Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'or; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, N.J.: 2005), 384 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew G. Bostom

On a recent trip to Switzerland, I encountered a gigantic mural in the Zurich Airport which depicted a proto-typical Swiss goat and sheep herder leading his flocks over an Alpine mountain pass, meeting a fully cloaked and turbaned Arab camel herder. Below the mural, a caption read, "You never know who you'll meet in Switzerland". This bucolic image struck me as bizarre, not having been personally conditioned to Western Europe’s deliberate sociopolitical transformation over the past 30 years. I was reminded of these prescient words, written a quarter century ago by the great historian of Medieval European Islam, Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, who was concerned (even then) that historical and cultural revisionism might precipitate a recurrence of

…the upheaval carried out on our continent (i.e., Europe) by Islamic penetration more than a thousand years ago…with other methods.

And Dufourcq characterized the original methods which facilitated the violent, chaotic jihad conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe, indistinguishable in motivation from modern acts of jihad terrorism, like the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04:

It is not difficult to understand that such expeditions sowed terror.  The historian al-Maqqari, who wrote in seventeenth-century Tlemcen in Algeria, explains that the panic created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim expansion in the zones that saw those raids and landings, facilitated the later conquest, if that was decided on:  ‘Allah,’ he says, ‘thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.’

Within a decade after Dufourcq’s death in 1982, the historian Bat Ye’or (from a 1991 French interview, published in English translation in 1994) echoed his intuitive concerns about Europe’s re-Islamization, and warned more broadly,

I do not see serious signs of a Europeanization of Islam anywhere, a move that would be expressed in a relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism...we are light years away from such a development...On the contrary, I think that we are participating in the Islamization of Europe, reflected both in daily occurrences and in our way of thinking...All the racist fanaticism that permeates the Arab countries and Iran has been manifested in Europe in recent years...

Bat Ye'or is the most informed and insightful contemporary scholar of those unique Islamic institutions which regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims: jihad, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating system of governance imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by jihad. Although she coined the term dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or's characterization of the salient features of this institution is entirely consistent with the views of seminal scholars from the early and mid 20^th century, such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar, and Antoine Fattal. Bat Ye'or's seminal contribution to the study of jihad and dhimmitude has been her unparalleled ability to accomplish two related tasks: (I) methodically and compulsively pooling a vast, rich array of primary source data; (II) providing a brilliant synthetic analysis of these data to demonstrate convincingly the transformative power of jihad and dhimmitude, operating as designed, within formerly Christian societies of the Near East and Asia Minor.

Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis portrays Western Europe’s recrudescent dhimmitude, chronicled in real time, by our most knowledgeable contemporary scholar of the dhimmi condition. Living as an eyewitness in Geneva - a major European center, with its United Nations, NGOs and other international fora - Bat Ye’or describes in painstaking detail, the ongoing transformation of Europe into "Eurabia," a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. The use of the term “Eurabia”, she notes, was first introduced, triumphally, in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity, Lucien Bitterlein, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). The articles and editorials in this publication called for common Euro-Arab positions, at every level – social, economic, and commercial –   and were contingent upon the fundamental political condition of European support for the Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim umma’s jihad against Israel. These concrete proposals were not the musings of isolated theorists – they in fact represented policy decisions conceived in conjunction with, and actualized by, European state leaders, their ministers of foreign affairs, and European Parliamentarians.

Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia” clearly transcends attempts to analyze the same contemporary phenomena by other pundits. This remarkable book is the product of her serendipitously apposite prior expertise, painstaking new research, brilliant insight, and intellectual courage. Bat Ye’or’s analyses have profound implications for Western Europe which may be incapable of altering its Eurabian trajectory; her research may be even more important for the United States if it wishes to avoid Europe’s fate:

Eurabia’s destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global  jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States…Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia’s contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent.