Transcript
JUSTIN VAISSE: Thank you, Phil, and thank you to the Saban Center and the Center on the U.S. and Europe for having supported us during these 3 or 4 years of research and work. It has been a wonderful environment to work in, even if it was a long-distance relationship.
I arrived in the U.S. about 10 days ago, and going from Boston to Washington and other cities I toured the bookshops and I was looking for books on Islam in Europe. And the only titles I could find, the only books I could find, bore titles like While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bauer; The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations, by Tony Blankley; Eurabia, The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye'or; or Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's, Too, by Claire Berlinski. Again and again these books would show up in different bookshops, ours would not, but I think with some time it will, hopefully. And more generally, even more serious authors like Bernard Lewis or Neil Ferguson write things or give interviews speaking of the Islamization of Europe, the reverse colonization, the demographic time bomb that is threatening Europe, et cetera, with the suggestion that the sky is falling.
In this literature that we call the alarmist school, you would generally find four inaccurate premises. The first one is about demography. Myth number one, if you want, is about demography. It is the idea that Muslims taken as a demographic bloc are gaining against the native population. The second myth is about sociology and culture. It is the idea that Muslims form "a distinct, cohesive, and bitter group" in the words of a 2005 Foreign Affairs article.
Myth number three is about political attitudes. The alarmist view has it that Muslims seek to undermine the rule of law and the separation of church and state in order to create a society apart from the mainstream whether by imposing head scarves on young girls, campaigning for gender segregation in public institutions, defending domestic abuse as a cultural prerogative, or even supporting terrorism.
The fourth and last myth is about domestic and foreign policy. Because they supposedly form a bloc, Muslims are supposed to influence more and more heavily the political process whether in domestic issues or, more importantly, in foreign policy issues. The idea is that France, Europe in general, but France more precisely, is kind of held hostage by its growing Muslim population and that it is tilting towards a more anti-Israeli and anti-American position.
What we did in the book, we did not write the book to paint a kind of rosy or optimistic picture as opposed to this dark or alarmist one. What we set out to do was to write a book to paint an accurate picture relying on much specialized literature as we can find, and firsthand empirical research, many interviews, and et cetera. What we have tried to do is go beyond the headlines and snapshots and document the way integration is actually taking place on a daily basis rather than to try to make a political statement.
More importantly, what we tried to do is offer a tour of the actual conditions in which French Muslims live and work, pray, participate in French politics, rather than using abstract categories. One of the conclusions that is sort of imposing itself is that there is no essence of Islam to be integrated into the French fold. Islam is constructed and constantly transformed by changing practices all over the world. It is really what Muslims make of it.
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