are sharia, polygamy, and routine first-cousin marriage in the interests of Europe or North America? Oh, dear, even to raise the subject is to tiptoe into all kinds of uncomfortable terrain for the multicultural mindset. It’s easier just to look the other way. Nobody wants to be unpleasant, or judgmental, do they? What was it they said in the Cold War? Better dead than Red. We’re not like that anymore. Better screwed than rude.
THE CAUCASIAN KNOT
Nobody writes a book subtitled “the end of the world as we know it” without expecting it to be controversial, but I had no idea until it came out that I was straying into forbidden territory. The aforementioned Martin Amis, a distinguished bestselling novelist of impeccably leftie credentials, made the mistake of giving America Alone a goodish review in the Times of London, which was jolly sporting of him all things considered (see the second page of the Prologue). He now finds himself damned as a “Steyn-hugger” (the Independent) and, defending himself for defending me, told an interviewer in 2008 that Steyn is “a great sayer of the unsayable.”
So what is it about America Alone that’s so unsayable? Even to ask that question is to tiptoe into murky water. One of the weirdest aspects of a self-neutering, politically correct West is how cobwebbed and squaresville its preoccupations are. When the book was published, I got a whole bunch of e-mails from (white) folks accusing me of “racism.” “So,” they sneered, “you’re worried that Caucasian women aren’t dropping enough babies, eh?”
Who said anything about “Caucasians”? As it happens, Arab Muslims are classified as Caucasians and they’re having a ton of babies. Here’s somewhere else that’s full of Caucasians: the Caucasus. The Caucasians of the Caucasus are of a Mohammedan persuasion, which is why the region’s a mighty big headache for the ethnic Russians in their steep post-Commie demographic decline.
More sophisticated sneerers e-mail that I’m worried that “white women” aren’t doing their bit. A Chinese lad on the west coast wrote to gloat that, since reading about my book, he’d been sticking it to the missus with rather more frequency and gusto than usual just to add one more Chinese baby to the yellow peril and thereby “scare me shitless.” I e-mailed back: Good for you. The trouble with the yellow peril is that these days it isn’t in the least bit perilous. If he’d read the book, as opposed to some Steyn’s-a-racist précis of it, he’d know that I note China’s disastrous demographic profile and dwell at some length on the collapsed birth rates of Japan. Declining fertility rates are a fact—not just for pasty Scots and Belgians but also for the “hordes of sinister little yellow men” of whom my correspondent believes me to be quaking in dread.
So who exactly is obsessed with “race” here? Racism has become so much the default prism that everything has to be squashed into its cobwebbed frame. Have you ever been to the Balkans? It’s the home of Europe’s newest nation, Kosovo, which declared independence in February 2008. Kosovo is also Europe’s second majority Muslim nation, after Albania. It will not be the last. Balkan “whites” being outbred by Balkan “darkies”? Not at all. The Muslims and the non-Muslims look exactly the same, “race”-wise. The chaps have the same weathered features, nicotine-stained fingers from the impressive 180-a-day smoking habit, itchy garments apparently knitted out of some industrial-sized Chore Boy sink scrubber. There’s no discernible difference—other than their respective faiths, and the fact that, year in, year out, the Muslims outbreed the infidels. Yet even to ponder the rise of Islam in Europe is to invite charges that you’re obsessed with “white people” and “Caucasians.” Au contraire, it’s the fetishization of reductive notions of race which makes us so ill-equipped to understand what’s really going on.
In 2007, some larky lads were arrested in Germany. Another terrorist plot. Would have killed more people than Madrid and London combined but it was nipped in the bud so it’s just another yawneroo: Nobody cares. Who were the terrorists? Mohammed? Muhammad? Mahmoud? No. Their names were “Fritz” and “Daniel.” “Fritz,” huh? That’s a pretty unusual way to spell Mohammed. Indeed. Fritz Gelowicz is as German as lederhosen. He’s from Ulm, Einstein’s birthplace, on the blue Danube, which, last time I was in Ulm, was actually a murky shade of green. And, in an excellent jest on western illusions, Fritz was converted to Islam while attending the Multi-Kultur-Haus—the Multicultural House. It was, in fact, avowedly unicultural—an Islamic center run by a jihadist imam. At least three of its alumni—including another native German convert—have been killed fighting the Russians in Chechnya. Fritz was hoping to kill Americans. But that’s one of the benefits of a multicultural world: there are so many fascinating diverse cultures and most of them look best reduced to rubble strewn with body parts. Fritz and a pal, Atilla Selek, had previously been arrested in 2004 with a car full of pro-Osama propaganda praising the September 11 attacks. Which sounds like a pilot for a wacky jihadist sitcom: Atilla and The Hun.
Fritz Gelowicz. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world there are young men raised in the “Multi-Kultur-Haus” of the West who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist, and self-detonate.
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British, and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of cultural relativism, a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something primal and raging. Islam is an ideology. To claim it’s a “race” is so breathtakingly stupid as to give the game away—and to confirm that “Racist!” is now no more than the cry of a western liberal who can’t stand his illusions being disturbed.
LIGHTS OUT
And yet, for all that, this book is not about Islam, or Islamists, or fire-breathing imams, whether in mosques in Germany or Jalalabad. It’s not about “them;” it’s about “us”—and by “us” I mean the cultures that shaped the modern world and established the global networks and legal systems and trading relationships on which so much of the planet depends. To echo Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the Great War, the lamps are going out all over the world, and an awful lot of the map will look a lot darker by the time many Americans understand the scale of the struggle. Demography isn’t everything: Some critics of my thesis point out that for dominant civilizations it’s never been a numbers game. But the point is you can only buck the numbers if you have confidence and w
ill—if you know who you are, and what you believe. And this is in some ways more profound than demographic decline, and even harder to rally against. But once in a while it’s spelt out very starkly. Oscar van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), and in 2006 he gave an interview to the Belgian paper De Standaard. Reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
Sorry, it doesn’t work like that—or not for long. Too many of us—not just Europeans, but Americans, too—are only good at enjoying it, and cannot even conceive of fighting for it. So we give, as Mr. van den Boogard does, a fatalistic shrug. In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, he is past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance. Those Europeans who don’t reach that happy stage quite so placidly will turn, in the great Continental tradition, to the old strongman-on-a-horse, hoping for a Hitler but finding no one on hand but some nickel-and-dime Fascist pining for the old days. Even the indestructible prominence of Jean-Marie Le Pen on the French political scene underlines the demographic reality: he’s pushing eighty. The strongman’s too old to get on the horse.
This is a major shift in the global order and I am amazed by how few so-called experts take it seriously. Francis Fukuyama, making yet another attempt to salvage his “end of history” thesis, recently hailed Europe as the model for the future:
I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.