Finding Out

"Submission” was first published on the same day as the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 innocent people were killed. Houellebecq himself was featured on the magazine’s front page that week, and since he had once said in an interview that Islam was the stupidest of religions, and since Islam supposedly played such a prominent role in his latest book, his name immediately became associated with the massacre. The French prime minister announced that France was not Michel Houellebecq, was not a country of intolerance and hatred. Houellebecq was held up as a symbol of everything France was not, a symbol, indeed, of everything undesirable, and this in a situation in which human beings had been killed — one of Houellebecq’s own friends among them, we later learned — so that it soon became impossible not to think of him and the killings together. He was, by virtue of having written a novel, connected with the murders, and this was affirmed by the highest level of authority."
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sunday Book Review, The New York Times

"The message I took from the novel Submission is that it is already too late. Western civilization has lost its core beliefs, and its will to survive. It is over."
"Fact or fiction? I think we are about to find out."
Ian Hunter, professor emeritus, Faculty of Law, Western University

The Victims --Charlie Hebdo

Well, then, where lies truth and reality? With the dire, bleak vision of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands held to be spouting dangerous bigoted views against Islam, with the rejection of Islamism by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who as a Somali woman knows the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideology extremely well, through direct intersection in her life as a Muslim woman? There is no end of people, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who warn of Islam's purpose. This is a religion, after all, whose end-purpose is final conquest.

The Prophet Mohammad himself led his burgeoning groups of followers on bloody conquest-fuelled raids to jihad, to transform non-Muslims resisting surrender to Islam into either corpses or chastened losers with no choice but to submit. This was a charismatic leader who appointed himself the voice of the almighty, taking the quick-and-easy route to establishing all the parameters of a world-class religion by pilfering the precepts and the prophets of a far earlier monotheism.

And so confident was this leader of Bedouin tribesmen convinced to throw in their lot with Islam that his was the finished formula, that he believed the ancient religion of Judaism would simply fold before his genius, surrendering themselves to the superiority of his version of Judaism with its Arab flavour. When that did not happen, his fury was boundless and he expressed it with the slaughter of the offending Jewish tribes.

Modern Islam is modern only in the sense that it exists in the 21st Century. There has been no enlightenment, no alterations, no adjustments, no closer parsing of its tenets to interpret them with an eye to fitting into the modern world. And certainly no attempt to revise the most basic of the injunctions to the faithful, to obey their obligation to jihad, the promotion of Islam by whatever means required by any given situation.

There has, in fact, been a renaissance of Islamic values, the original values that is, and this is engaging with violent jihad to bring a recalcitrant world into the Islamic sphere of influence. Michael Houellebecq's latest novel from the mind of an acclaimed French writer, set his stage in the year 2022, and doing the math, this is six years hence, all the time required to see Islam gathering strength and purpose in France where the largest demographic of Muslims now live, in Europe. 

He describes an effete, liberal, disenchanted, valueless and secular France whose pride in its traditions has been dreadfully diluted, diminished to the point of disappearing in the interests of fairness and equality, fraternity and freedom. The freedom to surrender values and heritage to a religious ideology in whom the far left can see no wrong. Interlopers, usurpers, violently hateful of the West, but craftily capable of using Western laws and democratic values to its own ends.

Carving political parties' support straight up the middle in an election, the Muslim Brotherhood prevails; yes of course, the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in France where it failed in Egypt. A work of fiction that aspires to become a historical reality. That effort elicited condemnation and contempt in equal measure, and Charlie Hebdo found Houellebecq's visage irresistible for its front cover, ripe for satire. A day later the satirical magazine became a case study in Islamist venom causing death.

Mr. Houellebecq, it is said, is incommunicado. Self-preservation, it seems is a powerful urge. No word whether a fatwa had been issued. But Islamists on a round of jihadist vengeance need no especial permission to guide their unerring instinct toward martyring writers. And nor will Jews, citizens of France be exempt, for the sins of their fathers, the Banu Qurayza tribes of Jews in Medina, mark their descendants forevermore.

In an appeal for witnesses to the shooting in Montrouge, police said they were looking for two people: a man called Amedy Coulibaly and a woman called Hayat Boumeddiene -- AP