Submission

It's submission. The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there's a connection between woman's submission to man, as it's described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man's submission to God. You see, Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha – unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn't Satan called 'the prince of the world' ? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it's an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to his laws.

In the France of 2022, François is a 44-year-old tenured professor at the Sorbonne-III who suffers a deep malaise: he has no relationship with his divorced parents or even any friends; he is apathetic about his career and politics; he dallies exclusively in short romances with his young students; and in a grinding routine that offers no higher pleasure than frozen Indian food, François ultimately can't decide whether he'd rather hire an escort for the evening or just kill himself. However, even this self-obsessed sad sack can see that the world around him is changing: positions of power at the university are increasingly given to people with public pro-Palestine/boycott-Israel stances; ethnic riots in the streets have become “old news” that the media has stopped reporting; his Jewish girlfriend decides to emigrate to Israel (prompting him to lament – a French man living in France – “There is no Israel for me”); and everyone accepts as inevitable that “France, like all the other countries of Western Europe, had been drifting toward civil war”.

In that year's presidential elections, there's a curious result: when Marine Le Pen of the ultra-right-wing Front National and Muhammed Ben Abbes of the newly-formed Muslim Brotherhood party wind up in a statistical tie, France's left-wing party throws their support behind Ben Abbes in order to thwart Le Pen's acquisition of power. The aftereffects are immediate: public institutions like the Sorbonne are rebranded as Islamic (and the – male – professors can choose to either convert to Islam or accept a generous pension); an irresistible benefit program is put into place for women who choose to leave the workforce and start families; women begin to dress more demurely in public (which François realises has a calming effect upon his formerly nonstop sexual fantasy life); and a post-Capitalist system of “distributism”is instituted – in which large corporations are denied subsidies while artisanal cottage industries (which will hopefully be passed down from fathers to sons) are encouraged. In the end, François must decide whether he will convert to Islam in order to continue his lackluster career or accept the pension and continue to drift along in a life devoid of meaning.

This article in The New Yorker outlines what makes Submission a brilliant work of satire in the tradition of Jonathon Swift or George Orwell, so I'm not going to try and assemble proof of my own. What I did find very interesting was the way that the character of François comes to symbolise the vacuity of post-Enlightenment French society; how secular humanism leads to meaninglessness that can open the door to radically new belief systems. The Muslim Brotherhood of this book are completely anti-violence, but with patience and a much higher birthrate amongst their supporters than found in ethnic French families, they were eventually able to conquer the political landscape – with a view to admitting Arabic Mediterranean countries into the EU that would ultimately eclipse the reach of even the Ottoman Empire – and with no firm beliefs of their own, the French were mostly happy to embrace Islam itself if it would fill their spiritual voids. Also, I appreciated the way that François, as a scholar of J. K. Huysmans, meditated on the spiritual journey that Huysmans experienced and documented in his literature – and even though François made his own pilgrimage to Huysmans' transformative abbey, he was not spiritually moved by the Catholic site; the old ways had lost their power and François, like France itself, was ripe for submission to a new way. Most especially, I appreciated that there was nothing necessarily evil about the Muslim Brotherhood – their policies improved the crime and unemployment rates, their ties to petromonarchs infused French institutions with much needed cash, and if French women found themselves sidelined from public life, even that is shown as an improvement over the young women who would debase themselves sexually in order to please François or those working mothers who were shown to not be loving “having it all”. 

On the other hand, I found this article in which columnist Rick Salutin excoriates Submission and its depiction of Muslims:

Michel Houellebecq’s foul novel about an Islamist takeover of France in the near future, Submission, was published the day of the Charlie Hebdo murders. I received the English translation the same day as the Paris attacks. The guy has timing.

Could there possibly be anything more foul than a columnist making a quip about deadly Islamist attacks in an opinion piece in defense of Islam? It's like Salutin totally missed that it's satire and if it wasn't so loathsome I'd be enjoying the irony: The Toronto Star, in which this article appeared, is the self-acknowledged pinnacle of Canada's left-wing print media, and their constant toeing of the party line of “The attackers may have been yelling Allahu Akbar as they shot up the cafe, but they're not real Muslims” is exactly what the French liberal press were portrayed as doing in the book; a fact that led directly to the French not recognising that they were losing their own country. It's like when my aunt once said, “I refuse to watch The Colbert Report because I have no time for right-wing nutbars.” Allrighty then. Satire is beyond some people. 

Submission, a French book by a French author, is very, um, French. I'm sure that many of the political and cultural allusions would be more meaningful to a French reader – I have no frame of reference for “de Gaulle's dream of France as a great Arab power” or “the atheism of Bakunin” – but I did appreciate what Houellebecq had to say about the odd times we're living in and where they may lead. Again, I didn't find this book to be anti-Muslim; it could be any belief system waiting to fill the void we're creating at the heart of modern society, and as Houellebecq sees it, we could do worse than the mild form of Sharia Law that the Muslim Brotherhood introduces. It has given me much to think about.

In Salutin's article, he also says:

The problem isn’t Islam, it’s ISIS. ISIS exists because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. No invasion — no ISIS. Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? Because of 9/11. Why 9/11? Because the U.S. bombed Beirut in 1982 (said Osama bin Laden). The point isn’t to decide who started it. It’s: can you interrupt the cycle, which has nothing essential to do with Islam or religion. It’s basically tit for tat. Of course ISIS comes garbed in religion but everything’s garbed in something. This is a long-running dance of death in which religion happens to be implicated but isn’t indispensable.

And I'm just really tired of the "no Islam to see here" response of The Toronto Star et al every time there's an attack by someone who tells us it is about Islam. I keep seeing this posted on facebook:

And I suppose that's the new rote response to anyone who takes an Islamist at his word; it certainly stops debate -- who wants to be associated with the KKK? But here's another example: When I read The Autobiography of Mark Twain, he included a long section on how his mother -- a good and noble woman who wouldn't stand by and watch children or animals be mistreated -- was also a slave owner because her entire life she had heard Christian sermons about the justifications for slavery (primarily the belief that rescuing "savages" from their jungle homes and introducing them to the Christian way of life would benefit their immortal souls). Never in her life had she heard one sermon against slavery and she, like everyone else around her, thought of herself as a devout Christian, living the Word of God. So: was Mrs Twain (and the church-going slavers at all levels of that despicable business) not a true Christian? What about the Jesuits who came to North America to force the conversion of Native populations through any means necessary? What about the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition? Not actually Christians? Or were they misguided Christians who had had their beliefs twisted into a parody of "true belief"? To me, a person's intent is more important than any external evaluation of their actions: the suicide bomber who cries Allahu Akbar believes himself to be a true Muslim and we can't ignore that fact because it doesn't fit the narrative we want to tell ourselves about "the Religion of Peace".

And, just in case it bears repeating, I'm not an Islamophobe: I don't fear some Muslim conquest of the world that would lead to me being locked up behind my husband's walls or suffocating in a burka. I didn't protest bringing Syrian refugees into Canada. But I am interested in what a writer like Michel Houellebecq has to say about where he sees society trending; that has always been the role of good fiction. How did Mark Twain resolve his mother's beliefs with his own? By writing Huckleberry Finn and demonstrating the basic humanity and decency of the slave, Jim, and outlining the ridiculousness of the institution of slavery. That's what good authors do and readers ought to approach them with an open mind.