Prospects for the Death of Europe: Islam, Christianity, the Future Identity of Europe

Ivan Strenski

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020, vol. 32, issue 3, 654-680

Abstract: A recent theme recurs in the writing of cultural critics, like journalist, Douglas Murray and the speculative novelists, such as Michel Houellebecq, author of Submission, and Jean Raspail, creator of the influential and controversial rightwing work, The Camp of the Saints. All agree that Europe finds itself poised on the brink of carelessly losing its distinctive identity. These authors concur in blaming a combination of cultural and social sources for Continent’s malaise. One the one side is the mass immigration of Muslims from conservative Islamic states and their resistance to integration into the European value mainstream. On the other side, European elites have been indifferent to and arguably complicit in Islamization, while the neglected population of traditionalist working class citizens have rebelled along racist and xenophobic lines. The alienation of the elites from the idea of Europe as a Christian civilization further feeds Europe’s crisis of confused identity. In response to these disturbing scenarios, the present author questions the assumption of a program of “saving a culture,” explores the comparative character of European national character versus the United States as immigrant nation. What are the difficulties of an actual re-Christianization, in light of European secularism, the obstacles to Tariq Ramadan’s European Islam? Are Muslim immigrants in Europe fated to remain an unassimilable entity?

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2020.1733341 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:32:y:2020:i:3:p:654-680

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2020.1733341

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().