April 2, 2007
Islam in the West
THE AMERICAN WRITER Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept, is an interesting entry point to this debate, because Bawer veers, almost at random, between the two schools of thought. He arrived in Europe just as jihadi smoke was beginning to hang over our streets: “I first traveled to the Netherlands in 1997 and thought I’d found the closest thing to heaven on earth. What sentient being, I wondered, wouldn’t want to live there?” He had, he believed, finally escaped the Protestant fundamentalism of his homeland and ambled into a secular society where he could marry his male partner and walk hand in hand down the canal lanes. But “Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism”
It hit him—literally—when he and his boyfriend were beaten up by a Muslim hate mob one sunny afternoon. Islamic fundamentalists were, he discovered, attacking Amsterdam’s gay men with such frequency that this pro-gay Shangri-La was unraveling: gay men could no longer hold hands or kiss in public. When he studied what some mullahs were preaching in the Muslim ghettoes scattered across Europe, Bawer found something worse than the Falwellian fanaticism he had fled. “Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas,” he writes. “James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but it didn’t tell people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the religious right for decades. Western Europeans had yet to acknowledge they had a religious right . . . Pat Robertson just wanted to deny me gay marriage; the imams wanted to drop a wall on me.”
