FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 647 16 September 2015 SUBMISSION

FRANCE WILL SUBMIT TO ISLAM, IMAGINES WRITER MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ. TRUE OR FALSE?
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Islam means ‘submission’. Michel Houellebecq’s last novel – Soumission - shows its hero and France indeed submitting to the religion of the Crescent. Not violently, ISIS fashion, but rationally, after the democratic election of a Muslim President. A quiet, logical apocalypse, you might term it…

Has the leopard changed its spots? Houellebecq’s reputation was Islamophobic enough. In a previous book, Platform, the narrator loses his beloved to jihadi terrorism and thirst in revenge for Palestinian blood. Instead, Submission praises Islam. The only religion capable of fixing the failures of Western secular humanism, it contends.

Francois, the protagonist, is a jaded, sex-obsessed Sorbonne professor. Copulation not being quite sufficient to fill his inner void, after reading the tract of a sententious, polygamous and wine-drinking (!) fellow convert, Ten Reasons for Islam, Francois takes the plunge. He recites the shehada and, voila’, he is a Muslim. Oh, yes, the bargain also includes a lucrative stipend for teaching at the renamed Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne. Only Muslims can teach there, see? (Don’t rage: for centuries only Anglicans could teach and study at Oxbridge.)

Francois’s academic expertise is in Joris-Kark Huysmans. The author of that gorgeous Bible of decadentism, A Rebours. A telling interest because the book’s main character is a fastidious aesthete bored with the bourgeois world, pursuing all manners of excess and perversion. Perhaps not unrelated to Houellebeck’s own self-image. Huysmans himself was rather odd, writing about Satanism, substitutionary suffering and child-murder. Eventually he entered a monastery, where he found peace and salvation. The Catholic Church today having become too wishy-washy and liberal, Houllebecq frets, only Islam can solve Western man’s inner and outer turmoil. Well, something like that.

France’s moderate Muslim messiah is Mohamed Ben Abbes. Elected President thanks to a deal with the Socialist party. They have a common enemy in Marina Le Pen’s National Front. Queerly, Ben Abbes’ own party is the Muslim Brotherhod. No such overtly religious party would actually be allowed to exist in the real France, ruled by the laicite’ dogma. It is a poetic license. Peculiar how fictional but successful Ben Abbes is contrasted with the existing but now sadly fading Tariq Ramadan. An intellectual whose sin is to have flirted with the far left. Ben Abbes is smarter although it is not clear how this moderate gets the socialists to agree to his programme, such as segregated Islamic schooling for boys and girls and similar bagatelles.

The book abounds in raw description of fornications between the author and his numerous girl-friends, verging on soft porn. (Forgive me, I am a poor prude.) That is vintage Houellebecq. Highbrow filth, you may call it. One key to the writer success. Sex and Islam. An unlikely combination in reality but it works in pushing the stuff. ‘Sold out’ is the answer I got in many bookshops. (My copy is in French – let me boast.)

So, Europe will submit to Islam. But what kind of Islam? The author’s argument contains at least one large fallacy. The kind of Islam he envisages, despite Ben Abbes’ putative ‘moderation’, is essentially of the fundamentalist variety. For example, Francois welcomes the introduction of polygamy into the new France. Now, there is only one verse in the whole Qur’an in which polygamy is mentioned. And not as an obligation but as an optional choice. Polygamy is not all widespread in the Arab and Muslim world. The overwhelming majority of Muslim men have only one wife. A reference to a fifteen year old girl-wife says more about the writer’s unhealthy fantasies than to anything else.

To see the religion of Islam chiefly through the prism of Islamism is far too partial and one-sided. Having just spent two weeks in the company of a jolly group of Turks, I can vouchsafe that. There were no beards or hijabs. No Qur’ans or prayer books around. They drank wine, whisky and ate pork sausages. (An old Italian saying: ‘Turco fino, mangia porco e beve vino’.) No one prayed. ‘I don’t believe in God’, a fellow told me. (Too bad but that’s what he said.) They hated Erdogan and his regime. I hardly heard one ‘insh’allah’ or even ‘mashallah’. They were, however, still Muslims. Children of Kemal Ataturk, sure. ‘I am a reformed Muslim’, a professional chap proudly told me. And it is not only Turks. I have met many Arabs and Pakistanis with similar attitudes. The point is simply that the Islamic state the France of Soumission conjures up is not the whole picture. Only a part of it.

In fact, I submit that the case of my Turks might perhaps evoke another, quite different scenario. One in which it is not Europe that submits to Islam but Islam that submits to secular Western ways. Nationalism being one. Even kids in the Paris banlieu tend to say first ‘I am French’ - religion comes a poor second. Only a fool would underrate the mega-power of secular culture to submit people to its own consumerist and hedonist values. And who needs polygamy when boys can get girls galore just by going to the local disco?

Lastly, Houellebecq’s opinion of Catholicism is too cavalier and negative. Interesting how France has many Catholics who felt strongly enough about matters like gay marriage that hundreds of thousands have demonstrated against it. Compare that with the meek acquiescence of pseudo-Protestant England. Not a mouse squeaked.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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