Blood entitlement is still used to justify violence, with even
The Guardian today shockingly peddling the notion -
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-is-the-liberal-media-peddling
Mark Lilla wrote an article for The New York Review in 2015, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, entitled
Slouching Toward Mecca, which starts like this:
"The best-selling novel in Europe today, Michel Houellebecq’s
Soumission, is about an Islamic political party coming peacefully to power in France. Its publication was announced this past fall in an atmosphere that was already tense. In May [2014] a young French Muslim committed a massacre at a Belgian Jewish museum; in the summer Muslim protesters in Paris shouted “Death to the Jews!” at rallies against the war in Gaza; in the fall stories emerged about hundreds of French young people, many converts, fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq; a French captive was then beheaded in Algeria; and random attacks by unstable men shouting “
allahu akbar” took place in several cities. Adding to the tension was a very public debate about another best seller, Éric Zemmour’s
Le Suicide français, that portrayed Muslims as an imminent threat to the French way of life...."
"January 7, the official publication date....I was probably not the only one who bought it [Submission] that morning and was reading it when the news broke that two French-born Muslim terrorists had just killed twelve people at the offices of
Charlie Hebdo..."
"Michel Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale..."
"François, the main character of
Soumission, is a mid-level literature professor at the Sorbonne who specializes in the work of the Symbolist novelist J.K. Huysmans..."
J.K. Huysmans wrote À rebours/Against The Grain; a book beloved of Oscar Wilde.
The paragraphs I find really interesting are these:
"There is no doubt that Houellebecq wants us to see the collapse of modern Europe and the rise of a Muslim one as a tragedy. “It means the end,” he told an interviewer, “of what is,
quand même, an ancient civilization.” But does that make
Soumission an Islamophobic novel? Does it portray Islam as an evil religion? That depends on what one means by a good religion. The Muslim Brotherhood here has nothing to do with the Sufi mystics or the Persian miniaturists or Rumi’s poetry, which are often mentioned as examples of the “real” Islam that radical Salafism isn’t. Nor is it the imaginary Islam of non-Muslim intellectuals who think of it on analogy with the Catholic Church (as happens in France) or with the inward-looking faiths of Protestantism (as happens in northern Europe and the US). Islam here is an alien and inherently expansive social force, an empire
in nuce. It is peaceful, but it has no interest in compromise or in extending the realm of human liberty. It wants to shape better human beings, not freer ones.
Houellebecq’s critics see the novel as anti-Muslim because they assume that individual freedom is the highest human value—and have convinced themselves that the Islamic tradition agrees with them. It does not, and neither does Houellebecq. Islam is not the target of
Soumission, whatever Houellebecq thinks of it. It serves as a device to express a very persistent European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom—freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one’s own ends—must inevitably lead to disaster.
His breakout novel,
The Elementary Particles, concerned two brothers who suffered unbearable psychic wounds after being abandoned by narcissistic hippy parents who epitomized the Sixties. But with each new novel it becomes clearer that Houellebecq thinks that the crucial historical turning point was much earlier, at the beginning of the Enlightenment. The qualities that Houellebecq projects onto Islam are no different from those that the religious right ever since the French Revolution has attributed to premodern Christendom—strong families, moral education, social order, a sense of place, a meaningful death, and, above all, the will to persist as a culture. And he shows a real understanding of those—from the radical nativist on the far right to radical Islamists—who despise the present and dream of stepping back in history to recover what they imagine was lost..."
It will take a long time for the French to read and appreciate Soumission for the strange and surprising thing that it is. Michel Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale.
www.nybooks.com
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