Book Review

New battle for the soul of Europe

God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s religious crisis

The Moor's last sigh" marks the site near Granada where the last Muslim king of Spain is said to have wept as he contemplated the ruin of a once great civilisation, overwhelmed by the Christian Reconquista. Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal in 2004 suggested that we might yet live to hear "the Moor's last laugh", as Muslims again hold sway over large tracts of Europe.

Philip Jenkins' remarkable book addresses precisely this situation, marked by a "sense of doom" on the European Christian side and a growing conviction among many Muslims that, after the expulsion of Islam from Spain in the fifteenth century and two failed attempts to conquer Vienna, the time has now finally arrived for Islam to secure a permanent, powerful foothold in Europe. The critical question at the back of the minds of Europeans is indeed "whether the Muslim presence can be absorbed into societies that were traditionally Christian or secular, and how that interaction will transform both sides".

This is a brilliant book by the Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies, Penn State University. It offers, clear, vivid, comprehensive and detailed information about the cultural and religious revolution taking place in present-day Europe, relating and analysing with great accuracy the discussions and debates in the various parts of the continent. Familiar with both the secular and religious past of the West, Jenkins is able soberly to assess the dramatic demographic and cultural-religious revolution of European societies. Looking at Europe from his vantage in the United States, he has the whole continent in view and can compare the particular majority-minority constellations in each European country and region. The long-established Muslim communities in the European successor states of the former Soviet Union and the Balkan countries are shown in all their difference from the much younger Muslim communities that have developed in western Europe from the mid-twentieth century.

Jenkins rightly pays close attention to internal tensions among Muslims in Europe, describing them as a "battle for the soul of Islam". He points to the struggle in progress for the control of religious structures in European Islam. He demonstrates convincingly that the pressure on Muslims in the new European environment to decide Islamically on countless issues, in counter-distinction to the European mainstream, favours orthodox mentalities and pan-Islamic identities. Thus, elements of puritanism, as well as the confounding of religion and politics, are not confined just to Wahhabism and Salafism but increasingly are found in most other groupings of Muslims in Europe. And yet, simultaneously, the same forces that foster extremism - the new media, wider access to news and information, travel and communications, exploration of alternative ideas - also foster the rise of Muslim reformers, critical scholarship and new thinking on questions of religious - as against national - identity and loyalty. The overall situation emerges as complex. "While radicals and militants flourish, their opponents are numerous and significant, and so are the historical forces working against extremism."

Jenkins also makes us aware of the tensions between the generations, the aspirations of the young, the mental revolutions of millions of immigrant Africans and Asians, called to shift in an instant from traditional-minded societies dominated by Islam to European societies that differ from them in virtually every basic assumption. Jenkins shows how, despite everything, there exists a convergence of values and beliefs. He does not minimise, however, the threat of Muslim terrorist violence. It does exist. But any long-term solution must come from within European nations themselves, by reducing tensions between ethnic communities and Europe's mainstream societies. Among the best means of integrating newer ethnic groups into Europe he counts economic factors, coupled with a willingness to accommodate religious needs and interests that until very recently would have seemed very strange to European policy-makers. New policies are demanded which depart significantly from the political assumptions of late-twentieth-century European societies.

Equally illuminating is the author's analysis of the role of cultural values and core beliefs in facilitating (or not) pluralism. The Rushdie affair cast doubt on the presumed equality of religions; the Danish cartoons affair convinced Europeans that Islam was after all the core issue of the cultural divide and that the Umma - the universal brotherhood of Muslims - was a tangible reality. Muslim challenges to artistic freedom do suggest deep hostility to cherished modern European values.

For Jenkins, the nub of the matter is that Muslims claim for themselves a new privileged role for their faith. This is explosive, since Christianity and Islam project their views into wider society in radically different ways. Christianity emphasises the conversion of individuals while Islam's traditions are communal and collective, and so is the act of conversion. If a society conforms itself to Muslim legal and social norms, it is already on the way to conversion. In this light, the recent EU guidelines urging member states to eschew the term "Islamic terrorists", preferring "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam", gains added significance.

Jenkins observes that Europeans feel the need now to define their own beliefs far more explicitly. They are beginning, furthermore, to specify the core values which newcomers should accept - values such as free speech and tolerance, gender equality and sexual freedom.

What is Jenkins' answer to the anxious twin question stated at the outset, namely, whether the Muslim presence can be absorbed and how the new interaction between Muslims and Christians will transform Europe? For some time, Jenkins answers, intellectual and spiritual turmoil will contribute to tensions and political extremism, but long-term pressure on Muslims is likely to create an ever more adaptable form of Islam that can cope with social change without compromising basic beliefs. The advent of Islam, he concludes, perhaps somewhat optimistically, "will drive more Europeans to take renewed interest in their Christian roots, to rediscover what so many seemed to have consigned to oblivion".

Jenkins is confident that European Christianity will not be reduced to insignificance. Nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully, he suggests, than a sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands. Death and resurrection are more than fundamental doctrines of Christianity: they represent "a historical model of the religion's structure and development".

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