The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray has been called many things, including racist, xenophobic, and fascist. What it is, is a book-length study of the European migration crisis that started in 2015 in Germany and continues to this day. It is a book obviously written by someone who is passionate, intelligent, and who genuinely cares about Europe’s future, and, to some extent, about the plight of refugees seeking asylum from war-torn and violence-ravaged nations.
Murray, in meticulous detail, lays out the problems associated with millions of immigrants, most of them Muslim, migrating to Europe after the so-called “Arab Spring”, a series of violent revolutions that has destabilized the majority of the already volatile Middle Eastern and North African nations. Within a few months of these immigrants’ arrival in Germany, Italy, Greece, Norway, and other European countries, incidents of rape of minors, terrorist attacks, and sexual harassment ensued, perpetrated mostly by young male immigrants coming from Muslim nations. So, Murray, like thousands of other Europeans, reached the conclusion that maybe letting in flocks of Muslims into Europe at such a rate had unforeseen consequences, a view in opposition to the majority of European politicians, opinion leaders, and media personalities.
The truth is, Murray is on to something. It is clear that there is something severely wrong with current Islamic culture, which has become, to varying degrees, rigid and defensive. It is also obvious that Muslim communities within Western countries are among the least integrated of all immigrant communities. Murray states these facts clearly and lucidly. But he also dismisses the entire Islamic/Arabic culture, repeatedly claiming that Islam has little to offer, drawing parallels between Islam and Nazism, and calling it “the slowest child in the classroom” when it comes to social liberal ideas. They are troubling thoughts, and the only instances when Murray comes off as a reactionary ethnonationalist.
It is true that Muslim communities have become complacent, and that their citizens and intellectual and religious leaders have done a subpar job of discussing and addressing the myriad concerns about seemingly contradictory ideas within Islam, and the history of the development of the religion. This, in turn, has resulted in a Muslim/Arabic community and culture that have been in intellectual stagnation for more than fifty years, and in which terrorism has blossomed like a poisonous flower. But simply dismissing Islam, a religion followed by almost 2 billion people around the world, as a religion of violence, schism, and ideas antithetical to the enlightenment, is a narrow-minded, problematic, and divisive view. Arabs and Muslims have contributed a lot across history in the fields of science, philosophy, and women’s rights.
Yes, the current Islamic/Arabic culture is terribly flawed. Yes, Muslims around the world need to do a better job of standing up to corruption and violence within their own communities. And yes, Islam is at a dangerous crossroads at the moment. And I agree with Murray that none of those things should be main concerns for Europe, which is going through its own identity crisis at the moment, as Murray details in the book. But adding fuel to the fire by labeling a people and a religion as irredeemable, is simply an untenable intellectual and ethical position, and one which has nothing constructive to offer, to anyone.
Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.
Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.
