Blaming Islam (review)

When I was in junior high school in the early 1960s, one of our assignments for social studies class was to research and present a current public issue for class discussion. One student chose as his topic "The Spread of Communism" and supplemented his remarks with a film produced by the John Birch Society. Two features of the film were so notable I remember them to this day: first, the dramatic graphic of red ink gradually covering the entire globe as one country after another fell to the inexorable advance of Communism. Second, the United States standing alone still etched in white, surrounded by a scarlet world. But then it too slowly began to lose its purity, the dreaded red glow swallowing the country from north to south; enveloping Pittsburgh, where we students sat—felled not by military conquest (for the United States was still the most militarily mighty nation of them all) but by the rot within, betrayal of our values, an inadequate defense of the American way of life.

I thought of that film while reading John R. Bowen's Blaming Islam, not solely because Islam, as has so often been noted, has replaced Communism as the focus of fear for many in the West, but also because the danger it poses is construed less as a threat of overt violence (after all, terrorist attacks, unsettling as they are, are relatively few and far between) than as the jeopardy we face from the rot within. The ban that France, Belgium, and Italy have placed on burqas, for example, is only partly about security—the ban is not on billowy clothing that might conceal a bomb but on a masking of the face—and far more about maintaining Western standards of civic interaction and the presentation of the female self. The fear, then, is not just that we will be killed; it is that we will be changed. The danger is not so much that we will die; it is that our culture will be corrupted.

It is appropriate that Bowen, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and author of four previous books on Islam, does not set out to address the dangers to rights and liberties that Islamaphobia has prompted. He is instead interested in the way in which Western phobias have misled us to see threats to our "way of life," our cultural values, that simply are not there. Four theses, three concerning Europe and one the United States, present themselves for Bowen's refutation. The first is that multiculturalist policies in Europe have worked against the integration of Muslims into European culture. The second, though contradictory to the first, is that Muslims will inevitably remain un-integrated, no matter what, because that is the nature of Islam. We see this at its worst in Britain, according to the third thesis. And the United States also is in jeopardy, says the fourth, thanks to foolish US judges deferring to shari'a law. Ink is overspreading the world again, though this time it is green, not red, and the United States lies in its path, destined not to be conquered by terrorists but betrayed by—what else?—wooly-headed liberal judges.

Bowen devotes a chapter to each thesis. His arguments take basically one of two forms: (1) there's not much new going on here but politicians and other critics find it convenient to scapegoat Muslims; and, (2) because they do, they often misrepresent the facts. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, received broad publicity for her contention that multiculturalism "has failed and failed utterly" despite "the German tendency to say, 'Let's adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side."¹ But German policy, Bowen says, has "historically denied that immigration could be of value [and limited] citizenship only to those who could demonstrate German descent."² True multiculturalism, in other words, has never really been tried in Germany, but because it is politically popular to stoke...