Reflections on the revolution in Europe : immigration, Islam, and the West /

Caldwell's controversial book will be both loudly attacked and widely praised. As if to underscore the urgency of what he describes as a clash of civilizations, he tackles the topic of contemporary immigration to Europe with fiery language. Along with statistics about ever-growing Islamic immigration, Caldwell (Financial Times columnist, The New York Times Magazine writer, and editor at The Weekly Standard) presents examples of Muslim demands to incorporate Shari'a law into European judicial systems. While analyzing Europe's low birth rate and aging population, Caldwell addresses what he believes are the true cultural costs of importing foreign workers to sustain economic growth and the generous European welfare systems. Central to Caldwell's argument is the contention that the tidal waves of Muslim immigrants are not enhancing European culture, but rather, supplanting it with an openly hostile Islam. Whether one agrees with Caldwell or not, his book is essential to debate about immigration to Europe. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General and undergraduate collections and above. P. Lorenzini Saint Xavier University

A departure and a return: In the legend of Moorish Spain, Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, is said to have paused on a ridge for a final glimpse of the realm he had just surrendered to the Castilians. Henceforth, the occasion, and the place, would be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro, The Moor's Last Sigh. The date was Jan. 2, 1492. More than five centuries later, on March 11, 2004, there would be a "Moorish" return. In the morning rush hour, 10 bombs tore through four commuter trains in Madrid, killing more than 200 people and wounding some 1,500, in the deadliest terror attack in Europe since World War II. This was not quite a Muslim reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, but a circle was closed, and Islam was, once again, a matter of Western Europe. In his "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," Christopher Caldwell, a meticulous journalist who writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications, gives this subject its most sustained and thoughtful treatment to date. The question of Islam in Europe has occasioned calls of alarm about "Eurabia," as well as works of evasion and apology by those who insist Islam is making its peace with European norms. Caldwell's account is subtle, but quite honest and forthright in its reading of this history. "Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But, all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe's religion and it is in no sense Europe's culture," he writes. It hadn't taken long for Islam to make its new claim on Europe. Caldwell's numbers give away the problem: "In the middle of the 20th century," he tells us, "there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe." Now there are more than 15 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain. The native populations in Western Europe hadn't voted to have the Turks and the Moroccans in Amsterdam, the Kurds in Sweden, the Arabs in London and the Pakistanis and Indians in Bradford and West Yorkshire. The post-World War II economic boom, and labor shortages, brought the immigrants, and they put down roots in their surroundings. In time, labor immigration "gave way to refugee immigration and to immigration aimed at reunifying (and forming) families. . . . Admitting immigrants changed from an economic program to a moral duty." A fault line opened in European society. On one side were those keen to keep their world whole and theirs; on the other was elite opinion, insisting on the inevitability and legitimacy of the new immigration. For their part, the new arrivals, timid at first, grew expansive in the claims they made. This was odd: they had fled the fire, and the failure, of their ancestral lands, but they brought the fire with them. Political Islam had risen on its home turf in the Middle East and North Africa, in South Asia, but a young generation in Europe gave its allegiance to the new Islamist radicalism. Emancipated women had shed the veil in Egypt and Turkey and Iran in the 1920s; there are Muslim women now asserting their right to wear the burqa in Paris. The European welfare state tempted and aided the new Islamism. Two-thirds of the French imams are on welfare. It was hard for Europeans, Caldwell writes, to know whether these bold immigrants were desperate wards or determined invaders, keen on imposing their will on societies given to moral relativism and tolerance. In Caldwell's apt summation, the flood of migration brought with it "militants, freeloaders and opportunists." The militants took the liberties of Europe as a sign of moral and political abdication. They included "activists" now dreaming of imposing the Shariah on Denmark and Britain. There were also warriors of the faith, in storefront mosques in Amsterdam and London, openly sympathizing with the enemies of the West. And there were second-generation immigrants who owed no allegiance to the societies of Europe. A STUDY by Britain's House of Commons of the July 7, 2005, bombings against London's Underground caught the hostility of the new Islamism to the idea of assimilation, to the principle of nationality itself. Three of the four bombers were second-generation British citizens born in West Yorkshire. The fourth, who was born in Jamaica and brought to England as an infant, was a convert to Islam. Mohammad Sidique Khan, age 30, was the oldest of the group. He "appeared to others," the report notes, "as a role model to young people." Shehzad Tanweer, age 22, was said to have led a "balanced life." He owned a red Mercedes, and enjoyed fashionable hairstyles and designer clothing. The evening before the bombings, he had played cricket in a local park. Years earlier, the legendary theorist of the Islamists, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, had written of the primacy of Islam: we may carry their nationalities, he observed, but we belong to our religion. The assailants from West Yorkshire, and the radical Muslims from Denmark who, after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, traveled through Islamic lands agitating against the country that had given them home and asylum, were witnesses to the truth of Qutb's dictum. "The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry," Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes in a set of remarks that Caldwell cites with approval. Many of Europe's "guests" have overstayed their welcome. They live on the seam: the old world of Islam is irretrievable and can no longer contain their lives; the new world of modernity is not fully theirs. They agitate against the secular civilization of the West, but they are drawn to its glamour and its success. In the way of exiles, once on safe ground they tell stories about the old lands. The telling speaks of Damascus as bathed with light, and the sea by Tunis and Algiers and Agadir as a piece of singular beauty. In its original habitat, there could be an honest reckoning with Islam. Men and women could wrestle with the limits it places on them; they would weigh, in that timeless manner, the balance between fidelity to the faith and the yearning for freedom. But it isn't easy in Amsterdam or Stockholm. There, the faith is identity, and the faith is complete and sharpened like a weapon. It wasn't always so. Little more than four decades ago, when I left Lebanon for the United States, I, and others like me, accepted the rupture in our lives. I knew there would be no imams and no mosques awaiting me in the New World. I was not traveling in quest of all that. I was in my late teens, 1 accepted the "differentness" of the new country. News of Lebanon rarely reached me, air travel was infrequent and costly, I lost years of my family's life. I needed no tales of the old country. Nowadays, air travel is commonplace, satellite television channels from Dubai and Qatar reach the immigrants in their new countries, preachers and prayer leaders are on the move, carrying a portable version of the faith. We are to celebrate this new movement of peoples, even as it strips nations of what is unique to them. It goes by the name of globalization. It makes those who oppose it seem like nativists at odds with the new order of things. It is a tribute to Caldwell that he has not oversold this story, that he does not see the Muslim immigrants conquering the old continent and running away with it. There is poignancy enough in what he tells us. It is neither wholly pretty, nor banal, this new tale of Islam in the West. Fouad Ajami teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift."

The issues of  undocumented (read illegal ) workers and a porous southern border remain a hot button topic in the U.S. According to Caldwell, a columnist for the Financial Times and a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, the mass immigration of Muslims into Western European nations in recent decades has created problems that dwarf those in our country. Caldwell acknowledges that he is treading on tricky, even incendiary, political ground here. Yet he is no racist or xenophobe, and strives to describe the problems in a restrained but blunt manner. He asserts that the dramatic influx of Muslim immigrants, combined with the low birthrate of native Europeans, is transforming their societies in unexpected and undesirable ways. Unlike Latin American immigrants to the U.S., Muslim immigrants to Western Europe have not shown an ability, or even an inclination, to assimilate; in fact, many reject the values of the majority culture. Caldwell provides warnings without offering solutions, but his provocative work merits serious discussion.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2009 Booklist

Caldwell frames the issue of Muslim immigration to Europe as a question of "whether you can have the same Europe with different people." The author, a columnist for the Financial Times and a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, answers this question unequivocally in the negative. He offers a brief demographic analysis of the potential impact of Muslim immigration-estimating that between 20% and 32% of the populations of most European countries will be foreign-born by the middle of the century-and traces the origins of this mass immigration to a postwar labor crisis. He considers the social, political and cultural implications of this sea change, from the banlieue riots and the ban on the veil in French public schools to terrorism across Europe and the question of Turkey's accession to the E.U. Caldwell sees immigration as a particular problem for Europe because he believes Muslim immigrants retain a Muslim identity, which he defines monolithically and unsympathetically, rather than assimilating to their new homelands. This thorough, big-thinking book, which tackles its controversial subject with a conviction that is alternately powerful and narrow-minded, will likely challenge some readers while alienating others. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Respected conservative journalist Caldwell (senior editor, Weekly Standard) writes with deep skepticism about Europe's future relations with the Islamic world. He most clearly expresses his attitude when arguing that immigration has had unintended consequences, "importing not just factors of production but factors of social change." More specifically, Caldwell is concerned about what he sees as Islam's tendency to "trump" other social identities and ultimately form a single identity contrary to the values of democratic rule; at its peril, Europe neglects religion as the "anchor" of this identity. The values and culture of secular Europe are dependent on "ethical survivals of Christianity," says Caldwell, but the same is not true of Islam, despite the number of European converts. Caldwell also rejects American-style assimilation as a model for European immigrant "integration." Verdict Regardless of one's attitude toward immigration, Caldwell interprets an important European policy debate and illuminates why anti-immigrant sentiment cannot be dismissed as simple bigotry. Recommended for informed readers.-Zachary T. Irwin, School of Humanities & Social Science, Penn State, Erie, Behrend Coll. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A specter is haunting Europe, writes Weekly Standard senior editor and Financial Times columnist Caldwella theocracy about to overwhelm a tolerant, relativistic society. The revolution referenced in the title is sometimes so quiet as to be unnoticedif one is not living in Germany, England, Spain or France. Those countries are being transformed by increasing numbers of Muslims radicalized to despise the very democracies into which they have immigratedor, increasingly, have been born. "Scale matters," writes Caldwell. If the United States had proportionate numbers to France, "it would have close to 40 million Muslims, concentrated in a handful of major cities and poised to take political control of them." The author's tone is not alarmist, but it is urgent, and the question of political control lies at the heart of his argument. What happens to Europe if its institutions are dismantled by those who believe in an authority other than the will of the people? Caldwell gives specific weight to the view that Islam in its current iterations is hostile to assimilation and instead bent on overwhelming other ways of thought. "When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines," he concludes, "generally the formerchanges to suit the latter." The author examines Western responses to the demographic and ideological shift, none of them completely adequatethough Nicholas Sarkozy's idea that Muslims doff the veil when entering secular society just as he removes his shoes on entering a mosque is a start. Caldwell's analysis is calm and forceful, and it provides excellent background for a much-needed discussion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.