Islamist Handmaid's Tale? | Submission by Michel Houellebecq

I just finished reading Submission, by Michel Houellebecq. This book is French, though I read the translated version, for obvious reasons. The book is rather infamous for its content, which is naturally why I chose to read it. And perhaps, how you describe it says a bit about your attitude regarding it. I wanted to make a joke about how this was basically The Handmaid's Tale in France, except you replace the Far Right with radical Islam (assuming there is a difference?); as such, many on the left don't like it. But while it does depict a near future, where a Muslim Brotherhood group takes over France, in coalition with the socialists, all because they could not bear to let the Far Right party win, the focus of the story is actually elsewhere.

What is this book about? Well, as it is often stated in right wing circles, empires are not defeated, they commit suicide. This book is about France's suicide. It is about the West's suicide. The reader is placed within the head of a nihilistic academic in his forties, who seemingly has no purpose or direction left in his life. He has spent his life researching Joris-Karl Huysmans, a French novelist, but he feels that his life is mostly over. When the major political shift hits France, he is largely apathetic. He is in the world, he is affected, but he is reminiscent of Camus' Meursault in how the world seems to move around him. One side of him is apathetic, the other side is searching.

But what we see in him is a complete intellectual and moral void. We see this in all the people around him. The people who are more engaged essentially cheer on this Islamic take over, praising all of the benefits that will come as a result, all without a hint of irony.

Houellebecq doesn't really portray Islam as a villain, so much as "an other" that France does not have the intellectual and moral fortitude to stand up against. The implication is that none of the West does. They have lost God, they have lost Christianity, they have lost their identity, they have lost all defining features of what they are—and now they simply collapse before a civilizational force, one that is oppositional to everything they once were.

Submission. This book is about Islam, as a civilizational force, submitting France and much of the West to its will, and forming a new empire. And France lets it happen, because the people who live there believe in nothing and have nothing to stand for. The book is both hilarious for its exaggerated nature and horrifying for its kernels of truth. I think the strongest truth is the fawning emptiness of the Western elites.

On the day of the book's release, it was being advertised on the magazine for Charlie Hebdo. Houellebecq's caricature was predicting an Islamic takeover by 2022, which is when this book is set. While this book was not the cause, it was that day that the infamous Charlie Hebdo attacks took place. Islamic militants killed twelve people because the magazine republished a picture of Muhammad.

This wasn't so much a review, but a musing. I found this book to be an incredibly compelling look into the current troubles that the West, in general, is facing. It perfectly captures the loss of identity, the loss of shared morality—and the ennui that people feel today. I think I will give this book an 8.5/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/deXeafleVRA