As Londoners anoint their first Muslim mayor, Labour MP Sadiq Khan, readers of Michel Houellebecq’s satire Submission might remember the fictional Muslim Brotherhood president of France, Mohammed Ben Abbes. In the controversial 2015 novel, Abbes’ moderate theocratic platform slides into full totalitarianism while limp, scholarly protagonist Francois helplessly looks on and, ultimately, gladly submits.
Sadiq Khan shares with Abbes a winsome handling of the press, easy popular appeal, and a preference for invoking his gratitude to his immigrant parents’ adopted homeland: “We’re blessed being in this country,” he likes to say. Londoners initially hesitant to support Khan might have felt, as Francois does first seeing Abbes make his case on TV, that “none of it sounded especially new.”
Khan has won despite Labour’s rocky footing of late. Revelations of entrenched anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party have yet to be addressed in full, while Labour insists it’s a very simple matter of rooting out a few bad seeds. It should come as no surprise then that, as BBC commentators say, Tory opponent Zac Goldsmith handed the mayorship to Khan when he pointed out Khan had shared platforms with “extremists.”
Mayor Khan defended former London mayor Ken Livingstone who was suspended from Labour for his controversial anti-Israel views. Extremists agree with Livingstone that Israel shouldn’t exist, and Khan supported Livingstone. But Goldsmith drawing attention to it? “Islamophobia!” Londoners gasp.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Houellebecq describes a France that seems right around the corner and is perfectly poised for a subtle Islamist takeover. The country is trending economically rightward, driven by a generational preference for entrepreneurship to embrace free markets. The people are ready for the right’s “reassuring, tradition value—with a perfume of exoticism that made it all the more attractive.” Regular riots, bursts of “civil war between Muslim immigrants and the indigenous populations of Western Europe” are the new normal. And progressives have “managed to hang on in the citadels of the media, still cursing the evils of the times and the toxic atmosphere of the country. Only Ben Abbes was spared. The left, paralyzed by his multi-cultural background, had never been able to fight him, or so much as mention his name.”
Now of course we must remember not to take satire too seriously.
But as critics pointed out, reading Submission as anything less than a deeply incisive commentary—Houellebecq is provocatively compared to Orwell—amounts to a dangerous, well, submission to the ongoing decline of the west.
