De l'Islam en général et du monde moderne en particulier

Barreau caused a sensation in France with his essay on Islam. Himself a jack-of-all-trades (theologian, educator, demographer, novelist), the author takes on the orientalist establishment, accusing it of proffering an exotic image of Islam quite at variance with its menacing reality. Why so? Because telling the truth would mean exclusion from the Muslim world, and so from the sources of information (an accusation long heard about American Sovietologists). To compensate for this self-censorship, Barreau offers a scathing interpretation of Islam, in the course of which he argues for the Prophet Muhammad's backwardness, the illegality of keeping non-Muslims out of Mecca and Medina, and stringent policies toward Muslim immigrants in France.

Barreau is right to expose the obsequious streak among French interpreters of Islam (the same applies to many of their American counterparts), but his effort to remedy the problem fails ingloriously. His essay hones in on unattractive qualities of Islam, whatever they might be, without trying to show the faith's intense appeal for hundreds of millions of adherents. Worse, Barreau commits many mistakes (two howlers of many: Jesus lived eight centuries before Muhammad and V. S. Naipaul is a Muslim). To an American, what's most striking is not the specifics of De l'Islam en général but the book's old-fashioned quality of disliking Islam and Muslims. It prompted a political uproar in France (getting the author fired, among other things) but would be ignored as little more than a crank effort in the United States.

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