The Submission of America’s Elites

Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission provides a glimpse of the first post-secular society, imagining a future France that gives in to the rising influence of Islam.

In Houellebecq’s tale, France’s effete and enervated elites acquiesce to the ascendant power, Islam, in order that they may remain elites. Francois, Houellebecq’s loathsome protagonist, can find little reason to go on living other than satisfying libidinous urges. Disillusioned and thwarted, he sets out in the footsteps of his dissertation subject (and would-be inspiration), Joris-Karl Huysmans, in search of spiritual rebirth, only to find that Christian culture—for him and implicitly for Europe—no longer possesses the capacity for its own regeneration

The reader encounters Christianity only well into the story, when Francois, in his forties, leaves Paris to encounter medieval Christendom for the first time. He journeys to Poitiers, where Charles Martel turned back the Muslim invaders, and then to Ligugé Abbey, where Huysmans had submitted to the beauty and mystery of Christianity. The confidence that had built Rocamadour and Mt. Saint Michel and Chartres has given way to ennui, exhaustion, and decline. Francois is an atheist who longs for mystery, for meaning—in a word, for God. But on his pilgrimage to Rocamadour he finds that the Christian God is already dead. In the end, Francois follows Huysmans down the path of conversion—not to Christianity, but to Islam.

In the history of Islamic expansion, the elites in conquered countries, if they were not instantly slaughtered in the Overrunning of of their cities, converted quickly and became the advisors and the teachers of the new rulers' courts. Almost all, if not all, of the scientific progress and literary preservation attributed to the Saracen "civilization" emanated from these people.

I put "civilization" in quotes because there was no Moslem civilization not entirely, physically and academically derivative of Christendom. Islamic societies CANNOT support themselves and thrive only on plunder and extortion. In the present that takes the form of foreign aid and defense of Arabia and the tremendous money given for Moslem oil which, itself, was stolen from the developers of the fields. When foreign income ceases Islamic society subsides into subsistence torpor with only the tiny ruling class living in the opulence that it steals from its population. Moslem societies never get beyond subsidence economy of themselves without foreign plunder or extortion because the Sultan or the Sheik or Imam, Dey, or Bey confiscates all wealth beyond just enough to keep the population from starving.

This is the future our elites all seem to crave. And when Islam subsumes the world, even the elites will lose their wealth because there isn't enough produced to feed them without them raising their own food and with Islam ruling all there will be no foreign plunder and fruits of extortion. It will truly be a brave new world of rapidly declining population and desertification of the world's crop growing lands as the Saracens necessarily convert good soil into sheep pasture and irrigation falls into disuse and then unusability.

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