It’s 2022 and the French presidential election has come round again. Marine Le Pen is once again one of the two final candidates, and the other is the charismatic Muhammad Ben Abbes, from the growing and moderate Muslim Fraternity.
This is the hypothetical background to the book that was most popular in France last year – Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Vintage Books).
The author is French, the enfant terrible of French literature, famous for his xenophobic rants but also for other highly successful books, such as Atomised.
It has been described as a satirical fantasy, an outrageous fable, deliberately offensive that speaks to France’s deepest fears and mounting European anxiety.
Ben Abbes forms a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendancy.
Ben Abbes sweeps to power and overnight the country is transformed. It is the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and life is set on a new course.
The tale is told by the narrator, Francois, a misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated professor at a Paris university who specializes in the 19th century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans.
At the first signs of trouble, his girlfriend Myriam ups and leaves for Israel where she soon forgets him.
Then an eerie silence settles over France as the Muslims take over. Francois escapes to the South and seeks refuge in a Catholic abbey where he is entranced by Charles Peguy’s poems in their right setting.
But then he leaves again and heads back to a vastly changed Paris. His post has been abolished, the university taken over by a Gulf university. All women on the staff are sacked.
Beyond the small world of the university, the Muslims in power have radically changed France – they cut down on education, as children are subsidized only to secondary school level.
And polygamy is brought in and, surprise surprise, the French take to it like a fish to water. Actually, it proves to be a stabilising influence on the secularist French with divorces and liaisons galore. Better have your sex-mates at home than romping around.
And in time even Francois sees reason and he, like so many others at the university, converts to Islam. It hurts less than a visit to the dentist.
That’s in essence what the book is all about. Submission is another word for Islam but in this context submission is not just to Allah but the submission that is enforced on everyone to observe a rigid code of laws that offer no discussion or equivocation.
To really understand this book is to read it in the context of today’s France (or rather last year when the book came out), the deepest fears of multiculturalism, of the demographic time bomb of Muslims with their endless childbearing against the non-Muslims with their birth control, abortion and a system based on pleasure and no children.
The Muslim take-over of France is done by legal means, through election and numbers, not through terrorist bombs and mayhem. It’s a demographic time bomb riding roughshod over an anaemic population.
Nor is there any trace of racism in the book: anybody, even and especially white Frenchmen, can become Muslim. Nothing can stand in the way of this roller-coaster – it flattens everything in its path. There is no resistance – the Catholics have retreated to some abbeys lost in the South-West, the Jews have fled to Israel, and there is no word of Le Pen and her fighters.
The book says it is a satire, not to be taken literally. Of course, a year later, today’s France is on the verge of a crucial election but there is no trace of any Muslim party. Marine Le Pen is strong on the right whereas the Left is deeply and crucially fragmented. Sarkozy is somewhere in the middle, playing with Le Pen’s concepts while trying to outdo her.
Yet the fear the book addresses is a real fear and it has been heightened by the terror attacks of the past months.
Outside France, one finds the same fear in Germany, in Eastern Europe and generally everywhere. It is fear of the Muslim hordes as graphic as the ones our forefathers lived through in past centuries. It is the clash of civilizations replayed at the ballot box and through demography.
As we stand on the eve of terrible year 2017, with its crucial and unpredictable outcomes, these fears come to the fore. In a way, though in an unstated manner, it was these fears that forced Brexit.
Submission brings the West’s deepest fears from the unconscious to the level of public debate. It has no happy ending, and provides no solution to the fears it arouses. It almost reads like the death-knell of European civilization as we know it. As Europe bestirs itself from its lethargy, it looks around to see who can offer a message of hope in all this despair.
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