The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! - growth of Muslimphobia

National Review, Nov 19, 1990 by Daniel Pipes

For a millennium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was

between Christianity and Islam; in the twenty-first century,

it may be so again.... We may find in the coming century

that ... cultural conservative T. S. Eliot was right, when

the old Christian gentleman wrote in "The Hollow Men"

that the West would end "Not with a bang but a whimper" - perhaps the whimper of a Moslem child in its cradle.

High Muslim birth rates already drive politics in the two non-Muslim states of the Middle East. Christians lost control of Lebanon after Muslims became a majority there. The challenge of maintaining a Jewish majority lies near the heart of the Israeli political debate; the local Muslim population keeps up a fertility rate of no fewer than 6.6 children per woman (1981 estimate).

Of course, the situation is very different in the West, but there too Muslim populations are growing. Muslims total two to three million in the United States and about 11 million in Western Europe. Muslims outnumber Jews and have become the second largest religious community in most Western European countries. In the United States, Muslims will become the second largest religious community in about ten years.

The Need to Modernize

FEARS OF a Muslim influx have more substance than the worry about jihad. Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene. Muslim immigrants bring with them a chauvinism that augurs badly for their integration into the mainstream of the European societies. Put differently, Iranian zealots threaten more within the gates of Vienna than outside them.

Still, none of this amounts to Richard Condon's notion of "another terrible threat" like the Soviet danger. Muslim immigrants will probably not change the face of European life: pubs will not close down, secularist principles will restrict the role of religion, and freedom of speech will remain a fundamental right. The movement of Muslims to Western Europe creates a great number of painful but finite challenges; there is no reason to see it as leading to a cataclysmic battle. If handled properly, the immigrants can even bring much of value, including new energy, to their host societies.

The United States faces less of a problem, thanks to a long tradition of immigration and the healthy attitudes that go with it. Being an American depends far less on ancestry than on shared values, and this encourages enfranchisement. Meritocratic ethics and an open educational system are also important. Should fundamentalist Muslims move to the United States and choose to remain outside the mainstream culture, that too can be accommodated, as the Amish Mennonites of Pennsylvania and the Hasidic Jews of New York City make clear.

There is a final point. The prediction that Communists will be re laced by Muslims as the main threat suggests that ideological divisions will give way to communitarian ones. And this conforms to Francis Fukuyama's thesis about the "end of history"where the end of history means not that time when literally nothing happens but (as befits a term coined by a philosopher) a time of no further advancement in the understanding of the human condition; that is, the moment when no new ideologies can be devised. If history in this sense should end, what one thinks will lose importance; who one is will become the key issue.