BRUCE BAWER
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writers had addressed. To be sure, there were plenty of books about
Islam
and
the West, but I could find only a handful about Islam
in
the
West. Most tended to take a sanguine view of the topic, more or less
echoing academic Islamists like John Esposito, whose influential
1992
book
The Islamic Threat?
exhaustively argued that there was no such
threat, period. More than one of these books, indeed, put a decidedly
upbeat spin on the subject, maintaining that Muslim immigrants' "spir–
itual" propensities were precisely what decadent Westerners need nowa–
days. For example, in
When Cultures Collide
(1989),
the Norwegian
writer Peter Normann Waage, while admitting that there were indeed
challenging aspects to the presence of Islamic fundamentalism in
Europe, characterized fundamentalist Muslim "moral" strictures as an
overall virtue and perhaps the West's best hope of salvation from ram–
pant capitalism and secularism. (And this in a book occasioned by the
Salman Rushdie case!)
Adam LeBar, whose
A Heart Turned East
(1997)
was the only non–
academic English-language book I could find in Amsterdam about Mus–
lim immigrant communttles in the West, was even more
fundamentalist-friendly. Routinely, LeBor contrasted what he saw as the
high spiritual and moral values of Islamic fundamentalists with what he
characterized as Western decadence. LeBor quoted with obvious
approval a French Muslim leader on the desirability of letting "Muslims
in the West introduce [Westerners to] a new approach [to both family
life and life in society]-or rather a much older one-founded in spiri–
tual values, rather than material ones ." Islam, wrote LeBor, "can bring
to Europe [something] immeasurable, intangible, but nonetheless
vital"-namely, "God and spirituality. The missing part of the jigsaw
puzzle of life in the late twentieth century." LeBar complained at length
about the "challenge" that the United States offers
to those Muslims wishing to live fully as Americans, but maintain
and cherish their Islamic heritage. Not because of any institution–
alized anti-Islamism, but because the values and mores of much of
contemporary America-widespread use of recreational drugs,
alcohol, promiscuity, homosexuality, teenage dating, gun owner–
ship, values that are ubiquitous across the media-clash completely
with the demands of Islamic morality.
LeBor sympathetically raised the case of an Islamic fundamentalist
father in the U.S. who "knows he will have to maintain a difficult jug–
gling act to raise his children according to the values of Islam, while liv-
