Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, has finally appeared in English. Set in the year 2022, the best-selling novel describes the process by which France peacefully submits to Islam after voters elect a Muslim President. Its popularity was no doubt stoked by the fact that it was published on the same day as Islamic terrorists killed 12 people at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Like most of Houellebecq’s anti-heroes, the central character in Submission, an academic who loses his job when the Sorbonne becomes a Muslim-only university, is an odious, sexist misanthrope. At the end of the novel he considers converting to get a good job and a couple of wives.
Ronnie Smith points out in the review below that the target of this provocative novel is not Islam, but a society which has ceased to believe in anything except comfortable consumerism. As he writes, “French/European/Western secular materialism is simply too comfortable to provide the motivation and intellectual vigour to form and then activate a response to Islam.”
Is that too pessimistic? Post a comment!
Michael Cook
Editor
MERCATORNET
 | Submission: A Novel
Ronnie Smith | FEATURES | 5 November 2015
Michel Houellebecq imagines how an apathetic France becomes a Muslim state.
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