2005-02-25—Book Review: Eurabia |
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Reviewed
by Andrew
G. Bostom On a recent trip to Switzerland, I encountered a gigantic mural in the Zurich Airport which depicted a
proto-typical Swiss goat and sheep herder leading his flocks over an Alpine
mountain pass, meeting a fully cloaked and turbaned Arab camel herder. Below the
mural, a caption read, "You never
know who you'll meet in Switzerland". This bucolic image struck me as
bizarre, not having been personally conditioned to Western Europe’s deliberate
sociopolitical transformation over the past 30 years. I was reminded of these
prescient words, written a quarter century ago by the great historian of
Medieval European Islam, Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, who was concerned (even
then) that historical and cultural revisionism might precipitate a recurrence of …the
upheaval carried out on our continent (i.e., Europe) by Islamic penetration more
than a thousand years ago…with other methods. And Dufourcq characterized the original methods which facilitated
the violent, chaotic jihad conquest of
the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe, indistinguishable in
motivation from modern acts of jihad terrorism,
like the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04: It is not difficult to understand that
such expeditions sowed terror. The
historian al-Maqqari, who wrote in seventeenth-century Tlemcen in Algeria,
explains that the panic created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of
the Muslim expansion in the zones that saw those raids and landings, facilitated
the later conquest, if that was decided on:
‘Allah,’ he says, ‘thus instilled such fear among the infidels that
they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as
suppliants, to beg for peace.’ Within
a decade after Dufourcq’s death in 1982, the historian Bat Ye’or (from
a 1991 French interview, published in English translation in 1994)
echoed his intuitive concerns about Europe’s re-Islamization, and warned more
broadly, I do not see serious signs of a
Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a
relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic
imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary,
I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both
in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking...All the racist fanaticism that
permeates the Arab countries and Iran has been manifested in Europe in recent
years... Bat
Ye'or is the most informed and insightful contemporary scholar of those unique
Islamic institutions which regulate the relations between Muslims and
non-Muslims: jihad, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude, the repressive and
humiliating system of governance imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis)
subjugated by jihad. Although she
coined the term dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or's characterization of the salient features
of this institution is entirely consistent with the views of seminal scholars
from the early and mid 20th century, such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar, and
Antoine Fattal. Bat Ye'or's seminal contribution to the study of jihad
and dhimmitude has been her unparalleled ability to accomplish two related
tasks: (I) methodically and compulsively pooling a vast, rich array of primary
source data; (II) providing a brilliant synthetic analysis of these data to
demonstrate convincingly the transformative power of jihad
and dhimmitude, operating as designed, within formerly Christian societies of
the Near East and Asia Minor. Eurabia:
the Euro-Arab Axis
portrays
Western Europe’s recrudescent dhimmitude, chronicled in real time, by our most
knowledgeable contemporary scholar of the dhimmi
condition. Living
as an eyewitness in Geneva - a major European center, with its United Nations,
NGOs and other international fora - Bat Ye’or
describes in painstaking detail, the ongoing transformation of Europe into
"Eurabia," a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim
world. The use of the term “Eurabia”,
she notes, was first introduced, triumphally, in the mid-1970s, as the title of
a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity,
Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d’Etudes sur le
Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East
International (London). The articles and editorials in this publication
called for common Euro-Arab positions, at every level – social, economic, and
commercial – and were
contingent upon the fundamental political condition of European support for the
Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim umma’s jihad
against Israel. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated
theorists – they in fact represented policy decisions conceived in conjunction
with, and actualized by, European state leaders, their ministers of foreign
affairs, and European Parliamentarians. Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia” clearly transcends
attempts to analyze the same contemporary phenomena by other pundits. This
remarkable book is the product of her serendipitously apposite prior expertise,
painstaking new research, brilliant insight, and intellectual courage. Bat
Ye’or’s analyses have profound implications for Western Europe which may be
incapable of altering its Eurabian trajectory; her research may be even more
important for the United States if it wishes to avoid Europe’s fate: Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it
decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global
jihad against America and
Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its
profound implications for the United States…Americans should consider the
despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism
that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans
should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather
it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly
responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia’s
contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s
Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent. |